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Mike Macnair Paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain weekly No need for a party? Mike n Labour makes gains workern Non-Labour left Macnair reports from the n Lib Dem slump US Platypus convention n CPGB aggregate No 865 Thursday May 12 2011 Towards a Communist Party of the European Union www.cpgb.org.uk £1/€1.10 CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS BECKONS 8 May 12 2011 865 US LEFT No need for party? The US Platypus grouping does not have a political line because there is ‘no possibility of revolutionary action’. Mike Macnair reports on its convention attended the third annual Platypus about madness and the penitentiary, as International Convention in Chi- well as about the history of sexuality, Icago over the weekend April 29- have been falsified by historians. May 1. The Platypus Affiliated So- And, though he identified Foucault’s ciety is a, mainly student, left group tendency to marginalise class politics, of an odd sort (as will appear further he saw this as merely a product of the below). Its basic slogan is: ‘The left defeat of the left, rather than as an is dead; long live the left’. Starting active intervention in favour of popular very small, it has recently expanded frontism. Hence he missed the extent rapidly on US campuses and added to which the Anglo-American left chapters in Toronto and Frankfurt. academic and gay/lesbian movement Something over 50 people attended reception of Foucault was closely tied the convention. to the defence of extreme forms of The fact of Platypus’s rapid growth popular frontism by authors directly on the US campuses, though still as or indirectly linked to Marxism yet to a fairly small size, tells us that Today, for whom it was an instrument in some way it occupies a gap on the against the ‘class-reductionist’ ideas US left, and also tells us something of Trotskyists. (limited) about the available terms of Ashley Weger deployed the debate. The discussions raised some ‘typical Platypus’ combination of interesting issues (though I am not Adorno with elements of 1970s sure how productive most of them Spartacism to polemicise against were). It is this that makes it worth the taboo/witch-hunt in relation to reporting the convention. This article intergenerational sex, which she will be an only slightly critical report argued flowed from a fetishism of of the convention; a second will offer the ‘innocence’ of childhood and a a critique of Platypus’s project. refusal to recognise the sexual desires I was invited to give a workshop of youth. This paper was competently on the CPGB’s perspectives, and done and valuably provocative to to participate in the Saturday current orthodoxies. evening plenary on ‘The legacy of It nonetheless did not get as far as Trotskyism’. I also attended some of the British debate of the 1970s-80s the panel discussions and the opening on the same issue. This recognised and closing plenaries, on ‘The politics Strange combination that the other side of the coin (adult of critical theory’ and ‘What is the aspirations to intergenerational Platypus critique?’ After the papers had been presented left groups were, in fact, principled approach and led to a return to sex) also flows from fetishisms, of and Nicholas Brown had responded, ones which would prohibit any Marx’s understanding of a much innocence and of powerlessness; Critical theory there was a brief and not particularly unity; and that programme was less more prolonged historical process and that statistically very much the I got little from the opening plenary on controversial question and answer fundamental than understanding of transition to capitalism, including larger part of intergenerational sex is ‘The politics of critical theory’ (on the session. history or the movement of the class the first experiments in the Italian father-daughter incest, which exploits Frankfurt School). The speakers were: struggle. I think I was able in the short city-states and the Dutch and English family power relations for what is in Chris Cutrone of Platypus and the Debating politics time available to answer these points revolutions (visible especially in the substance non-consensual activity. School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Saturday morning saw two 50-minute reasonably clearly: some divisions second half of Capital Vol 1). Since an immediate transition to the philosopher of technology and sessions of parallel workshops under on the left do have a principled basis, But beginning with the French the ‘higher stage’ of communism is student of Herbert Marcuse, Andrew the title, ‘Debating politics on the left but many do not, and in any case the Revolution and late-enlightenment not to be expected, a revolutionary Feenberg of Simon Fraser University; today: differing perspectives’. In the divisions in the early Comintern were ideas is, in fact, a new left dogma. It overthrow of the capitalist state Richard Westerman of the University first hour the choice was between the as wide or wider; a clear, short formal is linked to the idea that the ‘Hegelian’ order will not result in the immediate of Chicago; and Nicholas Brown of Maoist Revolutionary Communist party programme is essential to party logic of the first part of volume 1 of disappearance of this problem. the University of Illinois Chicago, as Party of the USA (leader since 1975: democracy. Marx’s Capital can be read without Accordingly any immediate (or respondent to the three papers. Bob Avakian) and the Democratic A representative of the International reference to the broader claims of ‘transitional’) programme point on the The plenary took as its starting Socialists of America (DSA). I went Bolshevik Tendency argued that historical materialism about the history issue must take a form like that in the point the publication by New Left to the latter. our view of democratic centralism before fully developed capitalism. CPGB’s Draft programme: “Abolish Review in 2010 of translated excerpts DSA claims to be the largest left amounted to going back on the fun- This approach is foundational to age-of-consent laws. We recognise the from a set of notes by Greta Adorno group in the US with around 10,000 damental gain represented by the Lukács, Korsch and the Frankfurt right of individuals to enter into the of a series of conversations in 1956 members, though the paid circulation 1903 split between Bolsheviks and school, who play an important role in sexual relations they choose, provided between Theodor Adorno and Max of their paper is lower, at around Mensheviks: I pointed out that the Platypus’s thought. this does not conflict with the rights Horkheimer with a view to producing 5,700 (and the Communist Party USA Spartacist (and other far-left) dog- of others. Alternative legislation to a modern redraft of the Communist claimed, as of 2002, 20,000 members). mas around this split actually origi- Sexual liberation protect children from sexual abuse.” manifesto. This project got nowhere, The presentation made clear that the nated with Zinoviev’s History of the The panel on ‘Marxism and sexual Jamie Keesling’s paper on the and (as Andrew Feenberg pointed out) group essentially consists of activists Bolshevik Party as a factional instru- liberation’ featured four interesting sexual emancipation of women was the Adorno-Horkheimer conversations in the left of the Democratic Party ment against Trotsky and were subse- papers. Pablo Ben critiqued the Reich/ the weakest of the four papers, moving are frequently absurd. engaged in a range of campaigns quently promoted as part of the Stalin Marcuse conception that ‘sexual from Juliet Mitchell to the modern Feenberg, who is a ‘child of 68’, for liberal good causes, plus some school of falsification. This argument liberation’ would undermine the debate among feminists about ‘sexy remarked also on the extent to which, support for trade unionists in dispute. shocked him. capitalist order. This idea informed dressing’, to philosopher Harriet in the conversations, Adorno and Its image of an alternative society is the early gay men’s movement, and Baber’s 1987 article, ‘How bad is Horkheimer displayed fear of falling Sweden or Finland. It is committed to Panels later the arguments of Pat Califia and rape?’ (which argues that compulsion into Marcuse’s positions: these, he popular-frontist ‘coalitions’ and has in In the afternoon there were three others in the lesbian sadomasochism to do routine labour is a more serious argued, had more connection to the its constitution rejected any electoral sets of parallel panel sessions under movement and its more general ‘sex- harm to the victim),4 to 1970s radical real emancipatory possibilities of intervention. It is, in short, not even the general title, ‘Lessons from the positive’ offshoots. The critique feminism (whose arguments she the post-war world than Adorno and Lib-Lab: the late 19th century Lib- history of Marxism’, with (in theory) combined the ideas of Adorno in did not grasp or attack in depth), Horkheimer’s theoreticisms. Labs at least agitated for working 15 minutes break between them. relation to the regulative power of to Moishe Postone’s 2006, broadly Chris Cutrone has posted his class representation within the Liberal In the first period the choice was capitalist economic relations over all Eustonite, ‘History and helplessness’,5 paper, ‘Adorno’s Leninism’, on his Party. between ‘Marxism and the bourgeois aspects of social life with the point - to Adorno. While various points were provocatively (or perhaps merely In the second hour the choice was revolutions’ and ‘Marxism and well understood by historians of the interesting, this did not add up to a pretentiously) titled blog The Last between CPGB and the Marxist- sexual liberation’. I have interests issue since the 1970s - that ‘sexuality’ coherent whole.
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