An interview with Max Elbaum Spencer A. Leonard Platypus Review 30 | December 2010 On October 17, 2010, Spencer A. Leonard interviewed Max Elbaum, author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che, to discuss the New Communist Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The interview was aired during [...]
December 1st, 2010 | PR web editor | 2 comments | ContinuedAll Posts Tagged With: "the Left"
Oil and the Left: An interview with Imre Szeman
Andony Melathopoulos with Brian Worley Platypus Review 29 | November 2010 In September of this year, Andony Melathopoulos interviewed Imre Szeman, author, professor, and founder of the Canadian Association of Cultural Studies, on behalf of the Platypus Review, to discuss his analysis of oil politics in light of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the [...]
November 6th, 2010 | PR web editor | 2 comments | Continued
The dead Left: Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution
M. A. Torres Platypus Review 25 | July 2010 ONE FINDS QUITE A BIT OF NAME-CALLING among the innumerable articles and blog posts written in criticism of Hugo Chavez and his government. Although most of this invective is not very illuminating, one article by a young, Colombian, Trotsky-ish labor organizer describes Chavez perfectly in two [...]
July 9th, 2010 | PR web editor | 5 comments | Continued
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 phases of the question of “philosophy” for Marx and Marxism. Black questions [...]
February 26th, 2010 | PR web editor | 0 comments | Continued
Comments on Chris Cutrone’s review of Marxism and Philosophy by Karl Korsch
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 [...]
December 6th, 2009 | PR web editor | 3 comments | Continued
The Failure of the Islamic Revolution
The nature of the present crisis in Iran
Chris Cutrone
Confusion on the Left around the 2009 electoral crisis in Iran has been expressed both in defense of President Ahmadinejad’s claim to victory as well as by support of Iranian dissidents and protesters. Slavoj Žižek has weighed in, questioning prevailing understandings of the nature of the Iranian regime and its Islamist character. Responses to the current crisis have recapitulated problems on the Left in understanding the Islamic Revolution since 1979. All share in attributing to Iran an autonomous historical rhythm or logic of its own, rather than as a symptomatic effect of a greater history. Žižek has come closest to addressing this issue of greater context, but even he has failed to address the history of the Left.
August 24th, 2009 | Platypus Review editor | 1 comment | 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
Resurrecting the ’30s
A response to David Harvey and James Heartfield
Ian Morrison
THE LAST FORTY YEARS have been conceptually bewildering for the Left. The withering of working class movements and the rise of the new social movements have coincided with a global shift away from national state-centric (or “Fordist”) modes of accumulation towards a more “global,” neo-liberal capitalism.
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