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From Protest to Politics
Parkes Social Hall 

Speakers:

• Louis

• Kathrin Dick

• Shanying Liu

• Ryan Mickler

• Jonas Nestroy

Anti-Imperialism: What is it and why are we against it?
Vail Chapel 

Speakers:

• Raniya Eshaiyan

• Nontapun Punnachet

• Rudolph Quamina

• Johann Richter

12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Doing the Platypus Review
Millar Chapel 

By the editors of the anglophone and germanophone Platypus Review, Lou Sterret and Moritz Schiffmann. 

12:45 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.
Organizing a panel
Vail Chapel

By Natalie and Ismael.

1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Asking a Platypus question
Millar Chapel 

By Benjamin Katz.

1:30 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
Seeding a chapter
Vail Chapel

By Therri and Conaugh.

Psychoanalysis and the Left
Vail Chapel 

Speakers:

• Ethan Cole

• Anna Pidstrigach

• Artur Bleischwitz

• Evan Hauffen

Art & Politics
Parkes Social Hall

Speakers:

• John Thompson

• Blondine Moree

• Evan Rodgers

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Revolutionary Communist Organisation
Swift Hall 107

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Freedom Socialist Party
Vail Chapel

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Paul North: Marx for the twenty-first century?
Annenberg Hall G15

Interviewed by Spencer A. Leonard.

Karl Marx: Capital. Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, edited by Paul Reitter and Paul North, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2026.

Jensen Suther: Philosophy and Marxism
Annenberg Hall G21

Interviewed by Danny Jacobs.

Jensen Suther: True Materialism. Hegelian Marxism and the Modernist Struggle for Freedom, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.

Following the re-election of Lincoln as president, Marx wrote to the American people: 

“From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class… [In America] the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” 

Given the seismic policies of Trump's second term, we ask: 

Does the American Revolution persist today? What is/was the American Revolution? How does it inform the conditions of possibility for the Left today? What tasks, if any, do the Left inherit from the American Revolution? Do we need new interpretations of the American Revolution?

Speakers:

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

• Chris Cutrone (Platypus Affiliated Society)

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Speakers:

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““Thomas Jefferson would scorn to enter a modern Democratic convention. He would have as little business there as Abraham Lincoln would have in a latter-day Republican convention. If they were living today they would be delegates to this [Socialist] convention!” - Eugene Debs 

Eugene Debs stood at the centre of the socialist movement in the United States during the era of the Second International. Like many socialists of the time, he understood the struggle for socialism as both continuous with, and an overcoming of, the wider legacy of the bourgeois revolution. The Socialist Party of America (SPA) rose contemporaneously with other movements which claimed America’s revolutionary legacy, such as Populism and Progressivism, yet Debs and socialists like him understood these movements to be fundamentally opposed to the goals of the proletarian socialist party. 

Yet this Marxist orthodoxy would enter a dual crisis, both from the international "Revisionist Dispute" of the early 1900s and the success of the October Revolution in 1917. The Bolshevik Revolution and the international revolutionary wave of the post-war years appeared to many socialists, including Debs, as a moment of revolutionary possibility for the socialist movement, yet the subsequent history of socialism in the United States and globally raises the question of whether the split of the SPA, and of the global socialist movement, was a step forward or step backward for socialism. 

What did Debs mean when he said “from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it”? What is the relationship between the crisis of the SPA, the rise of Progressivism, and the wider crisis of the American Revolution experienced in the aftermath of World War I? How did Debs understand the role of the socialist party in the struggle for socialism? What lessons does the life and legacy of Eugene Debs hold for emancipatory politics today?

Speakers:

• Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party)

• Mark Burrows (Railway Workers United)

• Ed Remus (Platypus Affiliated Society)

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Speakers:

• Edith Fischer (Revolutionary Communist Organisation)

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Johannes Regell 

• Ingar Solty (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

“Marxism is a form of cognition sui generis.” – Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology 

The 20th century saw the objective disintegration of the coherence of Marx/ism within the history of modernity. Now, ten years into the Trump era and its reconsolidation of world politics, Marxism seems more obscure than ever as a way of thinking about the world or the possibility of changing it. In this context Platypus asks the untimely question: “What is Marxism? Does it matter in the 21st century?” 

Do we still need Marx today? Why? 

Why in the past have people invoked Marx? Why did they refer to themselves as Marxists? 

Do we need Marx to understand capitalism? Do we need Marx to understand capitalist politics? 

How is Marxism useful to the Left for articulating the task of freedom? What kind of potential is it possible to find in the objective conditions of the present? Is an immanent critique of capitalism necessary? 

Finally, what kind of problem is it that we find ourselves in today? Is it possible to leave Marx behind, or to go beyond Marx?

Speaker

• Andrea Bauer (Freedom Socialist Party)

• John Garvey (Insurgent Notes)

• Paul North (Yale University)

• Benjamin Studebaker

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