Articles tagged “Black; David”

The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, London in 1848.

The Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s went beyond 18th century popular radicalism toward socialism.  Leaders like George Julian Harney not only called for social revolution but also published Helen Macfarlane’s first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. This article was first published in The Platypus Review No. 42 (Dec. 2011-Jan. 2012) – Editors

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The following comments on whether Luxemburg took back her 1918 critique of the Russian Revolution are in response to The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Vol. I). The original debate on Principia Dialectica, was entitled ‘More on Bolshevik censorship’ – Editors

The explosion of rage and revolt on the streets of British cities, recalls the dramatic “uprisings” of the 1980s. The author, a resident of the riot-hit London Borough of Haringey, looks at what has changed and why it matters – Editors

(Photo: The old Co-op Building, built in the 1920s as the pride of Tottenham’s labour movement, burns to the ground.)

In Adorno for Revolutionaries Ben Watson attempts to show how Theodore Adorno, starting with the commodity form, outlined a revolutionary musicology, a passageway between subjective feeling and objective conditions. In extending the analysis beyond the confines of ‘highbrow’ classical music Watson aims to ‘detonate the explosive core of Adorno’s method’. – Editors

The March 26 London demonstration organized by the Trades Union Congress to protest against the Tory-Liberal coalition’s public sector cuts was the largest labor outpouring in over two decades. Various tendencies participating, from reformist to anarchist, are discussed – Editors

On Hegel’s Dialectic of the “Beautiful Soul” in the French Revolution and the question of  “ethical reality” in the political philosophies of Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya and Gillian Rose; originally presented at a panel on “Marxism Beyond the Boundaries,” sponsored by the Hobgoblin Online Journal and the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, London, November 11, 2010  – Editors

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A report from the successfully concluded Founding Conference of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, Chicago, July 3-4, 2010

Black offers a dialectical critique of Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s materialist interpretation of ancient Greek philosophy, which has influenced a number of current and recent Marxist philosophers, among them Adorno, Postone, and Arthur. Another problem is how some on the left have been uncritical of Islamism, while others like Dawkins have put forth a “new atheism.”  A more dialectical view of religion is presented, rooted in Marx, Hegel, and the last writings of Dunayevskaya on the dialectics of organization and philosophy.  — Editors

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Alfred Sohn-Rethel and George Thomson sought to locate the source of philosophical abstraction in the monetary exchange of Greek Antiquity. According to Gillian Rose’s critique of Frankfurt School Marxism, Sohn-Rethel (and Theodore Adorno) erred in discussing commodity fetishism outside its specifically capitalist form. They thus obfuscated Marx’s critique of capital, in which “necessary illusion arises out of productive activity.” — Editors

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[Philosophy] is the scientific expression of a certain fundamental human attitude… toward being and beings in general, and through which a historical-social situation often can express itself more clearly and deeply than in the reified, practical spheres of life.
— Herbert Marcuse[1]

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If there is one dominant philosophy in the modern world that embraces both left and right (not to mention post-modernism) that philosophy is pragmatism. As a philosophy pragmatism is really quite simple. If you want to eat a bowl of soup, and the choice is between using a fork or a spoon, you will choose the spoon because it will do the job best.