this week in platypus. 10.10.16 - 10.16.16.
Robert Weitzer
this week in platypus:
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weekly coffee breaks
Platypus Coffee Breaks are the informal conversations about the meaning and future of the Left that Platypus hosts on a weekly basis. They are a great time to meet with members of Platypus, fellow travelers, and allies of the group. It’s an opportunity to discuss issues raised in the latest issue of the Platypus Review, consider the state of the Left, and just hang out with people who have similar political interests. Please join us!
NYU/NYC Coffee Break
Tuesdays @ 7:00pm
Think Coffee
//248 Mercer St, New York, NY 10012
Contact: vcs...@platypus1917.org
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Mondays 8:00 PM - 10:00 PM EDT
NYU Global Center, Room 274, 238 Thompson St, New York, NY 10012
The historical roots of the Left and Marxism in the bourgeois revolution of the 17th-18th centuries and its 19th century crisis in capitalism are addressed through readings from Karl Marx and the background in radical bourgeois philosophy of Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel. 20th century attempts to recover Marx and Marxism's political consciousness by the Frankfurt School and in the 1960s-70s "New Left" frame the problem of consciousness of the Left in the mid-late 20th century leading to the present, through writings by Juliet Mitchell, Adolph Reed, Moishe Postone, and the Spartacist League/U.S., among others, and Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Georg Lukacs, Karl Korsch, and Leszek Kolakowski.
Week 2. What is the Left? II. Bourgeois society | Oct. 10, 2016
• 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)