M. A. Torres 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 words: a “postmodern Bonapartist.” Chavez, his [...]
All Posts Tagged With: "the Left"
The dead Left: Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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, [...]
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
notes on Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism an Infantile Disorder (1920)
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 [...]
Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the death of the Left
Book Review: Cottee, Simon and Thomas Cushman (eds.). Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Spencer A. Leonard If it did not come to end in 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History [...]
