Overview of all pages with the authors #Chris Cutrone

The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today

December 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON NOVEMBER 5, 2011, using questions formulated together with Chris Cutrone, Haseeb Ahmed interviewed Slavoj Žižek at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Haseeb Ahmed: Are we currently – after Tahrir Square and the eruption of the Occupy movement – living through a renaissance of the Left? If so, what is the historical legacy that stands in need of reconsideration? [Read More]

Egypt Vladimir Lenin Maoism Max Horkheimer Moishe Postone RCP (USA) Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Occupy Occupy Wall Street

A cry of protest before accommodation?

The dialectic of emancipation and domination

December 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

HOW ARE WE TO REGARD the history of revolutions? Why do revolutions appear to fail to achieve their goals? What does this say about consciousness of social change? One common misunderstanding of Marx (against which, however, many counter-arguments have been made) is with respect to the supposed “logic of history” in capital. The notion of a “historical logic” is problematic, in that there may be assumed an underlying historical logic that Marx, as a social scientist, is supposed to have discovered. [Read More]

History History of the Left Marxism Revolution

Whither Marxism?

Why the occupation movement recalls Seattle 1999

November 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PRESENT OCCUPATION MOVEMENT expresses a return to the Left of the late 1990s, specifically the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. They both have taken place in the last year of a Democratic U.S. Presidential administration, been spearheaded by anarchism, had discontents with neoliberalism as their motivation, and been supported by the labor movement. This configuration of politics on the Left is the “leaderless” and “horizontal” movement celebrated by such writers as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth), John Holloway (Change the World without Taking Power), and others. [Read More]

Anarchism Marxism Occupy Occupy Wall Street Seattle Globalisation

Lenin's politics

A rejoinder to David Adam on Lenin's liberalism

September 25, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE PRINCIPAL MISTAKE MADE by those who contemplate Lenin’s political thought and action is due to assumptions that are made about the relation of socialism to democracy. Lenin was not an “undemocratic socialist” or one who prioritized socialism as an “end” over the “means” of democracy. Lenin did not think that once a majority of workers was won to socialist revolution democracy was finished. Lenin was not an authoritarian socialist.1 [Read More]

Vladimir Lenin Liberalism Exchanges

The politics of Critical Theory

Third Annual Platypus International Convention: Opening plenary

July 9, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE OPENING PLENARY of the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held April 29–May 1, 2011 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a panel discussion between Nicholas Brown of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Andrew Feenberg of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Richard Westerman of the University of Chicago. The panelists were asked to address the following: “Recently, the New Left Review published a translated conversation between the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer causing more than a few murmurs and gasps. [Read More]

1960s György Lukács Herbert Marcuse Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Max Horkheimer Platypus Convention Rosa Luxemburg Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory Frankfurt School

Lenin's liberalism

June 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

At the 2011 Left Forum, held at Pace University in NYC between March 18-21 , Platypus hosted a conversation on “Lenin’s Marxism.” Panelists Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Paul LeBlanc of the International Socialist Organization, and Lars T. Lih, the author of Lenin Reconsidered: “What is to be Done” in Context were asked to address, “What was distinctive about Vladimir Lenin’s Marxism? What was its relationship to the other forms of Marxism and Marxists of his era? [Read More]

Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Liberalism Marxism Theodor W. Adorno

To the shores of Tripoli

Tsunamis and world history

April 2, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

“AFTER ME, THE DELUGE,” the saying attributed to Louis XV (1710–74), would have been better said by his son and heir Louis XVI, who was soon thereafter overthrown by the French Revolution that began in 1789.1 Muammar Qaddafi has said something similar, that if he is overthrown Libya will be condemned to chaos. Qaddafi even claims to be fighting off “al-Qaeda.” Perhaps he is. United States Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and his men from USS Enterprise attacking the Barbary pirate ketch Mistico, December 23, 1803, painting by Dennis Malone Carter (1827--81). [Read More]

Libya Muammar Qaddafi

Egypt, or, history's invidious comparisons

1979, 1789, and 1848

March 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and the revolts gripping the Arab world had started to be made. But other historical similarities offered themselves: the various “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Central Asian states and Lebanon in recent years, and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc and beyond (the former Yugoslavia) starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. [Read More]

1789 1848 1917 Bonapartism Egypt Hosni Mubarak Iran Islamic Republic Karl Marx Marxism Revolution Walter Benjamin

The relevance of critical theory to art today

January 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2010, Platypus hosted a panel entitled “The Relevance of Critical Theory to Art Today” moderated by Chris Mansour at The New School for Social Research in New York. The panel consisted of Philosophy Professors J.M. Bernstein (The New School), Lydia Goehr (Columbia University), and Gregg Horowitz (Pratt Institute and Vanderbilt University), and Chris Cutrone (Adjunct Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Member of Platypus. [Read More]

Art Marxism Art and culture Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky Walter Benjamin

The Marxist hypothesis

A response to Alain Badiou's 'communist hypothesis'

November 6, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Against Badiou ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”1 This is also the title of Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review2 on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.3 There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows: What is the communist hypothesis? [Read More]

Alain Badiou Communism Karl Marx Marxism Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin