1917--2017

1917--2017

 March 8, 2018  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON NOVEMBER 6, 2017, the Platypus Affiliated Society held a panel discussion at the University of Illinois at Chicago on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. The speakers were Jonathan W. Daly (Professor of History at UIC and author of The Watchful State: Security Police and Opposition in Russia, 1906-1917), Franklin Dimitryev (News & Letters), Greg Lucero (Socialist Party USA), and Sam Brown (Black Rose/Rosa Negra). The speakers were asked to respond to the following questions: What were the aims of the 1917 Russian Revolution? [Read More]
russian revolution  1917  spusa  News & Letters  black rose  october revolution  leon trotsky  rsdlp  Bolsheviks  vladimir lenin 

Book Review: Philip Cunliffe, *Lenin Lives! Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017*

Book Review: Philip Cunliffe, *Lenin Lives! Reimagining the Russian Revolution 1917-2017*

 November 1, 2017  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

Alresford, UK: Zero Books, 2017 WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMP ANNOUNCED the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Climate Accord on June 1, 2017, for many liberals it meant that doom was upon us, that the earth was surely soon to be uninhabitable. Yet, if the Paris Accord was the best shot that our civilization had at survival, we were perhaps doomed from the start. NASA scientist James Hansen, at least, one of the earliest voices to raise the alarms about the effects of climate change, had deemed the Accord to be thoroughly inadequate to begin with. [Read More]
Philip Cunliffe  Vladimir Lenin  Russian Revolution 

1917--2017

1917--2017

 August 29, 2017  |  The Platypus Affiliated Society

ON APRIL 8, 2017, for the closing plenary of its 9 Annual International Convention, the Platypus Affiliated Society organized a panel discussion, 1917–2017, at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Tasked with reflecting on the historical significance of 1917 for the Left, the panel brought together Bryan Palmer, Chair of the Canadian Studies Department at Trent University and author of numerous histories of the Left; Leo Panitch, Professor of Political Science at York University, author, and co-editor of the Socialist Register; and Chris Cutrone, President of the Platypus Affiliated Society. [Read More]
1917  Bolshevism  Leon Trotsky  Vladimir Lenin 

Horkheimer on Lenin's "Empiriocriticism"

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

Horkheimer on Lenin's "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]
Critical Theory  Frankfurt School  Max Horkheimer  Vladimir Lenin  Empiriocriticism 

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 

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 

Revolutionary politics and thought

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

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

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 

1917

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

1917

 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