About

What is Platypus?

The Platypus Affiliated Society, established in December 2006, organizes reading groups, public fora, research and journalism focused on the 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.

Why attend the Platypus reading group?

It is the only place you can find a comprehensive (introductory) history of the Left--all the way from the radical bourgeois philosophes like Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel to Marx and Engels, the revolutionary Marxists like Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, and finally the Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno--without simply favoring one tradition against another. We are not a sectarian group upholding a political line. Instead, Platypus's slogan is "The Left is Dead, Long Live the Left!" which affords us the critical distance to step back and consider the entire history of the Left and its regression in the 20th century that has brought us to the confused and confusing present. It also means that no questions are taboo or politically incorrect. The reading group is a space to learn and ask difficult--or simply--questions that you cannot ask in the classroom.