Book Review

Cap on Debt

Book Review: David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years. New York: Melville House, 2012.

October 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

LIKE MANY CRITICS OF GLOBALIZATION, David Graeber does not seem to understand what capitalism is. Otherwise he would not emphasize time and again that a market economy is something fundamentally different, as he does in his book, Debt: The First 5000 Years. Graeber’s distinction fits with a lot of left-wing currents, from old-fashioned anarchists in the tradition of Proudhon to young militants of Attac. All too many people assume that capitalism simply means financial speculation, intransparent bank dealings, monopolies, or interest as a way to garner income without work, all of which place a burden on the middle class. [Read More]

The anti-political party

Book Review: Ian Birchall. 'Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time'. London: Bookmarks, 2011.

April 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY (SWP) is the largest political party left of the Labour Party, and has been active on the far left since 1977 and before that as the International Socialists since the 1960s. The party was led by Tony Cliff until his death thirteen years ago, and Ian Birchall, who has written this diligently researched memoir, is still a member since joining in the 1960s. Birchall’s “warts-and-all” examination is motivated by a marked unhappiness about A World To Win, the autobiography which Cliff apparently wrote based on recollection, without access to the relevant documentation. [Read More]

Book Review Tony Cliff Socialist Workers Party (UK) Ian Birchall SWP (UK) Cliffism Ian Birchall

The Arab uprisings and the dawn of emancipatory history

Book Review: Alain Badiou. The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings. New York: Verso, 2012.

October 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Introduction ALAIN BADIOU CLAIMS that the twenty first century has yet to begin. We stand mired in the ideology of democratic materialism, which insists there are only bodies and language, and that we can persist without an idea. Our “atonal” environment of weak differences is riddled with a type of nihilism that crushes every master signifier, even those struggling to point in the direction of equality. Emancipatory politics is confronted with the nearly impossible task of going beyond the subject of the market, but with no clear means by which to do so. [Read More]

Alain Badiou Arab Spring Book Review Middle East

Book review: John Holloway, Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler eds. Negativity & Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism

October 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

London: Pluto Press, 2009 [N]egative dialectics seeks the self-reflection of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true – today, in any case – it must also think against itself. If thinking fails to measure itself by the extremeness that eludes the concept, it is from the outset like the accompanying music with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims. —Theodor W. [Read More]

Activism Book Review Theodor W. Adorno

From Habakkuk to Locke: The non-peculiarity of the English Glorious Revolution

Book Review: Steve Pincus, _1688: The First Modern Revolution_ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)

September 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Cromwell and the English people] borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk. – Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte T. J. CLARK, IN “FOR A LEFT WITH NO FUTURE,” compares the “immobilized” state of the present-day Left with the impasse of Enlightenment radicals in the years between the Restoration of 1815 and the Revolutions of 1848. [Read More]

1688 Book Review England Steve Pincus T. J. Clark The Glorious Revolution

An exposé of classic liberalism?

A reply to Domenico Losurdo

September 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE INTERVIEW WITH DOMENICO LOSURDO in Platypus Review 46, which coincided with translation into English of his book Liberalism: A Counter-History, seems to be part of a broader attempt to raise the estimation of him as theoretician of the Left.1 His role as a new standard-bearer for the Left, however, does not especially interest me. I am interested in the central claims of Liberalism that the interviewers should have – but failed – to challenge him on. [Read More]

Book Review Domenico Losurdo Liberalism

Book Review: Karl Korsch, Marxismus und Philosophie

July 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The first English translation of August Thalheimer’s 1924 review of Karl Korsch’s seminal work, Marxism and Philosophy, appears below. The review originally appeared in the Soviet journal Under the Banner of Marxism (Pod Znamenem Marksizma), 4-5 (1924): 367–373). For an earlier discussion of Korsch’s book, see Chris Cutrone’s review of the 2008 reprint of Marxism and Philosophy released by Monthly Review Press, in Platypus Review 15 (September 2009), and the original translation of Karl Kautsky’s review of Korsch that was published in Platypus Review 43 (February 2012) [Read More]

August Thalheimer Book Review Karl Korsch Philosophy

A destroyer of vulgar-Marxism

Book review: Karl Korsch, _Marxism and Philosophy_ (Leipzig: C.L. Hirschfeld, 1923)

January 30, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Karl Kautsky’s 1924 review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy appears below in English for the first time.1 It is hoped that other reviews of Marxism and Philosophy will also be made available in the very near future, not least by leading German communists such as August Thalheimer. Given the highly disputed theoretical legacy of both Kautsky and Korsch, the publication of this review will doubtless add to the debate on the idea of a “coming of age” of Marxism in the late 1860s. [Read More]

Book Review History of the Left Karl Kautsky Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Marxism