Overview of all pages with the authors #Chris Cutrone

Chinoiserie

A critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA's 'New Synthesis'"

August 5, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Review of ‘Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage’, a Manifesto from the RCP, USA; and Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K. J. A., ‘Alain Badiou’s ‘Politics of Emancipation’: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World’ Demarcations 1 (Summer – Fall 2009). Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage. Lotta et al. is available online. Prologue DAVID BHOLAT ADOPTED, as epigraph for his essay “Beyond Equality,” the following passage from Joseph Schumpeter’s classic 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy: [Read More]

Alain Badiou Bob Avakian Cultural Revolution David Bholat Joseph Schumpeter Immanuel Kant Vladimir Lenin Maoism Karl Marx Marxism RCP (USA) Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Imperialism: What is it, why should we be against it?

July 9, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON JANUARY 30, 2007, Platypus hosted its first public forum, “Imperialism: What is it – Why should we be Against it?” The panel consisted of Adam Turl of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Kevin Anderson of the Marxist-Humanist group News and Letters, Nick Kreitman of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Danny Postel of Open Democracy, and Chris Cutrone of Platypus. What follows is an edited transcript of this event; the full video can be found online at the above link. [Read More]

Afghanistan Bosnia Bush administration History of the Left Iraq Imperialism War Anti-war ISO Marxism New SDS Vietnam

Against dogmatic abstraction

A critique of Cindy Milstein on anarchism and Marxism

July 1, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE LEFT FORUM 2010, held at Pace University in New York City in March, Cindy Milstein, director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, spoke at a panel discussion on anarchism and Marxism, chaired by Andrej Grubacic, with fellow panelists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Andrew Curley. The topic of Milstein’s talk was the prospect for the “synthesis of anarchism and Marxism” today.1 The relation between anarchism and Marxism is a long-standing and vexing problem, for their developments have been inextricably intertwined. [Read More]

Anarchism Karl Marx Marxism Cindy Milstein

Adorno and Freud

The relation of Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist critical social theory

June 10, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ADORNO’S HABILITATIONSSCHRIFT was on Kant and Freud. It ended with Marx. Why did Adorno think that Marx addressed the problems of both Kantian and Freudian accounts of consciousness? The distinction between Kant and Freud turns on the psychoanalytic concept of the “unconscious,” the by-definition unknowable portion of mental processes, the unthought thoughts and unfelt feelings that are foreign to Kant’s rational idealism. Kant’s “critical” philosophy was concerned with how we can know what we know, and what this revealed about our subjectivity. [Read More]

Sigmund Freud Immanuel Kant Karl Marx Theodor W. Adorno

Women the Longest Revolution

A Teach-In by Chris Cutrone

May 17, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Platypus presents: Tuesday, May 18th 8:00 PM [5710 S. Woodlawn ](http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=5710+S.+Woodlawn&sll=41.837771,-87.611412&sspn=0.174703,0.342979&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=5710+S+Woodlawn+Ave,+Chicago,+Cook,+Illinois+60637&ll=41.790801,-87.596891&spn=0.010927,0.021436&t=h&z=16) Featuring a presentation by Chris Cutrone on Juliet Mitchell’s “Women: The longest revolution” (1966) Join us for dinner and discussion Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming. A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical… As Marx wrote: ‘What is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity’s creative dispositions… unmeasured by any previously established yardstick[,] an end in itself… the absolute movement of becoming? [Read More]

Gillian Rose's 'Hegelian' critique of Marxism

Book review: Gillian Rose, 'Hegel Contra Sociology.' London: Verso, 2009.

March 15, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

GILLIAN ROSE’S MAGNUM OPUS was her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).1 Preceding this was The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978), a work which charted Rose’s approach to the relation of Marxism to Hegel in Hegel Contra Sociology.2 Alongside her monograph on Adorno, Rose published two incisively critical reviews of the reception of Adorno’s work.3 Rose thus established herself early on as an important interrogator of Adorno’s thought and Frankfurt School Critical Theory more generally, and of their problematic reception. [Read More]

György Lukács Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Rosa Luxemburg Theodor W. Adorno Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Sociology Gillian Rose

Rejoinder to David Black

On Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy

February 26, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korsch’s differentiation of Marx’s relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korsch’s historical account of such changes in Marx’s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch’s principal point. [Read More]

David Black György Lukács History of the Left Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Rosa Luxemburg The Left Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky

30 years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran

February 18, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Given the recent election crisis and continuing protests in Iran and in light of the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, The Platypus Affiliated Society on November 5, 2009 hosted a panel discussion at the University of Chicago entitled 30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left. Panel participants included Danny Postel, journalist and author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism; Kaveh Ehsani, editor of The Middle East Report (MERIP); Maziar Behrooz, historian and author of Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran; and Chris Cutrone of Platypus. [Read More]

Iran Islam Iranian Revolution

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

September 3, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”1 This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. [Read More]

The Failure of the Islamic Revolution

The nature of the present crisis in Iran

August 24, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE ELECTION CRISIS THAT UNFOLDED after June 12 has exposed the vulnerability of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), a vulnerability that has been driving its ongoing confrontation with the U.S. and Europe, for instance on the question of acquiring nuclear technology and its weapons applications. While the prior U.S. administration under Bush had called for “regime change” in Iran, President Obama has been more conciliatory, offering direct negotiations with Tehran. [Read More]