Freitag, 27.5 19:00. NIG, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Wien, Hörsaal 3
"Marx issued the call to all the workers of the globe, regardless of race, sex, creed or any other condition whatsoever. As a social party we receive the Negro and all other races upon absolutely equal terms. We are the party of the working class, the whole working class, and we will not suffer ourselves to be divided by any specious appeal to race prejudice; and if we should be coaxed or driven from the straight road we will be lost in the wilderness and ought to perish there, for we shall no longer be a Socialist party."
-- Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle" (1903)
How have changes in social group identity affected the politics of capitalism and the Left's responses to it? While vulgar-propagandistic and economic-reformist Revisionist pseudo-"Marxism" appeared to reduce the problem of capitalism to exploitation -- to the neglect of other forms of social oppression -- there have been several important attempts to grasp the struggle for socialism in capitalism in broader and deeper ways, occasioned by crises that have transformed the concrete practices and lived experience of people -- for instance, as matters of gender roles, sexuality, and "racial" segregation and affinity -- as capitalism has developed and changed over the course of the past century. We will read from among the most sharply acute and incisively critical attempts by Marxists to articulate these crises of social identity as opportunities for finding how capitalism potentially points beyond itself in the struggle for socialism.
Wednesdays 8 June - 20 July, 2016, 19:00h
Zossenerstrasse 56, eingang A, 4. Stock
Week 1: Women's Question - Wednesday 8 June
- Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution”(1966)
- Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question”(1920)
+ Quintin Hoare, "On Mitchell's 'Women: the longest revolution' " (1967)
+ Mitchell, reply to Quintin Hoare (1967)
Week 2: Women's Question and sexuality - Wednesday 15 June
- Cornelia Möser, Lucy Parker, Ursula Jensen, Joy McReady, Women: the Longest Revolution (Frankfurt), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
- Margaret Power, Brit Schulte, Yasmin Nair, Women: The Longest Revolution (Chicago), The Platypus Review #84, March 2016
Week 3: Gay Identity and sexuality - Wednesday 22 June
- Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today”(1963)
- John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity”(1983)
Week 4: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 29 June
Max Shachtman, Communism and the Negro AKA Race and Revolution (1933)
Week 5: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 6 July
- Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
- James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For black Trotskyism” (1963)
- Bayard Rustin, "From protest to politics" (1965)
- Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
Week 6: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 13 July
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), [
Week 7: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 20 July
- Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
- Bayard Rustin, "The blacks and the unions" (1971)
- Spartacist League, "Soul power or workers' power: The rise and fall of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers" (1974)
- Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)
- Adolph Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)
How has art under a capitalist society changed from its pre-capitalist practices? What is the commodity form, and what is art's relationship to its logic? Must art seek emancipation from the commodity form, or is it at home in it? In what sense does art take part in the Left and emancipatory politics, if at all? By asking these questions, this panel seeks to reinvestigate art's relationship to the commodity form, and make intelligible how this problematic relationship still sticks with us today.
New York
Wednesdays at 6:30pm beginning June 15
School of Visual Arts
380 2nd Ave, Room 804B
Chicago
School of the Art Institute, Chicago
Mondays 6pm
112 S Michigan Ave, Room 919
Houston
Sundays at 3:00 pm (ongoing)
University of Houston
MD Anderson Library (meet in the lobby)
London
Mondays at 6pm
Goldsmiths College, Richard Hoggart Building, Room 257
• required / + recommended reading
Marx readings pp. from Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (Norton 2nd ed., 1978)
Recommended background readings
+ Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Part II. Ch. 12–16 (from "Marx and Engels go back to writing history" to "Karl Marx dies at his desk")
+ James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (1966)
Week 1
+ Karl Korsch, "The Marxism of the First International" (1924)
• Karl Marx, Inaugural address to the First International (1864), pp. 512–519
• Ferdinand Lassalle, Open letter to the German workers’ movement (1863)
• Mikhail Bakunin, A Critique of the German Social-Democratic Program (1870)
• Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1872)
Week 2
+ Korsch, Introduction to Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1922)
• Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, pp. 525–541
• Marx, Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (1880)
• Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (1892)
Week 3
• Kautsky,The Social Revolution (1902)
Week 4
• Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, especially Chapters 3, 11 and 12 (1906)
• Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism (1909)
Week 5
• Kautsky, The Road to Power (1909)
