THIRD ANNUAL PLATYPUS INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION Opening plenary Chris Cutrone, Andrew Feenberg, Richard Westerman, and Nicholas Brown Platypus Review 37 | July 2011 [PDF] The opening plenary of the third annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, held April 29–May 1, 2011 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was a panel discussion between Nicholas [...]

June 20–24, 2011 Institute for the Humanities, University of Illinois at Chicago Marxism and the bourgeois revolution Spencer Leonard, “Marx’s critique of political economy: Proletarian socialism continuing the bourgeois revolution?” Pamela Nogales, “Marx on the U.S. Civil War as the 2nd American Revolution” Jeremy Cohan, “Lukács on Marx’s Hegelianism and the dialectic of Marxism” Moderator: [...]

Book review: Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Verso, 2009. Chris Cutrone GILLIAN ROSE’S MAGNUM OPUS was her second book, Hegel Contra Sociology (1981).[1] Preceding this was The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno (1978), a work which charted Rose’s approach to the relation of Marxism to Hegel in Hegel [...]

Joshua Howard GEORG LUKÁCS INTRODUCED the notion of totality as a major theme for Western Marxism in his work History and Class Consciousness, where he wrote, It is not the primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality. The [...]

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.