Karl Korsch’s “The Quintessence of Marxism” (1922), a text made reference to by Korsch in his “Introduction to the Critique of the Gotha Program” (1922), appears to have been translated into English only once: serialized in the pages of the Australian Workers’ Weekly, the official organ of the Australian Communist Party, across seven issues in July and August of 1924. The translation was prepared by Guido Baracchi, a founder of that Party and a labor movement activist, whose biography, Communism: A Love Story (2007) was written by Jeff Sparrow. Baracchi originally presented his translation with a foreword, retained here, that situates the text within Korsch’s pedagogical project. This historic document has been newly transcribed for publication in the Platypus Review by Natalya Antonova, Shane Hopkinson, and Liam Kenny.
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TIM HORRAS EPIGRAPHS his response to me with a passage out of the Class Struggles in France about a new crisis being “as sure to come as [a new revolution].” This passage from Marx was written when he and Engels had “declared that the first phase of the revolutionary period had closed and that nothing could be looked forward to until the advent of a new economic world crisis.”
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LIBERAL PARTY VOTERS IN the Philippines, like the Democrats in the United States, seldom admit the project with which they have long been associated — neoliberalism — is in terminal crisis.
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LABOR HISTORY HAS SHOWN ITSELF to be a patently counterrevolutionary field of study, despite its radical bona fides. How one understands the field’s object, labor, is largely determined by one’s understanding of capitalism. Increasingly, however, labor historians conceptualize capitalism in a frivolous manner.
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THE BOOK VERSION OF the 1619 Project was published on November 16, 2021, and the same period also witnessed the birth of a new genre of critical essay, written while The 1619 Project was in press but responding not to the book but to the August 18, 2019 special issue of the New York Times Magazine that it supersedes
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