What has the Left been, and what can it yet become?
Today is Saturday, March 13th, 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
Uli vom Hagen
THE ASSUMPTION THAT ROSA LUXEMBURG’S CORPSE has significance for the state of the German Left, though perhaps not her body, is tempting. Luxemburg was a Polish socialist involved in a European socialist movement during a time when there was no sovereign Polish state. She was successively a member of the Social Democratic Party [...]
February 18th, 2010 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
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 notes on our readings from Luxemburg and Trotsky on the Bolshevik Revolution and the greater revolutionary crisis of 1917-19.
I will discuss the relation of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky in the revolutionary period under consideration.
Our recent discussions of 1917-19 has taken 2 parts, Luxemburg’s Spartacus writings from the German Revolution of [...]
From Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism — An Infantile Disorder (1920):
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/
“[E.g.,] Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete”. That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared — and with full justice — to be “historically obsolete” many decades ago, but [...]
I am writing with some notes towards discussion of Lenin’s The State and Revolution (1917).
The first point to make is that this is least controversial of the three texts by Lenin we read in the group, the other two being What is to be done? (1902) and “Left-Wing” Communism: an infantile disorder (1920). (Imperialism, the [...]
I am writing with some notes on Rosa Luxemburg’s Mass, Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906), which we read as our second text from the period of the 1905 Revolution in Russia.
First, on the 1905 Revolution, it needs to be emphasized that this was not only a prelude to and “rehearsal” for [...]
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