Emancipation

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

September 3, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”1 This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. [Read More]

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

excerpt from Trotsky

March 16, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

From Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), Results and Prospects (1906), VII. The Pre-Requisites of Socialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp07.htm “Undoubtedly, the concentration of production, the development of technique and the growth of consciousness among the masses are essential pre-requisites for socialism. But these processes take place simultaneously, and not only give an impetus to each other, but also retard and limit each other. Each of these processes at a higher level demands a certain development of another process at a lower level. [Read More]

Chris Cutrone Discussion emancipation ideology Karl Marx Marxism Revolution Socialism Leon Trotsky

note on recent readings: Slaughter, Nettl, Luxemburg

February 10, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

After the recent discussion of Luxemburg’s pamphlet on Reform or Revolution? (1900/08), there might be some confusion regarding the relationship between Luxemburg’s formulations and the raison d’etre of Platypus as an organized project today.—What is the point of reading Luxemburg today? Whereas Luxemburg was critiquing Eduard Bernstein and other “revisionists’” arguments that the development of capitalism had made proletarian social revolution superfluous or even harmful, Luxemburg was arguing that such historical “development” must be seen as symptomatic of the growing and deepening crisis of capitalism, and that the organized Marxist social-democratic labor and political movement must be seen as part of that history, part of that crisis. [Read More]

capitalism Discussion emancipation History Marxism organization Politics Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Socialism society the Left

Heidegger's conservative-reactionary misunderstanding of freedom

February 5, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

… [M]odern man finds his own ‘essence’ in his greatest discovery, namely, that the most important thing is to turn ‘life’ into a ‘lived experience’ and to make all possibilities of lived-experience accessible generally to all in an equal manner so that through this universality of ‘lived experience’ ‘life’ may prove and actualize itself as the unconditioned whole… Without initiating its own self-destruction, how could that which has made itself beforehand the goal of itself and has put all goal-setting at the service of this goal, ever inquire into a goal? [Read More]

Chris Cutrone Discussion emancipation freedom History

Obama and Clinton

"Third Way" politics and the "Left"

December 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR THE “LEFT” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in 1992. Clinton’s election was seen as part of the triumph of “Third Way” politics that contemporaneously found expression in Tony Blair’s “New” Labour Party in Britain. [Read More]

Bill Clinton Consciousness Critical theory Depoliticization Emancipation Marxism Movement Neo-liberalism Barack Obama Politics Profiles Rosa Luxemburg Socialism The Left Third Way Workers

On the Relationship between Psychoanalysis and Emancipatory Politics

Castoriadis, Marx, and Freud on Time and Emancipation

February 1, 2008 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON TWO OCCASIONS, Sigmund Freud observed that politics, pedagogy, and psychoanalysis are all impossible professions. Cornelius Castoriadis attempted to make sense of this cryptic observation in a 1994 essay entitled “Psychoanalysis and Politics,” in which he argued that, not only are these three “professions” structurally analogous, they are also entangled with each other such that the “impossible” realization of pedagogical or psychoanalytic aims is ultimately conditional upon an emancipatory political transformation. [Read More]

Castoriadis Emancipation Sigmund Freud Karl Marx Psychoanalysis

Interview: Ernesto Laclau

December 1, 2007 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

CONFRONTING THE CONFUSION and fragmentation that wrought progressive politics in recent decades, Ernesto Laclau’s work attempts to theorize the path to the construction of a radical democratic politics. Drawing on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to devise his own theory by that name, Laclau describes the processes of social articulation that creates popular political identities. By redefining democratic politics as the construction of hegemony, Laclau reminds political actors of the work necessary to construct the plurality of democratic structures vital to any emancipatory political project. [Read More]

1930s Anti-globalization Capitalism Co-optation Commodity form Communist party Culture De-radicalization Democratic Economics Emancipation Emancipatory Equivalential Ernesto Laclau Feminism Freedom Hegemony History Identity Industrial Institutionalization Italy Labor Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Movements Participation Particularity Plurality Politics Popular Production Progressive Proletarian Radical Reification Revolution Surplus value Theory Union Universality Workers Working class WWII

The Left is dead! Long live the Left!

Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today

November 1, 2007 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that whatever ideas he might contribute were expressed long ago – and usually better the first time around. —Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” (1963) [Read More]

19th Century /20th Century capitalism consciousness counterrevolution crisis Vladimir Lenin Critical Theory defeat depoliticization emancipation György Lukács Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel History History of the Left humanity ideology Imperialism Industrial Revolution Iraq Karl Korsch liberalism Marxism Karl Marx Moishe Postone Negative Dialectics New Left Friedrich Nietzsche opportunism Philosophy Political economy Politics postmodernism Revolution Robert Pippin Rosa Luxemburg Social Democracy Social Democratic Party of Germany SPD Socialism society Stalinism Theodor W. Adorno utopianism Walter Benjamin war

Taking issue with identity

The politics of anti-gentrification

November 1, 2007 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The perception of gentrification in Chicago mirrors would-be progressive groups’ social imaginations and the heterogeneity of their goals. Gentrification is the reconstitution of a neighborhood which occurs when lower-income areas with lower land value are re-developed with higher-value housing into a decidedly wealthier neighborhood. During this process the class-composition and character of the neighborhood is changed; those already living in the neighborhood cannot sustain the rise in property taxes and must move elsewhere. [Read More]