the North Star

Conversations on the Left: What is to be done?

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Bhaskar Sunkara, James Turley, & Ben Blumberg

Platypus Review 57 | June 2013

On April 18th, 2013, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a conversation at New York University between Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin, James Turley of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Ben Blumberg of Platypus, to discuss the differences and similarities between their organizations. What follows is an edited transcript of the discussion.

Tri Logos

Bhaskar Sunkara: It is impossible to deny that the Communist Party of Great Britain’s (CPGB) Weekly Worker is an important publication. It is a publication that is right about many things, without a doubt more right than their peers on the British left, and their ideas deserve more engagement, so I am very pleased that Platypus has us together on this panel. There is no regular party publication on the American left that comes close to the Weekly Worker’s competence, especially considering the small size and resources of the CPGB. They have been consistently against the perversion of democratic centralism and lack of accountability by the leadership in groups like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). I have been reading it for a couple of years and I think they have a really nuanced view of Trotskyism’s legacy. They also have a solid critique of Eurocommunism and other coalition politics. What I like most of all is their openness about their small size and their limited influence as an organization. For someone like me, who has been around the Left and its posturing, we at Jacobin think the Weekly Worker is far more refreshing and useful than organs that herald the coming of every new socialist movement as if it is going to resurrect the Left. Platypus’s approach is also sometimes useful on this point. Jacobin doesn’t share the same politics, but only because we are operating in different contexts. We aim to reach a different audience. Jacobin, as a political project, is a publication that cannot substitute for the role of a political organization or the role of a party. It also cannot have the uncompromising and coherent vision and perspective of a propaganda group. And it is subject to lots of different pressures and forces — such as the market and the petty-bourgeois culture of writing and publishing.

Our different orientations affect whom we are trying to reach. Jacobin was always two projects. It is something of an intra-left project: emphasizing a Marxist perspective towards organization building. But our main project has been an outwardly directed one: engaging with American liberalism. We have always been geared towards the general public. We are liberals articulating radical ideas and we do so in a way that is clear and accessible. If we have any measure of mainstream success, it is intentional. We have sought to be a terrain for deep theoretical debates. It has been said that we are visible reminders of a long-forgotten socialist tradition, which would define us politically somewhere in between Leninism and the Democratic Socialists of America. One result of this is that the level of politicization of Jacobin’s readership is not quite the same as the level of politicization of our editors, and you could probably say there is a lot more political parity between the readership and the editors of the Weekly Worker and the Platypus Review.

James Turley: The CPGB is not a party. It doesn’t exist; it is a name. The name comes from the older official communist party that has since wound up. The name represents an ideal that we look towards. The far left is divided into small propaganda circles and some of them deny that they do propaganda. The SWP would be a good example; the International Socialist Organization (ISO) is another. They think they are talking to the masses, but it is bad propaganda reaching a mass audience. The CPGB identifies openly as a propaganda group and so probably would the International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) or the Spartacist League. So there is a very similar landscape out of which the CPGB of the 1920s was formed. The original CPGB was formed from one wing of the Socialist Labour Party, which was a kind of syndicalist sect, and the large majority of the British Socialist Party. At that time, it was a far-left Marxist sect rather than the mass party form that existed in continental Europe. Along with the South Wales committee, their forces together totaled about four to five thousand. If you add up the people in Britain today committed to some form of socialist revolution, you get a ballot figure of about five thousand. After 70–90 intervening years we are, in a sense, back where we started. That says something about the 20th century. Continue reading →

The North Star to the rest of the Left: Disengage from Platypus, engage with [pseudo-]reformism

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by Corey Ansel

Untitled.
Image: Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son (1819-1823)
untitled2.

NOTE: Just to be clear about my own relationship to Platypus as an organization, I must again remind readers that I am not currently a member, though I am obviously still sympathetic to its cause. Corey’s statement defends Platypus against a number of misperceptions and baseless accusations that are commonly leveled against it. Even if such accusations were true, however, I find it the height of hypocrisy that anyone, especially university professors, would refuse to participate in Platypus events on the ground that it supposedly “lends ideological support” to reactionary ideologies like Zionism or imperialism. This is all the more true given the fact that most of them hold positions at universities and routinely speak on campuses subsidized by the U.S. military (and all the foreign military forces it aids), in return for the advanced weapons technologies their research and development departments provide.

Not to mention that the historical “Lenin,” unlike Richard Seymour’s epigonal pseudonym, didn’t hesitate for a moment to meet cordially and grant an interview to the Fabian socialist (and apologist for British imperialism!) H.G. Wells during the middle of a bloody civil war. 

Originally posted at the Chair Leg of Truth. My one editorial gripe would be that The North Star does not even insist that one engage reformists, since this would seem to suggest that a genuine reformism today exists. What exists today is rather a pseudo-reformism of sorts, which calls for “realistic” programs of reform to reinstate the welfare state or government-funded social programs, even when such programs are no longer viable. The reformists of yesteryear — Bernstein, Schmidt, and the lot — actually deserved to be taken seriously by the likes of Luxemburg. Anyway, for more on The North Star, a shitty webzine owned and chiefly inspired by the living fossil Louis Proyect, and two of its “leading lights,” please see:

1. Dario Cankovic’s report on the Platypus International Convention 2013 in Chicago
2. Ben Campbell’s Sidney Hook moment

For some responses to this hysteria written by Platypus’ president, Chris Cutrone, see:

1. On the so-called “rational kernel of racism”
2. Platypus’ “position” on “imperialism”

Apparently I was not the only person to learn a lesson or two from Homer Simpson in my childhood. It appears that The North Star is at it again, primarily its editor Ben Campbell, having taken to Homer’s immortal quotes to nourish a newly drafted letter calling for total and unconditional disengagement with the public fora and publications of the Platypus Affiliated Society: “Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”

In my article “Dissecting the Platypus,”1 published in issue #963 of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker, I raised many political points about Platypus as a project that Ben Campbell and Chris Cutrone, the President of the Platypus Affiliated Society, were gracious enough to engage with in the letters’ page of the CPGB’s paper. Thus, I will waste no time attempting to continue my assessment of Platypus in the interest of leaving that dead horse be.

When it comes to a revolutionary regroupment of forces on the left, The North Star’s project is content to ‘try and try again’ in breathing air into the dead horse (or the “stinking corpse”, as Rosa Luxemburg put it) of the Second International. As of the time of this article, Ben Campbell’s letter calling for a disengagement with Platypus as a project due to its stated goal“to make war on the existing (“dead,” fake/pseudo) “Left” and to overcome it” has been posted on Richard Seymour’s Lenin’s Tomb blog and been signed by just over a dozen well-known figures amongst the Marxian left.2 Not surprisingly, the list of signatories includes numerous pseudo-Marxists such as Sherry Wolf, a leader of the US-based International Socialist Organization (ISO) and Richard Seymour, a former oppositionist within the British Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who after breaking with the group, has recently decided to add another sect, titled the International Socialist Network (ISN), to the sectarian embarrassment that has become the ostensibly revolutionary left. Ironically, I have attempted to engage both politically and polemically to no avail. Continue reading →