When was the crisis of capitalism?

Moishe Postone and the legacy of the 1960s New Left

When was the crisis of capitalism?

 October 18, 2014  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

LENIN STATED, infamously perhaps, that Marxists aimed to overcome capitalism “on the basis of capitalism itself.” This was in the context of horrors of not only industrial exploitation but also and especially of war: WWI. Lenin was not, as he might be mistaken to be, merely advocating so-called “war communism” or statist capitalism.1 No. Lenin recognized state capitalism as the advancing of the contradiction of capitalism. By contrast, after Lenin, there was state capitalism, but no active political consciousness of its contradiction. [Read More]
Vladimir Lenin  Moishe Postone 

Beyond Post-Industrial Society and Neo-Marxism

A Platypus Teach-in on the Current Economic Crisis

 November 28, 2012  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A discussion led by Platypus Affiliated Society member Spencer A. Leonard on the current economic crisis, longue-durée social change, and the Left. This teach-in was an introduction to the some of essential problems to be explored in the Chicago iteration of the “Radical Interpretations of The Present” panel on December 3, 2012. PLEASE NOTE: Due to technical issues, only the first forty-five minutes of the talk were recorded. Video Recording Description In 1999 the prominent social theorist Moishe Postone published an artile entitled “Contemporary Historical Transformations: Beyond Post-Industrial Theory and Neo-Marxism” in which he interrogated the two predominant theories of the social change that had been formulated in the 1970s by Daniel Bell and Ernest Mandel. [Read More]
Economic crisis  Economics  Marxian economics  Moishe Postone  Neo-Marxism  Post-industrial society  Spencer A. Leonard 

The Occupy movement, a renascent Left, and Marxism today

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 

Subject, class, and the Hegelian legacy in critical social theory

 July 1, 2011  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE 2011 LEFT FORUM, held at Pace University in NYC between March 18-21, Platypus hosted a conversation on “Lukács’s Marxism.” Panelists Timothy Bewes (Brown University), Jeremy Cohan (Platypus), Timothy Hall (University of East London, U.K.), and M. A. Torres (Platypus) were asked to address, “Who was Lukács? Critic of reification, founder of Hegelian Marxism, Critical Theory, Western Marxism? Or: philosopher of Bolshevism, apologist for Leninism, romantic socialist, voluntarist idealist, terrorist revolutionary? [Read More]
György Lukács  Moishe Postone  Theodor W. Adorno  Critical Theory 

The Imperialism Question and the Twentieth Century

 May 28, 2010  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

A panel discussion event held on May 28, 2010, at the 2010 Platypus International Convention held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Atiya Khan Spencer A. Leonard Sunit Singh Description To many on the Left today, opposition to imperialism has become a political litmus test of sorts, but historically anti-imperialism was by no means an exclusively leftist political project whether we are speaking of right-wing anti-colonialism in the metropole or in the colonies. [Read More]
Anti-colonialism  Anticolonialism  Christopher Hitchens  Fred Halliday  Imperialism  Moishe Postone 

2001

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression

2001

 November 18, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Ελληνικά, Deutsch

ON APRIL 18, 2009, the Platypus Affiliated Society conducted the following panel discussion at the Left Forum Conference at Pace University in New York City. The panel was organized around four significant moments in the progressive separation of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: 2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), 1968 (Atiya Khan), 1933 (Richard Rubin), and 1917 (Chris Cutrone). The following is an edited transcript of the 2001 presentation by Spencer A. [Read More]
Afghanistan  Fred Halliday  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  Iran  Iranian Revolution  Michel Foucault  Moishe Postone  New Left  Stalinism  Left Forum  Theodor W. Adorno 

Capital in history

The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left

 October 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society  • Other languages: Deutsch, Español, Ελληνικά

The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25th, 2008. I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on the history of the Left because we think that the narrative one tells about this history is in fact one’s theory of the present. [Read More]
1789  1930s  1960s  19th Century  Bourgeois  Capital  Capitalism  Class consciousness  Crisis  Degeneration  Domination  Friedrich Engels  Freedom  French Revolution  György Lukács  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel  History  History of the Left  Industrial Revolution  Karl Korsch  Vladimir Lenin  Marxism  Marxist-Hummanist Committee  Modern  Moishe Postone  Politics  Proletariat  Regression  Revolt of the Third Estate  Rosa Luxemburg  The Left  Theodor W. Adorno  Leon Trotsky  Walter Benjamin 

"Let the dead bury the dead!"

Response to Principia Dialectica (UK) on May 1968

 May 1, 2008  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

THE NEW MAYDAY MAGAZINE (UK) and Platypus have been in dialogue on the issues of anarchism and Marxism and the state of the “Left” today in light of history. (Please see “Organization, political action, history and consciousness” by Chris Cutrone for Platypus, and “Half-time Team Talk” by Trevor Bark for Mayday, in issues #2, February 2008, and #4, April-May 2008, respectively.) Principia Dialectica, another new British journal, also has taken note of Platypus (see “Weird gonzo leftoid journal,” April 15, 2008), specifically with our interview of Moishe Postone on “Marx after Marxism” (in issue #3, March 2008). [Read More]
1968  Anarchism  Exchanges  György Lukács  Marxism  Mayday  Moishe Postone  Principia Dialectica  Theodor W. Adorno  Trevor Bark  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 

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