A Platypus-wide teach-in on the CPGB’s campaign against Lukacs and its stakes for Platypus as a project.

Held on Saturday January 11 1-4PM at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920 while simultaneously broadcast internationally via Livestream.

James Turley's historical chart of Lukacs's influence on Platypus:

The preparatory readings for this event are as follows and can be found at:

- Mike Macnair, “The philosophy trap” 11/21/13
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/987/lukács-the-philosophy-trap

- Chris Cutrone, “Defending Marxist Hegelianism against a Marxist critique” 8/11/11
http://www.cpgb.org.uk/home/weekly-worker/878/defending-marxist-hegelianism-against-a-marxist-critique

- Georg Lukacs, Original Preface (1922) to History and Class Consciousness (1923)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/preface-1922.htm

CPGB contra Lukács
Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee)
contra Georg Lukács
James Turley, Chris Cutrone, Lawrence Parker

http://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=1716

Originally published in Weekly Worker January 24 – March 14, 2013. PDF:
http://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/cpgbcontralukacs031513.pdf

articles:
- James Turley, “The antinomies of Georg Lukács” 1/24/13
- Chris Cutrone, “Regression” 1/31/13
- James Turley, “Dummy” 2/21/13
- Chris Cutrone, “Nota bene” 2/28/13
- James Turley, “Bacon” 3/7/13
- Lawrence Parker, “Lukács reloaded” 3/7/13
- Chris Cutrone, “Unreloaded” 3/14/13

http://chriscutrone.platypus1917.org/?p=1716

Supplemental:

Chris Cutrone, “Gillian Rose’s ‘Hegelian’ critique of Marxism” 3/1/10
http://platypus1917.org/2010/03/15/gillian-roses-hegelian-critique-of-marxism/

The fourth installment of a panel series, held at the University of Chicago on November 23rd, 2013.  The first three panels were held in Halifax, Frankfurt, and Thessaloniki.

A moderated panel discussion and audience Q&A with thinkers, activists and political figures focused on contemporary problems faced by the Left in its struggles to construct a politics that adequately address issues of democracy. Hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of Chicago.

Panelists:

MICHAEL GOLDFIELD (Wayne State University)

AUGUST NIMTZ (University of Minnesota)

PETER STAUDENMAIER (Marquette University)

From the financial crisis and the bank bail-outs to the question of "sovereign debt"; from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street; from the struggle for a unified European-wide policy to the elections in Greece and Egypt that seem to have threatened so much and promised so little—the need to go beyond mere "protest" has asserted itself: political revolution is in the air, again.

At the same time, the elections in US and recently in Germany, by comparison, to be a non-event, despite potentially having far-reaching consequences for teeming issues world-wide. Today, the people—the demos—seem resigned to their political powerlessness, even as they rage against the corruption of politics. Hence, while contemporary demands for democracy to politicize the demos, they are also indicative of social and political regression that asks urgently for recognition and reflection. Demands for democracy "from below" end up being expressed "from above": The 99%, in its already obscure and unorganized character, didn't express itself as such in the various recent elections, but was split in various tendencies, many of them very reactionary.

Democracy retains an enigmatic character, since it always slips any fixed form and content, since people under the dynamic of capital keep demanding at time "more" democracy and "real" democracy. But democracy can be like Janus: it often expresses both the progressive social and emancipatory demands, but also their defeat, their hijacking by an elected "Bonaparte."

What is the history informing the demands for greater democracy today, and how does the Left adequately promote—or not—the cause of popular empowerment? What are the potential futures for "democratic" revolution, especially as understood by the Left?

Questions:

1. What would you consider as "real" democracy, as this has been a primary demand of recent spontaneous forms of discontent (e.g. Arab Spring, Occupy, anti-austerity protests, student strikes)?
2. What is the relationship between democracy and the working class today? Do you consider historical struggles for democracy by workers as the medium by which they got "assimilated" to the system, or the only path to emancipation that they couldn't avoid trying to take?
3. Do you consider it as necessary to eschew establishment forms of mass politics in favor of new forms in order to build a democratic movement? Or are current mass form of politics adequate for a democratic society?
4. Why has democracy emerged as the primary demand of spontaneous forms of discontent? Do you also consider it necessary, or adequate, to deal with the pathologies of our era?
5. Engels wrote that "A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian things there is." Do you agree? Can this conception be compatible with the struggle for democracy?
6. How is democracy related with the issue of possibly overcoming capital?
7. Is there a difference between the ancient and the modern notion of democracy and, if so, what is the source of that difference? Does "real" democracy share more with the direct democracy of ancient polis?
8. Is democracy oppressive, or can it be such? How do you judge Lenin's formulation that: "democracy is also a state and that, consequently, democracy will also disappear with the state disappears."

A moderated panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society on the interrelation of capital, history and ecology, held at Loyola University on November 19th, 2013.

Panelists:
- Franklin Dmitryev (News and Letters) Author of "Ecosocialism and Marx's Humanism"
- Fred Magdoff (University of Vermont) Author of "What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism"
- Steven Vogel (Denison University) Author of "Against Nature: The Concept of Nature in Critical Theory"
- Alice Weinreb (Loyola University) Author of the forthcoming "Modern Hungers: Food, War and Germany in the Twentieth Century"

Description:
The Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen recently 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 history its course will be determined by the question of what humanity will become.

This panel 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 seem 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 but never transformed.

This panel will consider the relationship between the history of 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 and degradation visible and comprehensible, and by extension, subject to its conscious and free overcoming by society.