My student friends and I talked about starting a reading group, but this presented logistical and organizational challenges in the plague year. Then Andrew Pfannkuche (aka “Pancake”) heard about a high-powered intellectual group that met online, a leftist reading group that went by the name of Platypus Society. Their reading syllabus included not only classics of the Marxist tradition but such precursor authors as Rousseau, Adam Smith, and of course Hegel, all interesting in their own right. Since I had never read Adam Smith and hardly anything by Rousseau, this appealed to me. The Platypus Society has a quirky sectarian origin in the Trotskyist spectrum and claims a vanguard role in pursuing the destruction and resurrection of the leftist opposition. If, as Platypus claims, the Left is “dead” and the residual leftist organizations zombies to be put down, how, one wonders, will Platypus resurrect the true Left?
It seems that the key to renewal lies in the study and proper understanding of Holy Scripture, the Marxist classics, and their sources—the ultimate authority. As a scholar of the German Reformation and its disputing sects, I was reminded of Reformation dissenting groups, Anabaptists or hardline Flacians, convinced that adherence to the one true reading of the Gospel would topple the papal Antichrist and bring about the New Jerusalem of heaven on earth. Pancake and I adopted the attitude of guests at the dinner of a family emerging from some twisted internecine quarrel. If they put satisfying fare on the table for us, the background of rancor and hubris could be ignored. I was happy to stick it out in the discussion sessions for most of the syllabus.
On a weekend last summer, Pancake and I drove to Chicago to rendezvous with a dozen or so Platypus members, all of them young and most in their first years after graduating from Northwestern or the University of Chicago. We knew them from the online discussions. They brought drinks and tasty sandwiches from a Vietnamese carry out place. They were a pleasant bunch and after so many months of semi-isolation and avoidance, it felt luxurious to sit beneath the trees in a lakeside park and chat at ease with our new acquaintances. In order to get to know them better while staying relevant, I asked each one in the circle what had been the issue or experience or personal conflict that turned them into sympathizers of the Left. To my surprise, the inquiry was received politely but it yielded almost nothing, no sudden or gradual realization that their world was unjust or oppressive. I explained that for my generation the question would have been answered with reference to some encounter with the antiwar, Civil Rights or women’s movement, some “Eureka moment” or some acquaintance who opened their eyes and “radicalized” them. Not so with them. Some had come in through related university courses. Others frankly admitted that they just liked the people in the group. What they said would have fit as well anyone’s participation in a library reading circle.
It might be tempting to ridicule them for their lack of active engagement in the time of BLM and ongoing war and poverty, but I’m not sure this would be fair and adequate. It is true, the Platypus Society actually boasts of its avoidance of single-issue, non-theoretical engagements; but many recent activists suffer from an equal but opposite anti-intellectualism, a lack of theoretical perspective, a disinterest in books and ideas. Ideally in life or learning there should be a unity of theory and practice. DSA manages to avoid any serious intellectualism or pursues it in a dilettante manner. Moreover, our culture suffers from a general disregard for the past which allows us to repeat its mistakes.
I told them in the discussion group that because the 60s in America began with Existentialism and only then turned to Marxism, there was a tendency to understand alienation in existential terms. I knew in the core of my soul that I would have to sell myself and alienate my personality in order to obtain employment and maintain myself under capitalism. I knew that I was a commodity even in intimate relations where I would have to ask myself, am I worth her? Am I equal to him in exchange value? What do I have to offer? Not who am I or what is the meaning of life? Consequently, certain teachings of Marx were embraced by 60s radicals without their bothering much with the Hegelian dialectic or the theory of surplus value. Alienation was an experience as well as a concept shared by Marxists and Existentialists. I cannot imagine that this concept is no longer relevant in a society of surveillance and expropriated personal data.
Rousseau, Adam Smith, and Hegel are certainly of interest in themselves; but studying them as precursors of Marx confuses several distinct notions. A and B are precursors of C because they are chronologically prior. Or because C has borrowed certain ideas from A and B. Marxists, however, regard precursor status in the sense that A and B only reach fulfillment in C. This is akin to biblical typology: the Old Testament only reaches its fulfillment in the New; the new realizes the hidden meaning of the old and completes the gradual realization of truth in a full and final revelation.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 