Chicago Fall 2017 Reading Groups: What is the Left? What is Marxism?

Loyola University
Tuesdays 6-9 PM
Metropolis Cafe
1039 W Granville Ave

School of the Art Institute at Chicago
Thursdays 6-9 PM
MacLean Center
112 S Michigan Ave
Room 517

University of Chicago
Saturdays 12:30-3:30 PM
Harper Memorial Library
1116 E 59th St
Room 151

• required / + recommended reading

Week 1. What is the Left? I. Capital in history | Sep 30 (UChicago) Oct 3 (Loyola) Oct 5 (SAIC), 2017

• Max Horkheimer, "The little man and the philosophy of freedom" (1926–31)

• epigraphs on modern history and freedom by Louis Menand (on Marx and Engels) and Karl Marx, on "becoming" (from the Grundrisse, 1857–58)

• Chris Cutrone, "Capital in history" (2008)

+ Capital in history timeline and chart of terms

+ Being and becoming (freedom in transformation) chart of terms

+ video of Communist University 2011 London presentation

• Cutrone, "The Marxist hypothesis" (2010)

• Cutrone, “Class consciousness (from a Marxist persective) today”

Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct 7 (UChicago) Oct 10 (Loyola) Oct 12 (SAIC), 2017

• Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a universal history from a cosmopolitan point of view" and "What is Enlightenment?" (1784)

• Benjamin Constant, "The liberty of the ancients compared with that of the moderns" (1819)

+ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the origin of inequality (1754)

+ Rousseau, selection from On the social contract (1762)

Week 3. What is the Left? III. Failure of Marxism | Oct 14 (UChicago) Oct 17 (Loyola) Oct 19 (SAIC) , 2017

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)

• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)

Week 4. What is the Left? IV. Utopia and critique | Oct 21 (UChicago) Oct 24 (Loyola) Oct 26 (SAIC), 2017

• Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left” (1968)

• Marx, To make the world philosophical (from Marx's dissertation, 1839–41), pp. 9–11

• Marx, For the ruthless criticism of everything existing (letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843), pp. 12–15