The Platypus Affiliated Society is an international organization looking to welcome interested students to its year-long Marxist theory (not meant as endorsement or dogma but rather open intellectual inquiry) student reading group which is currently happening at DePaul. Platypus organizes reading groups, public fora, research, and journalism focused on problems and tasks inherited from the “Old” (1920s-30s), “New” (1960s-70s), and post-political (1980s-90s) Left, for the possibilities of emancipatory politics today.
The first half of the reading group (Fall) is entitled “What is the Left? What is Marxism?”, and you can view the semester syllabus here. The description is as follows: “The historical roots of the Left and Marxism in the bourgeois revolution of the 17th-18th centuries and its 19th-century crisis in capitalism are addressed through readings from Karl Marx and the background in radical bourgeois philosophy of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. 20th-century attempts to recover Marx and Marxism’s political consciousness by the Frankfurt School and in the 1960s-70s “New Left” frame the problem of consciousness of the Left in the mid-late 20th century leading to the present, through writings by Juliet Mitchell, Adolph Reed, Moishe Postone, and the Spartacist League/U.S., among others, and Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Leszek Kolakowski.”
For more information about joining DePaul’s group, email Rosa Martins at nmart119@depaul.edu.
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