Karl Marx

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

Karl Marx, utopian socialist

An interview with Gregory Claeys

August 1, 2018 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

On May 9, 2018, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Gregory Claeys, historian of socialism and author of Machinery, Money and the Millennium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815–1860 (1987), Imperial Sceptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850–1920 (2010), and Marx and Marxism (2018), among others. The day after recording the interview it was broadcast on “Radical Minds” on WHPK–FM (88.5 FM) in Chicago. What follows is an edited version of the interview. [Read More]

Utopia Socialism Karl Marx

"The future instead of the past"?

Bookchin and Marx

October 6, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Presented at the 2016 Annual Gathering of the Institute for Social Ecology, held at the ISE compound in Marshfield, VT between August 19–21. PLATYPUS AS A PROJECT SEEKS to relate to the contemporary left by focusing on the Left in history. We do this because we think one’s understanding of history is in fact one’s theory of the present, of how the present came to be and what might become of it. [Read More]

Karl Marx Murray Bookchin

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

Back to Herbert Spencer!

Industrial vs. militant society

January 12, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

HERBERT SPENCER’S GRAVE faces Marx’s at Highgate Cemetery in London. At his memorial, Spencer was honored for his anti-imperialism by Indian national liberation advocate and anti-colonialist Shyamji Krishnavarma, who funded a lectureship at Oxford in Spencer’s name. Marx and Spencer's facing graves.Photograph by Christian Fuchs, http://fuchs.uti.at/ What would the 19th century liberal, Utilitarian and Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who was perhaps the most prominent, widely read and popular philosopher in the world during his lifetime – that is, in Marx’s lifetime – have to say to Marxists or more generally to the left, when such liberalism earned not only Marx’s own scorn but also Nietzsche’s criticism? [Read More]

Anti-imperialism Anti-war Benjamin Constant Capitalism Carl Schmitt Freedom Martin Heidegger Imperialism Karl Marx Liberalism Libertarian Max Weber Friedrich Nietzsche Paul Lafargue Socialism Theodor W. Adorno Herbert Spencer Featured Articles

Revolutionary politics and thought

September 5, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

No coarser insult, no baser defamation, can be thrown against the workers than the remark, ‘Theoretical controversies are for the intellectuals’ —Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900) Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology… This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. [Read More]

C. Wright Mills Democracy Environmentalism French Revolution Hannah Arendt Ideology Jacobin Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky Organization Political party Praxis Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Theory and practice Thomas jefferson

Democracy and The Left

June 1, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Honoré Daumier's (1808-1879) 'The Republic', 1848. After the Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848, the official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was launched to define the 'painted face of the republic'. The French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor submitted a mother nursing powerful toddlers while holding the tricolour flag in her hand. The child sitting at her feet, reading, was much admired. [Read More]

1776 1789 1848 1914 1917 1989 Arab Spring Bonapartism CIO Critique Cuban Missile Crisis Democracy Electoral politics GDR Immanent critique John F. Kennedy Koch brothers Kshama Sawant Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Max Weber New Deal Occupy Republic Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Russian revolution SFIO Socialist Alternative SPD The Left Ukraine WWII

150 Years after the First International

A Critical History

April 5, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel held at the Sixth Annual Platypus International Convention on Saturday, April 5, 2014 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Jon Bekken (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review) James Heartfield (audacity.org) William Pelz (Elgin Community College) Description The First International (1864 - 1876), or International Workingmen’s Association, was founded in the long shadow of 1848, amidst Polish and Italian national liberation movements and the upheaval of the American Civil War. [Read More]

Platypus International Convention 2014 Anarchism Mikhail Bakunin First International International Workingmen's Association Karl Marx Marxism Socialism

The Politics of Work

Chicago

November 6, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel event held on November 5, 2013, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Bill Barclay Democratic Socialists of America/Chicago Political Economy Group Lenny Brody Justice Party/Network for Revolutionary Change Leon Fink Professor of labor history, University of Illinois at Chicago Description Capital is not a book about politics, and not even a book about labour: it is a book about unemployment. [Read More]

Chicago Political Economy Group Democratic Socialists of America Justice party Labor Karl Marx Marxism Network for Revolutionary Change Work

Nietzsche's untimeliness

November 1, 2013 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Eros and Civilization: the title expressed an optimistic, euphemistic, even positive thought, namely, that the achievements of advanced industrial society would enable man to reverse the direction of progress, to break the fatal union of productivity and destruction, liberty and repression – in other words to learn [Nietzsche’s] gay science. — Herbert Marcuse In [ancient] philosophy the duties of human life were treated as subservient to the happiness and perfection of human life. [Read More]

Friedrich Nietzsche Jean-Jacques Rousseau Karl Marx