Upcoming: Moderated Dialogue between Thinker and Marxist Platypus Society

From 7 to 9 PM Central on Monday, May 15, 2023, representatives from the Thinker and the Platypus Affiliated Society’s Chicago chapter will engage in a moderated dialogue at the Reynolds Club’s south lounge. The event, entitled “Revolution: Retrospect & Prospect,” will be open to the public.

“Our task is critique and education towards the reconstitution of a Marxian Left,” reports the Platypus statement of purpose. Conversely, the Thinker’s stated agenda is “to defend conservative and libertarian perspectives in a community that is increasingly intolerant of such voices.”

The University of Chicago Philosophy Review is the sponsor of the moderated discussion, which will address the ideological complexities of the American Revolution and the prospects for reviving its insurrectionary spirit.

Staff writer Jack Moore, law school correspondent Ben Ogilvie, and senior editor Perry Zhao will represent the Thinker, though their statements will represent their own viewpoints and not those of the Thinker.

Desmund Hui (‘24), the Chicago chapter head of the Platypus Affiliated Society, informed the Thinker that he is “excited about the event.”

“The point of this event for me is not to establish a feel-good unity between Platypus and the Thinker, nor is it to engage in put-downs of another perspective,” Hui added, “but rather to clarify the genuine differences between the Left and the Right.”

“UChicago is often demonised by the ‘Left’ as a dreadful Right-wing institution,” Hui continued, “although the reality is nowadays it is rather similar to any run-of-the-mill radical liberal university that is generally insulated from either the perspective of a Left-critical organisation like Platypus or a Right-wing organisation like the Thinker.”

Hui reminded the Thinker that Platypus is “not an activist political organisation.” Instead, Platypus is “focused on investigating the ideological problems involved in what we consider ‘the death of the Left,’ which we consider dead insofar as it has departed from the highpoint of historical Marxism embodied by figures such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky.”

Platypus’s slogan, Hui reminds the Thinker, is “The Left is Dead, Long Live the Left!”