“The Left is Dead! — Long Live the Left!” Chris Cutrone “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” — Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852) “The theorist who intervenes in practical controversies nowadays discovers on a regular basis and to his shame that [...]
All Posts Tagged With: "anti-Bolshevism"
Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today
Introducing Platypus
Chris Cutrone
Platypus is an idea for a journal project on the Marxian Left several of us have had for a number of years, starting with two of us with a long political background on the Trotskyist Left, going back to our undergraduate years (1989-92) at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. The journal idea has been grounded in our shared commitments to challenging post-New Left politics. In recent years, the initial two of us were joined by a few University of Chicago students of the critical social theorist and Marx scholar Moishe Postone. We have been motivated by questioning what a Leftist politics today might be — we are struck by the decline if not total demise of the Left, and by the certain absence of Leftist politics informing the world. So our project involves radically interrogating the self-declared “Left,” taking nothing for granted in our sense of the necessity for reformulating a Leftist politics and re-appropriating the history of the Left towards the present.
