A moderated panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on the interrelation of capital, history, and ecology.
Panelists:
- Ashik Siddique, Democratic Socialists of America
- Ethan Wright, Zero Hour
- Mike Golash, Progressive Labor Party
- Wyatt Verlen, Platypus Affiliated Society
Description:
The Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen has characterized the period marked by the start of the industrial revolution in the 18th Century to the present as a new geological epoch “the Anthropocene”. This periodization is meant to capture a change in the history of the planet, namely that for the first time in Earth’s history its course will be determined by the question of what humanity will become.
While the idea of an era of planetary history driven by humanity was viewed as a great accomplishment by Enlightenment thinkers, it has now come to be associated with the potential demise of all life on Earth. The legacy of the Industrial Revolution has not, after all, led to the opening of human capacities and the flourishing of vibrant ecosystems, but rather the diminishing of both. The onus on humanity to shape the course of history seems only to lead to increasingly unsuccessful attempts to avoid planetary disaster. This event will focus on different interpretations of why the Left has failed to deal with the deepening crisis of the Anthropocene through the 19th and 20th Centuries, and how and if this problem is interrelated with the growing problems associated with ecological systems across the earth.
While Karl Marx would note that the problem of freedom shifted with the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the working class - the crisis of bourgeois society that Marx would term capital - the idea of freedom seemed not to survive the collapse of Marxist politics in the 20th Century. We seem to live in a world in which the fate of ecological systems seems foreclosed, where attempts at eco-modernization seem to emerge many steps behind the rate of ecological degradation. For many, degradation of the environment appears a permanent feature of modern society, something which can only be resisted or despaired but never transformed.
This panel will consider the relationship between capital and the Left – and thus the issue of history and freedom - and how it may be linked to our present inability to render environmental threats visible and comprehensible, and by extension, subject to their conscious and free overcoming by society.
Questions:
- Bourgeois society is typically marked as emerging in the 16th century, while the Anthropocene is dated later near the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Why mark the Anthropocene and the emergence of bourgeois society as distinct periods of natural and human history? What are the stakes? How do you relate these two periods? If you consider these periods to mark a qualitative change in humanity/society/ecology, then what is characteristic of this change?
- A later phase of the Anthropocene is marked by the historically unprecedented economic growth following World War II (what Crutzen called “the Great Acceleration”). Contemporary environmentalism emerged in response to the subsequent destruction in the late 1960s. How do you understand the conditions of possibility of an environmental critique? What, in your view, is the nature of the link between the 1960s origins of environmentalism, the subsequent transformation of state-centric capitalism into neoliberalism, and today’s worldwide ecological crisis in the 21st century? What is the price we pay for neglecting the story of how we got here?
- The late 20th century saw the migration of people originally drawn to Marxism into alternative camps. For example, a figure like Murray Bookchin in the 1960s prefigures the flight from Marxism by people like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (Green Party) in the 1980s. This, by all accounts, stems from their disappointment with the Marxism of the Old Left (1930s-40s) as well as the New Left (1960s-70s). Given this legacy, what, if anything, does Marxism have to contribute to advancing an environmental politics today?
- Early 20th century revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg characterized socialism as “the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind.” Today, by contrast, much of the Left appears to find the very notion of freedom hubristic, preferring to resist the dynamism of contemporary society rather than transform it. Many environmental scholars have reflected recently that environmental radicalism seems less-and-less located in the most advanced sections of capital formation, and more frequently among the displaced who understandably find recourse in resisting. How do you account for this change in focus? Is there a viable future within these movements? What is the meaning of the transition from freedom and transformation to resistance?
- There is a growing discourse of “de-growth”, which, like other aspects of contemporary environmentalism, presupposes concepts such as “limits” and “sustainability”. How do you regard the call for de-growth amid boundless accumulation? Does de-growth provide a promising path towards a reconciliation between ecology and society, or does it fall short of grasping the reasons why contemporary society constantly undermines limits, not only to destructive ends, but also towards generating previously unforeseen possibilities?
Thursdays, 6:30 - 9:00 pm
University Hall Room #218
1897 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL
Join at any time / no prior knowledge assumed
Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Oct. 10, 2019
Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract (1762)
• Max Horkheimer, "The little man and the philosophy of freedom" (1926–31)
• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by James Miller (on Jean-Jacques Rousseau), Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson), Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58), and Peter Preuss (on Nietzsche)
+ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo" (1908)
+ Robert Pippin, "On Critical Theory" (2004)
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) chart of terms
• Chris Cutrone, "Capital in history" (2008)
+ Capital in history timeline and chart of terms
+ video of Communist University 2011 London presentation
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
• Cutrone, "The Marxist hypothesis" (2010)
• Cutrone, “Class consciousness (from a Marxist persective) today”
+ G.M. Tamas, "Telling the truth about class" [HTML] (2007)
Week 2. What is the Left? II. Utopia and critique | Oct. 17, 2019
• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)
• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)
• Leszek Kolakowski, “The 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
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
Week 3. What is Marxism? I. Socialism | Oct. 24, 2019
• Marx, selections from Economic and philosophic manuscripts (1844), pp. 70–101
+ Commodity form chart of terms
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
• Marx and Friedrich Engels, selections from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), pp. 469-500
• Marx, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850), pp. 501–511
Week 4. What is Marxism? II. Revolution in 1848 | Nov. 31, 2019
• Marx, The coming upheaval (from The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) and Class struggle and mode of production (letter to Weydemeyer, 1852), pp. 218-220
• Engels, The tactics of social democracy (Engels's 1895 introduction to Marx, The Class Struggles in France), pp. 556–573
• Marx, selections from The Class Struggles in France 1848–50 (1850), pp. 586–593
• Marx, selections from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), pp. 594–617
Week 5. What is Marxism? III. Bonapartism | Nov. 7, 2019
+ Karl Korsch, "The Marxism of the First International" (1924)
• Marx, Inaugural address to the First International (1864), pp. 512–519
• Marx, selections from The Civil War in France (1871, including Engels's 1891 Introduction), pp. 618–652
+ 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)
Week 6. What is Marxism? IV. Critique of political economy | Nov. 14, 2019
The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.
— Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Walter Benjamin, August 2, 1935
+ Commodity form chart of terms
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
+ Organic composition of capital chart of terms
• Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61), pp. 222–226, 236–244, 247–250, 276–293 ME Reader pp. 276-281
• Marx, Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1 Sec. 4 "The fetishism of commodities" (1867), pp. 319–329
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
Week 7. What is Marxism? V. Reification | Nov. 21, 2019
• Georg Lukács, “The phenomenon of reification” (Part I of “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, 1923)
+ Commodity form chart of terms
+ Reification chart of terms
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
+ Organic composition of capital chart of terms
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
Winter break readings
+ Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate / A&Z, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution / Lenin for Beginners (1977)
+ Sebastian Haffner, Failure of a Revolution: Germany 1918–19 (1968)
+ Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Part II. Ch. (1–4,) 5–10, 12–16; Part III. Ch. 1–6
+ Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism / Trotsky for Beginners (1980)
+ James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (1966)
Week 8. Nov. 28, 2019 U.S. Thanksgiving break
Week 9. What is Marxism? VI. Class consciousness | Dec. 5, 2019
• Lukács, “Class Consciousness” (1920), Original Preface (1922), “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919), History and Class Consciousness (1923)
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
+ Reification chart of terms
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
+ Marx, Preface to the First German Edition and Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873) of Capital (1867), pp. 294–298, 299–302
Week 10. What is Marxism? VII. Ends of philosophy | Dec. 14, 2019 / Jan. 18, 2020
• Korsch, “Marxism and philosophy” (1923)
+ Capitalist contradiction chart of terms
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms
+ 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
+ Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), pp. 143–145