History of Marxism Reading Group

I. What is the “Left?” — What is “Marxism?”

Saturdays 1-4pm

Starting Sat. Sept. 10: School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) | 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 920

Starting Sat. Oct. 1: University of Chicago (UChicago) | The Reynolds Club 2nd floor South Lounge | 5706 S. University Ave.

• required / + recommended reading

Marx and Engels readings pp. from Robert C. Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (Norton 2nd ed., 1978)

Week A. Sept. 10–11, 2011 (NYU and SAIC only)

• Spartacist League, “The senile dementia of post-Marxism” (2006)
• Moishe Postone, “History and helplessness: Mass mobilization and contemporary forms of anticapitalism” (2006)
• Postone, “Theorizing the contemporary world: Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey” (2006)
+ Postone, “Necessity, labor, and time” (1978)

Week B. Sept. 17–18, 2011 (New School, NYU and SAIC only)

• Juliet Mitchell, “Women: the longest revolution” (1966)
• Clara Zetkin and Vladimir Lenin, “An interview on the woman question” (1920)
• Theodor W. Adorno, “Sexual taboos and the law today” (1963)
• John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and gay identity” (1983)

Week C. Sept. 24–25, 2011 (New School, NYU and SAIC only)

• Richard Fraser, “Two lectures on the black question in America and revolutionary integrationism” (1953)
• James Robertson and Shirley Stoute, “For black Trotskyism” (1963)
+ Spartacist League, “Black and red: Class struggle road to Negro freedom” (1966)
+ Bayard Rustin, “The failure of black separatism” (1970)
• Adolph Reed, “Black particularity reconsidered” (1979)
+ Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory” (1984)

Week 1. Oct 1–2, 2011

• epigraphs by James Miller (on Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and Louis Menand (on Edmund Wilson) on modern history and freedom
• Robert Pippin, “On Critical Theory” (2003)
• Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008)
• Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010)

Week 2. Oct. 8–9, 2011

• 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. Oct. 15–16, 2011

• Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (1926–31)
• Adorno, “Imaginative Excesses” (1944–47)

Week 4. Oct. 22–23, 2011

• Wilhelm Reich, “Ideology as material power” (1933/46)
• Siegfried Kracauer, “The mass ornament” (1927)
+ Kracauer, “Photography” (1927)

Week 5. Oct. 29–30, 2011

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

Week 9. Dec. 3–4, 2011 (New School, NYU and SAIC) / Jan. 7, 2012 (UChicago)

• Marx, selections from the Grundrisse (1857–61), pp. 222–226, 236–244, 247–250, 282–293
• Marx, Capital Vol. I, Ch. 1 Sec. 4 “The fetishism of commodities” (1867), pp. 319–329

Week 10. Dec. 10–11, 2011 (New School, NYU and SAIC) / Jan. 14, 2012 (UChicago)

• Georg Lukács, “The phenomenon of reification” (Part I of “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat,” History and Class Consciousness, 1923)

Week 11. Dec. 17–18, 2011 (New School, NYU and SAIC) / Jan. 21, 2012 (UChicago)

• Lukács, Original Preface (1922), “What is Orthodox Marxism?” (1919), “Class Consciousness” (1920), History and Class Consciousness (1923)
+ Marx, Preface to the First German Edition and Afterword to the Second German Edition (1873) of Capital (1867), pp. 294–298, 299–302

Week 12. Jan. 28–29, 2012

• Korsch, “Marxism and philosophy” (1923)
+ 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

Chicago Platypus chapters at The School of the Art Institue of Chicago, University of Chicago, Loyola University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago