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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On May 18, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member Noah Spore interviewed Enzo Traverso, author of Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914–1945 (2007), Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (2017), and Revolution: An Intellectual History (2021). An edited transcript follows.
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Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix: Social Theory after the Cultural Turn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2022).
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On May 14, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society members Mike Atkinson and David Mountain interviewed Steve Roberts, who was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (UK, 1978). An edited transcript follows.
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On February 17, 2022, Platypus Affiliated Society member Soren Whited interviewed Peter E. Gordon, Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Adorno and Existence (2016) and other works on modern European intellectual history. What follows is an edited transcript of their discussion.
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