Platypus Primary Marxist Reading Group Fall/Autumn 2010 – Winter 2011
I. What is the “Left?” — What is “Marxism?”
Saturdays 1–4PM
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920
University of Chicago (UChicago)
The Reynolds Club 2nd floor South Lounge
5706 S. University Ave.
• required / + recommended reading
A. Sept. 11, 2010 (SAIC only)
• Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism”(2006)
+ Iraqi Communist Party, Letter about the Situation in Iraq (2006)
• Spartacist League, “The Senile Dementia of Post-Marxism” (2006)
+ Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, “ ‘Action Will Be Taken’: Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents” (2002)
B. Sept. 18, 2010 (SAIC only)
• Karl Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (1843), Theses on Feuerbach (1845)
C. Sept. 25, 2010 (SAIC only)
• epigraphs by James Miller (on Rousseau), Peter Preuss (on Nietzsche) and Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson) on modern history and freedom
• Robert Pippin, “On Critical Theory” (2003)
• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in History” (2008)
Week 1. Oct. 2, 2010
• Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784)
+ Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754)
• Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” (1819)
+ Rousseau, selection from The Social Contract (1762)
Week 2. Oct. 9, 2010
• Leszek Kolakowski, “The Concept of the Left” (1968)
Week 3. Oct. 16, 2010
• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)
• Theodor W. Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)
Week 4. Oct. 23, 2010
• Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament” (1927)
• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as Material Power” (1933/46)
Week 5. Oct. 30, 2010
• Marx, selections from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844)
• Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Week 6. Nov. 6, 2010
• Georg Lukács, “The Phenomenon of Reification” (Part I of “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, 1923)
Week 7. Nov. 13, 2010
• Lukács, “Preface” (1922) , “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919) , “Class Consciousness” (1920), History and Class Consciousness (1923)
Week 8. Nov. 20, 2010
• Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923)
+ Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx’s dissertation, 1839–41), For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (1843)
+ Korsch, “The Marxism of the First International” (1924)
Week 9. Dec. 4, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 15, 2011 (UChicago)
• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: the Longest Revolution” (1966)
• Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question” (1920)
• Adorno, “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” (1963)
• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983)
Week 10. Dec. 11, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 22, 2011 (UChicago)
• Richard Fraser, “Two Lectures on the Black Question in America and Revolutionary
Integrationism” (1953)
• James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For Black Trotskyism” (1963)
+ Spartacist League, “Black and Red: Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (1966)
+ Bayard Rustin, “The Failure of Black Separatism” (1970)
• Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered” (1979)
+ Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)
Week 11. Dec. 18, 2010 (SAIC) / Jan. 8, 2011 (UChicago)
+ Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61)
• Martin Nicolaus, “The Unknown Marx” (1968)
• Postone, “Necessity, Labor, and Time” (1978)
+ André Gorz, from Strategy for Labor (1964)
+ Murray Bookchin, Listen, Marxist! (1969)
