Overview of all pages with the authors #Chris Cutrone

What is socialism? International social democracy

July 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 1ST, 2016, during its eighth international convention in Chicago, Illinois, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel discussion entitled, “What is socialism? International social democracy.” The panelists were Bernard Sampson, a member of the CPUSA and a precinct chair in Houston, Texas, for the Democratic Party; Karl Belin, a socialist worker, writer, and member of the Pittsburgh Socialist Organizing Committee; Jack Ross, a freelance editor and historian, and author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History (2015); and Chris Cutrone, president of the Platypus Affiliated Society. [Read More]

Social Democracy

Rosa Luxemburg and the party

May 3, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical “Revisionist Dispute,” in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that “the movement is everything, the goal nothing,” the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: “It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.”1 Critique of socialism What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have “class struggle” at all? [Read More]

Rosa Luxemburg Eduard Bernstein Socialism The party

The Sandernistas

Postscript on the March 15 primaries

March 30, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Coda to “The Sandernistas: The Final Triumph of the 1980s,” Platypus Review 82 (December 2015). THE PRIMARY ELECTIONS for the nomination of the Democrat and Republican candidates for President have demonstrated the depth and extent of the disarray of the two parties. Sanders has successfully challenged Hillary and has gone beyond being a mere messenger of protest to become a real contender for the Democratic Party nomination. But this has been on the basis of the Democrats’ established constituencies and so has limited Sanders’s reach. [Read More]

Bernie Sanders /2016 American Presidential Election

Horkheimer in 1943 on party and class

January 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Without a socialist party, there is no class struggle, only rackets HORKHEIMER’S REMARKABLE ESSAY “On the sociology of class relations” (1943)1 is continuous with Adorno’s contemporaneous “Reflections on class theory” (1942) as well as his own “The authoritarian state” (1940/42), which similarly mark the transformation of Marx and Engels’s famous injunction in the Communist Manifesto that “history is the history of class struggles.” All of these writings were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” (AKA “Theses on the philosophy of history,” 1940), which registered history’s fundamental crisis. [Read More]

/20th Century Capitalism Communist party Critical theory Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel History Vladimir Lenin Liberalism Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Political party Socialism Socialist Socioeconomic SYRIZA Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

Back to Herbert Spencer!

Industrial vs. militant society

January 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

HERBERT SPENCER’S GRAVE faces Marx’s at Highgate Cemetery in London. At his memorial, Spencer was honored for his anti-imperialism by Indian national liberation advocate and anti-colonialist Shyamji Krishnavarma, who funded a lectureship at Oxford in Spencer’s name. Marx and Spencer's facing graves.Photograph by Christian Fuchs, http://fuchs.uti.at/ What would the 19th century liberal, Utilitarian and Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who was perhaps the most prominent, widely read and popular philosopher in the world during his lifetime – that is, in Marx’s lifetime – have to say to Marxists or more generally to the left, when such liberalism earned not only Marx’s own scorn but also Nietzsche’s criticism? [Read More]

Anti-imperialism Anti-war Benjamin Constant Capitalism Carl Schmitt Freedom Martin Heidegger Imperialism Karl Marx Liberalism Libertarian Max Weber Friedrich Nietzsche Paul Lafargue Socialism Theodor W. Adorno Herbert Spencer Featured Articles

The Sandernistas

The final triumph of the 1980s

December 17, 2015 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE CAMPAIGN CYCLE for the 2016 general election in the U.S. has been characterized by some throwbacks to the 1980s, most notably in the two major party challengers, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Most remarkably, the Sanders campaign has introduced the word “socialism” into mainstream political discourse. It’s clear that what socialism means in Sanders’s mouth, however, is New Deal liberalism – despite the poster of Eugene V. Debs that hangs in Sanders’s Senate office. [Read More]

Bernie Sanders Liberalism New Deal /2016 American Presidential Election

What is a political party for the Left?

August 30, 2015 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 11, 2015, at the closing plenary of the 7th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention in Chicago, Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Mike Macnair of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), Adolph Reed, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania), and Tom Riley of the Internationalist Bolshevik Tendency (IBT) spoke on the topic “What is a political party for the Left?” The panel description reads as follows: In spite of many different political currents and tendencies, the most significant question informing the “Left” today is the issue of “political party. [Read More]

The Party

Postscript on party politics

December 1, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Coda to “What is political party for Marxism? Democratic revolution and the contradiction of capital: On Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy (2008),” Platypus Review 71 (November 2014). Originally published in abridged form as a letter in Weekly Worker 1035 (November 20, 2014). THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF THE 1930s recognized that the two historic constituencies of revolutionary politics, the masses and the party, had failed: the masses had led to fascism; and the party had led to Stalinism. [Read More]

What is political party for Marxism?

Democratic revolution and the contradiction of capital: On Mike Macnair's 'Revolutionary Strategy' (London: November Publications, 2008)

November 4, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

MIKE MACNAIR’S REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY is a wide-ranging, comprehensive and very thorough treatment of the problem of revolutionary politics and the struggle for socialism. His focus is the question of political party and it is perhaps the most substantial attempt recently to address this problem. Macnair’s initial motivation was engagement with the debates in and around the French Fourth International Trotskyist Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire prior to its forming the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste electoral party in 2009. [Read More]

The Party CPGB Mike Macnair

When was the crisis of capitalism?

Moishe Postone and the legacy of the 1960s New Left

October 18, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

LENIN STATED, infamously perhaps, that Marxists aimed to overcome capitalism “on the basis of capitalism itself.” This was in the context of horrors of not only industrial exploitation but also and especially of war: WWI. Lenin was not, as he might be mistaken to be, merely advocating so-called “war communism” or statist capitalism.1 No. Lenin recognized state capitalism as the advancing of the contradiction of capitalism. By contrast, after Lenin, there was state capitalism, but no active political consciousness of its contradiction. [Read More]

Vladimir Lenin Moishe Postone