Marxism

Rosa Luxemburg's legacy

A reply to Jerzy Sobotta

February 18, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE ASSUMPTION THAT ROSA LUXEMBURG’S CORPSE has significance for the state of the German Left, though perhaps not her body, is tempting. Luxemburg was a Polish socialist involved in a European socialist movement during a time when there was no sovereign Polish state. She was successively a member of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), and the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. [Read More]

Book Review: David Renton, Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times

January 8, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

London: Zed Books, 2004. IN 1926, HISTORIAN CARTER WOODSON inaugurated “Negro History Week.” Negro History Week bred Black History Month, and Black History Month bred the many diverse “Heritage” months of our American calendar: Women’s History Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and American Indian Heritage Month, to pick just a few. But along the way, the justification for studying history changed. Woodson believed the study of black history could erode racism and cultivate the recognition of human equality. [Read More]

David Renton Marxism

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

My dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism

May 28, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica On plagiarism, Postone, and the present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize Moishe Postone, by categorically denying it. When, last July, Sean of Principia Dialectica put forward the allegation of plagiarism (using somewhat different words), I tried to overlook it. I thought that the charge wouldn’t be taken seriously, given that Sean left it wholly unsubstantiated. [Read More]

capitalism critical theory Discussion Karl Marx Marxism Principia Dialectica the Left

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 Adorno

May 18, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

I am writing with some brief notes on Adorno’s 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory.” Another writing by Adorno we read in the group, “Imaginative Excesses,” the final section of the aphorisms orphaned from Minima Moralia (1944-47), published in New Left Review as “Messages in a Bottle,” Adorno addresses the division and necessary unity of “workers and intellectuals.” One passage in particular should be emphasized, that “Those schooled in dialectical theory are reluctant to indulge in positive images of the proper society, of its members, even of those who would accomplish it. [Read More]

/20th Century Add new tag Chris Cutrone Discussion Karl Marx Marxism Theodor W. Adorno

Symptomology

Historical transformations in social-political context

May 15, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

Marx ridiculed the idea of having to “prove” the labor theory of value. If Marxian theory proved to be the means whereby the real relations of bourgeois society could be demonstrated in their movement, where they came from, what they were, and where they were going, that was the proof of the theory. Neither Hegel nor Marx understood any other “scientific” proof. The more concrete the negation of the need, the more abstract, empty and flamboyant becomes the subjective mediation. [Read More]

/20th Century Crisis Critical theory David Harvey Karl Marx Marxism Michel Foucault Neo-liberalism New Left Barack Obama Reflections

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

my letter to The Nation on "Re-Imagining Socialism"

April 1, 2009 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The following letter that I wrote will be published in The Nation. I wrote in response to the article “Rising to the Occasion” (published elsewhere as “The ’S’ Word”) by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (spokesperson for the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-founder of Progressives for Obama), and forum of articles in reply, under the title “Re-Imagining Socialism,” by Robert Pollin, Tariq Ali, Immanuel Wallerstein, Rebecca Solnit, Christian Parenti, Doug Henwood, Mike Davis, Michael Albert, et al. [Read More]

/20th Century Discussion ideology Marxism Politics Revolution Socialism