Saturday 28 March - Saturday 6 June, 2020

Time: Mar 28, 2020 11:00 AM EST / 04:00 PM CET (BERLIN)

Time, thereafter: 11:00 AM EST / 05:00 PM CET (BERLIN)

Location: ZOOM

Contact Laurie Rojas <laurie.rojas[at]gmail.com> if interested in joining.

Art and politics

• required / + recommended reading

Week 1. Art and politics after postmodernism | March 28, 2020

“[Artists'] work is to sustain the critical moment of aesthetic experience. [Critics' work] is to recognize it.”
-- Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)

• Susan Buck-Morss, response to Visual culture questionnaire (1996)
• Robert Pippin, "On Critical Theory" (2004)
+ Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic torso of Apollo" (1908)
+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms [PNG]
• Chris Cutrone, "The relevance of Critical Theory to art today" (2011) [PDF]
• Cutrone, "An incomplete project? Art and politics after postmodernism" (2010) [PDF]

No meeting on April 4, 2020 (Platypus International Convention)

Week 2. The meaning of art | April 11, 2020

+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) / immanent dialectical critique chart of terms [PNG]
+ Kant's 3 Critiques [PNG] and philosophy [PNG] charts of terms
• Immanuel Kant, Preface and Introduction, Critique of Judgment (1790) [full book PDF]

Week 3. Art and humanity | April 18, 2020

+ Schiller on aesthetic education (and Nietzsche on art) chart of terms [PNG]
• Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

Week 4. Modern aesthetics of art | April 25, 2020

• G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Introduction): [PDF]
1 Prefatory Remarks
2 Limitation and Defence of Aesthetics
3 Refutation of Objections
4 Scientific Ways of Treating Beauty and Art
5 Concept of the Beauty of Art
6 Common Ideas of Art
(i) The Work of Art as a Product of Human Activity
(ii) The Work of Art, as being for Apprehension by Man’s Senses, is drawn from the Sensuous Sphere
(iii) The Aim of Art

Week 5. Modernity and modernism | May 2, 2020

• Heinrich Heine, excerpts from Salon of 1831 (1831)
• Heine, excerpts from Salon of 1843 (1843)
+ Baudelaire on the modern / modernity / modernism chart of terms [PNG]
• Charles Baudelaire, excerpts from Paris Spleen (1867)
• Baudelaire, excerpts from Salon of 1846 (1846)
• Baudelaire, excerpts from The Painter of Modern Life (1863)

Week 6. Art as justification for life? | May 9, 2020

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872, including 1886 "Attempt at self-criticism")
+ Schiller on aesthetic education (and Nietzsche on art) chart of terms [PNG]

Week 7. Art and revolution | May 16, 2020

“[A] protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion.”
— Trotsky, “Art and politics in our epoch” (1938)

• Walter Benjamin, "On the mimetic faculty" (1934)
• Cutrone, "Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno and Greenberg's critique of 'revolutionary art' " (2020) [PDF]
• Leon Trotsky, "Art and politics in our epoch" (1938)
• Clement Greenberg, "Avant-garde and kitsch" (1939)

Week 8. Revolutionary art? | May 23, 2020

• Walter Benjamin, "Experience and poverty" (1934)
• Benjamin, "The author as producer" (1934)
• Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity: an incomplete project" (1981)

Week 9. Art and capitalism | May 30, 2020

• Benjamin, "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (1936)
• Theodor Adorno, letter to Benjamin (1936)
+ Adorno, "The social situation of music" (1932)
+ Adorno, "The fetish-character in music and the regression of listening" (1938)
+ Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography" (1927)
+ Benjamin, "Little history of photography" (1931)

Week 10. Art's necessity and impossibility | June 6, 2020

• Adorno, "Those Twenties" (1962)
• Adorno, "Art's self-evidence lost" and "Society", Aesthetic Theory (1970)
• Stewart Martin, “Critique of relational aesthetics” (2007)
• Stewart Martin, “The absolute artwork meets the absolute commodity” (2007)

• required / + recommended reading

recommended book: Isaac Deutscher, Marxism, Wars and Revolutions: Essays from Four Decades (Verso, 1984) [ * essays included in book]

recommended background reading:
Spartacist League, Genesis of Pabloism (1972)

Week 1. The revolution betrayed | June 8, 2019

• Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What is the Soviet Union and Where is it Going? (1936)

+ Trotsky, "Stalinism and Bolshevism" (1937)

+ Trotsky, letter to James P. Cannon of September 12, 1939

+ Trotsky, The USSR in War (1939)

Week 2. Stalinophilia and Stalinophobia | June 15, 2019

• Herbert Marcuse, 33 theses (1947)

• Shane Mage, "'Pure democracy' or political revolution in Eastern Europe?" excerpts from The Hungarian Revolution (1957) republished in Spartacist 30 (Autumn 1980) pp. 10-16

• Michael Harrington, "Marxism and democracy" (1981)

Week 3. Crisis of Stalinism | June 22, 2019

(Recommended resource: Isaac Deutscher internet archive)

• Isaac Deutscher, "Two Revolutions" (1950) *

• Deutscher, "Stalin, Mao and Korea" (1950)

• Deutscher, "Khrushchev on Stalin" (1956)

Week 4. Whither Communism? | June 29, 2019

• Deutscher, "Three trends in Communism" (1959)

• Deutscher, "From Stalin to Adam Smith" (1959)

• Deutscher, "The tragedy of the Polish Communist Party" (1958) *

• Deutscher, 3 articles on Eastern Europe (letter to Gomulka, dialogue with Brandler, conversation with Trygve Lie) *

Week 5. Maoism? | July 6, 2019

• Deutscher, "Three currents in Communism" (1964)

• Deutscher, "Maoism — its origin and outlook" (1964) *

• Deutscher, "Vietnam in perspective" (1965)

• Deutscher, "The meaning of the 'Cultural Revolution'" * and interview on the Cultural Revolution (1966)

Week 6. 50 years of the USSR | July 13, 2019

• Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution: Russia 1917-67 (1967)

Week 7. Stalinism and the New Left | July 20, 2019

• Deutscher, "Marxism in our time" (1965) *

• Deutscher, "Marxism and the New Left" (1967)

Between us we can change this rotten society. Now, put on your coat and make for the nearest cinema. Look at their deadly love-making on the screen. Isn’t it better in real life? Make up your mind to learn to love. Then, during the interval, when the first advertisements come on, pick up your tomatoes or, if you prefer, your eggs, and chuck them. Then get out into the street, and peel off all the latest government proclamations until underneath you discover the message of the days of May and June.

Stay awhile in the street. Look at the passers-by and remind yourself: the last word has not yet been said. Then act. Act with others, not for them. Make the revolution here and now. It is your own. C’est pour toi que tu fais la révolution.

— Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative

Recommended films for screening

+ Brother Outsider: The Bayard Rustin Story
+ Rebels with a Cause: The SDS
+ Medium Cool
+ Columbia Revolt
+ The Weather Underground
+ Finally Got the News

Recommended background readings

+ Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (1962)
+ Irwin Unger, The Movement (1974); see also Unger’s retrospective of 1968

Further background readings

+ Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (1973)
+ Massimo Teodori, The New Left (1969)
+ Harold Jacobs, Weatherman (1970)

• required / + recommended reading

Primary book source *

• Carl Oglesby, ed. The New Left Reader (1968)

Recommended preliminary readings

+ The Platypus Historians Group, "Requiem for the '60s: Response to a boycott of discussion of '40 years of 1968'" (2008)
+ Chris Cutrone, "Let the dead bury the dead!" Response to Principia Dialectica (UK) on May 1968 (2008)
+ Atiya Khan, The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: 1968 (2009)

Week 1 | June 9

• Stuart Hall, "Introducing New Left Review"
• C. Wright Mills, "Letter to the New Left" and "The politics of responsibility" *
• Leszek Kolakowski, "The concept of the Left" *
• Herbert Marcuse, "Conclusion to One-Dimensional Man" *

Week 2 | June 16

• Carl Oglesby, "The idea of the New Left" *
• Louis Althusser, "Contradiction and over-determination" *
+ Althusser, "Marxism and humanism"

Week 3 | June 23

• Cliff Slaughter, "What is revolutionary leadership?"
• Revolutionary Tendency of the Socialist Workers Party/U.S., "In defense of a revolutionary perspective"
• Spartacist League, "Genesis of Pabloism"

Week 4 | June 30

• Malcolm X, "I don't mean bananas" *
• Huey Newton, "A prison interview" *
• Spartacist League, "Soul power or workers' power? The rise and fall of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers"
+ Harold Cruse, from The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual Part 1 Part 2

Week 5 | July 7

• Andre Gorz, from Strategy for Labor *
• Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, from The May Day Manifesto *

Week 6 | July 14

• Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, "The battle of the streets," from Obsolete Communism: The Left-Wing Alternative *
• Rudi Dutschke, "On anti-authoritarianism" *
• Mark Rudd, "Columbia: Notes on the Spring rebellion" *
• Sorbonne students' open assembly of June 13-14, 1968, "The appeal from the Sorbonne" *
• Tom Fawthorpe, Tom Nairn, David Triesman, "Three student risings" *

Week 7 | July 21

• Marcuse, "The question of revolution" (1967)
+ Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” (AKA “Is Marx Obsolete?”) (1968)
+ Esther Leslie, Introduction to the 1969 Adorno-Marcuse correspondence (1999)
+ Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, correspondence on the German New Left (1969)
• Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (1969)
• Adorno, “Resignation” (1969)
+ Adorno, Interview with Der Spiegel magazine (1969)

Coda

+ Marcuse, "The failure of the New Left" (1975)

Chicago
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Wednesdays 6pm
116 S. Michigan Ave., Room 202

Berkeley
Berkeley City College Room 033
Mondays 6:00PM
Last seven weeks beginning June 19th

• 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 | June 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 | June 21

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

Week 3 | June 28

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

Week 4 | July 5

• Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)

Week 5 | July 12

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

Week 6 | July 19

• 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 7 | July 26

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

New York
Wednesdays at 6:30pm beginning June 15
School of Visual Arts
380 2nd Ave, Room 804B

Chicago
School of the Art Institute, Chicago
Mondays 6pm
112 S Michigan Ave, Room 919

Houston
Sundays at 3:00 pm (ongoing)
University of Houston
MD Anderson Library (meet in the lobby)

London
Mondays at 6pm
Goldsmiths College, Richard Hoggart Building, Room 257

• required / + recommended reading

Marx readings pp. from Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (Norton 2nd ed., 1978)

Recommended background readings

+ Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), Part II. Ch. 12–16 (from "Marx and Engels go back to writing history" to "Karl Marx dies at his desk")
+ James Joll, The Second International 1889–1914 (1966)

Week 1

+ Karl Korsch, "The Marxism of the First International" (1924)
• Karl Marx, Inaugural address to the First International (1864), pp. 512–519
• Ferdinand Lassalle, Open letter to the German workers’ movement (1863)
• Mikhail Bakunin, A Critique of the German Social-Democratic Program (1870)
• Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1872)

Week 2

+ Korsch, Introduction to Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1922)
• Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, pp. 525–541
• Marx, Programme of the Parti Ouvrier (1880)
• Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle (1892)

Week 3

• Kautsky,The Social Revolution (1902)

Week 4

• Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, especially Chapters 3, 11 and 12 (1906)
• Kropotkin, Anarchist Communism (1909)

Week 5

• Kautsky, The Road to Power (1909)