That panel? I’m out.
I just sent this note to the organizers of Wednesday’s Platypus “Crisis of the Left” panel:
On reflection, I’ve decided to withdraw from Wednesday’s panel. I’ve had my reservations about the whole Platypus project for a long time, but in re-reading some of your material, which put words like “imperialism” and “antiwar” in scare quotes, those reservations deepened. But Chris Cutrone’s comment on Facebook that “Platypus aims more at ideological diversity in our events than race/gender/sexuality diversity” was the last straw. If you’re holding a panel on the crisis of the left, then it’d be far more useful and relevant to have a feminist and a smart identitarian in the mix than a vile character like Paul Berman and a party hack from a Maoist cult. I see no point in spending an evening on this. I’d much rather spend the time with my kid.
I’d like to thank Lou Proyect for reminding me of just how terrible the Platypoids can be. I’d recommend checking out his writeup of them. The pic of Chris Cutrone that Lou uses to illustrate the piece—this one
—reminds me of my old comrades in the Party of the Right. For more on that experience, see “I Was a Teen-Age Reactionary” and “Partying on the Right.”
So, no thanks. If anyone goes, I’d love a report!
LBO News from Doug Henwood 
good to hear
As much as I agree with you re: Platypus, publishing a photo of the organizer who invited you to a panel discussion (for your readers to jeer at?), seems somewhat petty, no?
Good choice. Enjoy the family time.
Yeah, a picture of me from a very proud day as best man at my brother’s wedding shows how “Right-wing” I am, for sure! Nota bene: working class people still wear tuxedos at their weddings, you guilt-wracked self-loathing bourgeois fakers!
and who is that ‘party hack’?
Disappointing, Doug. I’m both an admirer of your work and an associate of Platypus. The latter has pushed me into interrogating my ingrained political instincts as no other project has — pushing me towards the revolutionary left from a social-democratic position! (So much for its ‘right-wing’ character.)
And it has done so through unstinting theoretical rigor. Nothing else — not Zizek’s trolling, nor convulsive sloganeering — would have led me to (for instance) critical reexamination of Lenin.
There is one member of Platypus who does hit and runs on a number of blogs whose economic analysis seems to consist of:
+ One Part Economics 101
+ One Part neoliberalism (lots of defense of ‘school choice’, free trade, privatised pensions, financialisation, etc)
+ And one part vulgar Marxism
He can argue for all this stuff by citing his Marx, Lenin, etc; which doesn’t change the fact that it’s entirely bonkers. If he’s at all typical, and a brief glance at the website suggests he might be, I can’t imagine any panel convened by them being either useful, or enlightening.
This is truly disappointing and such a lame excuse to drop out. The ad hominem attacks against Cutrone have to stop. –In fact, I am having great trouble differentiating Cutrone’s picture with the picture of Henwood (in his silky and shinny tie) plastered right on the top of his blog!
Henwood’s boycott is only causing more unnecessary confusion about the intentions of the panel, and Platypus in general, than enlightening anyone about it. If he truly does take issue with some of Platypus’ past panelists’ views, or the views of some members in Platypus (who, by the way, are not speaking for the group), then he should actually formulate a worthwhile critique instead of and punching from the sidelines (via Facebook, for crying out loud!). This seems to me more like tabloid gossip of the Left than anything serious.
backing cian up, my experience reading a certain plat’s writing’s on Crooked Timber comment threads has been very negative.
Actually, this describes some of Platypus’s would-be co-thinkers in Germany perfectly.
The Bahamas sect does the same sort of thing, rabid defenses of Ariel Sharon, George W. Bush, neo-liberalism, and even rape (!) all dressed up with Marxist language.
In other words, just a sort of lame contrarian iconoclasm.
A friend of mine says that Slavoj Zizek would describe this as a form of “perverse enjoyment”:
basically, Platypus, and hardcore Anti-Germans, or Spiked Online/Living Marxism in England, all NEED the left as an audience for their empy-calories iconoclasm, because that’s the only audience that regards their statements as scandalous. But their content is 100% in accord with mainstream society, so if they lose the left as an audience, they also lose the opportunity to portray themselves as bold iconoclasts.
This is basically what has happened to Bahamas: after their defenses of rape as just “bad sex”, and their nasty racist diatribes against Muslims in Germany, their little rag isn’t sold in leftist bookstores, and they no longer have the leftist biotope to swim around in. As a result they’re sort of adrift, having lost the necessary audience to appear as dissident speakers of uncomfortable truths.
So Lou’s strategy is probably right: best to refuse them any legitimacy as being part of the discursive space of the left. On the other hand, this might also cause them to portray themselves as martyred victims of leftist “political correctness”.
They do sound pompous. From the first link:
“After 25 years of study, I still haven’t figured out how right-wingers can tout Trad Vals at the same they tout the market; capitalism destroys tradition and recognizes only monetary values.”
The rentier class is the new aristocracy. Did they go on about the Gold Standard in the POR? You do mention they liked the word “sound” as in sound money.
Simple cowardice. But you’ve said more by avoiding the panel than you would ever have been able to say if you were on it. And about Proyect — you should be ashamed of yourself for linking to that slanderer.
I think its just the usual bourgeoise obsession with inflation. Inflation is bad, because won’t anyone think of the poor granny with savings – and workers have savings too.
You go, Doug! I’ve always found them annoying, to say the least. Check out their ‘analysis’ of Pakistan here: http://platypus1917.org/2008/02/01/the-failure-of-pakistan-a-concise-history-of-the-left/
Note the main point here, which, incidentally, is not backed up by anything in the ‘brief political history that follows’: “The aim in the brief political history that follows is to argue that the contemporary meltdown in Pakistan is the stark consequence of the cumulative (self-) defeats of the left”. The Pakistani Left may have made mistakes, but to charge a small group of principled and committed activists that was constantly being harassed, jailed, tortured, and killed by the state for simply demanding what amounted to basic democratic rights for the majority, and (most importantly) for being critical of the developing special relationship with the US, with the responsibility for the ‘contemporary meltdown in Pakistan’ (whatever that means) is a shockingly irresponsible statement to make.
Good call Doug. They are scoundrels. When it comes to the Middle East and Israel-Palestine they are reactionaries, period.
Tell me Chris and Chris. What exactly is the economic analysis of Platypus. Where can we find your analysis of the reasons for economic crisis, for example? What is to be done?
I mean Lenin’s all very well, but the man’s dead.
@ cian: Completely off-topic, but here goes:
As a Marxist, I think that there is no knowing the world apart from the attempt to change it: What this means is that the absence of an adequately anti-capitalist or, better, socialist Left, for instance a lack of a class-struggle workers’ movement, means that our ability to understand the world today is severely impaired, compared, for example, to Lenin or Rosa Luxemburg’s time, when their conception of “imperialism” as the “highest stage of capitalism” — the eve of socialist revolution — was informed precisely by the place of the socialist workers’ movement in it.
So I think that not only the present crisis, but also the previous major shift in global capital, the post-1968-73 crisis downturn necessarily go under-analyzed and under-theorized.
That said, I like David Harvey’s history of the roots of post-Fordism in The Condition of Postmodernity.
The point is that the prior crisis of Fordism, like the current crisis of neoliberalism, is relatively opaque (by comparison with the crisis of global capitalism in the early 20th century that led to WWI and the revolutions in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, etc. that followed).
I think that Marx’s critique of capital, which was developed out of the crisis of the 1840s that followed the Industrial Revolution, is still insightful in fundamental respects.
But this original Marxist grasp of the historical problem of capital remains very general — at least for our purposes today. We need a reinvigorated — really reborn — socialist workers’ movement, at a global scale, to allow the problem of capital — what would need to be changed, and how it could be — to be manifested. That’s what needs to be done.
Short of that, today, the problem of capital, remains relatively occult and subterranean.
Platypus as a project — slandered here — exists to host the conversations/debates necessary to help clear ideological obstacles on the “Left” for the rebirth of a socialist movement adequate to our time.
Yeah, may I? There’s no waste of time like the kind of waste of time you get by spending time with someone from the RCP. That is, the Revolutionary Communist Party. Mr. Carl Dix is the individual from that group who will appear on the panel you have decided better time can be spent with loved ones rather than being part of that panel. There is no meaningful discussions with members of cults. If Mr. Dix or other RCP representatives were in the mood to express his actual opinion of others on the panel, it would be quite dismissive, let me assure you. That’s not because I know Mr. Dix personally, but because cult members in general, and Maoist cults in particular, have a particular “correct line,” the contents of which can at times be quite obscure, deviations from which quite fatal–at least, politically fatal. Maoists, if my memory serves, are the ones who came up with the whole notion of “politically correct,” wherein if you are not politically correct, you are one kind or another of an arm of the bourgeoisie, conscious or not. And so: “crisis in the left”? For the RCP, there is no crisis on the left, if by “crisis” one means “what is to be done?” That question has already been answered by the RCP, its central committee, and especially its chairman, Mr. Bob Avakian. Dix and the like will not want to talk to you about the crisis on the left, other than to persuade you that he and his party have the answer. Full disclosure: I used to be a member of the RCP. But that was in the long ago before time.
The quote that you call “the last straw” is taken out of context. After Louis Proyect blatently lied about the all white/all male make-up of Platypus’ membership and panels in order to disparage our project, several Platypus members( including me) called him out on it, then Chris Cutrone said the following :
“While I had nothing to do with organizing this panel, I know that it is part of a series of events (with the same title, description, and questions for panelists) being held in several cities. From what I know: In NYC, Nikil Saval (South Asian?) of N+1 is speaking; in Chicago, Roberta Gardner (woman) of the journal Science and Society and Alex Hanna (Egyptian American) are speaking; and in Philadelphia Suzy Subways is speaking. But it is true that Platypus aims more at ideological diversity in our events than race/gender/sexuality diversity.”
P.S. If you want to show your concern about women’s role on the Left (and on this panel in particular) you should probably refrain from calling Mara Fridell your hero for lobbing sexist insults at all of the female members of Platypus, calling us: “loyal website/conference-planning girl secretaries” on your facebook wall.
The socialist movement was derailed by individuals who have dominated the public political-economic conversations since the death of Engels; individuals who have turned Marx’s focus on the need to abolish the wage system toward more ‘realistic’ goals. In the process, class consciousness amongst the workers has atrophied as the ‘socialists’ have morphed into varying shades of radical liberalism morally focussed on, ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’.
“…the problem of capital, remains relatively occult and subterranean” ?!? Seriously?!? Cutrone this is needless obfuscation — and feels like some sort of perverse philosophical fatalism. You basically say that since there isn’t a strong worldwide worker’s movement we are fundamentally limited in our ability to understand capitalism — this is nonsense — as well as an abdication of the responsibility to understand and critique.
Of course a challenge to the power of Capital depends on a strong global workers movement, but to posit some functional relationship between action and thought is silly — this feels like an overly literal and rigid embodiment of Hegelian thought or reflection theory. It is almost as if our Understanding cannot progress without some proper, and complimentary, “Movement.” (And this criticism is from someone who finds a great deal of insight in Hegel’s thought)
Your whole post is a bunch of vagaries and to posit that there is a lack of theory concerning the various crises of capitalism since WWII (esp. regarding the 73/74 recession) is ignorant at best, downright vapid at worst. Might I suggest Mandel, Baran, Sweezy, Amin, Frank, Arrighi, Shaikh, Brenner, even fucking Hardt/Negri, to mention only a few of the obvious names.
Give me a break.
Chris Cutrone wrote:
“We need a reinvigorated — really reborn — socialist workers’ movement”
Just so long as they don’t a little too militant for you, right, Sonny?
Cute essay, Chris.
So Lou’s strategy is probably right: best to refuse them any legitimacy as being part of the discursive space of the left. On the other hand, this might also cause them to portray themselves as martyred victims of leftist “political correctness”.
^ That about sums it up, I think.
I can’t help but noting that if there is anyone who has created confusion about the ‘Platypus project’ it’s the member of Platypus, who continue to prevaricate about the positions of their organization.
Chris,
thank you for responding. But to be honest this isn’t much of a response, as I still have no idea what it is you stand for, except that nobody apparently lives up to your standards, whatever they might be.
As a Marxist, I think that there is no knowing the world apart from the attempt to change it: What this means is that the absence of an adequately anti-capitalist or, better, socialist Left, for instance a lack of a class-struggle workers’ movement, means that our ability to understand the world today is severely impaired
His point was that he wanted to analyse the world so as to change it. When I said that I find you guys bonkers, its formulations like that that I was thinking of. The idea that its impossible to understand the world because of a lack of unions is just odd.
So I think that not only the present crisis, but also the previous major shift in global capital, the post-1968-73 crisis downturn necessarily go under-analyzed and under-theorized.
Hmm, on my shelves I have books by David Harvey (written after Postmodern), by Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, by Robert Brenner, Leo Panitch, Robert Pollin and plenty of others, all of which would seem to do that. And if one steps away from Marxist analyses, there’s also people like Michael Hudson, or the more general theories of somebody like Hyman Minsky. I’m not sure your ignorance really justifies such a claim. Christ, we even have popular accounts that do a pretty good job of analysing it, if Political Economy is beyond you. I mean Yves Smith’s book, Nouriel Roubini’s or John Quiggin’s book are all perfectly decent introductions to what has been going on.
The point is that the prior crisis of Fordism, like the current crisis of neoliberalism, is relatively opaque (by comparison with the crisis of global capitalism in the early 20th century that led to WWI and the revolutions in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, etc. that followed).
I think the point is that the crisis is opaque to you, which doesn’t really bode well for your particular project.
I think that Marx’s critique of capital, which was developed out of the crisis of the 1840s that followed the Industrial Revolution, is still insightful in fundamental respects.
Except where modern capitalism is a completely different beat. He was writing in a time when money was on the gold standard, governments were a fairly small part of GDP and corporations didn’t really exist. And for that matter when industrial production was a significant part (and taking a growing share) of the economy. You know small things. Trivial probably. Yes there’s insight, no it’s not the holy bible.
So basically your analysis of the crisis is that you guys don’t know anything about it, and that you blame the left for not leaving their books analysing it in your apartments where you could find them.
@ cian:
If Hegelianism a la Adorno, et al. is “bonkers” to you, then of course I will seem so! It’s not a matter of “high standards,” but rather deep problems anyone on the purported Left must face today.
Of course I’m aware of the writers you mention, but I think those analyses are only so good as far as they go and they don’t go nearly far enough. They are helpful, but still leave one dissatisfied, no?
Was the crisis of the 1960s an *economic* crisis; how was the so-called “cultural” (and *political*) crisis a crisis of *capital* (not merely economically, but as an overall social system)? These are the kinds of questions that have been addressed, but only insofar, I think, as the crisis was made clear in the moment by the kinds of discontents and political movements that manifested, which I think remained relatively unclear — unlike the crisis of WWI and its aftermath, for instance, what Luxemburg and Lenin called “imperialism” and addressed as a practical matter of workers’ proletarian socialist revolution.
Of course I’m aware that the world has changed since Marx’s (and Lenin and Luxemburg’s) time!
That was my point. The question is, what kind of political engagement with changing the world is necessary, possible, and desirable, today? The disintegrated state of the Left is a sign that no one has particularly compelled answers to that question: the crisis has not taken an adequately political form.
@ Robert Wood:
Platypus as an organization doesn’t take “positions” so if you are looking for these you wont find them. We’re not a traditional “Left” group, at all: our basis of agreement and collaboration — our shared project — is hosting the conversation, not formulating analyses or a programme. We’re not a propaganda group or a political party — or an academic think tank. There’s no “prevarication,” because there’s no position to begin with.
We abstain from taking positions for the reasons I elucidated above in response to “cian.” Our project is about learning the tasks of emancipatory politics for our time, for which the Left of recent history has left us a woefully inadequate legacy to build upon. There is no tradition on the Left to uphold, for us, all prior bets are off, but only one to be reinvented, for which we think a return to the deeper background history of Marxism needs to be engaged.
Chris:
Scare Quotes around my name. Really?
Do you have anything concrete to say on these things. I dunno, is there an article, a paper. Because in two longish posts all you’ve offered is vague airyfairy nonsense.
Of course I’m aware of the writers you mention, but I think those analyses are only so good as far as they go and they don’t go nearly far enough. They are helpful, but still leave one dissatisfied, no?
I don’t know. Perhaps you could elucidate. I don’t know, make a point of some kind.
Was the crisis of the 1960s an *economic* crisis; how was the so-called “cultural” (and *political*) crisis a crisis of *capital* (not merely economically, but as an overall social system)? These are the kinds of questions that have been addressed, but only insofar, I think, as the crisis was made clear in the moment by the kinds of discontents and political movements that manifested, which I think remained relatively unclear
The first sentence is a kind of banal summary of the kinds of questions people have been addressing for the past 20-30 years. Perhaps unsuccessfully, but then all you’ve done is present a banal reformulation of the question. So god knows why you think anyone should take you seriously.
The second sentence is as clear as mud. What discontents? What political movements? I don’t even know which of the many crises you’re talking about here. The recent one? The crisis caused by oil shocks, Vietnam and the end of Bretton Wood? The Asia crisis? The Latin America crisis. WILL YOU JUST LEARN TO BE SPECIFIC, and stop waffling. The stuff about WWI is just funny. Because you know, they Rosa Luxmbourg and Lenin were right about EVERYTHING.
The question is, what kind of political engagement with changing the world is necessary, possible, and desirable, today?
Again, a banal question. Do you have answers? You could start with the actual political engagements that are going on? You know the real world, rather than your library.
The disintegrated state of the Left is a sign that no one has particularly compelled answers to that question: the crisis has not taken an adequately political form.
Whereas talking about Hegel, and moaning about the left, during the biggest social protest movement of the past 30 years is a truly revolutionary action.
There’s no “prevarication,” because there’s no position to begin with.
I think the position is bullshit. Or cowardice maybe. Because if you took a position, that would mean doing something.
We abstain from taking positions for the reasons I elucidated above in response to “cian.”
So you have no positions. None whatsoever? Then how exactly are you on the left, if you don’t hold any positions.
cian, Give me a break: This is a comment thread, not treatise-writing!
I’ve published enough that you can engage my writings in greater detail if you care to do so.
But, apart from my own writings, which are many at this point (but I would point especially, for starters, to my essay “Symptomology:” http://platypus1917.org/2009/05/15/symptomology/ ), I call your attention, regarding the crisis of Fordism and the New Left, to a brilliant essay by Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” that has helped me understand and orient towards the problems we inherit from the preceding generation(s) of the Left: http://libcom.org/library/black-particularity-reconsidered-adolph-l-reed-jr
Doug Henwood, please let me state the obvious, that we invited you to speak because of all the panelists yours is probably the closest to ours — not Berman’s! You and I, for example, would have very little to debate about the problems facing the Left today. But both you and I would have a great deal to take issue with Berman. But this isn’t about me, it’s about the conversation Platypus seeks to host, which is meant to be open and in good faith. No one, least of all you, is being set up at our panel. I think it could be productive and educational. Now that the OWS is going to have to ramp up its game, now is precisely the time to be reflecting on political problems on the Left. So I think you should still participate.
Cutrone, they want nothing to do with you because of Berman, “Eustonites” and Hitchens. All the other stuff is just tossed in as ad hominem insults. This won’t change. Like Platypus, OWS isn’t very focused either but they’re to be engaged.
Nothing will enrage the “antiwar” Left more than asserting that they’re fans of Saddam Hussein or that the fall of Hussein led to the Arab Spring which led to the American Autumn.
Isn’t the Maoist sect guy on the panel who Doug dissed opposed to U.S. imperialism?
Ironically, China built of its foreign reserves after the 1997 financial crisis so that they would never have to go to the imperialistic IMF hat in hand.
With the result that nowadays you get editorials in the New York Times arguing that the U.S. should sellout Taiwan in order to placate their banker China. Not much of an empire.
Having said all that, if Henwood doesn’t feel comfortable doing the panel he shouldn’t.
Now that the OWS is going to have to ramp up its game, now is precisely the time to be reflecting on political problems on the Left.
This might be true, but given you have a hard time expressing what it is that you think on any topic, how exactly is engaging with you going to help. Seriously, you had an opportunity to say something, and you waffled about the problems of the left (whatever the hell they are – you never actually said), and the fact that apparently Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin had some important things to say about post WWI Europe. Which might be true, but is not hugely relevant to the present.
@ cian,
It’s not about what we in Platypus have to say to anyone else — there isn’t a member of Platypus on the panel we invited Henwood to speak on for a reason.
If you think I don’t have much to say, it’s because I don’t. That’s not the point of Platypus, getting my or any other members’ of Platypus perspectives out.
It’s about curating what the invited panelists and audience members might have to say to each other, either in debate or just conversation.
Platypus exists to facilitate learning from different perspectives. We ourselves aim to learn from the events we host.
Why should anyone care about our events? Not because of Platypus, but because of the topics and speakers.
Cutrone, your whole schtick is totally disingenuous. On the one hand, you say there’s a “crisis of the left”, but you always cop out when you’re asked to explicate what that crisis is. You say Platypus doesn’t presume to have any answers, but the whole habitus of your milieu is constructed around regarding yourselves as smarter than everyone else for having read Adorno or Postone.
Chris says, “Of course I’m aware that the world has changed since Marx’s (and Lenin and Luxemburg’s) time!”
But it’s still a world dominated by Capital; it’s still a world dominated by the social relation of wage-labour. On this score, the left seems to have undergone a fair bit of political-economic amnesia since Marx and Engels croaked. The left has in fact become an eclectic gaggle of contending radical liberals, faction fighting over which reform of Capital to give priority.
@ Mike B)
Indeed the world has regressed in many important ways since Marxism’s heyday, and indeed into (sub-)reformism. What this means, however, is the persistence of the social relation of wage-labor, dominated by capital, but without ready concrete practical political purchase — the fault, I think, of the disintegration of the “Left.” That’s why need to unravel the history of the present.
the fault, I think, of the disintegration of the “Left.”
Or really bad jargon.
Cutrone, your whole schtick is totally disingenuous…
It’s an old schtick–with many variations on the theme–that only once in a blue moon is called out:
Good on you Doug! Thanks for standing up to those elitist jerks. Other than proclaiming that their Marxism is better than everyone else’s, I can’t see what their contribution is supposed to be. For example, what is the point of tweets like this?:
platypus1917 Platypus
more like Capital for dummies: David Harvey’s “A Companion to Marx’s Capital” is “an outstanding book” … http://fb.me/KOlK5I0T
I suppose their view is that studying Capital should be reserved for University of Chicago graduate students and their peers at other elite institutions, and not for the grubby unwashed ‘dummies’ of the working class…
Isn’t it funny how these mavericks never shock by taking a left-wing position? Imagine some Weekly Standard writer saying that the OWS kids have a point!
Your story (in the Bad Subjects article) about being converted to Marxism by your history teacher is really cute.
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