A panel discussion held at Left Forum 2013, at Pace University, on June 9, 2013.
This panel was transcripted in Platypus Review #61 (Click on banner below to see):
Description:
Bourgeois society came into full recognition with Rousseau, who in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and On the Social Contract, opened its radical critique. Hegel wrote: "The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau." Marx quoted Rousseau favorably that "Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature... to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men." Rousseau posed the question of society, which Adorno wrote is a "concept of the Third Estate." Marx recognized the crisis of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution and workers' call for socialism. But proletarian socialism is no longer the rising force it was in Marx's time. So what remains of thinking the unrealized radicalism of bourgeois society without Marx? Kant stated that if the potential of bourgeois society was not fully achieved as the “mid-point” of freedom then Rousseau may have been right to prefer savagery against civilization’s “glittering misery.” Nietzsche warned that we might continue to be "living at the expense of the future:" "Perhaps more comfortably, less dangerously, but at the same time in a meaner style, more basely." How have thinkers of the revolutionary epoch after Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant, Hegel, Benjamin Constant, and Nietzsche himself, contributed to the possibility of emancipation in a world after Marxism?
Speakers:
Chris Cutrone
Spencer Leonard
Sunit Singh
A plenary presentation by Chris Cutrone, Spencer Leonard, and Richard Rubin, delivered on April 7th, 2012 as part of the 2013 Platypus Affiliated International Convention held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, upon the trajectories of their personal political development that led to Platypus.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to technical issues, only the first forty-five minutes of the talk were recorded.
A discussion led by Platypus Affiliated Society member Spencer A. Leonard on the current economic crisis, longue-durée social change, and the Left. This teach-in was an introduction to the some of essential problems to be explored in the Chicago iteration of the "Radical Interpretations of The Present" panel on December 3rd, 2012.
In 1999 the prominent social theorist Moishe Postone published an artile entitled "Contemporary Historical Transformations: Beyond Post-Industrial Theory and Neo-Marxism" in which he interrogated the two predominant theories of the social change that had been formulated in the 1970s by Daniel Bell and Ernest Mandel. Today we live in what would seem like a historical moment far removed from the economic boom of the late 90s, but how much has society really changed from the one Postone described just over a dozen years ago?
The "Contemporary Historical Transformations: Beyond Post-Industrial Theory and Neo-Marxism: article discussed can be found here.
On February 28, 2012, the radio program Radical Minds on WHPK-FM Chicago broadcast an interview with Mary Gabriel, the author of Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011). The interview was conducted by Spencer A. Leonard of the Platypus Affiliated Society.
Transcript in Platypus Review #47:
A presentation by Platypus member Spencer Leonard on August 19th, 2011, at Communist University, which took place from August 17th to August 20th, 2011, at Goldsmiths, University of London.
For background reading please see the attached PDFs, also available at the following URLs:
Mike Macnair's Critique of Platypus
Also:
Cutrone, "Capital in history" (2008)
Cutrone, "The Marxist hypothesis" (2010)
