[full issue]

Obama: Progress in regress: The end of "black politics"
Chris Cutrone
The election of Barack Obama will be an event. But it has proven confusing for most on the “Left,” who claim to want to overcome anti-black racism and achieve social justice. Rejection of Obama on this basis has been as significant as the embrace of his candidacy. There is as much anxiety as hope stirred by Obama, especially regarding the significance of his blackness. But the Obama candidacy reveals the limits of “black politics,” especially in the ideology and social imagination of the “Left.”

On the corner: Intersectionality and transformation
Matthew Birkhold
As an able-bodied, working class white male with academic training, who does not work in the academy, if I want to think intersectionally, it requires a willingness to undergo personal transformation. I must be willing to listen to others, learn from others, and then let that knowledge change the way I see the world, which changes me. This goes for all people who occupy advantageous positions in the nexus of intersecting oppressions. Able bodied people must be transformed through experience of disabled people, white people must be willing to be transformed by the experiences of nonwhite people, men must be willing to be transformed by the experiences of women, straight people must willing to be transformed by the experience of queer folk, and gay folks must be willing to be transformed by trans folk.

The dead Left: Trotskyism
The Platypus Historians Group
Trotsky and his project in exile represented “the last man standing” of a kind of historical consciousness that we in Platypus have come to refer to as Second International radicalism. If the tradition behind Trotskyism is in fact the richest one in emancipatory politics, why is the Trotskyism of the present so rotten? As we’ve learned from Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, the world can only be known to the extent that it can be changed. The less leverage the declining Trotskyist movement had, the more that it fell into a sclerotic tendency to raise the tactical, historically specific, formulations of these historical figures into matters of permanent theoretical principle. This is because when history stagnates so does thought; as its sphere becomes removed from the movement of real events it falls away, powerless, into a purely contemplative position.

The Hundred Days campaign: the present and future of SDS: An interview with Rachel Haut
Laurie Rojas
From July 24th until July 28th 2008, the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had its third annual national convention in College Park, Maryland. At the convention, national campaigns were presented and voted on by the attendees. A major campaign introduced at the convention was the Hundred Days campaign, which seeks to organize and engage newly politicized Americans in politics beyond the campaign season. During the first one hundred days of the next administration the campaign will organize two nationwide weeks of action to ensure that the people remain involved in politics after the election cycle. Laurie Rojas, member of Chicago SDS, collaborating author of the Hundred Days campaign and editor of the Platypus Review interviews Rachel Haut, labor researcher, member of the New York non-student SDS chapter, and collaborating author of the Hundred Days campaign.

To the victor, the spoils: Review of Artforum's May 2008 issue "May '68"
Benjamin Blumberg
In its May 2008 issue, the most commercially successful art criticism publication, Artforum, dedicated its pages to the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of May 1968. In the issue’s editorial statement, Tim Griffin explains that Artforum’s intention was to “[look] at May 1968 specifically in historical counterpoint…[in order to bring] the questions of ’68 to bear on today.” What then are the lessons revealed by reflection on the persistence of 1968’s significance? Is it enough to simply point out that the modes of thought which activated consciousness in ’68 have now become integrated and co-opted? Or, despite the best efforts of the critical inheritors of 1968, do we still lack substantial critical reflection on why 1968 still “bears” on today?