Reminder: reading at the end of the summer - Lenin on Marx (1914) Chicago Sat. Aug. 28 1-4PM SAIC
Christopher Cutrone
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/
Sat. Aug. 28 1-4PM
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
112 S. Michigan Ave. room 707
Please see notes below.
-- Chris
--- On Wed, 8/25/10, Christopher Cutrone <ccut...@speedsite.com> wrote:
> From: Christopher Cutrone <ccut...@speedsite.com>
> Subject: reading at the end of the summer - Lenin on Marx (1914) Chicago Sat. Aug. 28 1-4PM SAIC
> To: platypus1...@googlegroups.com, platyp...@yahoogroups.com, "Platypus Summer 2010 Reading Group" <summerpla...@googlegroups.com>
> Date: Wednesday, August 25, 2010, 8:25 AM
> I am writing to invite everyone to a
> standalone reading group session for the end of the summer,
> and ahead of the start of the academic year primary reading
> group syllabus, to discuss Lenin's encyclopedia entry on
> Marx from 1914:
>
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/
>
> This standalone reading group session to discuss Lenin on
> Marx will take place at the normal time and place in Chicago
> Sat. Aug. 28 (1-4PM at SAIC 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 707),
> led by me, and Sun. Sep. 12 in NYC (1-4PM, location TBA),
> led by Richard.
>
> This text was used as the principal background reading for
> this year's Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) summer
> educational conference. It is perhaps one of Lenin's most
> straightforwardly "traditional Marxist" (or, less
> charitably, "vulgar Marxist") writings, written for a
> popular audience (a popular Russian encyclopedia
> readership), and written before Lenin's close engagement
> with Hegel's Science of Logic (documented in Lenin's famous
> Hegel Notebooks) later in 1914.
>
> Lenin's encyclopedia entry on Marx captures, however,
> something essential about the 2nd International Marxist
> radicalism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, on the threshold
> of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As such it is a very
> interesting and important attempt to summarize the
> importance of Marx to these radicals, right before they
> attempted to make the revolution, in the context of the
> global crisis of capitalist civilization in WWI.
>
> As was pointed out in the context of our closing reading on
> Marx and Marxism this summer, Horkheimer's "The
> Authoritarian State" (1940), 1917 punctuates two broad
> periods of the history of Marxism post-1848: that leading up
> to 1917; and that of its aftermath, which was brought to a
> close in certain key respects by 1940.
>
> The post-1940 period ushered in postmodernism and the New
> Left, both of which were prefigured in the 1917-40 period of
> the "Old Left" of the 1920s-30s and its "late modernism" (as
> characterized, for example, in Adorno's essay on "Those
> Twenties," where Adorno pointed out that perhaps
> emancipatory possibilities, in avowed politics and the
> broader society and culture, after the failure of the
> Revolution in Germany 1918-19, "only appeared so").
>
> Thus, Lenin's writing is an expression of 2nd International
> Marxism in its best, most advanced form -- which was not
> quite adequate to the task, as shown by history. The
> question raised by this text in the context of Platypus is,
> how did Marx appear in 1914? What was the basis of
> "Marxism," in its highest form, at that time?
>
> The primary reading group syllabus during the academic year
> (especially its second half, beginning at the end of Jan.
> 2011) will be concerned with parsing out carefully the
> manifold dimensions of this question. Thus, Lenin's
> encyclopedia entry on Marx can be regarded as preliminary to
> this, and not only as a summing up of our summer readings on
> Marx and Marxism.
>
> -- Chris
>
>
>
>