Overview of all pages with the tags #Rosa Luxemburg

1917--2017

April 8, 2017 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Audio recording of the closing plenary of the 9th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention. Audio Recording Your browser does not support the audio element Panelists Bryan Palmer Leo Panitch Chris Cutrone Description The First World War manifested an economic, social and political crisis of global capitalism, – “imperialism” – which sparked reflection in the mass parties of the Second International on the task of socialist politics. The revisionist dispute, the “crisis of Marxism” in which Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky first cut their teeth, shaped their understanding of the unfolding revolution as a necessary expression of self-contradiction within the movement for socialism. [Read More]

1917 Russian Revolution Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg and the party

May 3, 2016 | The Platypus Affiliated Society • Other languages: Ελληνικά

IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical “Revisionist Dispute,” in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that “the movement is everything, the goal nothing,” the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: “It is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.”1 Critique of socialism What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have “class struggle” at all? [Read More]

Rosa Luxemburg Eduard Bernstein Socialism The party

Revolutionary politics and thought

September 5, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

No coarser insult, no baser defamation, can be thrown against the workers than the remark, ‘Theoretical controversies are for the intellectuals’ —Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (1900) Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement the only choice is – either bourgeois or socialist ideology… This does not mean, of course, that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. [Read More]

C. Wright Mills Democracy Environmentalism French Revolution Hannah Arendt Ideology Jacobin Karl Marx Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky Organization Political party Praxis Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Theory and practice Thomas jefferson

Democracy and The Left

June 1, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

Honoré Daumier's (1808-1879) 'The Republic', 1848. After the Republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1848, the official image of the State had to be changed. A competition was launched to define the 'painted face of the republic'. The French caricaturist, painter, and sculptor submitted a mother nursing powerful toddlers while holding the tricolour flag in her hand. The child sitting at her feet, reading, was much admired. [Read More]

1776 1789 1848 1914 1917 1989 Arab Spring Bonapartism CIO Critique Cuban Missile Crisis Democracy Electoral politics GDR Immanent critique John F. Kennedy Koch brothers Kshama Sawant Vladimir Lenin Karl Marx Max Weber New Deal Occupy Republic Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Russian revolution SFIO Socialist Alternative SPD The Left Ukraine WWII

1914 in the history of Marxism

May 6, 2014 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

At the Platypus Affiliated Society’s annual International Convention, held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago April 4–6, 2014, Chris Cutrone delivered the following President’s Report. An edited transcript of the presentation and subsequent discussion appears below. A full audio recording is available online at <sixth-annual-platypus-international-convention>. Cover of the Vorwärts, the SPD's party organ in 1914; the headline reads, 'Social Democracy and the War!' The SPD voted for war credits to the First World War almost 100 years ago on August 4 1914. [Read More]

1914 /2nd International August 4 Bebel Imperialism Karl Kautsky Karl Liebknecht Vladimir Lenin Marxism Nationalism Pacifism Rosa Luxemburg RSDLP SPD War Woodrow Wilson WWI

Utopia and reality

December 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 2012, Chris Mansour interviewed Stephen Eric Bronner, a professor at Rutgers University and author of Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary for Our Times (1980), Socialism Unbound (1990), Of Critical Theory and Its Theorists (1994), and Reclaiming the Enlightenment: Toward a Politics of Radical Engagement (2004), among many others. His most recent book is Modernism at the Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, and Utopia. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. [Read More]

Art Art and Politics Stephen Eric Bronner Rosa Luxemburg Modernism Utopia

Splits, regroupments, war, and revolution in Germany, 1914--1920

A conversation with Ben Lewis

May 1, 2012 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

_LAST WINTER, on their radio show Radical Minds on WHPK-FM Chicago, Spencer A. Leonard and Watson Ladd interviewed Ben Lewis, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and co-author and translator, together with Lars T. Lih, of Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle (2011). The interview originally was broadcast on December 6, 2011. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation._ Spencer A. Leonard: Please give a brief overview of Zinoviev and Martov: Head to Head in Halle. [Read More]

Ben Lewis CPGB Eduard Bernstein Lars T. Lih Rosa Luxemburg SPD German Revolution

On "The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg"

August 5, 2011 | The Platypus Affiliated Society

AT THE MARXIST LITERARY GROUP’S Institute on Culture and Society 2011, held on June 20–24, 2011 at the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago, Platypus members Chris Cutrone, Greg Gabrellas, and Ian Morrison organized a panel on “The Marxism of Second International Radicalism: Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky.” The original description of the event reads: “The legacy of revolution 1917–19 in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy is concentrated above all in the historical figures Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, leaders of the Left in the Second International (1889-1914) – what they called ‘revolutionary social democracy’ – in the period preceding the crisis of war, revolution, counterrevolution and civil war in World War I and its aftermath. [Read More]

Marxism Rosa Luxemburg

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

1917

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

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 1917 presentation by Chris Cutrone. [Read More]

Bolshevik Revolution György Lukács Karl Korsch Vladimir Lenin Revolution Rosa Luxemburg Socialism Left Forum