I am writing with some very brief notes on the first week of readings from Kant, his essays on “What is Enlightenment?” and “The Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” and Benjamin Constant’s essay on “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns.” http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/ We are moving [...]
July 19th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | ContinuedArchive for Chris Cutrone
Chris Cutrone
notes to Rousseau
The reading group schedule with links to the readings for the summer has been posted at: http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/ Platypus Marxist reading group summer 2009, June 28 – August 16 Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th [...]
June 30th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
my dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism
[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica Posted: May 27th, 2009 | Author: Andrew Kliman | Filed under: Organization, Philosophy | Tags: concreteness, plagiarism, Postone | On plagiarism, Postone, and “the” present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, 1. First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize [...]
May 28th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 2 comments | Continued
notes on Adorno in 1968-69
I am writing with some very brief notes on Adorno’s last writings from 1968-69, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” “Resignation,” “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society? (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”),” and the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of 1969. The center of Adorno’s critique of the 1960s New Left was their romantic opposition to capitalism, found, for example, [...]
May 26th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
notes on Adorno
I am writing with some brief notes on Adorno’s 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory.” Another writing by Adorno we read in the group, “Imaginative Excesses,” the final section of the aphorisms orphaned from Minima Moralia (1944-47), published in New Left Review as “Messages in a Bottle,” Adorno addresses the division and necessary unity of [...]
May 18th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
notes on Trotsky and Trotskyism
I am writing with some brief notes on Trotsky’s Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the 4th International, AKA the Transitional Programme for Socialist Revolution (1938). Trotsky and the phenomenon of Trotskyism was and remains a highly controversial political and historical phenomenon, but one to which one’s reaction is highly symptomatic and indicative. [...]
May 13th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
notes on Trotsky and Luxemburg on 1917-19
I am writing with some notes on our readings from Luxemburg and Trotsky on the Bolshevik Revolution and the greater revolutionary crisis of 1917-19. I will discuss the relation of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky in the revolutionary period under consideration. Our recent discussions of 1917-19 has taken 2 parts, Luxemburg’s Spartacus writings from the German [...]
May 4th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
notes on Lukacs, “Standpoint of the Proletariat”
I am writing with some very brief notes on the 3rd part of Lukacs’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” which is very important for Platypus’s grasp of the self-understanding of the revolutionary Marxism in 1917-19 that Lukacs was trying to theoretically digest. — In a certain sense, [...]
April 27th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
notes on Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism an Infantile Disorder (1920)
From Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism — An Infantile Disorder (1920): http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ “[E.g.,] Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared — and with full justice — to be “historically obsolete” many decades [...]
April 13th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued
my letter to The Nation on “Re-Imagining Socialism”
The following letter that I wrote will be published in The Nation. I wrote in response to the article “Rising to the Occasion” (published elsewhere as “The ‘S’ Word”) by Barbara Ehrenreich (author of Nickel and Dimed) and Bill Fletcher, Jr. (spokesperson for the Maoist Freedom Road Socialist Organization and co-founder of Progressives for Obama), [...]
April 1st, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued