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.

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?

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]