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, [...]
All Posts Tagged With: "crisis"
notes on Adorno in 1968-69
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.
Left behind: the working class in the crisis (public forum)
The Platypus Affiliated Society presents, a moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A addressing issues of global capital, trade unions, workers rights, international solidarity, and immigration, in light of recent economic and political change. Thursday, April 23, 2009 The School of the Art Institute of Chicago 280 S. Columbus Drive (main auditorium) Speakers include: Abraham Mwaura, [...]
Why the U.S. stimulus package is bound to fail
David Harvey Much is to be gained by viewing the contemporary crisis as a surface eruption generated out of deep tectonic shifts in the spatio-temporal disposition of capitalist development. The tectonic plates are now accelerating their motion and the likelihood of more frequent and more violent crises of the sort that have been occurring since [...]
Can Neo-liberalism continue after the crisis?
Observations on the Ideological Recovery in France and the United States Ashleigh Campi It has been noted that the current economic crisis is of a scale unprecedented in the history of advanced capitalism. Today, three decades since the first stages of a transition of world markets through the expansion of finance capital, we face the [...]
notes on Feb. 15 reading Korsch “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923)
” ‘[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence’ [Marx, Preface to [...]
Trotsky on “degeneration” and “entire generations passing into discard” (1933)
“It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles. . . . [W]ith the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard . . . the necessity . . . arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. . . . With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary [...]
Platypus NYC screening: Rosa Luxemburg (1986)
A Film by Margarethe von Trotta
A political biography of one of the leading figures in the history of the Left
Friday, January 30th, 2009
6:30pm
295 Lafayette st. 4th FL New York, NY 10012
Living Marxism
James Heartfield One of the stranger sights in today’s banking crisis is the sudden popularity of Karl Marx. The Manifesto is flying off the shelves, and business execs are boning up on Marx’s crisis theory in much the same way that they used to lap up Sun Tzu’s Art of War, or parrot Heraclitus’ saying [...]
Re-thinking the Crisis of Capital in Light of the Crisis of the Left
Peter Hudis “Far from expressing a sequence of never-ending progression, the Hegelian dialectic lets retrogression appear as translucent as progression and indeed makes it very nearly inevitable if one ever tries to escape regression by mere faith.”—Raya Dunayevskaya (1) It may seem ironic that a moment so typified by the crisis of capital calls for [...]
