The call to advent

An answer to Chris Cutrone's 'Why not Trump?'

The call to advent

 November 8, 2016  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE SHORT ARTICLE “WHY NOT TRUMP?” by Chris Cutrone in Platypus Review #891 is both brilliant and deeply flawed. It is brilliant in its provocative polemic, starting with the title, forcing us to engage with the question in a fresh way. This undeniably is what Cutrone intended, a challenge starting with and finally culminating in “the obvious question that is avoided but must be asked by anyone not too frightened to think. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Donald Trump  /2016 American Presidential Election 

notes to Constant and Kant (1)

 July 19, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some very brief notes on the first week of readings from Kant, his essays on “What is Enlightenment?” and “The Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” and Benjamin Constant’s essay on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” https://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/ We are moving somewhat non-chronologically, starting with Constant as a reading from 1819 that synthesizes Smith with Rousseau (as well as taking issue with a Rousseauian perspective that cannot address the growth of modern, capitalist society since Rousseau’s time). [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion 

notes to Rousseau

 June 30, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

The reading group schedule with links to the readings for the summer has been posted here Platypus Marxist reading group summer 2009, June 28 - August 16 Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, but also by reference to the Rousseauian aftermath, and the emergence of the modern society of capital, as registered by liberals such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  critical theory  Discussion  emancipation  freedom  Karl Marx  Marxism  Robert Pippin  Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

notes on Adorno in 1968-69

 May 26, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969. The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, in their desideratum of the unity of theory and practice. Rather, Adorno asserted the progressive-emancipatory aspect of the separation of theory and practice. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  crisis  critical theory  Discussion  György Lukács  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Rosa Luxemburg  the Left  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky  Walter Benjamin 

notes on Adorno

 May 18, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some brief notes on Adorno’s 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory.” Another writing by Adorno we read in the group, “Imaginative Excesses,” the final section of the aphorisms orphaned from Minima Moralia (1944-47), published in New Left Review as “Messages in a Bottle,” Adorno addresses the division and necessary unity of “workers and intellectuals.” One passage in particular should be emphasized, that “Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive images of the proper society, of its members, even of those who would accomplish it. [Read More]
/20th Century  Add new tag  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Karl Marx  Marxism  Theodor W. Adorno 

notes on Trotsky and Trotskyism

 May 13, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some brief notes on Trotsky’s Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the 4th International, AKA the Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution (1938). Trotsky and the phenomenon of Trotskyism was and remains a highly controversial political and historical phenomenon, but one to which one’s reaction is highly symptomatic and indicative. We in Platypus regard Trotsky as the “last man standing” of what we call 2nd International radicalism, and thus treat the “Trotskyism” of the 1930s as the final remaining strand of this earlier revolutionary Marxist politics. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Marxism  Leon Trotsky 

Notes on Trotsky and Luxemburg on 1917--19

 May 4, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes on our readings from Luxemburg and Trotsky on the Bolshevik Revolution and the greater revolutionary crisis of 1917-19. I will discuss the relation of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky in the revolutionary period under consideration. Our recent discussions of 1917-19 has taken 2 parts, Luxemburg’s Spartacus writings from the German Revolution of 1918, and now Trotsky on The Lessons of October (1924) and Luxemburg’s writing on the Bolshevik Revolution and its trajectory, “The Russian Tragedy” (1918) and her final writing before being murdered by counterrevolutionaries, “Order Reigns in Berlin” (1919). [Read More]
1917  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Vladimir Lenin  Revolution  Rosa Luxemburg  Leon Trotsky  Notes 

Notes on Lukács, "Standpoint of the Proletariat"

 April 27, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some very brief notes on the 3rd part of Lukács’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” which is very important for Platypus’s grasp of the self-understanding of the revolutionary Marxism in 1917-19 that Lukács was trying to theoretically digest.—In a certain sense, this piece by Lukács is the culmination of all the prior readings we have done by Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukács and Korsch. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  critical theory  Discussion  György Lukács 

notes on Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism an Infantile Disorder (1920)

 April 13, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

From Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism – An Infantile Disorder (1920): http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ “[E.g.,] Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared – and with full justice – to be “historically obsolete” many decades ago, but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  History  Vladimir Lenin  Politics  Rosa Luxemburg  the Left  Leon Trotsky 

notes on Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

 March 30, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes towards discussion of Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917). The first point to make is that this is least controversial of the three texts by Lenin we read in the group, the other two being What is to be done? (1902) and “Left-Wing” Communism: an infantile disorder (1920). (Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (1916) is also somewhat controversial.) There are potentially 3 Lenins: vanguardist; utopian; and conservative. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Rosa Luxemburg  Leon Trotsky