there've been some shake ups within the leadership of the organization the past 6 years and all those shakeups have led to an increased cultishness with chris cutrone at the center. and that man is pretty much a quack.
if an interpretation of marxisn leads to this type of mystical shit you should be concerned.
So then, what are we? . . . Towards such ends, we might begin (perhaps provocatively) with the list of names that indicate the thoughts and problems issuing from events that, reading history against the grain (with Benjamin), still speak to us in the present: Marx, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Adorno. — Not much more than what is represented by these figures, but absolutely nothing less.
Sounds like pretentious academic leftists.
Who do these "intellectuals" think they are in having influence of the movement? I have never seen an organization takes seriously their thought and word (unlike other great intellectuals) so who are they writings towards? It's a self-serving vanity project by the petite-bourgeoise of society to serve their self-ego while chiding the masses.
I came in contact with them when I started at uni and I attended some of their reading circles. Basically they're trotskyists who claim that there has been no real left movement since the october revolution. Because of this they are stuck reading the same texts over and over again, condemning anything outside of their framework. Also they are very cultish. When you want to join, you have to do some kind of mentoring program in which you have to discuss texts of Chris Cutrone on multiple occasions with a member you haven’t met before. I also remember different mailing lists in which all conversations come to an end when Cutrone makes a statement.
They're the middle point of a Trotskyism-to-Neocon pipeline, reading Marx on the one hand and supporting the Iraq war, hating trans people and justifying sexual assault on the other. Like everyone here is saying, they're somewhere between harmful and pointless at best
[T]he Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq was an eminently responsible act. They were willing to stake themselves in a way the Democrats and the Europeans and others were not—and the “Left” could not. The “success” of the Bush policy amounts to its ability to cast all alternatives into more or less impotent posturing. Attributing motives for the war to American profiteering is to mistake effect for cause.
Like everything he writes against the left, it's a distortion of his opponents' arguments while trying to present the Republicans in the best possible light. Platypus members would tell you that he's not the official voice of the org, but given his status as de-facto cult leader, I don't think this distinction matters too much.
Their public positions, as expounded in their Platypus Review, take the consistent line that identity politics is a distraction from the class war and would be solved if we just had the (pre-Stalin) Soviet Union back. This is argued here in respect to trans rights and here in respect to #MeToo, written by the same guy. It's always the same pattern: saying that there is no difference between the right and the left by taking some superficial similarity -- like thinking there are right and wrong sex acts -- and then stating that the only real leftist thing to do would be to have the revolution of 1917 again, while boring the reader to death by recounting the history of left movements in the 1910's and 20's again in every article. They sometimes publish normal leftists in their magazine, but what the members write in there is a good reflection of their actual positions I think.
And that's only the public stuff. From looking at their internal conversations for a while, I can say that they're even more reactionary than they appear. There's a reason they consist mostly of cishet white guys.
