"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]