The Platypus Review

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Rejoinder to David Black on Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

Chris Cutrone

David Black’s valuable comments and further historical exposition of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. But attempting to defeat Korsch’s historical account of such changes in Marx’s approaches to relating theory and practice means avoiding Korsch’s principal point, and defending Marx on mistaken ground. Black considers that Korsch’s periodization opens the door to criticizing Marx for inconsistency on his relation of theory to practice. But that is not so. Marx had a critical theory of the relation of theory and practice, and a political practice of the relation of theory and practice. There is not simply a theoretical or practical problem, but also and more profoundly a problem of relating theory and practice. This is not a finished task. We need to attain this ability again, for our time, just as Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, following Marx, recovered and struggled through the problem of theory and practice for their time, as Korsch and Lukács explained.

February 6th, 2010 | admin | 0 comments | Continued
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Against the status quo: An Interview with Iranian trade unionist Homayoun Pourzad

Ian Morrison
Despite unrelenting state repression, there have been rumblings throughout the 2000s of renewed labor organizing inside the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI). One result of this upsurge in labor organizing was the May 2005 re-founding of the Syndicate of Workers of the United Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs, a union that has a [...]

January 8th, 2010 | PR web editor | 2 comments | Continued
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An Unmet Challenge: Race and the Left in America

Ben Blumberg

For the American Left in the first half the 20th century—commonly referred to as the “Old Left”— the task of advancing freedom entailed a thoroughgoing critique of the racist institutions in American society, a socioeconomic and historical analysis of their origins and contemporary function, as well as practical efforts to eradicate these structures. In other words, racism was the challenge faced by the American Old Left. However, to a large extent it evaded the very challenge it set for itself by accepting the characterization of the black population’s political situation as “the Negro problem.” Only the best of the Old Left pushed against this characterization. The New Left, seeking to overcome the Old Left’s shortcomings and receiving a great impulse from the demands of the Civil Rights movement to do so, would nevertheless come to reenact the previous generation’s failings. This brings forth an uncomfortable question: if Marxists in the United States were unable to meet the challenge of raising racism to the level of a transformable reality, then to what extent can we speak of an American tradition of Marxism—a Marxism adequate to the situation of American capitalism—at all?

January 8th, 2010 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
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Book Review: Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1882–1918.

New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Tim Barker
ONCE ACCLAIMED BY FIGURES as diverse as Eugene O’Neill, Henry Miller, and A. Philip Randolph, but later forgotten, the West Indian radical Hubert Henry Harrison is enjoying renewed prominence as a result of Jeffrey B. Perry’s recent biography, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, the first of [...]

January 8th, 2010 | PR web editor | 1 comment | Continued
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Book Review: David Renton, Dissident Marxism: Past Voices for Present Times.

London: Zed Books, 2004.
Max Elliott Katz

IN 1926, HISTORIAN CARTER WOODSON inaugurated “Negro History Week.” Negro History Week bred Black History Month, and Black History Month bred the many diverse “Heritage” months of our American calendar: Women’s History Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, and American Indian Heritage Month, to pick just a few. [...]

January 8th, 2010 | PR web editor | 1 comment | Continued
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Between Old Left and New: A postwar balance sheet

Ian Morrison
THE PERIOD FROM THE FIRST WORLD WAR to the Cold War belies easy classification. Unlike the single decade associated with the New Left, this extensive and historically dense period, that of the “Old Left,” has to be broken up into decades. Indeed, this is done even in the popular imagination, in which the 1930s [...]

December 6th, 2009 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
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The poverty of Pakistan’s politics (PPP)

Atiya Khan
LIFE IN CONTEMPORARY PAKISTAN is marked by a sense of despair and helplessness. A report commis­sioned by the British Council based on research con­ducted by the Nielsen Company recently found that only a third of the Pakistanis surveyed thought democracy was the best system for the country, a ratio roughly equal to that preferring [...]

December 6th, 2009 | PR web editor | 2 comments | Continued
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Film Review: Public Enemies

Ryan Hardy
GIVE THE MAN full points for timing. Released less than a year after the onset in the summer of 2008 of the global economic crisis, and now available on DVD, Michael Mann’s Public Enemies captures perfectly, if unconsciously, the political condition of our time. The film tells the story of John Dillinger, a bank [...]

December 6th, 2009 | PR web editor | 1 comment | Continued
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Comments on Chris Cutrone’s review of Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch

David Black
[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]
CHRIS CUTRONE WRITES, “What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the [...]

December 6th, 2009 | PR web editor | 1 comment | Continued
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Introduction

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century
Toward a Theory of Historical Regression
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO SAY, as Platypus does, that the Left is dead? And what does it mean to speak of the history of the Left postmortem? Our task is to address these questions. In the present, the Left has turned away from the question of how the defeated revolutionary Marxism of the first and second decades of the twentieth century continued through mid-century in the Frankfurt School.

November 18th, 2009 | PR web editor | 5 comments | Continued