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You are here: The Platypus Affiliated Society/Archive for category 2017
Following the clashes in Charlottesville on August 12th, and massive anti-fascist demonstrations afterwards in Durham, Boston, the Bay Area, and elsewhere, the struggle against fascism has arrived in the consciousness of the general public. Tens of thousands of people are realizing that the fight against fascism did not end in 1945. Today, as increasingly authoritarian governments collude with ascendant fascist movements all around the world, this battle is more pressing than ever.
Revolutionaries study revolutions. Many lessons might be learned from looking at the 1917 Russian Revolution and its aftermath. It began with such promise, bringing hope of a world without war, oppression, capitalism, imperialism, and states. How did it result in Stalinist mass murder and state capitalism, and finally to collapse back into traditional capitalism?

Platypus Reading Group at Dartmouth College
Mondays 4-7 PM
McCulloch Hall, basement seminar room*


• required / + recommended reading


Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Oct 2

• Max Horkheimer, "The little man and the philosophy of freedom" (1926–31)

• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by Louis Menand (on Marx and Engels) and Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58)

• Chris Cutrone, "Capital in history" (2008)

+ Capital in history timeline and chart of terms

+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) chart of terms

+ video of Communist University 2011 London presentation

• Cutrone, "The Marxist hypothesis" (2010)

• Cutrone, â€śClass consciousness (from a Marxist persective) today”


Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct 9

• Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" and "What is Enlightenment?" (1784)

• Benjamin Constant, "The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns" (1819)

+ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the origin of inequality (1754)

+ Rousseau, selection from On the social contract (1762)


Week 3. What is the Left? III. Failure of Marxism | Oct 16

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)

• Adorno, â€śImaginative Excesses” (1944–47)


Week 4. What is the Left? IV. Utopia and critique | Oct 23

• Leszek Kolakowski, â€śThe concept of the Left” (1968)

• Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx's dissertation, 1839–41), pp. 9–11

• Marx, For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843), pp. 12–15


 

* McCulloch is a residence hall connected to Brace Commons, behind 17 East Wheelock Street in Hanover. Street parking is available in front of the Dartmouth Gym. To gain access to the building, meet at the Brace Commons entrance which is located at the back of the courtyard to the right of 13 East Wheelock (a large white house).

Once inside the outer door, take a right and walk down a long hallway into McCulloch. Find stairs on your left, if you see a pool table you have gone too far. The McCulloch Seminar room is in the basement to your right after you get out of the stairwell.

If you do not have a Dartmouth ID card, you may need assistance entering the building. Please contact us ahead of time and we will make sure you can get inside.

Introductory workshop to the development of freedom in human history from the Platypus perspective, hosted by Ethan Linehan at the University of Tennessee (Knoxville), September 24, 2017.

Description:

In the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels famously observed that a "spectre was haunting Europe: the spectre of Communism". 170 years later, it is Marxism itself that haunts us, while capitalism remains.

What does it mean that Marx and Marxism still appeal, while political movements for socialism are weak or non-existent? What were Marxism's original points concerning radical possibilities for freedom that might still speak to the present?

Does Marxism even matter?

Tuesdays
6pm - 9pm
Starbucks, St. Katherine's House, 10 Kingsway