This year marks the 50th anniversary of May 68. As such, we would like to invite you to participate in the 12-week reading group covering the New Left.

The same amount of time has passed between our moment and 1968 as between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the events 1968. Ushered in by a New Left that sought to distinguish itself from the Old Left that emerged in the 20s and 30s, the monumental events of 1968 set the tone for everything from protest politics to academic leftism that we know today. We can perhaps feel the urgency of the question: what lessons are to be drawn from the New Left as another generation undertakes the project of building a Left for the 21st century?

Starting Feb 20th, 2018

Tuesdays 7–10pm

Zossener Str. 56, 10961 Berlin 

(Eingang A. 4. Stock. Buzzer: Zizoo)

Call 017680637663 if you cant find us!

Facebook event and discussion here.

General recommended background readings:

• Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement  (1962)
• Irwin Unger's The Movement (1974); see also Unger’s retrospective of 1968. 
• Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (1973)
• Massimo Teodori’s The New Left (1969)
• Harold Jacobs, Weatherman (1970)

Week 1: Feb 20th
Introducing the New Left
New forms of discontent?

"It is with [the] problem of agency in mind that I have been studying the intellectuals. . . . [I]f we try to be realistic in our utopianism — not fruitless contradiction — a writer on the Left today must begin there. For that is what we are, that is where we stand." (Mills 1960)

"The concept of the Left remains unclear to this day." (Kolakowski 1968)

• C. Wright Mills, "The Politics of Responsibility" (1960) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 23-31] [includes excerpts from "Letter to the New Left"(1960)]
• Leszek Kolakowski, "The Concept of the Left" (1968) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 144-158]

Week 2: Feb 27th
Theory and Practice I
Frankfurt School and the New Left: the 1930s and the '60s

"In socialism, freedom is to become a reality. But because the present system is called 'free' and considered liberal, it is not terribly clear what this might mean. . . . Not only [the Little Man's] lack of freedom but that of [his betters] as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom. . . . The socialist order of society is not prevented by world history; it is historically possible. But it will not be realized by a logic that is immanent to history but by men trained in theory and determined to make things better. Otherwise, it will not be realized at all."
(Horkheimer 1926-31)

"Praxis appears necessarily as a blind spot, as an obsession with what is being criticized. . . . This admixture of delusion, however, warns of the excesses in which it incessantly grows." (Adorno 1969)

• Herbert Marcuse, "Conclusion" from One-Dimensional Man (1964) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 32-40]
• Herbert Marcuse, "The End of Utopia," and "The Problem of Violence" (lectures 1967)
• Herbert Marcuse, "The Question of Revolution" (interview 1967)

Recommended background reading:

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (Notes 1926-31)
• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as material power” (1933/46)
• Ralf Wiggershaus's history (originally in German) of the Frankfurt School has one short chapter that is good source on history of German New Left and FS.

Week 3: March 6th
Theory and Practice II

Adorno-Marcuse correspondence

• Esther Leslie, Introduction to the 1969 Adorno-Marcuse correspondence  (1999)
• Theodor W. Adorno and Marcuse, Correspondence on the German New Left (1969)
• Adorno, "Marginalia to Theory and Praxis" (1969)
• Marcuse, The Failure of the New Left (1975)

Week 4: March 13th
Crisis on the Left: is revolution justified by history?

"For, after all, are we not always in exceptional situations? The failure of the [1848 revolution in France and the] 1849 revolution in Germany [were] exception[s], the failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception, the German Social-Democratic failure of the beginning of the 20th Century in producing the chauvinism of 1914 was an exception, the success of 1917 was an exception — exceptions, but with respect to what? Nothing but the abstract idea, which is nonetheless comforting and reassuring, of a pure, simple, dialectical schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained the memory (or rediscovered the allure) of the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving power of the abstract contradiction as such: particularly the beautiful contradiction between Capital and Labor." (Althusser 1962)

• Carl Oglesby, "Introduction: The Idea of the New Left"(1969) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 1-20]
• Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and Overdetermination" (1962) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 57-83; also in Althusser, For Marx (1965-66)]

Supplemental Reading:

• Althusser, "Marxism and Humanism"(1965) [also in For Marx]

Week 5: March 20th
"What is revolutionary leadership?"

"The historical crisis of mankind is reduced to the crisis of revolutionary leadership."
(Leon Trotsky 1938)

" 'Revisionism' is the view that every new development requires the abandonment in
practice of basic aspects of previously held theory. Ultimately this drift from the dialectical
materialist method leads to a drift from the working class itself. Marxism, on the contrary,
develops through the continual integration of new elements, new realities, into its
theoretical structure. . . . Particularly in the present period, when the working class seems
to the empiricist to be under the complete and everlasting domination of reformist
bureaucracies, this ideological pressure is the result of a terribly strong social pressure.
The Trotskyist groups feel small and isolated at the very moment that significant leftist
forces are clearly in motion throughout the world. These forces, however, are under the
leadership of non-proletarian tendencies: 'left' social democrats, Stalinists of one or another variety, and 'revolutionary' bourgeois or petty-bourgeois groups in the colonial countries." (RT of the SWP-USA 1962)

• Cliff Slaughter, "What is Revolutionary Leadership?"(1964)
• Revolutionary Tendency of the SWP (USA) "In Defense of a Revolutionary Perspective" (1962)

Supplemental reading:

• Spartacist League, "Genesis of Pabloism"(1972)
• Communist (Third) International, "The Organization of Communist Parties" (resolutions 1921)

Recommended Background Reading:

• Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution(1977)
• Tariq Ali and Phil Evans, Introducing Trotsky and Marxism (1980)
• Spartacist League, Lenin and the Vanguard Party (pamphlet 1978)

Week 6: March 27th
Re-organizing the Left?

• André Gorz, from Strategy for Labor (1964) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 41-56]
• Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, from May Day Manifesto (1967) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 111-143]

Week 7: April 3rd
New "vanguards" for revolution? (1): anti-authoritarianism

• Rudi Dutschke, "On Anti-Authoritarianism" (1968) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 243-253]
• Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, "The Battle for the Streets" — C'est Pour Toi Que Tu Fais La Révolution" [from Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative (1968)] [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 254-266]

Supplemental Readings:

• Atiya Khan, Mark Rudd, Spencer A. Leonard, You don’t need a Marxist to know which way the wind blows: An interview with Mark Rudd

Week 8: April 10th
Identity Politics

• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The longest revolution” (1966)
• Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
• Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)

Supplemental Readings:

• Valerie Solanas Scum Manifesto (1967)
• Herbert Marcuse, "Marxism and Feminism" (1974)
• Quintin Hoare, "On Mitchell's 'Women: The longest revolution' " (1967
• Mitchell, reply to Quintin Hoare (1967)
• Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
• Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
• Malcolm X, I don’t mean Bananas (1964)
• Huey Newton, A Prison Interview (1968) [in Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader, 223-240]
• Spencer Leonard, Black nationalism and the legacy of Malcolm X: An interview with Michael Dawson
• Spencer Leonard and Clyde Young "Thirty years of counter-revolution": An interview with Clyde Young

Suggested Viewing: Finally Got the News (film 1970, 55 min.: dir. Bird, Lichtman and Gessner with LRBW

Week 9: April 17th
Neo-Marxism?

• Martin Nicolaus, “The unknown Marx” (1968)
• Moishe Postone, “Necessity, labor, and time” (1978)

Mondays 7–10pm

Zossener Str. 56, 10961 Berlin (Eingang A. 4. Stock. Buzzer: Zizoo)

• required / + recommended reading

Lenin readings available in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (Norton, 1977), except (*) on marxists.org

Recommended background readings

+ Richard Appignanesi and Oscar Zarate / A&Z, Introducing Lenin and the Russian Revolution / Lenin for Beginners (1977)
+ John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)

Week 1 | Aug 14

• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)
• Lenin, On the Two Lines in the Revolution (1915) *

Week 2 | Aug 21

• Lenin, Lecture on the 1905 Revolution (1917)
• Lenin, Letters from Afar (1917) *
• Lenin, April Theses (1917)

Week 3 | Aug 28

• Lenin, The Dual Power (1917)
• Lenin, The Enemies of the People (1917)
• Lenin, The Beginning of Bonapartism (1917)

Week 4 | Sep 5

• Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? (1917)
• Lenin, Marxism and Insurrection (1917)
• Lenin, Advice of an Onlooker (1917)

Week 5 | Sep 12

• Lenin, To the Citizens of Russia! (1917)
• Lenin, Theses on the Constituent Assembly (1917)
• Lenin, The Chief Task of Our Day (1918)
• Lenin, The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (1918)

Week 6 | Sep 19

• Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (1918)

"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), [selections part 1, 3-10 and 11-63] [part 2, 451-475 and 544-565]

Week 7: Race and the Black Question - Wednesday 20 July

Rousseau-Smith-Kant-Hegel-Nietzsche

We will address the greater context for Marx and Marxism through the issue of bourgeois radicalism in philosophy in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Discussion will emerge by working through the development from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, but also by reference to the Rousseauian aftermath, and the emergence of the modern society of capital, as registered by liberals such as Adam Smith and Benjamin Constant.

The principle of freedom and its corollary, “perfectibility,” . . . suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless. . . . Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau’s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared. . . . As Hegel put it, “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.”
– James Miller (author of The Passion of Michel Foucault, 2000), Introduction to Rousseau,Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Hackett, 1992)

Recommended background reading:

+ Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 [PDF]

Location:
Wednesdays 6:30 pm
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Center Room 3C*
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 1/3
10117 Berlin

*Please note that you cannot bring a non-clear bag into the library.  We will be meeting at 6:30 in-front of the library if anyone needs to use the lockers with a lock to store their bags

Schedule

Week 1: June 10

• Max Horkheimer, “The little man and the philosophy of freedom” (pp. 50–52 from selections from Dämmerung,1926–31) [ENG] [DEU]

• Cutrone, "The Marxist hypothesis" (2010) [ENG]

• Louis Menand (on Marx and Engels) [ENG]

• Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58) [ENG] [DEU]

• Chris Cutrone, "Capital in history" (2008) [ENG] [DEU]

+ Capital in history timeline and chart of terms
+ video of Communist University 2011 London presentation
+ Robert Pippin, “On Critical Theory” [HTML Critical Inquiry 2003]

Week 2: June 17

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality PDFs of preferred translation (5 parts): [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
• Rousseau, from On the Social Contract [ENG] [DEU] (Book I Sec 5-9, Book II Chap 1-4)

Week 3: June 24

• Adam Smith, selections from The Wealth of Nations

Volume I [PDF]
Introduction and Plan of the Work
Book I: Of the Causes of Improvement…
I.1. Of the Division of Labor
I.2. Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour
I.3. That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market
I.4. Of the Origin and Use of Money
I.6. Of the Component Parts of the Price of Commodities
I.7. Of the Natural and Market Price of Commodities
I.8. Of the Wages of Labour
I.9. Of the Profits of Stock
Book III: Of the different Progress of Opulence in different Nations
III.1. Of the Natural Progress of Opulence
III.2. Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the Ancient State of Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire
III.3. Of the Rise and Progress of Cities and Towns, after the Fall of the Roman Empire
III.4. How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country

Week 4: July 1

• Smith, selections from The Wealth of Nations

Volume II [PDF]
IV.7. Of Colonies
Book V: Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth
V.1. Of the Expences of the Sovereign or Commonwealth

Week 5: July 8

• Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View“ [ENG] [DEU]
• Kant, “What is Enlightenment? ” [ENG] [DEU]
• Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” [ENG] [DEU]

Week 6: July 15

• G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History [HTML] [PDF pp. 14–96 (96–128)] [ENG] [DEU]

Week 7: July 22

Audio: Richard Strauss, “Der Held” ["The Hero"], Ein Heldenleben [A Hero's Life] (1898)
• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life [translator's introduction by Peter Preuss] [ENG] [DEU]
• Nietzsche, selection from On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense [ENG] [DEU]

Week 8: July 29

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

• Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic [ENG] [DEU]

Wednesdays 7pm
Pure Origins
Georgenstraße 193
Berlin

check Facebook event for details

Week 1 (14 Jan 2015)

• Cutrone, “Symptomology: Historical transformations in social-political context”
• Cutrone, “Capital in history: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left” + Capital in history timeline and chart of terms + video of Communist University 2011 London presentation + Marx on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse) + Marx and Engels as philosophes of a Second Enlightenment
• Cutrone, "Class consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) today"

Week 2 (21 Jan 2015)

• Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left”
• Adorno, “Imaginative excesses”

Week 3 (28 Jan 2015)

• Blumberg, Cutrone, Khan, Leonard, and Rubin, Forum: The decline of the Left in the 20th century

Week 4 (4 Feb 2015)

• Anderson, Cutrone, Kreitman, Postel, and Turl, Forum: Imperialism: What is it, why should we be against it?
• Albert, Cutrone, Duncombe, and Holmes, Forum: The 3 Rs: reform, revolution and “resistance:” The problematic forms of “anti-capitalism” today

Week 5 (11 Feb 2015)

• Brennan, Davis, Hendricks, Mujica, and Rubin, Forum: What is a movement?
• Hendricks, Hughes, Mwaura, and Thindwa, Forum: Left behind: The working class in the crisis

Week 6 (18 Feb 2015)

• Platypus Historians Group, Catastrophe, historical memory, and the Left: 60 years of Israel-Palestine
• Ibish, Kovel, and Rubin, Forum: Which way forward for Palestinian liberation?
• Goodman and Rubin, Forum: Marxism and Israel

Week 7 (25 Feb 2015)

• Farrow, Gabrellas, Mucciaroni, and Wolf, Forum: Which way forward for sexual liberation?
• Nogales, Pereira Di Salvo, and Rojas, Forum: Politics of the contemporary student Left
• Brennan, Klatt, Petcov, and Weger, Forum: Ideology and the student Left

Week 8 (4 March 2015)

• Bernstein, Cutrone, Goehr, and Horowitz, Forum: The relevance of Critical Theory to art today
• Cutrone, Feenberg, Westerman, and Brown, Platypus convention plenary: The politics of Critical Theory

Week 9 (11 March 2015)

• Horkheimer and Adorno, “Discussion about Theory and Praxis” (AKA “Towards a New Manifesto?”)[Deutsch] (1956)
• Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung
• Adorno, “Resignation”
• Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis”
• Cutrone, “The Left is dead! — Long live the Left!” Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and the possibilities for emancipatory social politics today

Week 10 (18 March 2015)

• Cutrone, Morrison, and Rubin, Platypus convention plenary: The Platypus synthesis: History, theory, and practice