As seekers after a highly problematic legacy from which we are separated by a definite historical distance, we are dedicated to approaching the history of thought and action on the Left from which we must learn in a deliberately non-dogmatic manner, taking nothing as given. We have organized our critical investigation of the history of the Left in order to help discern emancipatory social possibilities in the present, a present that has been determined by the history of defeat and failure on the Left. We think that an authentic emancipatory Left today would suffer from a similar problem of (mis)recognition, in part because the tasks and project of social emancipation have disintegrated and so exist for us only in fragments. We take our namesake from the platypus, which suffered at its moment of zoological discovery from its unclassifiability according to prevailing science. Hence, Platypus makes the proclamation, for our time: “The Left is dead! - Long live the Left!” - We say this so that the future possibility of the Left might live. At certain times, the most necessary contribution one can make is to declare that the Left is dead. The Left is in such a grave state of decomposition that it has become exceedingly difficult to draft coherently programmatic social-political demands. Platypus contends the Left suffers, as a result of the accumulated wreckage of intervening defeats and failures, from a very partial and distorted memory of its own history and that at crucial moments the best work on the Left is its own critique, motivated by the attempt to escape this history and its outcomes. Platypus is a project for the self-criticism, self-education, and, ultimately, the practical reconstitution of a Marxian Left. What’s the idea behind the Platypus project?Īt present the Marxist Left stands in ruins.
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