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 

Why the U.S. stimulus package is bound to fail

 March 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

MUCH IS TO BE GAINED by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since 1980 or so will almost certainly increase. The manner, form, spatiality and time of these surface disruptions are almost impossible to predict, but that they will occur with greater frequency and depth is almost certain. [Read More]
Capitalism  Crisis  Debt  Failure  Giovanni Arrighi  Hegemony  Keynesianism  Karl Marx  New Deal  Reflections  Stimulus 

notes on Lukács

 March 9, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some brief, partial notes from our discussion at UChicago at yesterday’s (Sun. 3/8/09) reading group, on several essays from György Lukács’s 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. I want to emphasize and discuss in particular a couple of passages, from the (original, 1922) Preface, and the essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919). Specifically, I wish to discuss Lukács’s use of categories, “materialist dialectics,” and his meaning of Marxism as a “method,” which might otherwise prove confusing or tricky. [Read More]
Chris Cutrone  Discussion  György Lukács  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  Hegelian  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Theodor W. Adorno  Walter Benjamin 

Is Marx Back?

An Interview with Leo Panitch

 February 19, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

The economic crisis, as many commentators and critics are quick to point out, has rekindled interest in – and anxieties over – Marxism. Although many on the Left hope this renewed curiosity marks the beginning of a radical turn, similar revivals of anti-capitalist politics in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s failed to achieve the revolutionary transformations they sought. Has Marxism returned as a significant political force? How might this translate into the possibility for a revitalized Left? [Read More]
Anti-capitalism  Karl Marx  Marxism  Radicalism  Socialism  Socialist Register 

notes on Feb. 15 reading Korsch "Marxism and Philosophy" (1923)

 February 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

‘[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’ [Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)]. 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]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  crisis  critical theory  Discussion  History  ideology  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Philosophy  Platypus  Revolution  Rosa Luxemburg  Socialism  vulgar Marxism 

Living Marxism

 December 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ONE OF THE STRANGER SIGHTS in today’s banking crisis is the sudden popularity of Karl Marx. The Manifesto is flying off the shelves, and business execs are boning up on Marx’s crisis theory in much the same way that they used to lap up Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or parrot Heraclitus’ saying that there is nothing permanent but change. Today’s economic dislocation, though, does not correspond to the crisis of overaccumulation that Marx explained in the third volume of his book Capital. [Read More]
Crisis  Economics  Karl Marx  Marxism  RCP (UK)  Value  Living Marxism 

Remember the future!

A rejoinder to Peter Hudis on "Capital in History"

Remember the future!

 November 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS ARTICULATES the problem of what “ought” to be with what “is.” The question is how the necessities of emancipatory struggles in the present relate to those of the past. The tasks revealed by historical Marxism have not been superseded but only obscured and forgotten, at the expense of emancipatory social politics in the present. Dunayevskaya and post-Trotskyism The problem with Raya Dunayevskaya lies in the belief that there has been any real theoretical or practical political progress since the failure of the revolutions of 1917-19. [Read More]
Capital  Exchanges  History  Karl Marx  Marxism 

Finance capital

Why financial capitalism is no more "fictitious" than any other kind

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

WITH THE PRESENT FINANCIAL MELT-DOWN in the U.S. throwing the global economy into question, many on the “Left” are wondering again about the nature of capitalism. While many will be tempted to jump on the bandwagon of the “bailout” being floated by the Bush administration and the Congressional Democrats (including Obama), others will protest the “bailing out” of Wall Street. The rhetoric of “Wall Street vs. Main Street,” between “hardworking America” and the “financial fat cats,” however, belies a more fundamental truth: the two are indissolubly linked and are in fact two sides of the same coin of capitalism. [Read More]
Authoritarianism  Bailout  Bill Clinton  Capitalism  Crisis  Economics  Financial  Freedom  Friedrich Hayek  Humanity  Ideology  Industrial  John Kenneth Galbraith  Karl Polanyi  Karl Marx  Marxism  Milton Friedman  Modern  Neo-liberalism  Organization  Production  Reforms  Reification  Socialism  Society  The Left  The Platypus Historians Group 

Walter Benjamin

 May 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

WALTER BENJAMIN OCCUPIES a unique place in the history of modern revolutionary thought: he is the first Marxist to break radically with the ideology of progress. His thinking has therefore a distinct critical quality, which sets him apart from the dominant and “official” forms of historical materialism, and gives him a formidable methodological superiority. This peculiarity has to do with his ability to incorporate into the body of Marxist revolutionary theory insights from the Romantic critique of civilization and from the Jewish messianic tradition. [Read More]
Anarchism  Bolshevism  Critical theory  Frankfurt School  French Revolution  György Lukács  Historical materialism  History  Ideology  Karl Marx  Marxism  Profiles  Progress  Theology  Theory  Violence  Walter Benjamin 

Marx after Marxism

 March 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

_MOISHE POSTONE IS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY at the University of Chicago, and his seminal book Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory investigates Marx’s categories of commodity, labor, and capital, and the saliency of Marx’s critique of capital in the neoliberal context of the present. Rescuing Marx’s categories from intellectual and political obsolescence, Postone brings them to bear on the global transformations of the past three decades. [Read More]
Capitalism  Karl Marx  Marxism  Moishe Postone