North Side Reading Group | Loyola University

Week 1. What is the Left? | Jan. 25, 2009

"The concept of the Left remains unclear to this day." (Kolakowski 1968)

• Leszek Kolakowski, "The Concept of the Left" (1968)
[in Carl Oglesby, ed., New Left Reader (1969), 144-158]

Week 2. Marxism as theory and practice: the 1920s-30s "Old" Left | Feb. 1, 2009

"In socialism, freedom is to become a reality. But because the present system is called 'free' and considered liberal, it is not terribly clear what this might mean. . . . Not only [the Little Man's] lack of freedom but that of [his betters] as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom. . . .
The socialist order of society is not prevented by world history; it is historically possible. But it will not be realized by a logic that is immanent to history but by men trained in theory and determined to make things better. Otherwise, it will not be realized at all." (Horkheimer 1926-31)

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (Notes 1926-31)
• Theodor W. Adorno, part X. "Imaginative excesses" from "Messages in a Bottle" (orphaned from Minima Moralia 1944-47)
• Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti, " 'Action Will Be Taken': Left Anti-Intellectualism and its Discontents" (2002)
• Esther Leslie, Introduction to the 1969 Adorno-Marcuse correspondence (1999)
• Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, correspondence on the German New Left (1969)

Week 3. February 8, 2009

• Richard Fraser, Two Lectures on the Black Question in America and Revolutionary Integrationism (1953)
• James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, "For Black Trotskyism" (1963)
• Bayard Rustin, "The Failure of Black Separatism" (1970)

Week 4. Feb. 15, 2009

• Juliet Mitchell, "Women: the Longest Revolution" (1966)
[revised version from Women's Estate (1971)] • John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity" (1983)

Week 5. Feb. 22, 2009

• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, selections from the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1847-48, Prefaces to various language editions, I. "Bourgeois and Proletarians," II. "Proletarians and Communists," and IV. "Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties" [PDF])
[in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 469-491, and 499-500] • Karl Marx, selections from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 ("Estranged Labour," "Private Property and Labour," "Private Property and Communism," and "The Meaning of Human Requirements" [PDF])
[in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 70-101]

Week 6. Mar. 1, 2009

"The most important Marxian political manifesto remains to be written." (Nicolaus 1968)

• Martin Nicolaus, "The Unknown Marx" (1968)
[also in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (1969), 84-110] • Moishe Postone, "Rethinking Marx (in a post-Marxist world)" (1995)

Week 7. Mar. 15, 2009

• Georg Lukács, "The Phenomenon of Reification" (Part I of "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat," 1923) [PDF]
[in History and Class Consciousness, 83-110]

Week 8. Mar. 29, 2009

"Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto;
Ogni viltà convien che qui sia morta
[Here all mistrust must be abandoned;
And here must perish every craven thought]"
(Dante Alighieri, Divina Commedia 1308-21 quoted by Marx 1859)

• Karl Korsch, Introduction to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme (1922)
• Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)
[also in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 525-541] • Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)
[also in Robert Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 3-6]

Week 9. Apr. 19th, 2009

• Leon Trotsky: Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay
• Christopher L Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law and the Organized Labor Movements in America 1880-1960, 282-329

"Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein and the new new left." By Larissa MacFarquhar

Read the complete article from the December 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Excerpt:

After the death of Milton Friedman, in 2006, the University of Chicago decided to set up an institute in his honor. The institute was opposed by many professors, who formed a group to protest it. Klein offered to debate someone from the institute’s board, but nobody would do it, so she agreed to go to Chicago and talk about her own objections to the project.

The evening was sponsored in part by the Platypus Affiliated Society—a student-teacher reading group that focusses on the Frankfurt School and the Second International period of Marxism—and a few of Platypus’s members, tall, thin, pale young men, had set up a table out front. Platypus was founded on the idea that the left didn’t have a proper sense of its own history, especially the bad bits, and that a study of that history would help it emerge from the troubled state in which it found itself. (“Protest has devolved into an insular subculture of self-hatred, frustration, and anxiety derived from a pathological attitude towards social integration,” a typically morose editorial in the Platypus Review declares.) Given its emphasis on self-criticism, Platypus was not a natural constituency for Klein’s work, but because she was coming to the campus the group read “The Shock Doctrine,” and also Hayek and Friedman. “The conservatives engage the questions of freedom and utopia directly,” Ian Morrison, the editor of Platypus’s newsletter, said. “We were very struck that Klein seemed to back away from utopianism, because we feel that the left has liquidated itself in part because it’s conceded talk about freedom to someone like Bush.” Platypus’s interrogation of the past has led it in a variety of directions. Several of its members also belonged to the new Students for a Democratic Society, a revival of the new-left group from the sixties. In August, Platypus participated in a historical reënactment, in Grant Park, of the 1968 Democratic Convention, minus the police. “As a group of young, largely inexperienced activists it was the only organizing framework we could find which emphasized active participation,” read a writeup of the event in the Platypus Review. “Other forms seemed linguistically and ideologically flaccid. . . We didn’t want to view our history—our radical history—as if from a riverbank, we wanted to jump in and splash around in it. . . . We debated, for instance, the ethics of nominating a live pig for the presidency: what should we feed it, and where would it stay?”

Laurie Rojas responded in the January 12, 2009 issue of the New Yorker that,

MacFarquhar, in referring to the article “Reenacting ’68,” creates a bit of confusion: although the Platypus Review did publish the piece, Liam Warfield, its author, is not a member of our organization, and Platypus did not participate in the reënactment. MacFarquhar’s excellent Profile of Klein illustrates many aspects of the complex and problematic legacy of the left, regarding which Platypus seeks to cultivate a critical understanding. As MacFarquhar suggests, Klein’s work points up the kinds of obstacles faced in reconstituting a left for the future, following a history of failures.

The Platypus Affiliated Society in New York organized a moderated panel discussion and audience Q-and-A to critically evaluate the widespread assumption that the election of Barack Obama presents an opportunity for today’s Leftists. Asking how opportunity can be distinguished from opportunism, Platypus invited several intellectuals and activists to publicly think through the foreseeable pitfalls and potentials posed by the passing of the Bush-era into the age of Obama.

Panelists

Chris Cutrone (Platypus)
Stephen Duncombe (author of Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy)
Pat Korte (New School SDS)
Charles Post (Solidarity)
Paul Street (author of Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, 2008)

Transcript in Platypus Review #12 (Click below):

Platypus questions for panelists

1.) Many people across the political spectrum—including those who claim to be on the Left—assume that the election of Obama represents a symbolic vindication of the struggles of the Civil Rights movement. But is the implied conception of the Civil Rights movement really adequate to this history? Pivotal Civil Rights intellectuals and leaders, including Bayard Rustin and even Martin Luther King Jr., advocated the use of political force against the economically structured social inequality of American race relations. As Rustin put it: “Negro poverty…will not be eliminated without a total war on poverty.” This vision clearly lost out—indeed, Rustin saw even purportedly radical declarations of “Black power” as both a conservative naturalization of the racial difference the movement had tried to eliminate and a rationalization of powerlessness. Today, changing the racial composition of the powers-that-be, celebrating diversity, and pursuing sanctioned reform and institutionally-given power are seen as the limits of what the Civil Rights Movement imagined or pushed to achieve.

2.) What are the roots of this historical forgetfulness? What critique can we offer to the reduction of the Civil Rights movement to symbolism and status-quo powers? And how might such a critique help foster popular political energy against the structural inequalities that remain intact in American Society?

3.) Organized labor was a major constituency of the Obama campaign, and put much effort into working for an Obama victory. For instance, the “Change to Win Coalition” mobilized the political power of six million workers represented by seven unions, it organized teams to knock on doors, make phones calls, distribute information, to rally for an Obama victory. However, even during the campaign Obama made statements, specifically about teachers’ unions, which revealed that he didn’t consider himself as squarely in the camp of organized labor. More recently he has said that he intends to bring all parties to the table, including labor and the interests of Capital, to seek solutions to the financial crisis. With this in mind, to what extent should organized labor see in Obama a “partner” in the struggles of the working class to secure improvements in their bargaining position? Furthermore, how can the working class take advantage of the limited opportunities presented by the Obama presidency without losing the degree of independence needed to push beyond what seems possible under the administration. What can be done beginning under Obama’s presidency to reverse the assault on organized labor which has characterized the past several decades and to put the working class into an active and not passive or defensive position? What is the agenda of labor regardless of the president?

4.) The vacuous phrase “Wall street vs. Main Street” was effectively used by the Obama campaign to portray the class divisions made perceivably more acute by the current economic crisis. How should this opportunistic rhetoric be addressed? And how should criticism of capitalist class-society and its crises be promoted without simply condemning the “greed” of Capitalists and heralding the altruism of the “working people”? What can be done to deepen a public understanding of class dynamics and to counter the ideological confusion produced by the crisis and its management.

5.) The politics of Anti-Iraq-War dissent, coupled with Anti-Bush-Administration disapproval, has driven Leftist organizing for most of the past decade. These politics have cemented a bond between political bedfellows who seem to share little more than the deep-set reliance on the quantification of “opposition” through mass-demonstrations and disapproval polling, and the cynical belief that practically anybody is better than Bush and the Republicans. Indeed, it often seems like the only thing that has held together groups with deeply conflicting principles and social visions has been a general “anti” stance towards the current regime. However, Obama’s administration threatens to dissolve this arrangement by meeting, at least in part, many of the rallying demands of the “movement”—for instance, by closing Guantanamo Bay, settling on a scheduled withdrawal from Iraq, curtailing some of the gross war-profiteering, and becoming less hostile to the U.N. and more careful with “global opinion.” If Obama’s presidency does diminish the efficacy of Bush-era “anti” politics, can you foresee a new arrangement of principles and criticisms which could create a more successful oppositional force? What could this Left stand for? How might it be capable of fighting against the causes of war across presidential terms, specific military campaigns, and nationally bound politics?

6.) Rather than hysterically celebrating Obama’s election as the “beginning of a new age” or cynically dismissing it as a meaningless display of “celebrity politics”, how do we determine what is really new versus what is left wholly unchanged in the present political moment? What are the actual and significant new developments the Obama presidency represents—or may represent—for the Left? This seems to be deeply affected by how we understand the election in light of the continuing weakness and obsolescence of the Left as a social force. How is Obama’s election part of a more general historical trajectory, characterized by the loss of political possibilities and the decline of a Leftist politics? And what might be done today to buck against that trend?

7.) To what extent is Obama or anyone in his administration free to transform socio-economic conditions in the United States? To what extent are they—granting them even the best of intentions—bound to preserve and reproduce these conditions? How should a Left begin to clarify and aim to overcome this present limitation? And how might it address this problem of constraint so that the task to overcome the limitations of social agency is made clear and may point toward effective political action? In other words, what would the Left need to become to end capitalism in 10 years?