An Unmet Challenge

Race and the Left in America

An Unmet Challenge

 January 8, 2010  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN HIS 1932 NOVEL BANJO, the radical black intellectual Claude McKay portrays the vibrancy of black cosmopolitanism in the French port city of Marseilles in the decade following the end of World War I. McKay’s characters – boys of the docks, mendicants, and drifters – grapple with the racism of the wider society, while in their relations to one another live beyond race’s narrowness. One in particular, the novel’s protagonist, an itinerant intellectual named Ray, is driven by French police brutality to reflect on the reality of his race. [Read More]
AFL  America  American Communist Party  Black Belt thesis  Claude McKay  Communist League of America  James P. Cannon  Max Shachtman  Nationalism  Race  Reconstruction  Richard Fraser  Joseph Stalin  Stalinism  Leon Trotsky 

Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

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]
/20th Century  Adolph Reed  Anarchism  Council communism  Critical theory  Emancipation  Fred Halliday  György Lukács  History  History of the Left  Ideology  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Karl Marx  Marxism  Max Horkheimer  New Left  Rosa Luxemburg  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky 

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 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 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 

Notes on Luxemburg's The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906)

 March 23, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some notes on Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass, Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), which we read as our second text from the period of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. First, on the 1905 Revolution, it needs to be emphasized that this was not only a prelude to and “rehearsal” for the 1917 Russian Revolution, but was itself a world-historic event that was galvanizing for the international Left and workers movement, as well as giving shape to 20th Century political trends more generally. [Read More]
Anarchism  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  Rosa Luxemburg  Leon Trotsky 

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 

Trotsky on art and politics: "with a sword or at least a whip in hand"

 February 26, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Re: Platypus: “They had friends, they had enemies, they fought, and exactly through this they demonstrated their right to exist.” – Trotsky, on the history of new political and artistic movements (1938) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm Not a single progressive idea has begun with a “mass base,â€? otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its masses – if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. [Read More]
/20th Century  Chris Cutrone  Discussion  Marxism  Marxism  Platypus  the Left  Leon Trotsky  Trotskyism