What are intellectuals good for?

What are intellectuals good for?

 February 27, 2010  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON THURSDAY NOVEMBER 19, 2009, Platypus Review Editor-in-Chief Spencer A. Leonard discussed with author George Scialabba a new volume of essays entitled What are Intellectuals Good For? (Boston: Pressed Wafer Press, 2009). Their discussion was conducted live on “Radical Minds,” a radio show Leonard conducts weekly with co-host Greg Gabrellas on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago. Leonard and Scialabba’s discussion focused chiefly on a single theme of the book, the connections and disconnects between the intellectuals of the anti-Stalinist Old Left forged in America in the 1930s and the New Left that emerged decades later in the early 1960s. [Read More]
1930s  George Scialabba  Intellectual space  New Left  Radical Minds 

Rosa Luxemburg's corpse

The stench of decay on the German Left, 1932--2009

 October 10, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

IN MAY OF 2009 SCIENTISTS IN BERLIN claimed to have unearthed the corpse of the martyred revolutionary leader Rosa Luxemburg. Stored in the cellar of a hospital, the corpse had neither a head, nor feet, nor hands. The stump of a corpse of Rosa Luxemburg lay rotting in a basement, subjected to the un-tender mercies of modern forensic science. Less than fourteen years after the death of one of its greatest leaders, the German Left died. [Read More]
1968  Anti-Americanism  Anti-Deutsche  Anti-imperialism  Anti-semitism  Germany  Herbert Marcuse  Nazi  New Left  Palestine  Theodor W. Adorno  Rosa Luxemburg  SPD 

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 

Symptomology

Historical transformations in social-political context

Symptomology

 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 

Film review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Film review: The Baader-Meinhof Complex

 May 15, 2009  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions. —Karl Marx DER BAADER-MEINHOF KOMPLEX (2008) dramatizes the violence that the Leftist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (“Red Army Fraction” [RAF] aka the Baader-Meinhof) wreaked across West German cities in the 1970s. The film documents, or, rather, reenacts their streak of violence that started with petty vandalism against storefronts in Frankfurt but that soon escalated into more serious acts. [Read More]
Baader-Meinhof Complex  Gerhard Richter  Germany  New Left  RAF  Red Army Fraction 

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