IF TODAY’S ATOMIZED Marxist Left agrees on anything, it is the disastrous consequences of the Second International’s failure to mobilize against war in 1914. Instead of banding together against militarism, socialists rushed to defend bourgeois states they had previously pledged to destroy. They all had their reasons.
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The following is a translation, by Lukas Hedderich and Ethan Linehan, of Walter Held’s “Kritische Theorie ohne politische Praxis? Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung” (1939).
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WHAT IS THE ROLE of the intellectual in a revolutionary working-class movement? How does the separation of theory from practice affect the development and utility of Marxism? And how did the twin phenomena of the Frankfurt School and Trotskyism succeed — or fail — in addressing the tasks of their historical moment? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Walter Held’s 1939 essay “Critical theory without political practice?”
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I AM A FOUNDING member of Platypus and one of the authors of our Statement of Purpose and the Platypus Review’s Editorial Statement. I bear some responsibility for starting our now 18-year-old organization, which is currently active in universities across three continents. I am also a historian of intellectual history, social reform, and the crisis of liberalism in the 19th century, and I teach undergraduates at the University of Chicago. Platypus is a Millennial Left organization, among the last which have survived the tumultuous decade and a half.
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IN EARLY MARCH 2024, two photos, each of a disturbing leaflet produced and circulated in Times Square in New York ostensibly in support of Palestinians, began circulating widely on X/Twitter. On each leaflet, superimposed over the Palestinian flag, was a slogan: “Rape is resistance” on one, and “Babies are occupiers too” on the other. “Free Palestine,” the subscript read, “by any means necessary.” Despite calls for other images of the leaflets to establish their origins and authenticity, only these two have appeared.
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