Overview of all pages with the tags #Max Horkheimer

Horkheimer on Lenin's "Empiriocriticism"

Max Horkheimer's 1928--29 reaction to Lenin's epistemological polemic _Materialism and Empiriocriticism_

July 21, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Deutsch

This is the first translation from the German-language Platypus Review to appear in the English edition. The original can be found at the above link. Material Basis AMONGST HIS MANUSCRIPTS Max Horkheimer left behind an essay, written in 1928 but unpublished during his lifetime, whose subject is Lenin’s important work Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which had appeared in German translation the year before. The publication of Horkheimer’s response to Lenin was eventually undertaken by Horkheimer’s pupil and successor, Alfred Schmidt in 1985. [Read More]

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

The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today

December 1, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON NOVEMBER 5, 2011, using questions formulated together with Chris Cutrone, Haseeb Ahmed interviewed Slavoj Žižek at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Haseeb Ahmed: Are we currently – after Tahrir Square and the eruption of the Occupy movement – living through a renaissance of the Left? If so, what is the historical legacy that stands in need of reconsideration? [Read More]

Egypt Vladimir Lenin Maoism Max Horkheimer Moishe Postone RCP (USA) Slavoj Žižek Theodor W. Adorno Occupy Occupy Wall Street

The politics of Critical Theory

Third Annual Platypus International Convention: Opening plenary

July 9, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE OPENING PLENARY of the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held April 29–May 1, 2011 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a panel discussion between Nicholas Brown of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chris Cutrone of Platypus, Andrew Feenberg of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Richard Westerman of the University of Chicago. The panelists were asked to address the following: “Recently, the New Left Review published a translated conversation between the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer causing more than a few murmurs and gasps. [Read More]

1960s György Lukács Herbert Marcuse Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Max Horkheimer Platypus Convention Rosa Luxemburg Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory Frankfurt School

The Politics of Critical Theory

April 29, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

The opening plenary of the 3 annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, on April 29, 2011. Co-sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Departments of Art Education, Art History, Liberal Arts, and Visual and Critical Studies, and the SAIC Student Association. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Transcript in Platypus Review #37 [Read More]

Platypus International Convention 2011 Critical theory Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno

Why is it that nobody understands me, yet everybody likes me?

The ambivalence of the current German student movement

March 15, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

“DIESER HÖRSAAL IST BESETZT!” (“This lecture hall is occupied!”) In November and December 2009, signs bearing such slogans were found on doors at over 60 German universities. For the second time that year, a broad student movement managed to gain public attention for its demands. Protests at the University of Vienna kicked off what became a Europe-wide solidarity wave. In Germany, the Viennese protest first triggered occupations in Heidelberg, Münster, and Potsdam, after which students at many other institutions also became involved. [Read More]

Bologna Process Capitalism Germany Human rights Max Horkheimer Michael Burawoy Nationalism Occupation Protest Red-baiting Reform Strike Students Student politics Student Left

Book Review: Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

March 15, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE NEW TRANSLATION AND REPUBLICATION of Theodor Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music1 is a further clarification of modernism, necessitated by the latest discontents with postmodernism’s vulgarization, which keeps it at a fictitious distance. Perhaps as his remedy for the most fragmented part of the whole of the arts, namely music, translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has in recent years been steadily reintroducing Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy to English readers.2 The republication of Philosophy of New Music continues this process, further introducing readers to Adorno’s complex aesthetic theory, also elaborated recently in Current of Music, which embodies Adorno’s aesthetic hopes for the early emergence of radio transmission. [Read More]

Arnold Schoenberg Art Igor Stravinksy Max Horkheimer Theodor W. Adorno Music

Rejoinder to David Black

On Karl Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy

February 26, 2010 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. Black questions Korsch’s differentiation of Marx’s relationship to philosophy into three distinct periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. But attempting to defeat Korsch’s historical account of such changes in Marx’s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch’s principal point. [Read More]

David Black György Lukács History of the Left Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Marxism Max Horkheimer Rosa Luxemburg The Left Theodor W. Adorno Leon Trotsky

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]