Program of Events

Interview with Caro
Left Workshop 

2:30 PM - 4:30 PM CT
Room 016, Pick Hall, UChicago
5828 S University Ave, Chicago, IL 60637

Caro Hoffmann is a member of the Interventionist Left, which is an association of radical left-wing groups and individuals from the undogmatic and emancipatory left in German-speaking countries. The IL has been active for over 20 years in socialist, anti-racist, feminist and climate struggles and are committed to anti-fascism and anti-war politics. Their practice ranges from transformative organizing in tenants' struggles to campaigns of mass civil disobedience against coal mining.

Book Talk with Chris Cutrone
Left Workshop

5:30 PM - 7:30 PM CT
Room 122, Social Sciences Research Building, UChicago
1126 E 59th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Chris Cutrone is the last Marxist. He teaches Critical Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute for Clinical Social Work and completed his PhD on Adorno's Marxism at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years in the Social Sciences Core Curriculum, and is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society. He is the author of Marxism in the Age of Trump (2018), The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006–2022 (2023) and Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006–2024 (2024).

This discussion with Chris Cutrone will focus on his upcoming book, Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006–2024.

Liberal Democracy in Crisis?
Opening Plenary 

5:00 PM - 7:30 PM CT
Room 107, Kent Lab, UChicago
1020 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Speakers:

• Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York who has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, labor, and the environment since the 1960s. A co-founder of the US Green Party in 1984, he was the party’s candidate for US president in 2020.

• Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer based in England. His work has appeared in UnHerd, Sublation Magazine, Areo Magazine, Quillette and elsewhere.

• Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan and the author of The Political Right and Equality and the forthcoming The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.

• Jordan De Anda is an activist and the Education Chair of For the People (FTP) - Chicago, a revolutionary communist organization whose mission statement is to develop a broad communist movement in America through both material and ideological intervention in local political struggle. FTP's current body of work includes working tenant unions, national liberation organizations, leftist student groups, community-based political action committees, running survival programs, and hopefully in the near future, workers organizations.

• Chris Cutrone is the last Marxist. He teaches Critical Theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute for Clinical Social Work and completed his PhD on Adorno's Marxism at the University of Chicago, where he taught for many years in the Social Sciences Core Curriculum, and is the original lead organizer and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society. He is the author of Marxism in the Age of Trump (2018), The Death of the Millennial Left: Interventions 2006–2022 (2023) and Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006–2024 (2024).

Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016, many on the Left perceive “liberal democracy” to be in crisis. Trump, Brexit and the rise of new populist parties and authoritarian regimes around the world have been regarded as a global “threat to democracy”. The election of Biden in 2020 was largely felt as a relief or accepted as a lesser evil. However, after three years, many of the discontents with “liberal democracy” remain. With the return of Trump as a strong contender for reelection in the upcoming US presidential race, the Platypus Affiliated Society now asks:

1. What does "liberal democracy" mean for the Left? How is it useful for understanding the capitalist state? If not, why?

2. Where does the term “liberal democracy” come from historically?

3. What did Marx and Engels mean when they said that the working class has to “win the battle of democracy”? Is there still a “battle of democracy” to win?

4. Is “liberal democracy” in crisis today? If so, how? If not, why? What would it mean for the Left to "defend", or to "oppose", or to "overcome" "liberal democracy"?

5. How have different generations, the New Left, the Millennial Left and young Leftists today–the so-called “Zoomer Left”–tried to grapple with the problem of liberal democracy? What, if any, are the lessons to learn from previous generations on the Left?

The Politics of Free Speech
Panel Discussion 

1:00 PM - 3:30 PM CT
Room 107, Kent Lab, UChicago
1020 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Speakers:

• Jack Weinberg is an environmental activist, former New Leftist, and is known for his role in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. 

• Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer based in England. His work has appeared in UnHerd, Sublation Magazine, Areo Magazine, Quillette and elsewhere.

• Abdul Alkalimat is Professor of African-American Studies at UIC and author of Malcolm X for Beginners. 

• Carlos Garrido is a co-founder of Midwestern Marx and writer currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. 

• Jack Ross is author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History and The Strange Death of American Exceptionalism. 

"If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." 

— Jefferson, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801)

“The government knows, and the bourgeoisie knows too, that the whole German workers' movement today is only tolerated, only survives, for as long as the government chooses. For as long as it serves the government's purpose for this movement to exist and for the bourgeois opposition to be faced with new, independent opponents, thus long will it tolerate this movement. From the moment that this movement turns the workers into an independent force, and thereby becomes a danger to the government, there will be an abrupt end to it all. The whole manner in which the men-of-Progress agitation in the press, associations and assemblies has been put down, should serve as a warning to the workers. The same laws, edicts and measures which were applied in that case, can be applied against them at any time and deal a lethal blow to their agitation; and they will be so applied as soon as this agitation becomes dangerous. It is of the greatest importance that the workers should be clear about this point, and do not fall prey to the same illusion as the bourgeoisie in the New Era, when it was similarly only tolerated but imagined it was already in the saddle. And if anyone should imagine the present government would free the press, the right of association and the right of assembly from their present fetters, he is clearly among those to whom there is no point in talking. And unless there is freedom of the press, the right of association and the right of assembly, no workers' movement is possible.” 

— Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers' Party (1865)

From the Sedition Act of 1798 through the Sedition Act of 1918, the right to public speech has been tied to the politics of the state. Both acts were raised in recent prosecutions of Trump to bar him from candidacy. The 1798 Act was authorized under John Adams’ presidency as a means of prosecuting and convicting members of the Jeffersonian press for their support of the Jacobins in the French Revolution and their further criticism of the Adams administration; while the 1918 act was authorized under Wilson’s presidency as a means of prosecuting and convicting Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for his speech in Canton, Ohio which called for turning the inter-imperialist war into a class-war. Meanwhile, today, the same Leftists calling to de-platform the Right are themselves called the Right and driven off campus.

1. What is the importance of civil liberties, especially freedom of speech, for the freedom of society?

2. Does society have the right to be wrong?

3. What made free speech a socialist cause? What is the relationship of socialism and civil liberties?

4. Why has the Left suppressed or supported free speech and what distinguishes its doing so from the Right's? In what way is free speech a concern for the Left? How is its concern distinguished from the Right?

From Politics to Protest
Closing Plenary 

5:00 PM - 7:30 PM CT
Room 107, Kent Lab, UChicago
1020 E 58th St, Chicago, IL 60637

Speakers:

• Sean KB is a longtime rank and file member of the NYC District Council of Carpenters and a co-host of The Antifada, a podcast about history, current events and political economy from a communist perspective. His intermittent writings can be found at seankb.substack.com.

• Caro Hoffmann is a member of the Interventionist Left, which is an association of radical left-wing groups and individuals from the undogmatic and emancipatory left in German-speaking countries. The IL has been active for over 20 years in socialist, anti-racist, feminist and climate struggles and are committed to anti-fascism and anti-war politics. Their practice ranges from transformative organizing in tenants' struggles to campaigns of mass civil disobedience against coal mining.

• Howie Hawkins is a retired Teamster in Syracuse, New York who has been active in movements for civil rights, peace, labor, and the environment since the 1960s. A co-founder of the US Green Party in 1984, he was the party’s candidate for US president in 2020.

• Carlos Garrido is a co-founder of Midwestern Marx and writer currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. 

“Movements can get politicized. No broad movement emerges out of an apolitical era and latches immediately onto some sort of unified and comprehensive critique. And new politics will emerge, in part, from the cauldron of occupation. But real debates, the clash of ideas, beyond just rosy, impressionistic reports from the front, are required now more than ever.” 

- Bhaskar Sankara, 2011

Since 2020, the Left has undergone a transformation in organizing and self-conception. With the end of the Bernie Sanders movement, the lifting of COVID restrictions, and political disorientation under the Biden administration, horizons for the contemporary Left have shifted to street politics, taking up popular discontents with racism, climate change, and American foreign policy. This recalls images of the past–not only of the Late 60s and 70s, but the early moments of the Millennial Left, born out of Occupy, the Anti-War Movement, and the shadow of Anarchism in the 80s and 90s.

How should today’s Left consider this history, and what resonance does it have (if any) with the current moment? How have the politics of protest been impacted by the Biden administration and the looming specter of Trump? Are the horizons of possibility for the Left today greater than they were ten years ago?