Rosa Luxemburg and the party
Chris Cutrone Platypus Review May 21, 2016 . . In one of her earliest interventionsin the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical...
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Marx and Engels on Karl Kautsky
. That Vladimir Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries of 1917 considered the Social-Democratic leader Karl Kautsky a pedant and a philistine is well known. Lenin pinpointed the reason...
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Race and the Enlightenment
. I wrote a preamble to this piece relating it to a recent debate over postmodernism and Enlightenment. Since it got a bit overlong, I decided to repost as a standalone entry. But you can still read...
View ArticleMaterialism, postmodernity, and Enlightenment
Jacobin published an article just over a week ago entitled “Aliens, Antisemitism, and Academia,” written by Landon Frim and Harrison Fluss. “Alt-right conspiracy theorists have...
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Mihály Biró, 1886-1948
Budapest native Mihály Biró (1886-1948) joined the Social Democratic cause early in life. He spent the period between 1910 and 1914, designing striking and widely noted posters and...
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David Riazanov and the tragic fate of Isaak Rubin
Reportedly, the Russian revolutionary and pioneering Marxologist David Riazanov once insulted Stalin to his face at a party meeting held during the mid-1920s. At the time, the...
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Don’t bother reading Settlers
. Addendum . So after I posted this a couple days ago it was picked up by Anti-Fascist News, which linked to it along with the sole remark that it was “interesting.” This led some fans of...
View ArticleSociety, totality, and history
. Dialectics elude straightforward definition. No doubt it is easier to say what dialectics is not, rather than to say what it is. Against Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx remarked in a letter to...
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Marxism and historical predictions
. Because Marxism addresses itself principally to history, its adherents often traffic in historical predictions. This was true of Marx and Engels no less than their followers, and...
View ArticleBordiga on Sorel
. It is asserted that in order to eliminate social injustice, all that is required is to relate every commodity’s exchange value to the value of the labor contained within it. Marx shows...
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Victor Serge, chronicler of revolution
A week ago, the centenary of the October Revolution came and went. For this week’s post, I thought I’d share the works of one of its most important witnesses and participants. Victor Serge was a...
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CLR James, critical theory, and the dialectic
The writings of the Trinidadian Marxist and revolutionary Cyril Lionel Robert James contain some of the noblest reflections on human freedom ever put to page. Obviously the present author does not...
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Moishe Postone, 1942-2018
< p style=”text-align: center;”>. (Caricature depicting Postone on the left, next to Karl Marx and Karl Liebknecht) Yesterday morning I saw it announced across social media and on several sites,...
View ArticleLooking back: A self-critique
It’s never easy to look yourself in the mirror and own up to your mistakes. For a long time, I balked at the very idea. Part of it felt too reminiscent of Stalinist/Maoist self-criticism, in its...
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Engels on the importance of Hegel to Marxism
Conrad Schmidt was a German economist and intellectual, an early follower of Marxism who corresponded with Engels during the 1890s. He was also older brother of the famed artist Käthe Kollwitz....
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