Overview of all pages with the tags #Critical Theory

Marx@200: The point is to change the world (Knoxville, 3.27.19)

May 16, 2019 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Panel discussion on the life and legacy of Karl Marx as a revolutionary intellectual, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on March 27, 2019 at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). Speakers: Dr. Harry Dahms, University of Tennessee (Sociology) Dr. Arnold Farr, University of Kentucky (Philosophy) Dr. Spencer Leonard, Platypus Affiliated Society Moderated by AJ Knowles. Description: This past year marked the 200^th^ birthday of Karl Marx, than whom, as even his ideological opponent Isaiah Berlin had to admit, “no thinker in the nineteenth century has had so direct, deliberate and powerful an influence upon mankind. [Read More]

19th Century 20th Century Communism Critical Theory eco-socialism economic crisis Karl Marx Knoxville Marxism psychoanalysis Revolution socialism

Messages in a bottle instead of pseudo-revolution

June 1, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Detlev Claussen is Professor Emeritus at Leibniz University in Germany and author of Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. He defends Critical Theory’s political relevance against both academic co-optation and the charge of retreat into the academic ivory tower. His writings investigate, among other things, Lenin’s influence on Adorno’s thought. Jan Schroeder is a member of Platypus. The following interview was conducted in German on March 21, 2017. What follows is Clara Picker’s translation of the transcript of that interview. [Read More]

Detlev Claussen Critical Theory Theodor Adorno Student Movement

Horkheimer on Lenin's "Empiriocriticism"

Max Horkheimer's 1928--29 reaction to Lenin's epistemological polemic _Materialism and Empiriocriticism_

July 21, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Deutsch

This is the first translation from the German-language Platypus Review to appear in the English edition. The original can be found at the above link. Material Basis AMONGST HIS MANUSCRIPTS Max Horkheimer left behind an essay, written in 1928 but unpublished during his lifetime, whose subject is Lenin’s important work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which had appeared in German translation the year before. The publication of Horkheimer’s response to Lenin was eventually undertaken by Horkheimer’s pupil and successor, Alfred Schmidt in 1985. [Read More]

Critical Theory Frankfurt School Max Horkheimer Vladimir Lenin Empiriocriticism

The politics of Critical Theory

April 2, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON FEBRUARY 17, 2017, as part of its Third European Conference, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a panel, “The Politics of Critical Theory.” Held at the University of Vienna, the event brought together the following speakers: Chris Cutrone, President of the Platypus Affiliated Society; Martin Suchanek of Workers Power, an international organization fighting to build a Fifth International; and Haziran Zeller of Humboldt University, in Berlin. What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion. [Read More]

Critical Theory Theodor W. Adorno

The Politics Of Critical Theory

Platypus 3rd European Conference, Vienna

March 14, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Audio Recording Part One Your browser does not support the audio element Part Two Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Chris Cutrone, Platypus Affilated Society, Chicago Martin Suchanek, Workers Power, Berlin Haziran Zeller, Berlin Description Recently, the New Left Review published a translated conversation between the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer causing more than a few murmurs and gasps. [Read More]

Critical Theory Theodor W. Adorno

Platypus Nashville Reading Group - Fall 2016

September 30, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Summer and Fall/Autumn 2016 – Winter 2017 Every Monday, 7:00-9:00 pm Bongo Java, 2007 Belmont Blvd. 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) Week A. Radical bourgeois philosophy I. Rousseau: Crossroads of society | Aug. 8, 2016 Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. [Read More]

critical theory History of the Left Marxism Platypus Socialism

Horkheimer in 1943 on party and class

January 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Without a socialist party, there is no class struggle, only rackets HORKHEIMER’S REMARKABLE ESSAY “On the sociology of class relations” (1943)1 is continuous with Adorno’s contemporaneous “Reflections on class theory” (1942) as well as his own “The authoritarian state” (1940/42), which similarly mark the transformation of Marx and Engels’s famous injunction in the Communist Manifesto that “history is the history of class struggles.” All of these writings were inspired by Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history” (AKA “Theses on the philosophy of history,” 1940), which registered history’s fundamental crisis. [Read More]

/20th Century Capitalism Communist party Critical theory Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel History Vladimir Lenin Liberalism Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Political party Socialism Socialist Socioeconomic SYRIZA Theodor W. Adorno Walter Benjamin

On becoming things

September 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON JULY 3, 2013, at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, Jensen Suther interviewed Axel Honneth, director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and author of numerous books and articles, on behalf of Platypus. Their conversation focused on the problem of “reification,” or the tendency for processes of transformation to appear as, and be treated as if they were, static objects of an immutable nature. Reification was the theme of several writings Honneth delivered as the Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in 2005. [Read More]

György Lukács Axel Honneth Critical theory Frankfurt school

Lukács's abyss

August 5, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE MARXIST LITERARY GROUP’S Institute on Culture and Society 2011, held on June 20–24, 2011 at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, Platypus members Spencer A. Leonard, Pamela Nogales, and Jeremy Cohan organized a panel on “Marxism and the Bourgeois Revolution.” The original description of the event reads: “The ‘bourgeois revolutions’ from the 16th through the 19th centuries – extending into the 20th –conformed humanity to modern city life, ending traditional, pastoral, religious custom in favor of social relations of the exchange of labor. [Read More]

György Lukács Critical Theory

The politics of Critical Theory

Third Annual Platypus International Convention: Opening plenary

July 9, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE OPENING PLENARY of the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held April 29–May 1, 2011 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a panel discussion between Nicholas Brown of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Andrew Feenberg of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Richard Westerman of the University of Chicago. The panelists were asked to address the following: “Recently, the New Left Review published a translated conversation between the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer causing more than a few murmurs and gasps. [Read More]

1960s György Lukács Herbert Marcuse Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Max Horkheimer Platypus Convention Rosa Luxemburg Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory Frankfurt School