Overview of all pages with the authors #Chris Cutrone

Ends of philosophy

August 5, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Prepared opening remarks for an internal discussion by members of Platypus on “Marxism and philosophy” to be held on August 11, 2018. Misery MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as “bourgeois ideology.” This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. [Read More]

Karl Korsch Philosophy

Why I wish Hillary had won

Distractions of anti-Trump-ism

August 5, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Presented at the Left Forum 2018 on the panel “Has ‘the Left’ Accommodated Trump (and Putin)? A Debate,” with Ravi Bali, Brendan Cooney, Anne Jaclard, Daphne Lawless and Bill Weinberg, organized by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative at John Jay College in NYC on June 2, 2018. A video recording of the event is available online at: https://youtu.be/tUvBeXO02JY. AS A MARXIST academic professional and a gay man living in a Northern city, married to a nonwhite Muslim immigrant, it would have been beneficial to me for Hillary Clinton to have been elected President of the U. [Read More]

Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Marxist Humanists

1918--2018

The century of counterrevolution

May 5, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Presented as the President’s report at the closing plenary of the 10th annual international convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on April 7, 2018. Recently, I came across a 1938 article by the “Left communist” Paul Mattick, Sr., titled “Karl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler.” In it, Mattick asserted that the reformist social democracy that Kautsky ended up embracing was the harbinger of fascism – of Nazism.1 There is a certain affinity to Friedrich Hayek’s book on The Road to Serfdom (1944), in which a similar argument is made about the affinity of socialism and fascism. [Read More]

The Platypus Review

The future of socialism

What kind of illness is capitalism?

April 2, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

An abridged version of this article was presented at the 4th Platypus European Conference closing plenary panel discussion, “What is the Future of Socialism?,” with Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute of Globalization and Social Movements), Alex Demirovic (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation), Mark Osborne (Alliance for Workers’ Liberty; Momentum) and Hillel Ticktin (Critique journal), at Goldsmiths University in London on February 17, 2018. The liquidation of [Marxist] theory by dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice… The interrelation of both moments [of theory and practice] is not settled once and for all but fluctuates historically… Those who chide theory [for being] anachronistic obey the topos of dismissing, as obsolete, what remains painful [because it was] thwarted… The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth-content only by those who agree with [Friedrich] Schiller that “world history is the world tribunal. [Read More]

Capitalism Theodor W. Adorno Friedrich Nietzsche Alain Badiou

The Millennial Left is dead

October 1, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Those who demand guarantees in advance should in general renounce revolutionary politics. The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process. It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. [Read More]

Millenials Barack Obama Bernie Sanders Donald Trump Black Lives Matter Occupy Wall Street

1917--2017

August 29, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 8, 2017, for the closing plenary of its 9 Annual International Convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a panel discussion, 1917–2017, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Tasked with reflecting on the historical significance of 1917 for the Left, the panel brought together Bryan Palmer, Chair of the Canadian Studies Department at Trent University and author of numerous histories of the Left; Leo Panitch, Professor of Political Science at York University, author, and co-editor of the Socialist Register; and Chris Cutrone, President of the Platypus Affiliated Society. [Read More]

1917 Bolshevism Leon Trotsky Vladimir Lenin

Critical authoritarianism

November 8, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Immanent critique WHENEVER APPROACHING ANY PHENOMENON, Adorno’s procedure is one of immanent dialectical critique. The phenomenon is treated as not accidental or arbitrary but as a necessary form of appearance that points beyond itself, indicating conditions of possibility for change. It is a phenomenon of the necessity for change. The conditions of possibility for change indicated by the phenomenon in question are explored immanently, from within. The possibility for change is indicated by a phenomenon’s self-contradictions, which unfold from within itself, from its own movement, and develop from within its historical moment. [Read More]

Article The Platypus Review /20th Century Marx Marxism The Platypus Review Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin Authoritarianism Authoritarian Personality

1917

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

November 18, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά, Deutsch

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the 1917 presentation by Chris Cutrone. [Read More]

Bolshevik Revolution György Lukács Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Socialism Left Forum

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

Questions and Answers

November 17, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the Q & A session that followed. [Read More]

Left Forum History

History, theory

The Platypus Synthesis

June 14, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Transcript of the plenary presentation by Chris Cutrone at the 1st annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, Chicago, June 12–14, 2009. See the above link for an audio recording. I WANT TO BEGIN, straightaway, with something Richard raised, on which I would like to try to elaborate, by way of properly motivating the more “positive” aspect of Platypus’s theory. Not how we are misrecognized, as either neoconservatives, crypto-Spartacists or academic Left-liberals, and what this says “negatively” about our project, as if in a photonegative, as Richard has discussed, but rather how we positively think about the intellectual content of our project. [Read More]