The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century
Toward a Theory of Historical Regression
THE ABANDONMENT OF EMANCIPATORY POLITICS in our time has not been, as past revolutionary thinkers may have feared, an abandonment of revolution in favor of reformism. Rather, because the revolutionary overcoming of capital is no longer imagined, reformism too is dead. As the task of achieving human society beyond capital has been abandoned, nothing worthy of the name of politics takes its place, nor could it. The project of freedom has now altogether receded from view. For, while bourgeois thinkers like Hegel were no doubt mistaken in their identification of capital with freedom, they nevertheless grasped that the question of freedom only poses itself with reference to the capital problematic.
All Posts Tagged With: "Hegel"
2001
Book Review: Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Soren Whited SUSAN BUCK-MORSS‘S RECENT OFFERING, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, takes critical aim at two targets: what she identifies as Eurocentric models of universal history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rejection of any notion of universality whatsoever in favor of the postmodernist “plurality of alternative [...]
Platypus Chicago summer 2009: Radical bourgeois philosophy
Platypus Marxist reading group June 28 – August 16 Sundays 1-4PM at: School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 707 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 Centuries. Discussion will [...]
notes on Lukacs
I am writing with some brief, partial notes from our discussion at UChicago at yesterday’s (Sun. 3/8/09) reading group, on several essays from Georg Lukacs’s 1923 book History and Class Consciousness. I want to emphasize and discuss in particular a couple of passages, from the (original, 1922) Preface, and the essay “What is Orthodox Marxism?” [...]
Capital in history: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left
Chris Cutrone [The following is a talk given at the Marxist-Humanist Committee public forum on The Crisis in Marxist Thought, hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on Friday, July 25, 2008.] I want to speak about the meaning of history for any purportedly Marxian Left. We in Platypus focus on the history of [...]
Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today
“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 [...]
