What is the Left? What is Marxism? London 2013 Reading Group

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London: Mondays 7PM

Goldsmiths College, Richard Hoggart Bldg, Rm356,

London Borough of Lewisham, London SE14, UK

London Platypus Facebook invitation: http://www.facebook.com/events/148283905314897/

Summer and Fall/Autumn 2013 – Winter 2014

I. What is the Left?—What is Marxism?

• required / * recommended reading

Marx and Engels readings pp. from Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (Norton 2nd ed., 1978)

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Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Sep. 30, 2013

• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by Louis Menand (on Marx and Engels) and Karl Marx, on “becoming” (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58)

• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008)

• Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010)

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Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct. 7, 2013

• Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view” and “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)

• Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns” (1819)

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Week 3. What is the Left? III. Failure of Marxism | Oct. 14, 2013

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)

• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)

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Week 4. What is the Left? IV. Utopia and critique | Oct. 21, 2013

• Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left” (1968)

• Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), pp. 9–11

• Marx, For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843), pp. 12–15

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Week 5. What is Marxism? I. Socialism | Oct. 28, 2013

• Marx, selections from Economic and philosophic manuscripts (1844), pp. 70–101

• Marx and Friedrich Engels, selections from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), pp. 469-500

• Marx, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850), pp. 501–511

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Week 6. What is Marxism? II. Revolution in 1848 | Nov. 2–4, 2013

• Engels, The tactics of social democracy (Engels’s 1895 introduction to Marx, The Class Struggles in France), pp. 556–573

• Marx, selections from The Class Struggles in France 1848–50 (1850), pp. 586–593

• Marx, selections from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), pp. 594–617

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Week 7. What is Marxism? III. Bonapartism | Nov. 11, 2013

• Marx, Inaugural address to the First International (1864), pp. 512–519

• Marx, selections from The Civil War in France (1871, including Engels’s 1891 Introduction), pp. 618–652

• Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, pp. 525–541

• Marx, Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (1880)

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Week 8. What is Marxism? IV. Critique of political economy | Nov. 18, 2013

• Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61), pp. 222–226, 236–244, 247–250, 282–294

• Marx, Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1 Sec. 4 “The fetishism of commodities” (1867), pp. 319–329

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Week 9. Nov. 27, 2013 Thanksgiving break

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Week 10. What is Marxism? V. Reification | Dec. 2, 2013

• Georg Lukács, “The phenomenon of reification” (Part I of “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, 1923)

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Week 11. What is Marxism? VI. Class consciousness | Dec. 9, 2013

• Lukács, Original Preface (1922), “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919), “Class Consciousness” (1920), History and Class Consciousness (1923)

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Winter break readings