Half-time team talk

Mayday (UK) response on anarchism and Marxism

 April 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

FOR ISSUE #2 (FEBRUARY 2008), Chris Cutrone wrote, in “On anarchism and Marxism: a response to Mayday magazine (UK),” on behalf of Platypus, that the principal difference between anarchism and Marxism lies in the way “history” figures in any present estimations of ideology, conscious political program and organization, at the levels both of the historical specificity of struggles for emancipation beyond the modern society of capital, and in the history of capital itself, of which a Marxian approach considers the history of the Left as an essential and not extrinsic part. [Read More]
Anarchism  Marxism  Mayday 

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 

Organization, political action, history, and consciousness

On anarchism and Marxism

 February 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind… to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history. —Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1915) [Read More]
Anarchism  Consciousness  Exchanges  History  History of the Left  Marxism  Organization  Political action 

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 

Review: "The Common Sense"

 November 1, 2007  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

MY FIRST IMPRESSION UPON ENTERING Haseeb Ahmed’s installation, “The Common Sense,” which opened at Around the Coyote Gallery on September 5th was one of open space. It was an openness that contrasted sharply with the hundreds of paintings, photographs, sculptures that cluttered the rest of the many other galleries that opened that Night in Wicker Park’s FlatIron Building. Such a contrast pointed out the fact that, more a piece of interior architecture than a collection of installed objects, the central element to be experienced in Ahmed’s installation was space itself. [Read More]
Aesthetics  Architecture  Art  Critical theory  Exhibition  Installation  Islam  Marxism  Muslim  Religion  Sculpture  Society