Helplessness without history: Political education after the Millennial Left
On November 9, 2023, the University of Chicago chapter of the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a teach-in on Moishe Postone’s 2006 essay “History and Helplessness” and the origins of Platypus, led by Pamela C. Nogales C. What follows is an edited, revised, and expanded version of that presentation.[1] [Auf Deutsch]
However difficult the task of grasping and confronting global capital might be, it is crucially important that a global internationalism be recovered and reformulated . . . [The Left should be very careful] about constituting a form of politics that, from the standpoint of human emancipation, would be questionable, at the very best, however many people it may rouse.
— Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness” (2006)[2]
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.
— Platypus Statement of Purpose (2007)[3]
Introduction
I am a founding member of Platypus and one of the authors of our Statement of Purpose and the Platypus Review’s Editorial Statement. I bear some responsibility for starting our now 18-year-old organization, which is currently active in universities across three continents. I am also a historian of intellectual history, social reform, and the crisis of liberalism in the 19th century, and I teach undergraduates at the University of Chicago.
Platypus is a Millennial Left organization, among the last which have survived the tumultuous decade and a half. When we got started in 2006, I was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where Chris Cutrone introduced me to the Frankfurt School. Soon after, I first read Capital while sitting in Moishe Postone’s class at the University of Chicago. Given the opportunity to deliver this teach-in after the events of October 7, I thought it would be a timely occasion to revisit the founding moment of Platypus alongside Postone’s “History and Helplessness” — a touchstone of our early education.
We are in a far less propitious moment for political education today than in 2006. However, some of the obstacles we face are not new. Students today are under a similar pressure to “take a side” or be condemned as tacit collaborators — “White Silence=Violence,” as a placard at a recent pro-Palestinian rally read. What side are you on? This is their introduction to the “Left” today. The Israel–Palestine conflict after October 7 presents familiar hurdles.
At the same time, from the standpoint of the present, the past appears as a moment of opportunity. In his book talk on The Death of the Millennial Left (2023), at the University of Chicago, Cutrone argued that there was a historical opening in the Millennial Left moment, which went unfulfilled.[4] I want to use my teach-in to take up the question of the unrealized potential of the recent past and place Platypus within the history of the Millennial Left.
My teach-in is motivated by a sense that Platypus finds itself at a crossroads: we are trying to reinscribe our raison d’être under new and degraded conditions. What was Platypus? And what can it yet become? The answer is not self-evident.
I. Now . . .
In the Platypus Statement of Purpose, we wrote, “The present disorientation on the Left means that we can hardly claim to know the tasks and goals of human emancipation better than the utopians of the past did.” This is still true.
The past month has felt like going back in time. This tragedy that is unfolding, the current Israel–Palestine conflict, has brought out some of the worst social impulses among the so-called Left. A profound nihilism has taken the place of political questions. Back in 2007, the questions we posed in order to organize the discontent against the Iraq War were, as we put it in the title of our first panel in 2007, “‘Imperialism’: What is it? Why should we be against it?”[5] Today, moral indignation has taken the place of political education, and the participants are less able, perhaps less willing, to engage with the history of the Left and its defeat — that is, the historical conditions for the absence of emancipatory politics.
Today, the Israel–Palestine conflict takes place in a vacuum, on an ahistorical plane, where agency is generated by and through oppression ad infinitum. There are good people (who suffer) and there are bad people (who oppress). It’s simple. What side are you on?
Does anyone care to ask: why are we only left with Hamas and the Israeli state? Why are they taken up as representatives of an eternal and ahistorical struggle?
It was slightly different in 2007. I would like to turn to that moment in order to piece together how the Left responded to conflicts in the Middle East during our founding moment. To be clear, I am not returning to this era out of nostalgia — there were no “good old days.” Yet, perhaps, something has been lost. I return to our raison d’être because the present tasks us to look at our own history — that is, at the memory-image of the founding of Platypus. What do we see there, from the standpoint of the present?
II. Then . . .
In preparation for our first panel, Platypus read several texts. They included Postone’s “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism” and Tariq Ali’s “Mid-point in the Middle East?,”[6] both published in 2006. The two authors, Postone and Ali, stood in for remnants of a historical Left. In taking them up, we sought to deepen our understanding of what was happening around us, namely the mass demonstrations against the Iraq War, which were modeled after the popular agitation against the Vietnam War. Platypus was confronted with the history of the New Left by encountering the anti-war movement. As a young person, these protests made a profound impression. They were massive demonstrations, mobilizing millions of people in hundreds of cities across the world: what did they want? I was not on the Left, but as a result of my studies in Platypus I began to ask myself, what is the Left? What would it mean to be part of a Left opposition to the Iraq War?
I became part of the New Students for a Democratic Society. I remember sitting in rooms at different universities and Left spaces in Chicago, entering into frustrating conversations about the goals of the anti-war mobilization. As Platypus members participating in the New SDS, we thought we could help the organization avoid the New Left’s old mistakes. We thought we could make new mistakes, different from those of the generations that came before us. We thought we could consider the world anew.
At a New SDS meeting at SAIC, in the Michigan Avenue building, we argued about what the first public statement by the New SDS should say. The proposal on the table was to take the old SDS’s Port Huron Statement, written in 1962, and simply “rebrand” it for the present by making a single change: replace “Cold War” with “Iraq War.” We argued against this cosmetic change and successfully stopped it. Moishe Postone’s work had already taught us that the absence of the Left as a political force in Iraq made the 2007 moment wholly unlike that of the New Left. The change would have masked a historical decline of political agency.
Our intervention felt empty however, because what this episode actually revealed was the stillborn character of the Millennial Left. In front of us was a rehearsal of the undigested past. Calls for a revised Port Huron Statement came alongside chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh” — but there was no Ho Chi Minh, no Vietnam War, no organized Left against the United States in Iraq. This was a bizarre introduction to the Left. What was this rehearsal really about?
The New Left had gripped the political imagination of its time. To make sense of it, we read The New Left Reader (1969) and tried to recapture the horizon of possibilities occluded by the protests.[7]
We didn’t know any better than the protestors. We didn’t know what to do. We certainly didn’t have the program for a socialist party in our pocket. What we developed at this moment were negative lessons: calling for UN intervention meant calling for American soldiers with blue helmets; calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops meant a massacre, an ethnic cleansing, violence by Kurds against Shias, Shias against Sunnis; calling for the “international community” to intervene amounted to little more than an empty moral stance against the brutality of war that handed the reins back to the capitalist butchers. War conjures up moral indignation, but the question remained: what could the Left do? Where was this Left anyway? There were a lot of people in the streets but no political agency. In the early years of Platypus, we learned that the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), a fragment of the Left from a pre-Ba’athist Iraq, had been ousted from the World Social Forum, which at the time was among the few international organized bodies on the Left. The ICP was ousted because it chose to participate in the provisional government set up by the Americans.[8]
What about this political reality? How did it change what the New SDS wanted? It didn’t.
Outside of the New SDS things were also rather bleak. Verso published Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden (2005);[9] Judith Butler claimed that Hamas and Hezbollah—the same people who killed socialists, trade union leaders and women educators— were part of the “progressive Left.” The most influential Marxists in the anti-war movement at the time were the U.S.-based Cliffites, the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The general sense among them was that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” — that anyone who took up arms against the United States was on the right side of history. In an interview with Tariq Ali, conducted by Platypus in 2007, he cautioned us not to paint the resistance against the Americans as fueled by religious fanaticism, that this was “Western propaganda.”[10] Meanwhile, the Spartacist League split the difference by saying: no political support for Saddam Hussein or the Islamic resistance, but “military support” for the anti-imperialist forces[11] — what did this mean? Were they providing military assistance to the insurgents? When we asked, we were told that Lenin himself insisted on the distinction between military and political support and they cited a letter on the Kornilov Revolt of 1917. It was in these conversations that we learned that 1917 haunted the Left. Therefore, it haunted us as well.
Platypus was born out of a frustration that a political impasse went unrecognized — was actively suppressed. People willfully suspended their disbelief. We thought that in the absence of an emancipatory Left, public opposition on the street would amount to little. That the war would come to an end, likely with a negotiation by world powers over how best to manage the tinder box of Iraq. We declared, “The Left is dead! Long live the Left!” — to make room for the future. That is, to create the conditions for a future Left, we had to first recognize the absence of the Left. Thinking back, we thought that we had a modest goal: let’s make new mistakes — let our generation think the world anew again — what can the Left become? We thought it was modest but, in retrospect, it was a tall order.
What could we do? Platypus asks the questions.
I wish it were otherwise, by the way. It’s not comforting to realize that I cannot side with emancipatory forces in the world and that my generation has witnessed nothing but catastrophe. The inability to “take sides” today is an undesirable situation. It is what makes Platypus necessary.
Platypus banner at an anti-war demonstration, Chicago, 19 March 2008.
III. Symptomology
As we turned to Moishe Postone and Tariq Ali in the preparatory stage of the first panel, we asked ourselves, what were these fragments and shards of Left history? Generationally, both were part of the New Left. Ali and Postone were on the Left in a period of a historical transition, from Fordism to post-Fordism to neoliberal capitalism. Postone described this transformation as a symptom, an expression of deep historical dynamics and large-scale cultural changes. Capitalist society, according to Postone, is the context to understand social and political phenomena. Politics are functionalized within capitalism. While ideologically disparate, the state management of production relations by both the Keynesian welfare states and the USSR operated within the social-historical constraints of capitalism and its form of accumulation. Similarly, the shift to flexible accumulation, with the centralization of financial markets and decentralization of production, and the international cultural rebellion of the postwar era, were also bound to the transformation of capital in the post-Fordist period. Capital’s social relations constrained politics, that is, political agency is subject to the constraints of capital.
What implications does this have for Left politics? Postone helped us to disarticulate two different temporalities, both of which affect the conditions for the Left. The first is a historical dynamic of capital and its reconstitution. Currently, we are living through a transition from a neoliberal to a post-neoliberal order. The second temporality is the history of the Left itself, that is, the ways in which the Left tried to transform society — the trials of previous attempts at emancipation. These attempts also have unintended consequences and can help to advance the reconstitution of capital. The two temporal dimensions overlap. They are not independent from one another. Both the subjective (the Left) and the objective (the historical dynamics) are factors mediated within the context of the present, an arena shaped by the accumulation of history.
While Ali and Postone were of the same generation and were thus both subject to the same historical dynamic, they represent two different historical fragments of the Left. Postone represents the legacy of the Frankfurt School — Lukács, Adorno, Marcuse, and the preoccupation with Marx after Marxism. Postone asks, how does Marx speak to the present after the degeneration of Marxist politics? Tariq Ali, on the other hand, represents the legacy of Trotskyism transformed in and through the New Left. In 1968, Ali was a member of the International Marxist Group, the British section of the Fourth International, and aligned with Ernest Mandel. Mandel thought that it was possible to renew socialist revolutionary politics under the historically novel conditions of “neo-capitalist affluence.”[12] However, this would require socialists to go beyond “the ‘normal’ aims and institutional framework of the capitalist state and society,” or “traditional forms of action and organization.”[13] It would require socialists to identify opportune moments for the mass strike different from the model offered by the German Revolution (1918–19), which would nonetheless result in a crisis through the creation of dual power:
“[New forms of radical mass combat] can and must result in the conquest by the masses of new real powers, powers of control and of veto which create a duality of power, raise the class struggle to its highest and bitterest level, and thus bring the conditions for a revolutionary seizure of power to maturity.”[14]
Postone asked, how do we uphold the insights of Marx after Marxism? How can we capture, understand, and consider Marx as an immanent critic of capital, separate from the application of Marx in the present? The Fourth International asked, how should socialists build a practice? How can they direct their activity toward the aim of socialism? Both Postone and the Trotskyists recognized a problem — what Platypus would call a historical impasse. Both were Left critics of the Left.
Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) poster
When Benjamin Blumberg and I interviewed Postone for the Platypus Review, we asked about his involvement with the New Left and his experience as a student.[15] Postone was at first aligned with the faction in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which opposed Progressive Labor (PL) — a Stalinist organization born out of a split in the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). The problem with PL, said Postone, was that it operated “essentially outside of historical time,” disconnected from contemporary and actual possibilities. But his alignment with RYM was short-lived. In response to RYM’s study group “Youth as a Class,” he along with a friend began a separate reading group on Hegel and Marx. He explained,
[W]e felt that social theory was essential to understanding the historical moment and that the RYM’s emphasis on surface immediacy was disastrous. We read Lukács, who also was an eyeopener — the extent to which he took many of the themes of some conservative critics of capitalism, the critique of bureaucratization, of formalism, of the dominant model of science, and embedded them within Marx’s analysis of the commodity form. In a sense, this made those conservative critics look a lot more superficial than they had looked beforehand and deepened and broadened the notion of a Marxian critique. I found it really to be an impressive tour de force. In the meantime, I was very unhappy with certain directions that the Left had taken.[16]
Postone’s concerns with “surface immediacy” and the “concrete opposition to capital,”[17] are consonant with his “History and Helplessness” article. His critique of the Left in 2007 was shaped by his critique of the New Left — that is, by what he considered the mistakes of his generation. That was Postone’s judgment.
What about the Trotskyists? In the interview with Ian Birchall conducted by our member Efraim Carlebach in 2017, Birchall specified the relationship between the New Left and the anti-war movement:
The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was basically run by what became the International Marxist Group (IMG), which was another fragment of the Fourth International. . . . We set up the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign . . . This was against the British Council for Peace in Vietnam, which was basically run by the Communist Party and the Labour left, and which took a very soft line which simply called for negotiations.[18]
In those unstable years of splits and regroupments among the Trotskyist Left, Mandel’s organization, the IMG, rivaled Birchall’s, the International Socialists (IS) — a precursor to the Socialist Workers Party (f. 1977), led by Tony Cliff. Even though the two Trotskyist organizations remained competing and opposed tendencies (Mandelites and Cliffites) for decades to come, they began a rapprochement over shared Vietnam solidarity. The two tendencies converged on a strategic relationship to the anti-war movement. Ali’s trajectory therefore represents an important continuity and overlap that emerged from their shared response to 1968.[19] Their shared strategic outlook signals the trajectory which was taken by the New Left.
According to Birchall, the IS was responding to the Old Left, rejecting a previous framing of anti-imperialist socialist politics and replacing it for a new perspective: “We took the stance that there was a clear line of division and we were in favor of victory for the National Liberation Front, because this was a struggle for national liberation against imperialism. That slogan started drawing people.”[20]
A young Georg Lukács
In the United States, the Cliffites were represented by the International Socialist Organization (ISO), which led the anti-war movement during the Iraq War under George W. Bush.
Birchall said that Tony Cliff initially thought that Vietnam was “a bit of a distraction.” He changed his mind rather quickly on this but “it was the younger comrades, particularly Chris Harman . . . who shifted the International Socialists toward a greater involvement in the Vietnam movement and away from what would have been a very abstract negative position.”[21]
On the one hand, Postone identified the problem of the New Left in terms of a superficial analysis, or “surface immediacy,” and on the other hand, Birchall characterized the problems they had faced as potential irrelevance, or a “very abstract negative position,” wherein principles would have been completely disconnected from reality.
If we take up this conceptual framing, Birchall would reject Postone for embracing abstract negation, leaving the present bereft of a Marxist political practice, while Postone would reject the Cliffites for espousing a “superficial” analysis, a fetishization of the concrete (e.g. American imperialism) by tailing the anti-war movement in order to make Marxism relevant.
IV. The abstract and the concrete
What are Postone’s main categories in “History and Helplessness”? I’ve tried to point out a few thus far: a historical dynamic and the problem of the “fetishization of the concrete.” The last category I’d like to introduce is the notion of “resistance.” In a section of the essay that Platypus has used as an epigraph for the panel “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution and ‘Resistance,’” Postone writes, “
The notion of resistance, however, says little about the nature of that which is being resisted or of the politics of the resistance involved — that is, the character of determinate forms of critique, opposition, rebellion, and “revolution.” The notion of resistance frequently expresses a deeply dualistic worldview that tends to reify both the system of domination and the idea of agency.[22]
What troubled Postone was the character of Left political agency, when understood as a form of opposition to concrete historical developments absent consideration of the deep structural transformations, that is, the reorganization of society under capital. How does the Left grapple with historical change?
Postone offers a diagnosis of the state of the Arab and Muslim world, which warrants some discussion. He argues that there was a steep decline in the Arab world:
For whatever reasons, the authoritarian state structures associated with the Arab nationalism of the postwar Fordist epoch proved incapable of adjusting to these global transformations. These transformations, it could be argued, weakened and undermined Arab nationalism even more than did the military loss to Israel in 1967. Such abstract historical processes can appear mysterious “on the ground,” beyond the ability of local actors to influence, and can generate feelings of powerlessness.[23]
Furthermore, “The ideological framework that was already available to make sense of this decline [of the Arab world]” — that is, to concretize the problem of freedom and unfreedom —
…was formulated by thinkers such as the ideologue of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyed Qutb, who rejected capitalist modernity and regarded it as a plot created by Jews (Freud, Marx, Durkheim) to undermine ‘healthy’ societies. Within his anti-Semitic imaginary, Israel was simply the bridgehead for a powerful and pernicious global conspiracy.[24]
This form of misrecognition, Postone argues, is related to the tendency to grasp the abstract — the domination of capital — as concrete, that is, as “the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world” or a “fetishized identification of the United States with global capital”[25]:
…the spread of anti-Semitism and, relatedly, anti-Semitic forms of Islamicism (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and its Palestinian offshoot, Hamas) should be understood as the spread of a fetishized anticapitalist ideology which claims to make sense of a world perceived as threatening. This ideology may be sparked and exacerbated by Israel and Israeli policies, but its resonance is rooted in the relative decline of the Arab world against the background of the massive structural transformations associated with the transition from Fordism to neoliberal global capitalism.[26]
The decline of the Arab world took place within the structural transformation of capital relations, which, arguably, presented an opportunity for the Left. But the political forces capable of organizing mass social discontent turned the problem of unfreedom into a matter of bad (and dangerous) actors. This form of misrecognition, Postone argues, gave rise to dead-end political practices and a Rightward shift in political ideology.
He then repeats his critique of the anti-war Left during the Iraq War, which he’d also aimed at his colleagues in the New Left:
recent mass mobilizations neither expressed nor helped constitute what, arguably, was called for in this context — a movement opposed to the American war that, at the same time, was a movement for fundamental change in Iraq and, more generally, the Middle East.[27]
Postone’s diagnosis comes with a warning. Lacking the political agency to transform society in the Middle East, the New Left masked its hopelessness by turning to violence in the late 1960s and early 70s under the guise of militancy. Given the pervasive social, political, and cultural discontent and the bureaucratic stasis of the Fordist world, the Left embraced Sorelian violence as a “cleansing act,” a “redemptive act of regeneration,” as a creative force which ultimately occluded its helplessness. Postone taught us that the embrace of violence as redemption — as justice — expresses hopelessness masked as hope. This desperation indicates an absence of Left political agency.
Tariq Ali, on the other hand, foregrounded a history of the Left in the Middle East. In the interview with Platypus, Ali recounted the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I and the transformation of this region into small states under the British and French, which, he argued, brought about both a strong nationalist current and the emergence of small communist parties in part inspired by the Russian Revolution. He said that the Palestinian question arose within the context of the emerging Nasserite movement in the 1950s, the vanguard of a secular Arab nationalism. The revolutions in Syria (1954) and Iraq (1958) followed. In his estimation, a vision of a United Arab States with Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad as its capitals “seemed possible.” However, this vision of a “non-radical, i.e., non-Islamist, nationalism in the Arab world” — the path not taken, according to Ali — was defeated by a series of wars, with a final blow in 1967. After which, a window of opportunity closed: “The rest of this history, from the 1980s onward, is a story of U.S. imperialism using religious forces to eradicate the socialists, thus creating a void — a turning point of which was the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan in 1989.”[28] Ali warned the audience that we needed to be careful when talking about the “Iraqi resistance” because there were “secular elements there which the imperialists want to portray as religious zealots,” and we should not be duped. What was he referring to?
For Ali, Hamas offered a political alternative to the Palestinian Authority. In his New Left Review article from 2006, he wrote,
Without any of the resources of its rival, it set up clinics, schools, hospitals, vocational training and welfare programmes for the poor. Its leaders and cadres lived frugally, within reach of ordinary people. It is this response to everyday needs that has won Hamas the broad basis of its support, not daily recitation of verses from the Koran.[29]
And yet,
Hamas’s programmatic heritage remains mortgaged to the most fatal weakness of Palestinian nationalism: the belief that the political choices before it are either rejection of the existence of Israel altogether, or acceptance of the dismembered remnants of a fifth of the country.[30]
The question for him was whether or not Hamas could “break with this crippling tradition.”[31] While socialist forces were defeated definitively by 1989, Ali argued that the new political subjects for a resurgent Left were the most disenfranchised: “It is in the slums that Hamas, Hizbollah, the Sadr brigades and the Basij have their roots.”[32] Ali’s conception of political agency turned to what Postone would have identified as the fetishization of the concrete:
The contrast with the Hariris, Chalabis, Karzais, Allawis, on whom the West relies — overseas millionaires, crooked bankers, CIA bagmen — could not be starker. A radical wind is blowing from the alleys and shacks of the latter-day wretched of the earth, surrounded by the fabulous wealth of petroleum.[33]
For Ali, the history of the Left was indispensable. In the interview for Platypus and his contribution to the New Left Review, Ali gave us his theory of the present through a history of the Left in the 20th century. The communists had been defeated, American imperialism reigned supreme, and while political agency had collapsed by 1989, a new political subject was to be reconstituted on the resentment of the downtrodden, rather than the organization of the laborers.
V. Historical education: A theory of the present
It was through Platypus’s engagements with the existing Left that I learned about the relationship between the 1905 Russian Revolution and the Constitutional Revolution of Iran; the history of the Communist Parties of Iraq and Iran; and the turn to Arab nationalism. Our panels provided a way of excavating further, where our one-on-one engagements could not reach. In a 2010 event we held at Hunter College, “Marxism and Israel: Left perspectives on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict,” I learned that there were glaring omissions in Ali’s historical account.[34] The two speakers were Richard Rubin, a member of Platypus, and Alan Goodman, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. There, Rubin noted,
[I]n 1948 . . . the Soviet Union under Stalin’s dictatorship supported the creation of Israel, and the socialist camp mentioned above [China and the USSR] provided significant, some would argue decisive, material aid to Israel. Furthermore, many articles appeared in the communist press at the time hailing the Israeli struggle as an anti-imperialist one. Arab communist parties, which were small, but which did exist in several countries — particularly Egypt and Iraq — loyally opposed the intervention of the Arab armies and supported partition.
Rubin’s contributions highlighted a buried history: the support for Israel by the Left. This fragment of Left history would come into sharper relief as Platypus grew in Germany. It was our international growth beyond the United States which required that we become historians of the Left. We subjected ourselves to an ongoing education with the mission to understand the Left and make sense of its apparent contradictions. Breaking out of the provincialism of American Leftism also meant subjecting the readers of our monthly publication, the Platypus Review, to the fragments of a history they didn’t recognize as their own.[35] It also meant asking our German members to consider the history of America as part of the global rise of bourgeois society. Platypus built bridges to construct a history of the Left for the future.
Members of the Israeli Communist Party (Maki), formerly the Palestine Communist Party, on election day in Nazareth, January 25, 1949. This photograph was after the Unification Conference, held on 22 and 23 October 1948 in Haifa, when the Palestinian communists who remained in the areas occupied by Israel and who had been members of the National Liberation League (NLL), led by Tawfiq Toubi and Emile Habibi, announced that they would join the Israeli Communist Party.
It was out of intellectual curiosity and the desire for self-education that many young Platypus members took on research projects and additional readings, often leading to Platypus Review articles and teach-ins. Ian Morrison wrote an article on the history of Ba’athism.[36] Platypus also held a summer reading group on the Islamic Revolution, which sparked a multi-year engagement with the Iranian Left. We read Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson’s Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005), Ervand Abrahamian’s Iran Between Two Revolutions (1982), and Fred Halliday.[37] Once I had left Chicago for New York, I continued my education on the Iranian Left by sitting in a class at CUNY with Abrahamian on the Islamic Revolution, leading a Platypus teach-in, and organizing panels on the legacy of the Islamic Revolution in the wake of the Green Movement (2009–10).[38]
Abrahamian represented at the time not the Trotskyists nor the Frankfurt School, but a radical liberal perspective — the “radlibs.” In an interview by Spencer Leonard for the Platypus Review, Abrahamian taught us that the rise of radical Islam had distinct historical origins from Arab nationalism.[39] He warned that these should not be conflated. A key historical marker in the rise of radical Islam was its origins among the university students in Iran, who interpreted Islam in a much more “socialist way”:
The main philosopher of this is Ali Shariati, who was very much influenced by Frantz Fanon. What Shariati did was inject into Shi’ism radical notions of class struggle, equality, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, and anti-clericalism. There is a strong streak of anti-clericalism in Shariati. His ideas very much appealed to graduates, college students, and high school students, and these were the biggest groups of people who organized the demonstrations and were out in the streets from 1977 onwards.[40]
What this meant was that the Islamic Revolution was also a part of the history of the New Left. Students in the halls of Tehran University reinterpreted Marxist politics, pushed back against the Old Left, and formulated a new version of anti-imperialist politics. Tariq Ali’s reappropriation of Fanon when describing the revolutionary wind from the slums was not original — it was Ali Shariati’s.
What I am trying to draw out in my lengthy exposition is how the history of the Left we have encountered in bits and fragments transforms our understanding of the present impasse. This is an ongoing transformation, and the present requires thinking through this history under changed conditions. Left history did not provide us with a definitive answer but helped us formulate our questions. In Platypus panels, we are not asking, do you agree with Ali, do you agree with Postone, do you agree Abrahamian? We are not asking you, what side are you on? Rather, we want to grasp the lasting obstacles to a Left praxis: how did the Left act in history? What tasks and obstacles would a newly constituted Left have to take up? There isn’t a simple or direct line from the present into the past. Things are buried, partially distorted; horizons are forgotten or lost. Platypus attempts to sort through the detritus and decipher the hieroglyphics so that past attempts at revolutionary consciousness and socialist politics may find a new meaning.
VI. Potential?
To conclude, I’d like to return to Platypus and the question of the Millennial Left. A common Platypus refrain about the Millennial Left’s self-inflicted defeat is that it “failed to build the socialist party.” That is true enough, but it does not help to clarify what Platypus has done as a Millennial organization over the course of the last 18 years. It was never our aim to “build the party,” but to partake in the division of labor so that such an attempt would be possible, desirable and once again necessary.
Despite the general downturn on the Left, new projects are bursting onto the scene, new “communist parties,” new reading circles, and even a renewed campaign for a socialist party. What of this activity?
Platypus remains agnostic.
Now, as in 2006–07, we must remain open to the possibility that new generations will try again and fail. The Millennial Left tried and failed. It was only because Platypus was there to make sense of its attempts that our audience, potentially, could learn lessons from its defeat. That the Millennial Left “didn’t build the party” is a simple statement of fact. Certainly, there were attempts to do so, including by those who engaged in the Campaign for a Socialist Party. How could Platypus make sense of such attempts? We must, if we have not forgotten how to learn.
Our expectation during the early years was that Platypus could make the symptoms on the Left sharper — and help clear out the “obtuse symptoms.” What did this mean? We imagined that forcing the Left to articulate its understanding of the present, as well as what motivated its political practice, could do two things: lay bare the obstacles which a future Left would have to tackle in its practice; and help our members to identify the gaps and incongruities in the Left’s self-understanding, which they would have to fill. We wanted to cultivate intellectual curiosity among our audience about the Left, its history, and its horizons of possibility. Rather than looking to the existing Left as having the answers (just choose a side!), we wanted to provoke our audience to think. The panels were critical in this endeavor. Platypus would host the conversation. Nowhere else but in Platypus could Postone, Ali, and Abrahamian be forced into conversation. The three didn’t “make a whole” but, rather, when put into a constellation, they illuminated a problem, an impasse on the Left — albeit only partially. We knew that without Platypus such self-education would not take place, and that the absence of the Left would not be made palpable. Without Platypus, there would be no future Left.
The question of the potential of the Millennial Left raised by Cutrone’s book talk has lingered in my head. I wondered if Platypus could be the Millennial Left’s self-overcoming — that is, if at a different temporal moment the past attempts of a defeated generation could be reconsidered anew through our work. Maybe what was possible at that time was not a “socialist party” but the beginning of an inquiry and the insistence of a task. Maybe what was possible was Platypus.
We too, like the rest of the Millennial Left, were optimistic about what we could accomplish. We made demands of an unripe reality. We hoped that the Millennial Left would recognize itself as something other than what already has been. Were we too optimistic?
I think we’ve had many unintended effects on the Left that we did not foresee. Across the Left, the Platypus insight that “the Left is dead” has become commonly accepted, even by those calling for the struggle to continue. The second part of our slogan, “Long live the Left!,” remains confounding. Most of the Left has become more obtuse and less historically conscious. The collapse of sectarian organizations (the ISO and the Socialist Workers Party (UK), among them) has not galvanized others to take responsibility but opened the door to greater disorientation. Parts of the Left today seem to be waging an outright battle against historical consciousness. Their desperate bids to become relevant include doing away with the history of Marxism altogether, sometimes rebranding their organizations, and lowering themselves closer to the resentment of an unconscious mass. Among this mass are students looking for greater clarity; instead, they are encouraged to submit to their despair. How can Platypus educate a new generation of people under these conditions?
There is of course the possibility that our work will provide the terms and conceptual categories for new post-Millennial self-deception and liquidation on the Left. We are not exempt from the forces of regression. For that reason, we have to reflect on our historical trajectory and our aims with sober senses. 18 years later, Platypus must still ask the questions — yes. But these questions should include a healthy dose of self-inquiry. We do not want to squander new historical possibilities by rehearsing the repetition compulsion of the dead Left. Our aim remains: critique and education towards the reconstitution of a Marxian Left. How we achieve that aim under changed historical conditions will require confronting ourselves anew.
Originally published in the Platypus Review 170 (October 2024)
[1] A recording of the teach-in is available online at <https://youtu.be/T9BX4HGK1m8>. The author would like to thank Efraim Carlebach, Nils Frisius, Cam Hardy, Itsï Ramirez, Marco Torres, Tobias Rochlitz, and Andreas Wintersperger for their thoughtful feedback and suggestions.
[2] Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 110.
[3] Platypus Affiliated Society, “Statement of Purpose” (2007), <https://platypus1917.org/project/statement-of-purpose>.
[4] A recording of the event, held on October 12, 2023, is available online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4D7YGgqfGc>.
[5] Kevin Anderson, Chris Cutrone, Nick Kreitman, Danny Postel, and Adam Turl, “‘Imperialism: What is it? Why should we be against it?,” Platypus Review 25 (July 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/07/09/imperialism-what-is-it-why-should-we-be-against-it/>, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2vmDa6si30>.
[6] Tariq Ali, “Mid-point in the Middle East?,” New Left Review II/38 (March/April 2006): 5–19, <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii38/articles/tariq-ali-mid-point-in-the-middle-east>.
[7] The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969).
[8] Central Committee of the Iraqi Communist Party, “Letter to Fraternal and Friendly Parties About the Situation in Iraq and the Position of the Iraqi Communist Party” (January 2006), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/04/01/44538>.
[9] Osama Bin Laden, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden, ed. Bruce Lawrence, trans. James Howarth (London: Verso, 2005).
[10] Chris Cutrone, “Interview with Tariq Ali at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago” (October 15, 2007), <https://archive.org/details/TariqAliInterviewedByChrisCutronePlatypusChicago>.
[11] “Defend Iraq Against U.S. and Allied Imperialist Attack!,” Spartacist 57 (Winter 2002–03), 4–11.
[12] Ernest Mandel, “Lessons of May,” New Left Review I/52 (November/December 1968): 9–31; also published in Les Temps Modernes 266/267 (August/September 1968): 296–325, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1968/07/lessons-may68.html>.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Benjamin Blumberg and Pamela C. Nogales C., “Marx after Marxism: An interview with Moishe Postone,” Platypus Review 3 (March 2008), <https://platypus1917.org/2008/03/01/marx-after-marxism-an-interview-with-moishe-postone>.
[16] Ibid.
[17] See Postone, “History and Helplessness,” 102, 107–08.
[18] Efraim Carlebach, “The unchanging core of Marxism: An interview with Ian Birchall,” Platypus Review 102 (December 2017 – January 2018), <https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/unchanging-core-marxism-interview-ian-birchall>.
[19] Also worthy of note here is Ali’s editorship of the journal Black Dwarf, which included members of both the IMG and the IS. Thanks to Efraim Carlebach for pointing this out.
[20] Carlebach, “The unchanging core.”
[21] Ibid.
[22] Postone, “History and Helplessness,” 108.
[23] Ibid., 100.
[24] Ibid., 101.
[25] Ibid., 98 and 102.
[26] Ibid., 101–02.
[27] Ibid., 103.
[28] Cutrone, “Interview with Ali.”
[29] Ali, “Mid-point,” 7.
[30] Ibid., 9.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., 18–19.
[33] Ibid., 19.
[34] Alan Goodman and Richard Rubin, “Marxism and Israel: Left perspectives on the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” Platypus Review 35 (May 2011), <https://platypus1917.org/2011/05/05/marxism-and-israel-left-perspectives-on-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict>.
[35] See Initiative Sozialistisches Forum, “Communism and Israel,” Platypus Review 28 (October 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/10/08/communism-and-israel>; and Felix Baum, “German psycho: A reply to the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum,” Platypus Review 33 (March 2011), <https://platypus1917.org/2011/03/01/german-psycho-a-reply-to-the-initiative-sozialistisches-forum/>. For an introduction to the anti-German Left, see Max Hörügel, “The early Antideutsch and the working class,” Platypus Review 147 (June 2022), <https://platypus1917.org/2022/05/31/the-early-antideutsch-and-the-working-class/>. For the latest Platypus panel taking up the Anti-German Left, see our recent Berlin panel “Was waren die Antideutschen?” (August 2, 2024), <https://youtu.be/sPbT71IExIw>.
[36] Ian Morrison, “Ba’athism and the history of the Left in Iraq: Violence and politics,” Platypus Review 3 (March 2008), <https://platypus1917.org/2008/03/01/baathism-and-the-history-of-the-left-in-iraq-violence-and-politics>.
[37] See Fred Halliday, “Iran’s Tide of History: Counterrevolution and After,” openDemocracy (July 17, 2009), <https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/iran-s-tide-of-history-counter-revolution-and-after/> ; Fred Halliday, “The Fates of Solidarity: Use and Abuse,” in Crime, Social Control and Human Rights: From Moral Panics to States of Denial: Essays in Honour of Stanley Cohen, eds. David Downes, et al. (Cullompton: Willan Publishing, 2007), 394–406; Danny Postel, “Who is responsible? An interview with Fred Halliday” (2005), <https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/readings/hallidayfred_dannypostelinterview2005.pdf>.
[38] Ervand Abrahamian, Siyaves Azeri, Hamid Dabashi, “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left,” was held on September 13, 2009, at the Brecht Forum; my teach-in “The Failure of the Islamic Revolution” (February 17, 2010), at the New School; “The Green Movement and the Left: Prospects for Democracy in Iran” (March 20, 2010), at the Left Forum at Pace University; Ervand Abrahamian’s teach-in “Forging a Left in Iran: Possibilities and Difficulties” (May 2, 2010), at New York University. See also Chris Cutrone, “The Failure of the Islamic Revolution,” Platypus Review 14 (August 2009), <https://platypus1917.org/2009/08/24/the-failure-of-the-islamic-revolution>; and Danny Postel, Kaveh Ehsani, Maziar Behrooz, and Chris Cutrone, “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,” Platypus Review 20 (February 2010), <https://platypus1917.org/2010/02/18/30-years-of-the-islamic-revolution-in-iran>.
[39] Spencer A. Leonard, “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: An interview with Ervand Abrahamian,” Platypus Review 14 (August 2009), <https://platypus1917.org/2009/08/23/30-years-islamic-revolution-iran>.
[40] Ibid.
