Biography of Chris Cutrone

My dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism

 May 28, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica On plagiarism, Postone, and the present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. When, last July, Sean of Principia Dialectica put forward the allegation of plagiarism (using somewhat different words), I tried to overlook it. I thought that the charge wouldn’t be taken seriously, given that Sean left it wholly unsubstantiated. [Read More]
capitalism  critical theory  Discussion  Karl Marx  Marxism  Principia Dialectica  the Left 

Symptomology

Historical transformations in social-political context

Symptomology

 May 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Marx ridiculed the idea of having to “prove” the labor theory of value. If Marxian theory proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other “scientific” proof. The more concrete the negation of the need, the more abstract, empty and flamboyant becomes the subjective mediation. [Read More]
/20th Century  Crisis  Critical theory  David Harvey  Karl Marx  Marxism  Michel Foucault  Neo-liberalism  New Left  Barack Obama  Reflections 

Progress or regress?

The future of the Left under Obama

 May 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON DECEMBER 6th, 2008, a panel discussion titled Progress or Regress? Considering the Future of Leftist Politics Under Obama was held in New York City. The Panelists were: Chris Cutrone of Platypus; Stephen Duncombe, a professor at the Gallatin School at New York University and author of Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (2007); Pat Korte of the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Charles Post of the Detroit-based organization Solidarity; and Paul Street, author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (2008). [Read More]
Adolph Reed  Bayard Rustin  Exchanges  Martin Luther King  Barack Obama  Pat Korte  Paul Street  Stephen Duncombe 

my letter to The Nation on "Re-Imagining Socialism"

 April 1, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

The following letter that I wrote will be published in The Nation. I wrote in response to the article “Rising to the Occasion” (published elsewhere as “The ’S’ Word”) by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (spokesperson for the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-founder of Progressives for Obama), and forum of articles in reply, under the title “Re-Imagining Socialism,” by Robert Pollin, Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Parenti, Doug Henwood, Mike Davis, Michael Albert, et al. [Read More]
/20th Century  Discussion  ideology  Marxism  Politics  Revolution  Socialism 

Heidegger's conservative-reactionary misunderstanding of freedom

 February 5, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

… [M]odern man finds his own ‘essence’ in his greatest discovery, namely, that the most important thing is to turn ‘life’ into a ‘lived experience’ and to make all possibilities of lived-experience accessible generally to all in an equal manner so that through this universality of ‘lived experience’ ‘life’ may prove and actualize itself as the unconditioned whole… Without initiating its own self-destruction, how could that which has made itself beforehand the goal of itself and has put all goal-setting at the service of this goal, ever inquire into a goal? [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion  emancipation  freedom  History 

Obama and Clinton

"Third Way" politics and the "Left"

 December 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR THE “LEFT” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in 1992. Clinton’s election was seen as part of the triumph of “Third Way” politics that contemporaneously found expression in Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party in Britain. [Read More]
Bill Clinton  Consciousness  Critical theory  Depoliticization  Emancipation  Marxism  Movement  Neo-liberalism  Barack Obama  Politics  Profiles  Rosa Luxemburg  Socialism  The Left  Third Way  Workers 

Remember the future!

A rejoinder to Peter Hudis on "Capital in History"

Remember the future!

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ARTICULATES the problem of what “ought” to be with what “is.” The question is how the necessities of emancipatory struggles in the present relate to those of the past. The tasks revealed by historical Marxism have not been superseded but only obscured and forgotten, at the expense of emancipatory social politics in the present. Dunayevskaya and post-Trotskyism The problem with Raya Dunayevskaya lies in the belief that there has been any real theoretical or practical political progress since the failure of the revolutions of 1917-19. [Read More]
Capital  Exchanges  History  Karl Marx  Marxism 

Obama: three comparisons: MLK, JFK, FDR

The coming sharp turn to the *Right*

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN PREVIOUS ARTICLES I have addressed the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama in terms of the historical precedents of MLK, Jr. (the end of “black politics”) and JFK (Iraq and the election). Now I wish to address the final and perhaps most important but problematic comparison that might be available, FDR. MLK, Jr., JFK and FDR span the political imagination of the preceding generation, the “baby-boomers” who came of age in the 1960s, the time of the “New Left. [Read More]
Franklin Roosevelt  History  History of the Left  John F. Kennedy  Martin Luther King  Barack Obama 

Iraq and the election

The fog of "anti-war" politics

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

BARACK OBAMA HAD, UNTIL RECENTLY, made his campaign for President of the United States a referendum on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. In the Democratic Party primaries, Obama attacked Hillary Clinton for her vote in favor of the invasion. Among Republican contenders, John McCain went out of his way to appear as the candidate most supportive of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. Looking towards the general election, it is over Iraq that the candidates have been most clearly opposed: Obama has sought to distinguish himself most sharply from McCain on Iraq, emphasizing their differences in judgment. [Read More]
Adolph Reed  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad  ANSWER  Anti-imperialism  Anti-war  Ba'athism  Bill Clinton  Bush administration  Democracy  Democrats  Election  History  History of the Left  Imperialism  Iran  Iraq  ISO  Joe Biden  Kurds  Liberalism  NATO  Barack Obama  Occupation  Politics  RCP (USA)  Republicans  Saddam Hussein  Saudi Arabia  Shia  Sunni  The Left  The Right  U.N  Vietnam  World Can't Wait 

Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Deutsch, Español, Ελληνικά

The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25th, 2008. I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in fact one’s theory of the present. [Read More]
1789  1930s  1960s  19th Century  Bourgeois  Capital  Capitalism  Class consciousness  Crisis  Degeneration  Domination  Friedrich Engels  Freedom  French Revolution  György Lukács  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  History  History of the Left  Industrial Revolution  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  Modern  Moishe Postone  Politics  Proletariat  Regression  Revolt of the Third Estate  Rosa Luxemburg  The Left  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky  Walter Benjamin