All Posts Tagged With: "20th Century"

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NYC Forum: 30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left

The Platypus Affiliated Society presents
30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran: The Tragedy of the Left
6:00pm Sunday, September 13, 2009
at The Brecht Forum 451 West St New York, NY

September 9th, 2009 | NY chapter head | 0 comments | Continued
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Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy

Chris Cutrone

KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY on “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) is a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels’s time through the 2nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917–19 in Russia, Germany and beyond. More specifically, Korsch took up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which he considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism. Korsch, like Georg Lukács and the thinkers in Frankfurt School critical theory, was inspired by the “subjective” aspect of Marxism exemplified by Lenin’s irreducible role in the October Revolution. Korsch was subsequently denounced as a “professor” in the Communist International and quit the movement, embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory, writing an “Anti-Critique” in 1930 that critiqued Marxism as such, and by 1950 actively seeking to liquidate the difference between Marxian and anarchist approaches. In so doing, Korsch succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch abandoned his prior discernment and critical grasp of their persistent antagonism in any purported politics of emancipation.

September 3rd, 2009 | admin | 5 comments | Continued
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Platypus NYC summer 2009: Theory post-revolution — Georg Lukács

Platypus NYC summer 2009 readings
Theory post revolution: Georg Lukács
Saturdays, 1:00pm to 4:00pm
July 11th to August 29th
Puck Building, NYU (4th floor)
295 Lafayette St

June 20th, 2009 | NY chapter head | 1 comment | Continued
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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, in [...]

May 26th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
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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 “workers [...]

May 18th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
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Symptomology

Historical transformations in social-political context
Chris Cutrone
We in Platypus have anticipated, since our inception in 2006, the possibility of a “return to Marx,” and have sought to inform the terms in which this might take place. We have sought the re-opening of historical issues on the Left with the intention of their fundamental recon­sideration, taking nothing for granted, so that we could definitively close the books on stale “debates” in which the “Left” has remained stuck for more than a genera­tion, since at least the 1960s. Given the confusion reign­ing on the “Left” today, the urgency for this is evident.

May 15th, 2009 | admin | 1 comment | Continued
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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.
We in [...]

May 13th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
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Platypus at Left Forum 2009

Left Forum 2009 “Turning Points”
April 17-19, 2009
Dialectics of Defeat: Towards a Theory of Historical Regression and
Politics of the Contemporary Student Left: Hopes and Failures

April 13th, 2009 | admin | 9 comments | Continued
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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 ago, but [...]

April 13th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 1 comment | Continued
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Platypus NYC screening: TOUT VA B!EN (1972)

TOUT VA B!EN (1972)
A Film by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin
Running Time: 96 minutes (In French w/ English Subtitles)
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
8:00 p.m.
435 Grand Ave # 2F
Brooklyn, NY

April 11th, 2009 | NY chapter head | 0 comments | Continued