What has the Left been, and what can it yet become?
Today is Sunday, March 14th, 2010
Rejoinder to David Black
On Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy
Chris Cutrone
DAVID BLACK’S VALUABLE COMMENTS and further historical exposition (in Platypus Review 18, December 2009) of my review of Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy (Platypus Review 15, September 2009) have at their core an issue with Korsch’s account of the different historical [...]
February 26th, 2010 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
David Black
[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]
CHRIS CUTRONE WRITES, “What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that 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.
September 3rd, 2009 | admin | 5 comments | Continued
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, in [...]
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?” (1919).
Specifically, [...]
I am writing with some notes and suggestions on Lenin’s What is to be done? (1902).
I’d like to start with a quotation from Lenin’s first footnote, in the chapter “Dogmatism and Freedom of Criticism:”
“At the present time (as is now evident), the English Fabians, the French Ministerialists, the German Bernsteinians, and the Russian Critics all [...]
February 23rd, 2009 | Chris Cutrone | 0 comments | Continued
” ‘[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
Platypus NYC meets Sundays 2-4PM
New York University
295 Lafayette St. 4th floor
contact: pam.nogales@gmail.com
Platypus chapter at University of Chicago meets Sundays at
Reynolds Club 5706 S. University Ave.
2nd floor South Lounge
2-5PM
For more information contact mtorre3@artic.edu
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 the Left because [...]
