What has the Left been, and what can it yet become?
Today is Friday, March 12th, 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
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Haseeb Ahmed
FOR YEARS Theodor Adorno’s theoretical work has suffered from either neglect or semi-hostile “interpretation.” It is therefore refreshing to see Detlev Claussen, who studied under Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1971, take a more sympathetic approach to the study of Adorno’s philosophy [...]
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 notes on Adorno’s 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory.”
Another writing by Adorno we read in the group, “Imaginative Excesses,” the final section of the aphorisms orphaned from Minima Moralia (1944-47), published in New Left Review as “Messages in a Bottle,” Adorno addresses the division and necessary unity of “workers [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Chris Cutrone
The new Mayday magazine (UK) and Platypus have been in dialogue on the issues of anarchism and Marxism and the state of the “Left” today in light of history. (Please see “Organization, political action, history and consciousness” by Chris Cutrone for Platypus, and “Half-time Team Talk” by Trevor Bark for Mayday, in issues #2, [...]
“The Left is Dead! — Long Live the Left!” — Platypus, Chicago
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 [...]
