Join the Platypus Affiliated Society for a special screening of Margarethe Von Trotta's 1986 Rosa Luxemburg. The screening will be onTuesday,22 February 2011, from 5:30- 8:00 pm, at MIT 4-415. A discussion will follow the film (very possibly at the Muddy Charles.)
"The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror:
I was, I am, I shall be!"
Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Marxist radical at the turn ofthe 20th Century. Luxemburg was active in the German Social Democratic Party, the most powerful Marxist party in the world at the time of WWI (1914-19).
During WWI the German socialists abandoned revolutionary Marxism and supported the nationalist war effort. Luxemburg was killed by the Right during the suppression of the revolution that began in 1917 in Russia and spread to Germany in 1918-19.
Luxemburg wrote a scathing critique of this betrayal of the international socialist movement -- whose aftermath led to Nazism and Stalinism, and from which the Left has still not yet recovered to this day.
The 20th century has made the question of Marxism an obscure one. The absence of an International Left suggests the irrelevancy of Marxism to the present. Yet historically, Marxism mattered to society at large. It was understood to be relevant, not simply as an anti-capitalist politics, but as a framework for addressing the potentials raised by modern society. Can this history say anything about our own present moment? Does Marxism matter today? This event will explore the question.
A teach-in on the Communist Manifesto led by Platypus Affiliated Society member Jeremy Cohan, PhD candidate in Sociology at NYU, at the New School in NYC on February 17, 2011.
10 sessions of readings introducing the raison d’être of the Platypus project, including published transcripts of our public forum activities.
A series of 10 sessions introducing Platypus’s approach to the history of Marxism, including readings on Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky.
Were the Bolsheviks the highest expression of Marxism? Did the Bolshevik project discredit other competing forms of Marxism? Or did the October Revolution change the meaning of Marxism itself? Is it necessary today to return to the writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Vladimir Lenin? Or would it be better to skip over the Second International and the October Revolution by simply returning to Marx's own writings? These as well as other questions relating to the legacy of the Second International and the October Revolution will be discussed and debated.
Presented by Ian Morrison
Saturday, December 4 at 7pm
Crown Center Room 530
Loyola University-Chicago
1001 W. Loyola Ave
"Before Marxism became 'bankrupt' in the form of Bolshevism it has already broken down in the form of social democracy, Does the slogan 'Back to Marxism' then mean a leap over the periods of the Second and Third Internationals -- to the First International? But it too broke down in its time. Thus in the last analysis it is a question of returning to the collected works of Marx and Engels. One can accomplish this historic leap without leaving one's study and even without taking off one's slippers. But how are we going to go from our classics (Marx died in 1883, Engels in 1895) to the tasks of a new epoch, omitting several decades of theoretical and political struggles, among them Bolshevism and the October revolution? None of those who propose to renounce Bolshevism as an historically bankrupt tendency has indicated any other course. So the question is reduced to the simple advice to study [Marx's] Capital. We can hardly object. But the Bolsheviks, too, studied Capital and not badly either. This did not however prevent the degeneration of the Soviet state and the staging of the Moscow trials. So what is to be done?" Leon Trotsky
