[full issue]

"Let the dead bury the dead!" Response to Principia Dialectica (UK) on May 1968
Chris Cutrone
The British journal, Principia Dialectica, in a leaflet distributed at a recent event in London celebrating May ’68, borrows from Platypus's rhetoric on the "death of the Left," but offers only retrospective critique. In declining to specify the continuity between past and present, Principia Dialectica divorces itself from forms of historical knowledge, instead offering political prescriptions that lay claim to an ostensibly emancipatory “outside.”

"Race" in social-historical and political context
Chris Cutrone, Aay Preston-Myint
Aay Preston-Myint comments on the status of racialized identities in politics, taking issue with Chris Cutrone’s subordination of the category of "race" to a discussion of capitalism in his article, “Review: Angela Davis ‘How does change happen?’” In response, Cutrone warns of the dangers of reactionary political identities in confronting structures that reproduce poverty.

Capitalism and the environment: Interview with James Speth in NPR Worldview's series "Critical Thinking on Capitalism," March 26, 2008
Adony Melathopoulos
When recently interviewed by NPR, Yale environmentalist James Speth called for radical economic reform to rein in the destructive effects of the pursuit of continued growth by capitalist enterprises. In his review, Andony Melathopoulos traces the history environmentalist reform, and the persistence of new ecological crises under capitalism.

Catastrophe, historical memory and the Left: 60 years of Israel-Palestine
The Platypus Historians Group
The "Left" consciousness of the Arab-Israeli conflict is characterized by the pathos of Palestinian statelessness and oppression, which obscures recognition of the variety and complexity of forces impacting political developments in the region. On the occasion of marking the 60th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel and/or the "Nakba" catastrophe of the displacement of the Palestinians in 1948, the Platypus Historians Group attempts a historical reading attentive to this complexity, revealing the roots of the conflict in prior failures of the Left, and searching for a more adequate consciousness for a progressive politics.

Persepolis and the personal consequences of failure
Jeremy Cohan
The animated film Persepolis, is the story of a young Iranian girl, and her relationship to the tumultuous past of the Iranian revolution, and her family’s investment in the hopes of the radical left. In his review of the film, Jeremy Cohan reads the protagonist’s nihilism as characteristic of the social neurosis that abound in moments of shrinking political possibility, suggesting a provocative political critique behind the film’s melancholic narrative.

Requiem for the ’60s: Response to a boycott of discussion of “40 years of 1968”
The Platypus Historians Group
Former members of the 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society withdrew from a panel discussion they agreed to do on “40 years of 1968,” a public forum recently attempted by the Platypus Affiliated Society with Chicago chapters of the new SDS. In this article, panel organizers offer a response to the '60s-era activists' boycott and cancellation of this discussion, questioning the ambivalent character of the legacy of the '60s young activists inherit from our predecessors.

The science that wasn’t: The orthodox Marxism of the early Frankfurt School and the turn to Marxist Critical Theory
Marco Torres
Many contemporary appropriations of the work of Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer offer only superficial considerations of the political circumstances surrounding the research programs pursued by these theorists. In this brief history of the Frankfurt School of Social Theory, Marco Torres argues that the turn to Critical Theory represents not the abandonment of Marxism, but theoretical refinement in response to the historical-political developments of the interwar period, specifically the failure of the revolution on whose hopes the Institute had been founded.

Walter Benjamin
Michael Löwy
Profiling the development of ideas in Walter Benjamin’s writings, Michael Löwy argues that the unique combination of Jewish messianic thought and Marxist theory contributes to Benjamin’s pessimism with regards to the progressive nature of history, but also illustrates the need for a theory of history adequate to a revolutionary project.