Teach-in by Chris Cutrone held October 10, 2017 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on the article "The Millennial Left is dead" published in Platypus Review issue #100 (October 2017).

Loyola University
Tuesdays 6-9 PM
Metropolis Cafe
1039 W Granville Ave

School of the Art Institute at Chicago
Thursdays 6-9 PM
MacLean Center
112 S Michigan Ave
Room 517

University of Chicago
Saturdays 12:30-3:30 PM
Harper Memorial Library
1116 E 59th St
Room 151

• required / + recommended reading

Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Sep 30 (UChicago) Oct 3 (Loyola) Oct 5 (SAIC), 2017

• 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, “Class consciousness (from a Marxist persective) today”

Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct 7 (UChicago) Oct 10 (Loyola) Oct 12 (SAIC), 2017

• 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 14 (UChicago) Oct 17 (Loyola) Oct 19 (SAIC) , 2017

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

• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)

Week 4. What is the Left? IV. Utopia and critique | Oct 21 (UChicago) Oct 24 (Loyola) Oct 26 (SAIC), 2017

• 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

School of the Art Institute Chicago
Tuesdays at 6 PM
MacLean Center, Room 517
112 S Michigan Ave

9/1 (Friday) - Battleship Potemkin
9/5 - Reds
9/12 - Rosa Luxemburg
9/19 - Cradle Will Rock
9/26 - Grin Without a Cat (Part 1)
10/3 - Grin Without a Cat (Part 2)

University of Illinois at Chicago
Tuesdays at 6 PM
Grant Hall, Room 106
703 S Morgan St

9/12 - Reds
9/19 - Fall of Eagles
9/26 - Rosa Luxemburg
10/3 - Nixon in China

Bayard Rustin speaks in front of City Hall in New York on May 18, 1964, at a rally for school integration.

Loyola University
Tuesdays 6-9 PM
Metropolis Cafe
1039 W Granville Ave

School of the Art Institute at Chicago
Thursdays 6-9 PM
MacLean Center
112 S Michigan Ave
Room 517

• required reading / + recommended reading

Week E. 1960s New Left I. Neo-Marxism | Sep. 5 (Loyola) Sep. 7 (SAIC), 2017

• Martin Nicolaus, “The unknown Marx” (1968)

+ Commodity form chart of terms

• Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”) (1968)

• Moishe Postone, “Necessity, labor, and time” (1978)

+ Postone, “Interview: Marx after Marxism” (2008)

+ Postone, “History and helplessness: Mass mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism” (2006)

+ Postone, “Theorizing the contemporary world: Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey” (2006)

Week F. 1960s New Left II. Gender and sexuality | Sep. 12 (Loyola) Sep. 14 (SAIC), 2017

• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution” (1966)

• Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question” (1920)

• Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today” (1963)

• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity” (1983)

Week G. 1960s New Left III. Anti-black racism in the U.S. | Sep. 19 (Loyola) Sep 21 (SAIC), 2017

• 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 H. Frankfurt School precursors | Sep. 26 (Loyola) Sept. 28 (SAIC), 2017

• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as material power” (1933/46)

• Siegfried Kracauer, “The mass ornament” (1927)

+ Kracauer, “Photography” (1927)

The first meeting will take place on Wednesday, August 9th at 6 PM in Room 517 of SAIC's MacLean Center (112 S Michigan Ave).

All subsequent meetings will take place:
Thursdays 6-9 PM
MacLean Center
112 S Michigan Ave
Room 517

• required / + recommended reading

I. Rousseau: Crossroads of society | Aug. 9, 2017

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)

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) PDFs of preferred translation (5 parts): [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

• Rousseau, selection from On the Social Contract (1762)

II. Hegel: Freedom in history | Aug. 17, 2017

• G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1831) [HTML] [PDF pp. 14-128] [Audiobook]

III. Nietzsche (1): Life in history | Aug. 24, 2017

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874) [translator's introduction by Peter Preuss]

+ Nietzsche on history chart of terms

IV. Nietzsche (2): Asceticism of moderns | Aug. 31, 2017

+ Human, All Too Human: Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil (1999)

• Nietzsche, selection from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887)