Chris Mansour Platypus Review 33 | March 2011 [PDF] On February 19, 2011, Chris Mansour of Platypus interviewed Robert Hullot-Kentor, noted Adorno translator and author of Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. Chris Mansour: For several decades you have been translating and interpreting [...]
March 1st, 2011 | PR web editor | 2 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "critical theory"
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 | 10 comments | Continued
notes to Rousseau
The reading group schedule with links to the readings for the summer has been posted at: http://platypus1917.org/2009/06/21/platypus-chicago-summer-2009-radical-bourgeois-philosophy/ Platypus Marxist reading group summer 2009, June 28 – August 16 Radical bourgeois philosophy: Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th [...]
June 30th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
my dialogue with Kliman on Chicago Political Workshop, Principia Dialectica and Marxist Humanism
[Andrew Kliman wrote:] Reply to Chicago Political Workshop, Chris Cutrone, and Principia Dialectica Posted: May 27th, 2009 | Author: Andrew Kliman | Filed under: Organization, Philosophy | Tags: concreteness, plagiarism, Postone | On plagiarism, Postone, and “the” present May 27, 2009 Dear Comrades, 1. First, I want to respond to the charge that I plagiarize [...]
May 28th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 2 comments | Continued
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, [...]
May 26th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
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.
notes on Lukacs, “Standpoint of the Proletariat”
I am writing with some very brief notes on the 3rd part of Lukacs’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” “The Standpoint of the Proletariat,” which is very important for Platypus’s grasp of the self-understanding of the revolutionary Marxism in 1917-19 that Lukacs was trying to theoretically digest. — In a certain sense, [...]
April 27th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
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
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 [...]
February 15th, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 2 comments | Continued
Obama and Clinton: “Third Way” politics and the “Left”
Chris Cutrone For the “Left” that is critical of him, the most common comparison made of Obama is to Bill Clinton. This critique of Obama, as of Clinton, denounces his “Centrism,” the trajectory he appears to continue from the “new” Democratic Party of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) expressed by Clinton and Gore’s election in [...]
December 1st, 2008 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | Continued