Democracy and Marxism

• * required / • recommended reading

Film screening

• * Last Party 2000 (2001)

Week 1

Marx and democracy

• * Dick Howard, selections from The Specter of Democracy (2002)

• Howard, “Philosophy by other means?” (2001) (original version of Chapter 13 of The Specter of Democracy)

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

• Karl Marx, On Bruno Bauer’s The Jewish Question (1844)

• Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)

• Chris Cutrone, “Lenin’s liberalism” and “Lenin’s politics” (2011)

Week 2

Communist Party of Great Britain debates Platypus

• * Selected articles from Weekly Worker, May 12–August 11, 2011</a.

• Original pages of Weekly Worker

• * Ben Lewis, “Chicago school” (letter in Weekly Worker 914, May 17, 2012)

• * Chris Cutrone, letter in response to Ben Lewis (May 17, 2012)

• Danny Hammill, “Debate, controversy and comradeship” (on the 2011 CPGB Communist University summer school, Weekly Worker 879, September 1, 2011, p. 11)

• Spencer Leonard, “Adam Smith’s profoundest reader: Marx” (Weekly Worker 895, December 22, 2011, pp. 12–14)