The Left is dead! Long live the Left!
Platypus Penn is an official student-run chapter of the international Platypus Affiliated Society, a project for the self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left. At present the Marxist Left appears as a historical ruin. The received wisdom of today dictates that past, failed attempts at emancipation stand not as moments full of potential yet to be redeemed, but rather as “what was” — utopianism that was bound to end in tragedy. As critical inheritors of a vanquished tradition, Platypus contends that — after the failure of the 1960s New Left, and the dismantlement of the welfare state and the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1980s-90s — the present disorientation of the Left means we can hardly claim to know the tasks and goals of social emancipation better than the “utopians” of the past did.
The mission of Platypus Penn is to foster the growth of critical discourse engaged with leftist politics among the university’s student body. We intend to take nothing for granted in this political tradition, and we will concentrate our efforts on peeling away the deep-seated taboos and dogmas which encumber the development of a relevant and compelling Left. Towards this goal, our group will organize and promote film screenings, public interviews and fora, coffee breaks, reading groups, and student journalism which will take seriously the social, historical, cultural and political problems requiring thoroughgoing rethinking today. Needless to say, this means intersecting many other political groups on campus, to engage in a deeper, more general, critical intellectual and political conversation about the present and future of the Left.
Platypus asks the questions: How is the thought of critical theorists of modern society such as Marx, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno relevant for the struggle for social emancipation today? How can we make sense of the long history of impoverished politics on the Left leading to the present — after the international Marxist Left of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, to the barrenness of today — without being terrorized or discouraged by this history? — How might the answers to such questions help the urgent task of reconstituting the Left at its most fundamental levels of theory and practice? How might we help effect escape from the dead-end the Left has become?
We hope to re-invigorate a conversation on the Left that has long since fallen into senility or silence, in order to help found anew an emancipatory political practice that is presently absent.
What has the Left been, and what can it yet become? — Platypus exists because the answer to such a question, even its basic formulation, has long ceased to be self-evident.