Objectivation of Spirit

Chris Cutrone

“The history of philosophy has meaning only insofar as we know the determinations of thinking within their own internal development. The later philosophies contain the principles of earlier ones, but are more concrete over against them. So our own philosophy [absolute idealism] necessarily is also the richest, the most concrete, since it is the result of the work of millennia. Everything is contained in this result. 

“The Eleatic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and other such philosophies cannot be the philosophy of our own time. Our principles are of necessity more concrete than theirs, which arose when spirit still stood at a lower level of development.”

— Hegel, Lectures on Logic

Teaching

When I teach Marxism, I immediately distinguish the Socratic — Platonic — dialectic from the Rousseauian — bourgeois — dialectic of Kant, Hegel and Marx.[1] What makes them different? One way is that the former is a dialectic of thinking, presented as dialogue, arguing from opposite positions, and moving from error to truth; whereas the latter is an open-ended transformation of truth through successive overcoming of prior truths, and is in and of reality itself. But what reality? Social reality — social relations. Social relations were not always dialectical but they are in bourgeois society — in capitalism. There is a difference between a dialectic of philosophy and that of society.

But this is not in the way “Marxists” conventionally explain it, via Parmenides vs. Heraclitus, endless change, etc. “Marxists” are content to adopt a position in Ancient philosophical disputes and assert traditional ontological claims, i.e. “materialism” vs. “idealism.” But Kant and Hegel already transcended such antinomies. Plato is not already Hegel. (Let alone Marx.)

Cards on the table: I think of Ancient philosophers as tribal mystics. This is their truth. Theology and philosophy were not so separated — which is why they could cross-fertilize, e.g. Christianity’s regard for Plato and Aristotle as “Christians before Christ.” Or Muslims. When truths or virtues — gods — were eternal, this made sense. But we know differently.[2]

Philosophy

Kant began philosophy and Hegel completed it. Why? Because Kant established that metaphysics — ontology — is a matter not of the world or things in themselves but of the subject: metaphysical concepts and categories refer to our relations, both practical and theoretical. Because our practical relations change, our theoretical concepts change — philosophy changes. And the change is not only in form but substance. It is in our relations themselves. The subject changes, substantially. There was no philosophy in the modern sense yet because there was no subject. We are subjects in ways the Ancients were not. None of them. — As Adorno put it, “Before the formation of the individual in the modern sense,” there were “phases and societies in which there is no freedom[, and hence] are not only not rational but not human,” because there did not yet exist the subject “in the sense meaning not simply the biological human being, but the one constituted as a unit by its own self-reflection, the Hegelian ‘self-consciousness’.” (“Freedom and organized society,” Negative Dialectics, trans E.B. Ashton [Continuum, 1973], 218).

The Ancient definition of philosophy as concerned with the universal freed from all particulars — abstractions freed from the concrete, the noumenal freed from the phenomenal, the ideal freed from the real, the Good apart from all manifest phenomena — is an inherently elite conception, for those who were freed from the need to labor to survive — for those freed from the exigent needs of society and politics expressed by doxa. — Are capitalists today such an elite? Not really. They are manics, no more able to make good use of their leisure than anyone else. In the past, the priesthood and aristocracy also hardly made good on their exemption from labor, since they were consumed with other activities such as warfare and plumbing the depths of resisting temptation — “mortification.”

By contrast, modern philosophy, as articulated explicitly by Kant, was to articulate common sense, and did not consider itself more intelligent than the thinking of the common day-laborer, i.e. anyone and everyone. Philosophy was not apart from or above the community or humanity, but another activity that participated in everyday life: the world had become philosophical and philosophy became worldly in modern life and modern freedom. Freedom was not freedom from work — the freedom of a priestly or warrior caste exempted from subsistence labor — but the opposite: the people contributing and participating in freedom through labor; the social relations of bourgeois society in production and commerce.

Bourgeois society overthrew the old ruling castes in the Revolt of the Third Estate of Commoners: the first and only successful slave revolt in history. Ancient philosophy depended on and ratified slavery: it was the thought of slaveholders. Society was enslaved to the priests and warriors, legitimated by their theology and philosophy. God or the gods created the world as it was; and its rulers embodied the Good of the world. As Nietzsche put it, they defined the Good in terms of themselves. This was the essential Ancient heritage of philosophy. It is a particular Will to Power — that of the philosopher. — And who was the philosopher? That rare species of thoughtful warrior or priest.

Today

But bourgeois society completely overcame and surpassed the power of the Ancients — and the thought that emanated from that power. Ancient conceptions of philosophy itself were about the impossibility of thought — the Divine mystery of Being. Not only is any phenomenon separated fatally from the noumenon, but every concept of the Good is a falsification of it. It is a philosophy of the impossibility of philosophy, not so for the moderns. The Enlightenment initiated by bourgeois society is about the possibility and necessity of philosophy: an activity of the highest necessity, freedom. It is not about a reverential humility acknowledging the folly of following particular transient phenomena, but the arrogance of “storming Heaven” and taking fire from the gods into our own hands, as an act of freedom. Philosophy was not about the invariant eternal but about what changes — and what changes as a result of our own action. This gives an urgency to social and political action in the present. The false that is overcome is no longer merely the false but the truth that changes. Revolutionary philosophy is about overthrowing existing truths in favor of new ones.

Such change is the expression and result of our freedom — the freedom of transformation in our relations. How does such freedom develop? In and through society, which transcends human beings and their capacities. Human beings have always been as intelligent — or stupid — as they are now. But society has become more intelligent: the original Artificial Intelligence, Rousseau’s “general will.” The subject is not the predicate but the result of freedom: freedom produces us. We are the manifestations of Spirit, parts of the general will and members of society. The objectivations of Spirit are its necessary forms of appearance of the substance of reality and not the inevitable deceptions of a fallen world separated from pure Ideas — separated from God or the Good.

Marxism

The issue of Marxism is not that of a closed dead doctrine vs. an open living tradition, but rather whether and how we still live in Marxism’s time; and whether apparent “developments” of Marxism in the last century have or have not helped us to grasp the problem of capitalism and the prognosis for overcoming it. Marxism was meant to overcome itself — its own necessity. But it was overcome instead by capitalism itself. Yet the problem of capitalism remains. Is there a point to prioritizing and centering original historical Marxism in our considerations of the task of socialism today? That is an open question. I do not assume it — I don’t presume the relevance of Marxism.

Furthermore, as regards how Platypus functions as an educational project, it was never meant to provide a general or basic education: it was never a foundations course — not even for the foundations of Marxism. Is there a point to maintaining the original meaning of historical Marxism, if only to contrast it against and throw a critical light on present “Leftist” thinking and action, allowing us to recognize the latter through a defamiliarization or estrangement-effect? For this is the actual purpose in Platypus conducting such primary internal education in what seems to be Marxist “scripture.” If the rest of the “Marxist Left” reads these texts — specifically, the “canon” of commonly referenced writings rather than the actual best works of Marxism (Lenin wrote far more and better than his Imperialism pamphlet, including on the issue of imperialism itself) — then familiarity with them is important to be able to engage the present “Left” and the problems of its conceptions and assumptions — not to simply share them, but to be able to cast them into critical relief.

There is no living tradition of Marxism — it died a long time ago. So that is simply not an option: there is no tradition to join — not even to resuscitate. At least not a ready-made one. Marxism cannot be reconstituted as a function of reading.

Where to begin one’s education in order to be able to approach Marx and Marxism? Does one begin with Plato and Aristotle? Marx himself was steeped in Classical Antiquity, including writing on the pre-Socratic materialism of Epicurus and Democritus — albeit in light of the controversies within and disintegration of Hegelianism in his own time. Platypus chooses to begin with Rousseau — we choose to begin with society and politics rather than philosophy, and moreover with modern rather than Ancient political thought.

Ancient and modern

This is not because we consider pre-modern thought, whether political or philosophical, to be evil or bad — wrong — but because it is simply inappropriate to the modern capitalist world. The change is important. We have been facing problems in the last couple of centuries not faced by Plato or Aristotle — not addressed in their political writings. Our problems wouldn’t even begin to make sense to them. As the modern poet Paul Valéry observed at the turn of the 20th century, neither space nor time nor matter nor energy are any longer what they were for time immemorial. This of course affects our social and political world. But we are still living very much in the shadow of problems raised by Rousseau, which subsumed those of Hobbes and Locke, who are hence less controversial than Rousseau — who thus remains importantly (and painfully) unassimilable and indeed undigestible. Kant observed that bourgeois society had already transcended Newtonian time and space. How much more so is this the case in industrial capitalism, which Kant himself couldn’t anticipate. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from those who preceded Rousseau — or Marx — of course not. But efficiency must be achieved and decisions made about priority and point of departure. We must begin with “all that is solid melts into air,” which didn’t just happen yesterday but already two centuries ago. It was not mere rhetoric or a figure of speech but literally the case. — By contrast, there is no such thing as “winged horses.”[3] Unfortunately.

There is something new and different that, as Hegel put it, “dawned on the world in Rousseau,” namely “freedom,” which “gave infinite strength to man, who thus recognized himself as infinite.” This is not the case as clearly, directly and unambiguously in Plato and Aristotle, the pre-Socratics or late Romans or early Church Fathers. Freedom is the problem of the modern era — not the Good as was true of the Ancients. God is dead and we have killed Him. The One is destroyed and we have destroyed it. “All that is holy is profaned.” Really. A long time ago.

Task

The question is whether and how are we going to address this freedom, which we not only recognize in thought but inhabit and embody in the modern world in new and different and indeed unprecedented ways? The issue is how the problem of capitalism is new, different and unprecedented. — It is not Plato and Aristotle’s condemnation of the rule of the merchants as the worst form of politics — which bourgeois social, economic and political thinkers such as Rousseau and his followers Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel also rejected as unacceptable. We don’t actually live under the rule of the rich, but of the capitalist state, and under the domination, not of the capitalist class but of capital, which is different.

This is why the blindness of Millennials to capitalism, due to the present problem of neoliberalism and its “billionaires,” is so urgent to overcome, to open young people’s eyes in their education, if there is to be any hope whatsoever to address let alone deal with the actual crisis of our time, politically and socially. We must actively counteract the ignorance and false assimilation of the past to the present. We are not in a cycle of civilization in which there is a temporary rise of mercantile power and its misfortunes, but in an entirely different epoch of history, consequential in a profound way never faced previously: politics has never had such stakes as today. It didn’t have the same substance as it does now. Capitalism is simply a new and different problem. The Ancients can’t help us. But Marxism might — if only to clarify things: the nature of the problem.

So what is to be done in the face of this monstrously daunting and fearsome task, to even begin to approach the political realm of our society in the present crisis of capitalism? Does anyone doubt that gargantuan changes are underway in our contemporary world, with almost unfathomable consequences looming on the horizon? And the terrifying magnitude of this is due to capitalism — this is the difference. This is the reason why people today might reach for Marx and the history of Marxism — rather than back to Plato and Aristotle.

Reading

But there is a qualitative transformation involved — a difference in meaning and reading in the case of Marx and Marxism as opposed to Ancient writings. Their purposes are different. Their substance is different. The nature and task of reason itself changes. We are thinking not merely about but in and through things completely unknown to the Ancients, and not only thinking differently about the same things. I am part of something different from what Plato and Aristotle were: the modern university is different from the Ancient Lyceum. So are its participants. Donald Trump is not Alexander the Great — Trump is far greater: more consequential. What is happening now is more important — at least potentially — than anything that ever happened before.

But more obscurely. This is where we must deal with the phenomenology of Spirit, the manifest phenomena of our freedom: the transformation of our social relations, which are cosmological in nature and character. And the phenomena of capitalism are the appearances of contradiction, in manifold forms. The self-contradiction of capitalism is different and greater than that of the Ancient world — if there was even such contradiction back then. We face an existential crisis today unknown to the Ancients. Obviously. As Marx stated in the Grundrisse, on modernity and its “becoming”:

the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.

It is comforting — but dangerously misleading — to imagine that only technology has changed and not our humanity. Homo sapiens might be the same as a biological species as it ever was, but humanity as a historical species has changed, fundamentally.

For Marxism to be truly — as opposed to falsely — meaningful, it has to challenge and not affirm us in what we already think. But for that we need to know what it actually was. It is the critical distance of original historical Marxism from our present concerns that is meaningful: how far we today fall short of the problems Marxism originally tried to address.

Marxism is not an answer or a solution but a question and a problem. It does not help us to know things so much as it tells us what we do not know. I am the Socrates of Marxism. As Habermas said in eulogy to Adorno about his students who had in their frustration protested against him, “They do not realize all that they are incapable of knowing in the present state of affairs.” Marxism tasks us. It is not a ready-made programme that can be followed — it never was, but certainly is not now.

Socialism

As I have written very clearly, my call for “socialist unity” is not predicated on Marxism.[4] It is not a Marxist unity project or even a Left unity project. It is based on working class unity and independence. But its purpose is socialist. It is not ideologically let alone philosophically exclusive.

My interest in original historical Marxism is in the horizon of the task it preserves. This has been severely lowered in the past century, to the extent that I know when I say “Marxism” others do not know what I mean, let alone its significance. Indeed, they cannot know. But the relevance of what I know — namely, what I think we are tasked with knowing — must be proved. It might not be relevant at all, let alone how it might be. But my Campaign for a socialist party is not about proving Marxism’s relevance. The starting-point is rather the problem of capitalism, which must be rendered a practical one rather than a merely theoretical issue. But what kind of practical problem? A problem specifically for the working class — not for investors (trust-fund babies) or the PMC. Not for intellectuals — other than as participants in a socialist movement of, by and for the working class. Not for philosophers. Not for the pursuit of virtues — other than the virtues required in the struggle for socialism. Marxism is not a virtue or the pursuit of virtues but a tool. Its usefulness must be proved in practice. But not right now. Right now, it is a sophisticated tool without application — without applicability. It is an artifact. This is why and how it can become an object of reverence. It suggests an occult mystery. But that is not what it was meant for.

Benjamin Studebaker and I first spoke on a panel hosted by Platypus on the purpose of Marxism, back in 2022.[5] I was and remain interested in his non-Marxist perspectives. But I am still interested in the perspectives of Marxism, and I think I have some things to teach about that. I think that their dialogue is most interesting and important in a practical context, rather than abstractly as mere theory. My Campaign for a socialist party is in part meant to create the practical context within which intellectuals have substantial things to think about, rather than formal schema or categories to compare (e.g., the Good vs. freedom). We need better matters to reflect upon, in order to improve and develop our thinking, whether Marxist or otherwise. But this is the kind of thing that must be demonstrated in practice. The solipsistic spell must be broken from outside. As an abstract proposition it will remain uncompelling — especially for intellectuals, given over to things of the mind.

Mind

But what mind? Hegel sought to address what he called objective mind — objective Spirit. The objective mind of our time is concerned, whether self-consciously or not, with the objective Spirit — of capitalism. The dialectic in which we are engaged is not directly those of members of society participating in politics, deciding our shared values, but only as mediated by our social relations — alienated in capital. As Marx described “commodity-fetishism,” as beset by “theological niceties and metaphysical subtleties,” it is “a definite relation between persons that takes the form of a relation between things.” Not mistakenly but objectively — and hence subjectively. The objectivations of Spirit are now those of capital, whether we recognize them as such or not. But we do recognize them. Everyone speaks of and thinks about capital and capitalism: capital goods, human capital, cultural capital, etc. The struggle for socialism I seek to pursue is concerned with what this means for the workers — in practice. What it might mean theoretically to the philosopher comes after that, if at all.

Object

Before there can be a subject, there must be an object. We need something to think about. We must objectify our pursuit of socialism. Before interrogating how we see things (in “theory”), first there must be something to see. Before we speak, we must have something to talk about. Something other than capitalism and its politics. My Campaign for a socialist party is doing things to see and talk about. Without this, there is really nothing to discuss — at least nothing to discuss beyond capitalism and the way people already see and talk about it: the things people are already doing as they are already doing them and how they already see and talk about them. Talk of the Good is talk about capitalism. (So is talk of freedom…) All philosophy today is the philosophy of capitalism. In both Platypus and my Campaign for a socialist party, I am pursuing something different. | §

[1] See my “Negative dialectic of Marxism,” opening remarks at the panel discussion on “The politics of Critical Theory,” with Dennis Graemer, Doug Lain and Douglas Kellner, Platypus Review 140 (October 2021), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2021/10/01/the-politics-of-critical-theory-2/>.

[2] See my “Ends of philosophy,” Platypus Review 108 (July–August 2018), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2018/07/30/ends-of-philosophy/>.

[3] See Benjamin Studebaker, “Doctrines, lenses and traditions,” November 12, 2025, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/doctrines-lenses-and-traditions>. Also, see my previous articles in response to Studebaker, “Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique,” Platypus Review 180 (October 2025), at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/10/01/social-relations-and-ideology-an-anti-critique/>; and “Is capitalism Epicurean and socialism Stoical?,” Platypus Review 181 (November 2025), at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/11/01/is-capitalism-epicurean-and-socialism-stoical-a-rejoinder-to-benjamin-studebaker-on-political-disturbance-and-social-freedom/>.

[4] See my “Socialist unity!,” Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025, available online at: <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>.

[5] See “What is Marxism for?,” Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/what-is-marxism-for/>.

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Is capitalism Epicurean and socialism Stoical? Rejoinder to Studebaker

Is capitalism Epicurean — and socialism Stoical?

A rejoinder to Benjamin Studebaker on political disturbance and social freedom 

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 181 | November 2025

Benjamin Studebaker attributes modern social and political thought to Stoicism, which he understands to be at heart Neo-Platonist — by contrast with Plato’s own Platonism.[1] In his view, it comes down to us from late Hellenism — Alexandrianism? But is capitalism Epicurean, as Studebaker avers, and socialism Stoic? Studebaker rejects the vision of socialism as society going beyond politics, which he interprets as the impossible or undesirable state without “disturbance”: an inhuman dystopia.

I wrote previously in response to Studebaker on ideology and social relations in capitalism.[2] Here, I will take a different tack, and try to rejoin all of Studebaker’s criticisms together.

Studebaker describes himself as a “non-liberal pluralist” — a Hobbesian. But the struggle for socialism comes from reaching the limits of liberalism — not from rejecting or as an alternative to it. Socialism arises from the self-contradiction of liberalism in capitalism — the self-contradiction of bourgeois social relations. But liberalism and capitalism are not identical — or, their identity is only a “speculative” one. This is not a matter of principles or ideals but social reality itself. Hobbes was a modern — which means a liberal. There was an emancipation of bourgeois society from traditional civilization: the emancipation of labor and social cooperation. The issue is not the self-conscious political or economic order but society itself, which comprehends both the economic and political realms — and includes culture and psychology. It is the actual unity of theory and practice. This includes “philosophy.” All thinking in modern society is a function of modern society — even when it draws from Ancient sources. As Durkheim observed, forms of thought are social forms. They remain modern. Modern civil liberties and rights will not be politically constrained, as they subsist in social reality itself. Their abrogation remains a crime — against social freedom.

Studebaker challenges me to support “Medicare for all,” the demand of the Bernie Presidential campaign and central to the DSA’s reform program. But we already had “human infrastructure” — as opposed to physical infrastructure, which was denounced as “masculine” and bad for the environment — funded by the Biden Administration as a way of buttressing the “service economy” after the stresses of the COVID pandemic. This is backward-looking. The moment for radical health care reform has passed — even as it remains, as they say, core to the Democratic Party brand: even Obama now says that the Affordable Care Act should have been public and not private provision of health care. This is mere sloganeering. Trump flirted with the idea of public health care as a cost-cutting measure for American capitalism — to make it competitive with other advanced capitalist countries that have such government provision. But he soon realized that it was not impossible but unnecessary. The Democrats will dangle it forever — or for so long as it holds the attention of voters, which, like climate change, seems to be already passing as a political issue. I pointed out to Ben that the Republicans are correct that health care is not — cannot possibly be — a “right,” but is a “good”: a commodity, whether provided by the market or the state; either a cheap or expensive one.[3] Capitalism will adjust to the new situation if not new needs, with or without political action. As Trump is driving down pharmaceutical costs, he is also proud to point out that the private sector is already making great strides on carbon reduction, even in developing cleaner fossil fuel production and use. The issues of the future will be different.

Studebaker takes issue with what he calls “Quixotic socialism” — it’s unclear whether he includes me in this category, but he might.[4] Are we still fighting the battles of the past? But which past? The history of a dead movement — Marxism — might indeed seem to be tilting at windmills. But there be dragons. The issue, it seems, is the “progressive” wave in politics from Obama through Biden, cresting with Bernie Sanders and the Squad of AOC et al. (Zohran Mamdani?) during the Trump era.  What did this have to do with socialism and capitalism? There is an evident disconnect between the “Left” — animated by Democratic Party issues — and Marxism. Is the latter merely a noble position belonging to a past world? Platypus poses two questions: Does Marxism even matter? And: What is Marxism? — What is the Left? If it is only the “Left-wing” of capitalism, then certainly Marxism is irrelevant. As Marx himself said, he did not discover class divisions or the class struggle of the workers — liberals already had.[5] (Marx only found the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat — which liberals of course reject.)

Is Studebaker’s dreaded stasis of “Epicureanism and Stoicism” just the “dynamic equilibrium” of capitalism itself, which he associates with neoliberalism’s termination of politics — which is now in political crisis and in the political process of transformation to post-neoliberalism? But he denies that this is taking place at all — thus agreeing with the DSA’s Vivek Chibber, who thinks that Trump is just another typical Republican President.[6] There is evidently a deep ambivalence about the passing of the “post-political” technocracy of neoliberalism, which has been underway since George W. Bush’s War on Terror, and certainly after Obama’s failed Presidency — or what the Aufhebunga crew has called “the end of the end of history.” Studebaker associates me with a broader traditional (“)Marxist(“) approach to socialism and its implicit agreement with a more endemic alleged eschewing of the political in the neoliberal era (which he thinks began with the post-WWII U.S.-led world “liberal political order” — why not in the U.K.-led post-1814 Pax Britannica, i.e. the capitalist era itself?) — or in liberalism tout court.

By contrast, Studebaker cites — against me — my own “Lenin’s liberalism,” where I wrote that the goal is to free politics from capitalism. But this was about the goal of proletarian socialism as a movement and as a revolution: the desideratum of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I wrote about this as follows:

Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Theodor Adorno, teasing out a “Hegelian” dimension to Lenin’s Marxism, derived from Lenin’s theoretical writings and political practice an elaboration of the Marxist theory of social mediation in capital, through the politics of proletarian socialism, that sought to recover Lenin from a bad utopian perspective of the desire to do away with politics altogether. Rather, such Marxist critical theory following Lenin understood overcoming the “alienation” and “reification” of capital as providing the possibility for the true practice of politics, a neglected but vital contribution Lenin made to the development of Marxism. Lenin did not attempt to destroy modern forms of political mediation, but rather to achieve the true mediation of theory and practice, in politics freed from society dominated by capital. This was the content of Lenin’s liberalism, his “dialectical” Marxist attempt, not to negate, but rather to fulfill the desiderata of bourgeois society, which capital had come to block, and which could only be worked through “immanently.”[7]

Nevertheless, the “utopian” horizon of socialism should be maintained. Because neither Lenin nor Marx and Engels, or Lukács, Adorno et al. tried to foresee what society beyond capitalism would be, defining it negatively as overcoming the unfreedom of capitalism, but only anticipated and pursued politically the dictatorship of the proletariat, I was similarly addressing the latter and not the former. Dialectically:  since original historical Marxism considered the only true politics in capitalism to be that of the class struggle of the workers for achieving socialism (the rest being merely pseudo-politics or racketeering — mere power-struggles), the realization of this will be their exercise of social and political power, in order not to merely manage but overcome the problem of capitalism.

The dictatorship of the proletariat will thus still be a politics of capitalism. It will still need to be political. But it will be more truly political than can be the case under capitalism. It will be the final form of state — but not any state, but one in particular: the capitalist state. It is this state that will “wither away” along with capitalism in being overcome. This is the dialectical relationship between what Marxism called Bonapartism and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a final state.

Studebaker dislikes the Marxist theory of the state, regarding “Bonapartism” as too pejorative a characterization of the state, discouraging of politics.[8] But recognizing how and why we are politically alienated in capitalism is important if we are not to be misled — simply by remaining aware of how we are liable to be misled. As I wrote in my previous article in response to Studebaker, capitalism inevitably misleads us: it is what Marx called a “false necessity” that dominates us. This means that what appears necessary to us is precisely what must be overcome. But the problems that appear to us presently both must and cannot be worked through in their own terms. All of our problems stem from capitalism, and yet none of them can be solved in their own terms — none, not even the struggle against exploitation, leads out of but only more deeply into capitalism. It is for this reason that we have need of the state. It is a false need.

“False” is a tricky designation because it suggests the truth by contrast with it. We don’t know our true needs in capitalism — other than the need to overcome it. What Marxism meant by the “false consciousness” of ideology was its self-contradiction: contradictory consciousness. Capital accumulation is a self-contradictory necessity in capitalism: it is self-destructive and self-defeating even while it remains necessary. It is because of this self-contradiction of social necessity in capitalism that the state arose to meet it in the 1800s.

In many crucial and decisive respects the state as such — as we know it in capitalism — is unique, a new and different phenomenon specific to capitalism. For instance, there were no police or prisons before capitalism — before the Industrial Revolution. The state, as thus recognized by Marxism, is composed of the “special bodies of armed men.” This is not the more conventional, colloquial definition of the state as the legal-juridical constitutional order of politics. The fate of the specifically coercive state in this Marxist view is clear; what is more obscure is the fate of politics. Friedrich Engels wrote that it would involve the replacement of the “governing of men” by the “administration of things” — actually, the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon had first formulated it thusly (very little positive in Marxism is original to it).

Studebaker objects to this view, seeing in it the end of social freedom, which requires the “disturbance” that Epicureans and Stoics seek to avoid. But social disturbance need not be political in character — need not, as Marx described it, be a matter of “when right meets right, force will decide.” This is not even the case always today under capitalism, let alone beyond it in socialism. Bourgeois society is able to tolerate all kinds of difference: there is scope for a great deal of collective and individual right without conflict unknown to prior history.

Studebaker conflates the political with the social, restricting the social to the realm of agreement and characterizing the political as the domain of disagreement. Rousseau explained, following Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees as well as John Locke’s theory of property rights, that commercial competition was a form of cooperation. Rousseau’s social compact is implicit not explicit: it is the interdependence developed through the contract involved in any transaction — even what Hegel called “military transactions” in war. Society developed through antagonism and not only or even primarily concord. Social development has accelerated through commercial activity in ways that could never have been achieved through war.

And politics before capitalism was all about war — except in the American republic. Even Plato’s ideal state was a republic of war. It is important to note that the participants in the Ancient republic — ancient politics — were members of the warrior caste: the nobility/aristocracy. War might be “politics by other means;” but politics is not another means for war; and war is no longer the principal way to achieve political goals, let alone greater social freedom.

The socialist party I seek to lay a foundation for building might be a party for war — class war — but it will not be primarily a military party; however it will be a party with the required martial discipline to achieve power. Plato’s Republic banned all music except for marching.

Stoic resolve is necessary in order to avoid unnecessary disturbance in our Campaign. But the disturbance to be avoided is the torment of mistaken aspiration. Are we in global capitalism a civilization in decline? If so, the fall has been long — and we are nowhere near the bottom of it.

We already live in a unified world of peaceful cooperation — including competition — and interdependence that includes a great deal of diverse multiplicity without violent conflict. Pax Americana remains. Because we have been living through a period of economic and political crisis and transformation for the last 20 years, it might be easy to naturalize this, but we will forget that, despite this, commercial social relations and cooperative production at a global scale continue, largely unperturbed, nonetheless. ( — The horror is that open warfare with millions of casualties is inconsequential in the course of modern history. This means wars are actually unnecessary, even if the pathologies of capitalism still make them possible. The U.S. is correct to regard them as impermissible, even if in fact they are quite tolerable.) This is only increasingly the case over the course of the last 200 years of capitalism. It is an irreversible trend.

Studebaker asserts that Marxism was a phenomenon of “early capitalism” that prematurely declared “late capitalism,” but we need to accept living in “middle capitalism” for the foreseeable future.[9] But it was always both too late and too early for socialist revolution. It is a perennial need. This is because capitalism is in a constant state of “creative destruction” — actually, destructive creation — that is always planting the seeds for its future crises even while recovering from current ones. It moves, as Marx wrote, in “fits and starts.” The transition from capitalism to socialism can never come too soon and is always long overdue. The Industrial Revolution pointed directly to communism. We have been stuck in an incomplete transition and suffered from its pathology ever since. When the proletariat emerged in bourgeois society it was time to transcend it. Not every community has been tasked with overcoming itself, but capitalism is. By deferring the question of capitalism, Studebaker abdicates from it. By treating the Marxist philosophy of history as a Platonic “noble lie,” he inhibits true recognition of the task we face. We pay an accumulating price for deferring the task of building a socialist party that could take power.

Studebaker doesn’t like the idea of being “tasked,” thinking that this is somehow counterposed to the cultivation of virtue. He cursorily observes the scientific and technical progress of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, but downplays its significance. — A common misapprehension of Marxism is that it is technological determinism or technophilia. But the technology we currently have is what capitalism needs, and is neither the cause or problem nor the solution and answer to our suffering in modernity. Technology is a social relation — an alienated social relation. Its appearance is a key indication of the task we face in capitalism.

It must be consoling to think that we face the same problem as ever, but only in different forms. Perhaps we do. But the forms in which our problems appear still matter. We must deal with the specific problem of capitalism. That is not addressable in terms of capitalist politics.

Studebaker wants politics. He wants dissensus against the prevailing stale — rotten, disintegrating — default “consensus.” He just wants it to be true, meaningful political disagreement — rather than how it appears now: false, confused and meaningless  — which means debating the “good.” No: the debates today are truly over the direction of capitalism — which everyone knows will not be detained over questions of the “good.” Those in power know very well that in the realities of global capitalism we are already far beyond questions of good and evil. But what if we are in a pre-political moment — so far as the issue of capitalism and socialism is concerned?

Studebaker wants a better conservative, liberal and socialist politics — or at least improved political discourse. But the only way to develop liberal and conservative political thinking and action would be in the face of the challenge of socialist politics, which is currently entirely absent. We only have debates between progressive and conservative perspectives that are largely beside the point since capitalism will conservatively and “progressively” reform as needed, not according to sentiment. To improve the overall political situation in capitalism, in the sense of any possible clarification of stakes, we need a socialist movement and politics. We need a socialist party. Without this, capitalist politics degenerates, both in theory and practice, inexorably.

As a former Bernie supporter, Studebaker is a populist; as a disappointed Sandernista, he is disenchanted with the prospect of fundamental political change — such as demanded by the pursuit of socialism. Democracy seems to be a more tractable issue — even if it has become chronic rather than acute. His main complaint is against the Democratic Party. He has said that Marx’s philosophy of history is good because it is useful to motivate a movement; but Marx’s theory of exploitation is good because it is true.[10] It is actually the opposite: the theory of exploitation is useful as a political analysis motivating the class struggle of the workers, but the philosophy of history is true — so far as capitalism is concerned. We are in a unique historical moment — tasked with overcoming pre-history and achieving true history: the true “progress in consciousness of freedom.”[11]

Bonapartism is the farce of the tragedy that appears in our political alienation.[12] It is a grotesque visage of our comedy. It is not a fetish for warding off the demon of politics, but a recognition of what possesses us in our political passions. It is not to purge the passions that we must exorcize the demon. But it is not to dispel the political but only its fetish. Shakespeare couldn’t play in Ancient Athens. Trump is not the Lear but the Hamlet of our politics, from which the domino has slipped in our “carnival of philosophy.” Can we learn from what has thus been revealed — or must we treat it as still concealed, hidden behind its death-mask?

I seek the participation of those such as Studebaker in building the social and political movement for a socialist party in the United States. All would-be socialists should be united in this effort — whether Platonic or not.

I don’t despair of the necessity of this task, which asserts itself objectively and not merely subjectively. It was abdicated by the Millennials, in favor of “progressivism.” But the needed “progress” of our moment in capitalism has been met by Trump, not the “Left.”

The political question of our time is overcoming capitalism. Its name is “socialism.”

As the young Marx wrote,

In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For even though the question “where from?” presents no problems, the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.[13] | P

[1] “The Buddha’s bastards,” October 3, 2025, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-buddhas-bastards>.

[2] “Social relations and ideology: An anti-critique,” Platypus Review 180 (October 2025), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/10/01/social-relations-and-ideology-an-anti-critique/>.

[3] See our discussion of my call for “Socialist unity!” (published in Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025, available online at: <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>), posted to my YouTube channel at: <https://youtu.be/BJer4nbmrCk?si=ApcYukrgjI8kDzVF>.

[4] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.

[5] Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852.

[6] Jacobin, July 14, 2025, available online at: < https://jacobin.com/2025/07/trump-foreign-policy-budget-gop>.

[7] “Lenin’s liberalism,” Platypus Review 36 (June 2011), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/>.

[8] “Beyond Bonapartism,” Platypus Review 166 (May 2024), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/beyond-bonapartism-breaking-statephobic-thought-taboos/>.

[9] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.

[10] See “What is Marxism for?,” panel discussion of April 2, 2022, recording available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5i4orxCAM>; transcript published in Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/what-is-marxism-for/>.

[11] Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History.

[12] See my “Bonapartism is not Bonaparte,” Platypus Review 177 (June 2025), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2025/06/01/bonapartism-is-not-bonaparte/>.

[13] Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, available online at: < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>.

October 21, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 180 | October 2025

[T]he ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1858)

UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.

In the midst of the manifest on-going social and political crisis of capitalism, people want something solid to believe in and ground to stand on: religion, nation, “race” — “politics.” Also: “philosophy.” (As well as, perhaps, “science”?)

But as Marx pointed out, in capitalism “all that is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is a moving proposition that we must engage from within and as part of its motion. There is no stable standpoint from which to view — theorize — it. But that doesn’t mean that it somehow isn’t real. Its shifting illusion is its reality. There is nothing else.

We are shaken but evidently not stirred — not stirred to action — but paralyzed. The incessant images flood over us. We reach out for the Truth. But it constantly escapes our grasp. We shrink back and collapse into ourselves.

Benjamin Studebaker has written a critique of “ideology critique” that offers an alternative “Platonist” reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and situates non-identity not as a matter of self-contradictory social relations and unfreedom but of thinking about the good.1

Studebaker proposes that where I say freedom he says good, and that freedom is best understood in terms of the good and the good should be understood in terms of freedom. He writes that the good must be the essential starting-point for “laddering up” to political goals.

But the pursuit of the emancipation and transformation of social relations is very different from that of the good.2 For the issue is not the good that resides in every body, but rather the social relations that develop the subjectivity of everyone.

Social relations are more than the sum of their parts: they express the “general will” that transcends the individual wills of interested parties. Social relations are the result of interaction that produces something beyond the individual actions. Society is a third party with an interest of its own. Social freedom means the freedom of society itself to develop.

Studebaker raises Louis Althusser’s approach to ideology in order to attack the limitations of Althusser’s “interpellation” as a theory of subjectivity that loses sight of the good. It seems that Studebaker understands — and disagrees with — “social relations” in such Althusserian structuralist terms, saying that it amounts to an “ontology” that he disputes.

Studebaker among many other Millennials prefers a political to a social or societal ontology. But he prefers not just any ontologization of politics, but one in particular, Plato’s. For Plato, politics is the bringing back together what has been divided and separated: the One. This is why Studebaker says that it is because we are in separate bodies that politics is necessary. No: that bodily differentiation does not even make society or social relations necessary. Plato’s ontology only allows for cycles of separation and return, appropriate to his world of agricultural production. It is no longer appropriate to the modern world of capitalist production.

What if it is only society — what Studebaker means by “politics,” as in the zoon politikon (“political animal”) — that allows for the differentiation of humanity, to become other than what it is or originally was, to transform its being? And this transformation is necessary.

This was what Marx thought — following from Rousseau, among others: social relations are not merely the relations between people or to others, but also to and with Nature and to and with oneself. Social relations are what allow and motivate the elaboration of diverse multiplicity and complexification of our being.

It is such a process of not only the realization of existing but generation of new potential that Marx found capitalism to constrain and distort — dominate. It is not about people but social relations. Capitalism was the domination limiting social freedom: the freedom to elaborate and transform social relations — society.

Social relations are not causal or determinative but conditioning and elaborative. Social relations are not structural but cosmological. The universe is still expanding. So are our social relations. So is our freedom.

“Ideology” in the original historical Marxist sense of “ideology-critique” meant the exploration of conditions of possibility for transforming our social relations from within them. As a Hegelian, Marx thought that manifest contradiction indicated the possibility and necessity for change. Capitalism was a new social — societal — self-contradiction — a self-contradiction of society, of social relations — that brought about a new task: socialism. Socialism was for Marx the highest form of “bourgeois ideology.” Marx critiqued socialist ideology according to its self-contradictory character: statist vs. anarchist; individualist vs. collectivist, reactionary vs. progressive, etc.

But the appearance of contradiction was not only a potential recognition but also and most importantly a misrecognition: misrecognitions are necessarily forms of recognition; forms of recognition are also necessarily forms of misrecognition. We must struggle in and through forms of misrecognition that are our only possible forms of recognition — we must struggle from within and on the basis of and find our way out of ideology. There is no breaking the spell or stepping outside of ideology. There is no leaving Plato’s Cave.

There will be no returning to the One. The yearning for totality is understandable given the manifest exhaustion of postmodernism and neoliberalism and the self-contradiction, fragmentation, and crisis of society in capitalism. But this does not actually return us to Plato’s Republic, a utopia that was never meant to be realized but only to get us thinking about politics. A very long time ago. What Plato and Aristotle meant by “politics” is not our social and political world. Their misrecognitions were different from ours. Their “ideology” was different from ours. Actually, they didn’t have ideology; only we have ideology — and hence only we have ideology-critique. Only we have Marxism. We need something more and other to think about the problem of capitalism and the political task of socialism. Only we need Marxism — only we need Marxist ideology-critique. It was not the critique of inadequate or contradictions between different definitions of the good, but of a self-contradictory freedom of our social relations, to which we are all subject, and of which we are all subjects.

We are not only bodies separated from the original One, but members of society — participants in social relations. There is a higher good and necessity we must serve than the good of our bodies: the freedom of society. The misery of capitalism might break our bodies, but its wrong is against society and its potential, which goes far beyond our physical selves. As Ortega y Gassett put it, what nature is for animals, history is for humans. We are more than the product of a natural or divine act, but at least in part produce our own being — our spiritual not physical being. It is not our existence as homo sapiens that is free but our humanity.

The zoon politikon is not an origin but a result. The point is that it changes. We are not political but become political in society. Society humanizes us: our social relations make us human — they also make us political. Society changes our humanity — constantly. It is the self-contradiction of our social relations in capitalism that jeopardizes our humanity — even to the point of placing the (supposed) physical needs of our bodies above it. Whereas all human cultures and communities, ever, have valued spirit above body. — Do we still?

At issue in politics is not our bodies but our social relations. It is a peculiar form of politics that is demanded and required by the problem of capitalism. If Durkheim recognized that society is an object sui generis, then the crisis of society in capitalism is a problem sui generis — a unique problem of politics unprecedented in history. Marxism is the “sui generis form of cognition” (Gillian Rose) prompted by the political problem of capitalism.

Ideology expresses the social origin of our manifest phenomena: the misrecognitions through which we must act politically to change society. It is the source of our cognition and the means through which we must cognize our reality. It is not a problem of consciousness but produces our consciousness. It is a cosmos in crisis, a cosmology of crisis — a total crisis and hence the totality one is looking for. But it is a negative totality of contradiction, and one which reproduces itself in and through that crisis. As Adorno wrote to his friend Benjamin: “The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.”3 The explosion is not the calamity but the potential and possibility of freedom, however only perceptible through its phantasmagoria. Its appearances don’t deceive but indicate: “The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal, his aphorism: ‘Know thyself.’ It is a difficult saying; for that god ‘hides nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way,’ as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to you?”4

Can we yet know ourselves as members of society, and read the writings on the wall of capitalism, directing us to the task of socialism? Can this be our politics — of freedom? | P

1 Benjamin Studebaker, “Beyond ideology critique,” Platypus Review 179 (September 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2025/09/01/beyond-ideology-critique/>.

2 Please see my conversation with Studebaker and Doug Lain (March 28, 2025), <https://youtu.be/PYuQTwCs-tM>.

3 Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin (August 2, 1935), in Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Rodney Livingstone, et al., trans. Anya Bostock, et al. (London: Verso, 2007), 111, 113.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), trans. Ian C. Johnston for The Nietzsche Channel.

October 1, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Socialist unity!

Chris Cutrone

Originally published in Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025.

I am writing with an appeal to the would-be “socialist intelligentsia.” — Hear me, oh people! My plea is earnest! I come with good news, for the day is upon us! Hallelujah! It is time for socialism!

* * *

The Millennial Left tried to constitute itself through several attempts at “unity”: Left unity, Marxist unity, and class unity. The last is perhaps the most promising, but even it foundered on the question of what “class”: was it a PMC project in the end, despite not wanting to be so? Left unity couldn’t distinguish itself from “progressive liberal” capitalist politics — the conventional meaning of “Left”; and Marxist unity turned “Marxism” itself into a fierce bone of contention, never to be resolved.

It is time, now that all alternatives have failed, finally, for socialist unity. What would this mean? First of all, commitment to overcoming capitalism: a permanent “blood” oath not to accept any politics that does not have this as its aim — and refusing to pursue any other politics but socialist politics: giving ourselves totally, in a political sense, to this task.

But might we disagree on the meaning of capitalism and hence the meaning of socialism? Yes. But no matter: we will work out the meaning of both socialism and capitalism in practice — not ahead of time “theoretically.”

If so, then what will we collaborate on, in this “socialist unity”? Anything and everything that empowers the working class: socially, economically, politically. What does “empower” mean — and what does “working class” mean? I think we already know: anyone who has to work: who is not a proprietor, employer or boss. What kind of work? Any and all — but especially the work that produces the means of subsistence, of consumption and production: in all sectors and industries, the workers who enable and support others in their work. Everyone who contributes to the reproduction of labor and laborers, individually and collectively. What would it mean to empower them? To build up and develop the working class’s capacity to act independently, as a working class, socially, politically and economically.  The end goal is an old one: “those who labor must rule.” Its necessity must be realized.

An expansive rather than narrow definition of labor is advantageous, politically, and fulfills our aspiration: to achieve a socialist politics of labor. The working class has yet to be defined, politically — even economically: it has yet to be brought into existence as such. As things are, there are workers but no working class: only socialism can bring it about.

We are starting out at a very preliminary stage in such an effort: We must create the bare rudiments and elements of a socialist movement of the working class.

We start with the intent: to build a socialist politics.

How to begin doing so? We must not be oriented by the conflicts and divisions within capitalist politics, but cut across them — and thus separate the working class into a force of its own.

We must not exclude anyone on merely “moral” grounds: rights and sins are not really in conflict; and what the capitalist state and its politics call “crimes” is often a matter of practical exigency and hypocritical convenience in capitalism — especially for the working class. Let the capitalist politicians debate the number of angels or devils on the head of a pin — let them demagogue their laws on specious “moral” grounds. The working class will always do what is necessary to survive. Allow everyone’s freedom of religion and ethical autonomy without guardianship: the workers don’t want to be anyone’s wards.

Issues which do not unify the working class as socialists must be accepted for what they are: real disagreements which we may not resolve immediately — perhaps ever. For example, socialist unity means including workers on both “sides” of the pro- and anti-abortion debate in seeking to empower the full and true reproductive freedom of the working class. There must be empowerment to have children or not as people see fit. No cookie-cutter solution will ever provide true freedom or justice.

Empowerment to social and political action means: political, economic and social freedom — self-determination and democracy; but: it also means civil liberties — minority and individual rights, against the state and against majorities. The working class cannot be corralled if it is to achieve socialism; otherwise, its freedom and interests will always be sacrificed to the necessities of capitalism.

Let the capitalist politicians fund and grant public welfare benefits and other provisions and infrastructure if they so wish and see fit, but have it taken out of the profits of capital, not taxed from the wages of labor or consumption purchases. It is their concern, not ours. We expect and rely on nothing from them. “Not one person or penny for this system!”

The working class must champion everyone’s rights if its own are to be preserved and advanced. Such rights are not already firmly established once and for all, but are constantly in the process of asserting themselves and emerging into recognition: we cannot know ahead of time what new needs and rights the workers will have moving forward; we can only know that they will have them. Much is already common sense, but this is constantly evolving. In order to allow such freedom to develop, socialists must defend every right the workers might assert, and encourage and facilitate achieving them in practice.

The current framework of politics and law in capitalism is severely limited, and geared to other needs: the needs and “rights” of capital. But the workers depend on capital and capitalism: their contradiction must be brought about; for now there is an apparent identity of interests — which capitalist politics exploits. The workers are bound to support capitalism out of self-interest.

We do not start with “anti-capitalism” — which would make no more sense than being anti-God. The working class must earn for itself the right and the necessity to overcome capital. Otherwise, the capitalists will always be able to confront them with the limitations of necessity — the need to sacrifice themselves for the greater interest in capital.

But because capital has contradictory interests, the working class is divided against itself: we are liable to be divided over them. Indeed, we start out divided on this basis. The working class is divided by capital. Their unity can only come about on the basis of the struggle for socialism — which means the task of overcoming their divisions. As socialists, we must not play into capitalist separation of the workers, preventing the working class from coming into existence.

In short, we must earn the right to be socialists. None of us have it to begin with. We are by default capitalists — capitalist politicians. Do we wish to remain as such? We must begin again.

This is the true task in which we are unified: the need for socialist politics is what produces the necessity of socialist unity.

This is what I had to tell you. — The rest will be history.

Socialists of the world, unite!

* * *

Recall:

Campaign for a socialist party in the U.S.

11 Theses

1.) We are exploring interest in starting a mass socialist political party in the U.S.

2.) Mass = more than a sect (small or large); Socialist = more than merely democratic or liberal; Political = going beyond social and economic actions, including but not primarily or limited to holding political office; Party = more than a movement or organization.

3.) This will be an unprecedented undertaking, and in many respects the first real political party in the U.S. — The only precedents are the old pre-World War I Socialist Party of America and, before that, the Republican Party of the mid-19th century.

4.) We want to include as much of the present avowed Left as possible, from liberals to anarchists; we find the existing Left to consist of talented organizers and thinkers, but they need a new and different context to be effective; now they are condemned to ineffectiveness — or to more or less support the Democrats.

5.) We are looking ahead to a decades-long, painstaking and patient but deliberate and serious process; the building of a mass socialist political party will fundamentally alter the political but also the social landscape in the U.S. and internationally — globally.

6.) The aim is to take governing power in the U.S. — This does not preclude and indeed aims at doing so in direct political cooperation with similar parties taking power in other countries.

7.) Now, in 2016, is a good time to begin this project, because of the disarray of the existing parties as well as of society. There is a window of opportunity with a new generation to embark on a political task and possibility that has been avoided since the 1960s New Left and also avoided since the 1930s Old Left — both of which were conditioned and distorted by the gravitational attraction of the Democratic Party as well as the dynamics of anti-Communism and the Cold War. We are past this now and so can proceed to build socialist politics free of such pressures.

8.) The Sanders campaign is a distraction from this task because it is a desperate attempt to reform the Democrats which will not happen; and even if it did, would not lead to socialism in any way.

9.) All existing Left social, economic, civic, legal and political activism — of all kinds — should be conducted under the political banner of the struggle for socialism. We need to make all these disparate struggles coherent for any of them to be effective. Such struggles should take place in and through a socialist party.

10.) In the immediate future, the goal is to reconfigure U.S. politics in terms amenable to a socialist Left: the Republicans should be the capitalist party; the Democrats should be the party of middle-class democracy. A socialist party should be for the working class in its struggle for socialism.

11.) Socialism will be the realization of the social potential made possible — but held back — by capitalism. We need a party to pursue the politics of this task. — Join us!

February 28, 2016

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July 8, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Bonapartism is not Bonaparte

Chris Cutrone

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint
— Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” (1968)

Two theories

THERE ARE TWO DISTINCT THEORIES of “Bonapartism”: one liberal; the other Marxist. The liberal theory of Bonapartism is about “strong-man rule” and focused on the character of the political leader; the Marxist theory is with respect to the role of the state in capitalism. Liberalism takes Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar as exemplary; Marxism developed its theory on the occasion and figure of Louis Bonaparte particularly, but also other contemporary phenomena more generally, such as Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli in the UK, and Bismarck in Prussian Empire Germany. Bonapartism for Marxism is not Napoleon but Louis. For what happened historically between them is capitalism — the necessity and possibility of socialism.

Louis Bonaparte was for Marx a Bonapartist figure from his very election as President of the Second Republic in 1848, and not merely after his “18th Brumaire” coup d’état in 1851 or in his Second Empire of 1852–70. Moreover, the Marxist theory addressed Bonapartism as an expression of the crisis of bourgeois society and the state in capitalism, linked to its dialectical opposite: the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Needless to say, liberalism does not concur with this latter conclusion.

Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously blamed “ideologists” for the travails of the Revolution, later prognosed from prison in exile on St. Helena that in “50 years Europe will be either Cossack or republican.” That meant that if the democratic republic — the revolution — did not prevail, it would be the police-state instead. He didn’t reckon with capitalism for this outcome. Marx concluded that the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the condition for achieving the democratic republic — but on the way to the “withering away of the state,” in overcoming capitalism and achieving socialism and communism. The achievement of the proletarian socialist revolution will be the final battle of democracy. But the result of the frustrated 1848 revolutions was what Marx called the “Cossack republic” — Bonapartism: the state as its own special caste ruling over society.

Louis Bonaparte was a repetition of Napoleon insofar as there are still political figures trying simultaneously to revolutionize and preserve the state. But in the era of capitalism it is not the squabbling of political factions driving the need for a strong leader to master them, but the subordination of politics to bureaucratic imperatives necessitated by capitalism, in which the apparent political leader is actually just a figurehead of a process of rule that constrains the very choices available from which politicians can possibly choose. The Marxist view of capitalism is that the needs of capital overrule all other considerations. But this can appear as a function of the mere failure of politics; whereas in actuality it is the self-contradiction of society in capitalism that drives antinomical values and irresolvable conflicts, presenting impossible choices among bad alternatives. Such choices can be deferred and avoided, or done in hidden and unaccountable ways.

One way that the state mediates society is through political parties that vet and select viable political characters who can serve the role of making bureaucracy something to which the public can assent: a convincing rationalization for what must be done anyway. This means that political parties will be present only as necessary to perform this mediation. Insofar as they are unnecessary for bureaucracy to function, they will wither in their ability to win the popular consent of the governed. Discontents will provoke crises of political parties and their renovation, or the emergence of new parties to take their place.

In this respect, Bonapartism is a tendency of the state and politics in capitalism, endemic but expressed more or less prominently at different moments in its history.

Bonapartism in the 20th century

20th-century Marxism regarded the new phenomenon of fascism as a species of Bonapartism — Leon Trotsky considered Stalinism in the USSR, which was not personal but bureaucratic rule, as a phenomenon of Bonapartism. (Liberals called Stalinism “red fascism”; many 20th-century Marxists agreed.) How did Marx and Marxism define Bonapartism? It was a situation in which the “bourgeoisie can no longer, and the proletariat not yet rule.” This increasingly took the form of either the exacerbation of class struggle or the submerging of class in the Marxist sense into the mass of society, seen in the indistinct separation of, yet still opposition between society and the state. This was for Marxism not a contingent circumstance but a permanent condition of capitalism after 1848. As Walter Benjamin put it, the “state of emergency” is not momentary but constant: it is not the exception but the rule.[1] What characterized Bonapartism for Marxism? The state rising above society and becoming a power in itself — indeed as an end in itself. This is increasingly the case as capitalism develops — as the contradiction and crisis of capitalism grows.

What was the “contradiction and crisis of capitalism,” according to Marxism? The contradiction of “bourgeois social relations of labor” and “industrial forces of production.” In capitalism; this was a crisis of “socialism or barbarism”: capitalism was barbarized bourgeois society, necessitating socialism — workers were reduced from humanistic free artisans in society to wage-slave “appendages of the machine.” The state in capitalism is the key phenomenon of this: not Hobbes’s majestic Leviathan of the bourgeois social contract but a monstrous abomination, the Behemoth of damnation in the Devil’s bargain of capitalism.

Bonapartism is characterized for Marxism by precisely the inability of leading political figures to render society and the state tractable: Louis Bonaparte is the “farce,” compared to Napoleon’s (and Caesar’s) “tragedy,” because of his futility; he is not a cunning hero but a comedic villain. Where celestial forces swirl around a protagonist of Divine Fate, instead, we have the folly and error of someone who is merely “human, all-too human” (Nietzsche): not punished but merely scorned by the gods. While the conquering Napoleon summoned Goethe to insist that “there is no Destiny, only politics,” he was for Hegel nonetheless the “World Soul” of eternal History[2] when he rode his horse into town at the young professor’s first academic appointment. Louis Bonaparte is not the substantial character of political action, but a holographic projection of greater forces that neither he nor anyone else can master: “Bonapartism” is Marx/ism’s term for the self-alienation of politics in capitalism. As Marx summed it up about the plebeian masses in capitalism (petite bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, et al. — including workers, insofar as they are not self-organized into a social and political force of their own): they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented; they will be represented.[3] Bonapartism means the state represents everyone and no one. The state is universal but also its own particular interest.

Police and military are “citizens in uniform” — as are bureaucrats — and hence playing a role that anyone could; and yet in capitalism they become their own specific caste apart from everyone. This is not merely a function of specialized knowledge but of role: the peculiar political role of the state in capitalism. Bureaucracy is considered by Marxism to be endemic in capitalism differently from its role in traditional civilization, which was of course a caste system that bourgeois society is not or at least is not supposed to be. Bureaucracy is a function of reification of social and political activity in an alienated society.

For liberalism, by contrast, Bonapartism is a historical accident and mistake to be avoided; like all crime, it is the responsibility of a bad actor. For Marxism, however, it is not an error or moral infraction of wrong choice but inevitable, because it expresses a necessity in capitalism: if the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to socialism is not met, then the inexorable result is Bonapartism. What is this necessity? For the state to manage the crisis of capitalism.

Liberalism treats Bonapartism as the cause; whereas for Marxism it is only the effect. This feature of the capitalist state is more or less prominent; but it is not an acute but a chronic condition: it is not a bug of the political system but its very origin. “Out, damned spot!” is the guilty conscience of political action: “To be, or not to be, that is the question.” But this is not a question of the supposed violent founding of the political state.

Marxism agreed with liberal political thought that society should subordinate the state; and politics would be of minimal importance in the life and course of mankind. What raised politics to its primacy in the 19th century was the “social question” that drove the popular demand for “democracy”: the need for the state to ameliorate the condition of the proletariat. Emergency measures were meant only to return bourgeois society to its normal life of peaceful commerce, without coercive force or violence. But the capitalist state established new institutions of police and prisons and a permanent standing army. The police are Bonapartist, not the politicians trying to control them; Bonapartism is the police-state, not the elected civilian authorities mandated by democracy. The police are meant to be the instruments of politics; but politics becomes the instrument of the state.

With the police-state also comes lawfare, which is no less Bonapartist, in that it reduces the law to a weapon and the judiciary to a competing executive authority. The law becomes mere power-play of casuistic manipulation. It is, as Edmund Burke warned about what the Jacobins represented, the rule of sophistry in service of venality. Shakespeare might have been critical of the motives for characters uttering “first, we kill all the lawyers,” but they appear justified today.

How did such a counterrevolution against the original bourgeois revolution and modern liberal-democratic republic come about? Through the need to control the proletariat: the more or less chronically unemployed masses constantly produced by capitalism out of the petite bourgeoisie; those thrown in and out of wage-labor in the continuously revolutionized industrial society. This called for extraordinary powers of the state, clamored for not only by the capitalist haute bourgeoisie but by the workers themselves: the social security and welfare programs demanded to counteract the displacements of capitalist upheaval — no one can count on the wages earned either by themselves or members of their family — and the forces required to contain the pathologies of the increasing numbers of broken and breaking members of the disintegrating social contract. There is no social-welfare-state without the police-state. The state is inseparable from the spreading cancer in the organic metabolism of society, in the end for which the cure proves to be worse than the disease; but there are no other available treatments for the inescapable condition. There is only political wrangling to try to control it, which in the end proves futile. It is much easier for the police to get rid of politicians than the reverse.

Marxism disagreed with liberalism that a strong constitution would stave off and prevent the malady; what happened instead was the constant abrogation of the law in order to preserve the law: “bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies in the name of order”[4] — by workers armed by the state. Worse still, the state itself becomes inseparable from crime: the powerful are merely the stronger criminals; the police are merely the most powerful gang, observing an honor code for protecting its own colors. And “politics” became indistinguishable from racketeering: as Foucault wryly commented, the “path of power leads to either politics or prison” — often both. To fall from the grace of political favor means being charged with a criminal offense. Politics becomes the court intrigue of clannish dynastic struggles; more prosaically, it means bureaucratic in-fighting among craven careerists, reduced to mere profiteering off the public misery once they realize the limited good they can do. In capitalism, bureaucratic “experts” are competent not in their fields of specialization so much as in gaming the system, in which public benefit is only a by-product of their private vice (the reverse of Mandeville’s “private vice leading to public benefit”[5] in competition that proves to be cooperation). This potential abuse was supposed to be curtailed by limiting power; but society in its capitalist deformations and pathologies requires greater scope of action than can ever be admitted in principle. Everyone does what they can get away with, clothed in the justification of exigency — until they find themselves caught out and exposed, if and when their actions fail to serve adequately the interests of other powerful people.

Superficially, this picture resembles Ancient Athens or Rome, or perhaps the Italian Renaissance of the Medicis and Borgias. But, no, this is a specifically modern problem of capitalism.

Trump: Bonaparte contra Bonapartism?

Donald Trump arrived as a tribune of the people to vanquish “Crooked Hillary and Joe,” who seemed to symbolize everything that had seemingly gone wrong in the prior two (or three) Presidencies: the bankrupt frauds of neoliberalism and neoconservatism under (Clinton,) Bush and Obama; but he ended up confronting the Deep State instead. The drama that has unfolded on the political stage of the Age of Trump has been “phantasmagorical” indeed: it is a shadow-play of smoke-and-mirrors in the lurid lantern show at the apparent twilight of the American Empire.

“Conspiracy theories” are the essence of Bonapartism as a political phenomenon. The opening act of “Who killed Vince Foster?,” and the “vast Right-wing conspiracy” of “bimbo explosions” detonating around Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, was shuffled off the stage, in favor of 9/11 “Truth,” and finally replaced by Pizzagate Washington pedophile rings revealed by QAnon; the Dirty Dossier and “Pee Tape” speculated by MI6 and Hillary Clinton; Mossad’s Kompromat factory on Epstein Island; and Hunter Biden’s Laptop from Hell — loudly attested by top intelligence officers to have “all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” Who’s the actual Manchurian Candidate, and who are they working for? Russia? Israel? China? Ukraine? Various kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula? The KGB surviving the demise of the USSR? The Illuminati? Davos? Bohemian Grove? Reptilians of the Hollow Earth? UFOs/UAPs? — There is more than enough evidence to “prove” them all.

The opacity is the point — the paranoia of misapprehension: the seeming impossibility of ever getting to the bottom of things in politics. The point is that with bureaucratic rule in the administrative state, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Did Anthony Fauci expose us to COVID or save us from it? Perhaps both. Trump’s crusade against the Deep State and its elusive, apparently “secret” ruling class is either insincere, part of the ruse pulling the wool over our eyes; or, if sincere, quixotic. In any case it’s a wild gamble, by either Trump himself or the public that voted for him. Trump is “keeping all his promises,” and has been (painfully) transparent in all his actions. Elon Musk joined Trump on stage for the variety act as either point-man or fall-guy: he’s actually running the government as the power behind the throne; or perhaps he’s a court-jester as celebrity volunteer from the audience for performing a magic trick — the richest dupe of the powers-that-be the world has even seen, whose wealth is just that much liability when his wild goose chase comes up empty — in either deuces or snake-eyes. DOGE’s slashing the Deep State turned out to be a fool’s errand. At the same time, there are such lingering questions from recent political history as: who couped Joe Biden; why was his Afghanistan withdrawal — prepared politically by Trump — so botched; how was Kamala picked to begin with; and even “What is a woman?” (Why are we even asking such questions?)

How did all this happen? — Where did it go so completely wrong? But wasn’t it happening all the time? Trump’s election besets the “Left” with problems going back at least a couple of generations now. Like the New Left, culminating not in “revolution” but Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980, all the talk of “socialism” for the last couple of decades resulted in: Trump. Does this mean that he is Hitler stopping Communism? Of course not.

The Nixonite true believers in the “Unitary Executive” are not seized by the ghost of Carl Schmitt, formulating Constitutional justifications for a “fascist” seizure of power, albeit in American terms. No. The problem goes back to the height of the American Century itself: Eisenhower’s specter of the “Military-Industrial Complex™.” If the Deep State killed (both) Kennedy(s and Malcolm and MLK) and ousted Nixon, then perhaps the same struggle is being fought out today. If the American Republic became an Empire in Vietnam and the War on Terror, then the silver-spooned draft-dodger has come to stop it. Can it be done? Liberalism will claim to try; but Marxism says: no.

Unlike the Bonaparte of Bonapartism, as either hero or villain, Trump is coming not at the beginning but the end of a history — or the dawn of a new one. He repeats the history of either the liberal or Marxist story of Bonapartism: both and neither. We are always in capitalism simultaneously in 1776/1789 and 1848/1876: in bourgeois revolution and capitalist counterrevolution. The infamous John Eastman Memo, seeking to justify Trump’s disputing the electoral outcome of 2020, pointed as precedence to two very different events: the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800; and the counterrevolution against Reconstruction in 1876 — the former defending and extending the spirit of the American Revolution; the latter bringing about an “18th Brumaire” coup against the intentions of Lincoln and U.S. Grant and the results of the revolutionary Civil War and its abolition of slavery, to “restore order” and consolidate a Bonapartist capitalist state in America.

We have been told not to “normalize” Trump; we are asked what we are currently doing when “first they come for . . .” and during an “actual genocide.” How will history judge Trump? How will posterity judge us? But this is indeed the “normal” state of affairs during the history of capitalism — even given Benjamin’s warning against treating “fascism as the norm.” History is not coming to an end; its bloody saga will continue.

Deportations

For instance, Trump’s unjust deportations are clearly political in character: he promised to deport the “Palestine solidarity” protesters (“useful idiots” and the rest) and all the immigrants Biden let in when he opened the border — especially and starting with the gangsters. — Indeed, it’s very easy to find links for the Palestine protests to actual gangsters through Hamas, since terrorism necessarily operates in the criminal netherworld, as does of course capitalist politics more generally; and anyway, not only the politicians but the universities and their “good works” are funded and founded by the more or less dirty, laundered money of ill-gotten gains — organized crime. But the Palestinians’ only hope is Trump; and Trump is deporting people now at a slower pace than Biden or Obama.

It’s not as if there weren’t unjust detentions and deportations before Trump: it’s just that he is proudly demagoguing and photo op-ing them in broad daylight; whereas previously it went on in the dark of night — it is the latter not the former which is characteristic of the Bonapartist state for Marxism. While Trump could be challenged in the public sphere and voted upon, Biden and Obama could not; it’s hard to say exactly that Trump was elected to institute injustice, that his voters wanted to strengthen the state — one could argue that it was quite the opposite. The outcome of a plebiscite is always ambiguous, but especially in capitalist politics. Are the voters saints or sinners? No matter: the bureaucratic machine, once set in motion, as a function more or less of popular will, is necessarily and not accidentally — inevitably — a juggernaut rolling over all questions of justice. It’s all apparently very “democratic.”

Everyone hates the cops until they need them; and aren’t our taxes paying for the police salaries, so shouldn’t they serve the public better — serve and not abuse us? But: police cannot exist without wrongful arrests and unjustified use of force; prosecutors cannot exist without wrongful convictions; prisons cannot exist without innocent people languishing and dying in them. But focusing on the brutality of deportations leaves aside the violence of migration itself, for instance and not least, the rank exploitation and profiteering and even enslavement of “human trafficking” that is inseparable from it — against which Trump loudly proclaims to be fighting, and indeed as his priority concern.

Trump’s opponents don’t have the monopoly on compassion. Far from it. From the very moment he descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower, he called out by name the “rapists and murderers” of the cartels controlling the Mexican border. Who are their primary victims? The migrants themselves. As Marx long ago observed, right is on both sides of the contradictions of capitalism; and each side in its one-sidedness demagogues everything, such that all public exposés and accusations of injustice serve as just so much apologetic propaganda and political cover on the part of the accusers. Meanwhile, the needs of capitalism grind on.

Bonapartism and socialism

Where Hegel found in Napoleon the rogue to play a hero’s part, in Louis Bonaparte and other contemporary phenomena Marx finds that even heroes inevitably play the part of rogues in capitalism. Even and perhaps especially trying to do good results in evil: as Hegel described it, “the Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims.”[6] This is where liberalism maintains a point: we should avoid empowering the state as much as possible; but Marxism recognizes that this is actually impossible in capitalism. If we don’t understand that Trump is actually trying to do good, then we will understand nothing about what is really happening and why.

Napoleon was a Jacobin, and Louis Bonaparte was a Saint-Simonian Utopian Socialist. They claimed to defend the Revolution, but expressed its inherent limits. In the case of Louis Bonaparte, or Bonapartism per se, those limits are those of capitalism. The political limits of capitalism are found in bureaucratic rule.

Where liberalism treats the history of capitalism as the end of the world, Marxism finds the end of the world, as ever, in History.  As Adorno wrote, “the world has survived its downfall”[7]; but “its end today is not the end.”[8] Our farce in the Play for Today is that the Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth is not a grand Existential allegory but a real one: “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.” — Kafka’s humor is easily lost on the melancholic! For Marxism, there was no way out of politics but politics; but only as socialist politics: the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat — not as a millennial dream, but as the real bid for power against the capitalist state. Will it end in tragedy? ( — Children, please don’t go to prison!)

Whether as Napoleon or Louis, with Trump as with them, “Bonapartism” is not Bonaparte: not the figure, but the condition is historically significant. But this still means that “there is no Destiny, only politics.” There will be a future for capitalism and capitalist politics; will there be for socialism — will there be the “class struggle” for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or only the Bonapartism of the capitalist state?

For Marxism, the only politics that matters in capitalism — the only actual politics of world-historic consequence — is the “class struggle”; but: “Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Lenin, The State and Revolution). Today, we have only the pseudo-politics of the delusional pseudo-reality and the “normative psychosis of the political social world”[9] of the state in capitalism: it is Bonapartism — not Bonaparte. | P

[1] Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 392.

[2] For what is eternal in history is freedom — its transformation. From G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 96, 127–28: “While we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past — however extensive its periods — only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present. . . .

“Spirit once more driven back upon itself, produces its work in an intellectual shape, and becomes capable of realizing the Ideal of Reason from the Secular principle alone. Thus it happens, that in virtue of elements of Universality, which have the principle of Spirit as their basis, the empire of Thought is established actually and concretely. The antithesis of Church and State vanishes. The Spiritual becomes reconnected with the Secular, and develops this latter as an independently organic existence. The State no longer occupies a position of real inferiority to the Church, and is no longer subordinate to it. The latter asserts no prerogative, and the Spiritual is no longer an element foreign to the State. Freedom has found the means of realizing its Ideal — its true existence. This is the ultimate result which the process of History is intended to accomplish, and we have to traverse in detail the long track which has been thus cursorily traced out. Yet length of Time is something entirely relative, and the element of Spirit is Eternity. Duration, properly speaking, cannot be said to belong to it.”

[3]  Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 608.

[4] Ibid., 603.

[5] The Fable of the Bees (1714).

[6] Hegel, Introduction, 34.

[7]  Theodor W. Adorno, “Those Twenties” (1962), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 47.

[8]  Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110.

[9] “Pseudo-politics” and “pseudo-reality” are terms of Adorno; the “normative psychosis of the political social world” is a phrase by the Marxist-informed Freudian psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell: “the normative delusions of an acceptable psychotic status quo, which is what our political world very often is.” See E. Efe Çakmak and Bülent Somay, “There is never a psychopathology without the social context: An interview with Juliet Mitchell,” Eurozine (April 12, 2006), <https://www.eurozine.com/there-is-never-a-psychopathology-without-the-social-context/>.

Fear itself

Chris Cutrone

This is Trump’s world, and we are just living in it. The only question is how we feel about this. FDR gave his famous speech, “The only thing to fear is fear itself,” to address concerns about his New Deal reforms, which were at the time unprecedented steps and so legitimately frightening. The second Trump Administration — which is really in many ways actually his first — message is the same: the threat is not from any measure he is taking but the scare-mongering about it. Stock- and bond-market panic reaction seemed to temporarily complicate the tariff negotiation process, but these are tactical, not strategic matters: the objective remains the same. And the 10% baseline, already a massive increase, is kept in place. Trump will not be deterred from his goal, which is to restructure the American and global economy. He has already irreversibly affected things. Who knows how it will all work out? Trump and his team seem confident in their knowledge of what they are doing.

Whatever behind-the-scenes drama there might have been (or not) among Trump’s advisors, it was over “sequencing” and not pacing: the 90-day pause was preceded by a similar 30-day delay on the earlier tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico. It was to give time to negotiate and not avoid them. Trump has at least two years to achieve his goals.

“Liberation Day” was not only declared for the U.S. but the world. Not only doesn’t Ukraine “have the cards,” but neither does anyone else — except the U.S., who remains the sole dealer of the game, calling in all the bets. And everyone knows that one should never bet against the house — not least because the casino is owned by the biggest gangsters of all. Trump is neither a protectionist nor an isolationist. If anything, Trump is showing that the era of imperial restraint is over. If everyone is going to take advantage of the empire and complain about it, then Trump is apt to act like it, bringing the recalcitrant to heel — and the delinquent to account. Trump wants to be generous, but he has to put himself in the position to be able. What is easily overlooked is just how much the world needs and wants him to do so. American leadership is not only still possible but necessary.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that “strategic ambiguity is key to any negotiation,” and so the market jitters are inevitable. But as of this writing, stocks have already recovered. Resistance to Trump’s policy is from all who have an interest in the status quo that he is trying to shake up and overthrow. He’s resetting the table, and all prior bets are off. We are all concerned, but some are more invested than others. Trump is upping the ante on them, and they will have to fold or risk losing it all. Trump isn’t bluffing: he doesn’t have to. All he has to do is get his own house in order — and it turns out the easiest way for him to do so is to act on the world stage, delivering a restructured world economy as a fait accompli to domestic politics.

Bessent declared that for the past generation Wall Street has done well but now it’s Main Street’s turn. He points out that the economy has worked to advance only the top 10%, while it has worked to the detriment of the bottom 50% who have lost ground; and the middle 40% have struggled merely to tread water. He wants it to serve the 90% and not merely the 10 or 50%. If America is threatening to come apart, Trump has come to repair it.  

Bessent described the opening salvo of the tariffs as sorting the world’s countries into “three buckets: ally, neutral and enemy” — in which China was exposed as a “bad actor.” All that means is driving a harder bargain with them, not an actual trade war — which China can only lose. But Trump is promising benefit to China, whose economy is as much in need of change as America’s. It doesn’t mean casting China into an adversarial position — unless they insist on it — but handling the relationship differently. Though Trump uses zero-sum rhetoric, he does not negotiate that way but rather seeks mutual benefit. Trump considers the world to have already been in a trade war with the U.S., but the U.S. wasn’t fighting back. But what would be the point of the U.S. winning? He thinks the fight has been to everyone’s detriment, and that he can serve not only the U.S.’s but all their interests better. The “war” analogy is perhaps not appropriate, because it has been a parasitic relationship that is slowly killing the host, but to let that happen will drag the world down with it.

Who are the principal actors? The U.S., China and Europe (such as it exists) — the rest of the world just doesn’t want to get gobbled up. But China is the monkey on the U.S.’s back weighing it down; and Europe is a Cold War creation of the U,S. that now thinks it independently exists. The only way for either to become itself would be in tandem with the other, contra the U.S. But neither trusts the other more than the U.S. And there is Russia: when Europe looks at Russia it sees China; when China looks at Russia it sees Europe. And now Trump’s U.S. wants to approach Russia with an offer of normalization as an alternative to becoming an appendage of either China or Europe. So the U.S. remains in the priority and privileged position of being able to deal with all and sundry, severally and together. It can also — at least threaten to — withdraw into its own hemisphere and let the Old World consume itself. (Which it would surely do without the U.S. — as shown by all the last and this century’s wars.)

As Trump promised, lowering the price of oil has drained Russia and Iran’s ability to conduct war. They will beg to be brought down from the ledge. The Biden Presidency’s long night of depraved horrors is vanishing as mirages in the mist at the dawn of Trump’s new American Golden Age. Not only the U.S. but the world is eager to wake from the nightmare.

The trade war will not lead to WWIII; rather, Trump is working to prevent it. The way he is doing so is, as his critics accuse him, leading the U.S. into “bankruptcy.” Trump is preemptively declaring the U.S. “bankrupt,” not to liquidate it but to renegotiate terms with its creditors: as with his companies, they have a greater interest in keeping the U.S. in business. If anything is “too big to fail” it is the U.S. Anticipating eventual default, Trump is getting out ahead of it. As with Nixon breaking and reordering the post-WWII Bretton Woods system by taking the U.S. off the gold standard, and Reagan similarly devaluing the dollar by gaining assent from U.S. creditors in the Plaza Accord, Trump is seeking to revalue the dollar internationally so as to no longer disadvantage the American economy. One advantage that he has for pursuing this is that the U.S. is actually significantly less dependent on international trade than most other countries.

Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Stephen Miran’s white paper proposing a “Mar-a-Lago Accord” has been adopted as a means towards this end — whether officially or not is deliberately unclear. Miran wrote that the world depends on two “public goods” provided by the U.S.: universal currency for trade; and global military security. This was and remains in the U.S. interest, but the terms became unbalanced once the world recovered from WWII by the 1960s. Since then, the U.S. started accepting an undue burden subsidizing other countries that undermines not only America but the world. Defense costs have been explicitly factored into the trade negotiations, and Miran has even proposed a user’s fee for the dollar as trade currency.

Investor Ray Dalio sees in the present crisis the end of several cycles in domains that have proved unsustainable: financial, trade, geopolitical, and domestic-political — both within the U.S. and many other countries. Trump represents potential transformation in all of them, to a new post-neoliberal political and economic order. The alternative is to try to avoid the necessary changes through a patchwork approach. But the can has already been kicked down the road as far as it could go. The bill has come due, and Trump is willing to pay it — before the cost becomes too high.

But the neoliberalism of the past generation’s “bipartisan consensus” was not a mere policy but an entire complex political, economic, cultural, and even psychological form of capitalism. It was both a change from and in continuity with the prior form of capitalism in the high 20th century. The question is the character of the historical rhythm of transformations in capitalism.

Trump has always wanted to do this: From his earliest intimations of running for President in the late 1980s, Trump has complained about American potential being squandered. That he is implementing it forty years later is typical of prior changes in capitalism: John Maynard Keynes formulated his approach before the first World War but it was only implemented after the second and in the wake of the Great Depression; Milton Friedman sought reforms in the 1940s in response to automation that were adopted after the 1970s crisis and downturn in an era of deindustrialization. Such changes only caught up belatedly with longstanding necessities in capitalism. They all represented a political crisis that altered ideologies and parties and reconfigured electorates. While responding in terms of a state of affairs already past — Trump’s opportunity came after Obama failed to adequately meet the crisis of the post-2008 Great Recession — they nonetheless set conditions for the future.

I have spent the last 10 years — ever since Trump emerged as a candidate — observing the dawning of post-neoliberalism that Trump expresses. It has taken this long for the dismissive denial of Trump as an aberration to wear off. But the confusion and fear continue. Ezra Klein calls Trump a “radical moderate,” which means someone who uses extreme means — for instance intemperate rhetoric — to achieve what are ultimately modest ends. Trump is pursuing changes rather conservatively, but even this is too much to bear for an ossified establishment and a public it has trained to fear.

It is dizzyingly disorienting, but one can find landmarks to steady oneself if one is willing to open one’s eyes to the signs of the times: Trump as a blast from the past is a reminder that the account of history cannot be settled cheaply. One form of capitalism has run its course. It is fitting that a dissident from its high period should be the one to change it now. Like Bernie Sanders, Trump is a figure of the 1980s Reagan Revolution who warned of its dangerous deficiencies, which others failed to acknowledge. The quaintly old-fashioned can appear suddenly up-to-date, meeting the needs of the present. What is required is the will to do so. Trump’s will is terrifyingly implacable. There are those who are exhilarated by it, and others incredulously insisting on its impossibility. But things must change, and they will: they already have.

When Jeb Bush called Trump the “chaos candidate” a decade ago in the 2016 Republican primaries, he meant to warn against someone who would not observe the pieties of the established order — or simply party-loyalty to the Republicans. But it went much further than that: Trump is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to do what he thinks is right. It is a Cortés “burning the boats,” no-turning-back moment, in which the leader forces his followers to advance in order to conquer this new world that has been opened up to them. But if they refuse, Trump will not feel culpable for their inaction, for he did everything he could bringing them to this point: it will now be up to them to seize the opportunity.

Trump doesn’t necessarily care about the Republican Party’s fortunes or even those of his voters, as they served merely to place him in the position to act that he is using now. His actions are meant to benefit coming generations: it is for his voters’ (and others’) children and grandchildren, not themselves. Representative democracy means electing politicians to exercise judgment and make decisions on our behalf, not to implement our will, which we can hardly know in matters of state anyway. The only recourse for disappointment is to vote them out. That Trump has nothing to lose as a “lame duck” exacerbates the problem: there is no way to hold him accountable other than (another) impeachment and removing him from office. That is not going to happen. Most of those who even disapprove of his actions won’t support taking him out. And many do continue to support what he is doing.

Will Trump succeed? That is anything but clear. But he will try. Like it or not, we are on this ride now. We have never had a say with the drivers — other than to choose them. Ben Shapiro said that nothing is guaranteed but the adventure in capitalism. It’s times like these that test the basic propositions of the open society, in which nothing is safe and the risks are real. What we can be certain of is that Trump is no empty suit. He has claimed the right and freedom to act. The only thing to count on is what a transaction contracts between the interested parties — at least for the duration of their interaction. Trump is confident there are always deals to be made: he can make clients out of would-be adversaries; and mutual self-interest will win out to hold fast the relationship in the end.

Trump’s gamble is that in this game of chicken others have much more to lose and little to gain in refusing to give way. Staring down his opponents, one thing we can be sure of is that he won’t be the one to blink. Or break faith: he is making commitments for America and the world to last for decades to come. He has nothing to fear, and neither should we.

May 8, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

The Millennial Left is unborn

Is there a Left in the 21st century?

Alternate video:

Presented at the closing plenary panel discussion of the Platypus Affiliated Society 17th annual international convention at the University of Chicago, with Andrew Hartman (historian, author of Karl Marx in America, 2025), Branko Marcetic (Jacobin Magazine),and Alex Higgins (Prometheus Journal).

Ironically, it might only be now that the 21st century is really beginning. But this comes after the death of the Millennial Left, which strived but failed to be true to what was new and different about the 21st century, instead falling back on rehearsing and repeating the 20th century, to which it remained beholden. But the demand of 20th century history was to overcome it. Capitalism is already doing so. 

Meanwhile, what the Millennial Left abandoned as its task has been taken up by Trump. Trump, as the last 20th century political figure, is finally ushering in the 21st. 

Trump began his political ambitions in the 1980s Reaganite neoliberal boom era of optimism that gave birth to the Millennial generation. — Unfortunately, they entered adulthood just when first the War on Terror and then the Great Recession hit, robbing them of their life-chances. The first political response to these twin crises was Obama’s election in 2008. But Obama’s failure led to the Republican Tea Party revolt and Occupy Wall Street. When Obama was reelected in 2012, both Bernie Sanders and Trump decided to run in 2016: Bernie to represent the dashed hopes of the Millennials; Trump to finally, after several election cycles of hesitation and frustration, throw his hat in the ring. But where Trump was determined to win election in 2016, Bernie aspired only to shape the Democrats’ program and message, winning back the young voters who elected Obama in 2008 but were disaffected by 2016. Both Trump and Bernie offered to fulfill the Millennial promise betrayed by Obama. 

But this betrayal began long before, at the very beginning of the new Millennium and indeed earlier. Trump first floated his Presidential ambition in 1987, towards the end of Reagan’s 2nd term and in response to the dawning end of the Soviet Union, Iran-Contra debacle, Reagan’s illegal immigration amnesty, and the Black Monday stock market crash. 

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/02/donald-trump-first-campaign-speech-new-hampshire-1987-213595

Trump believed the promise of American renewal signaled by Reagan was being squandered. He was attracted to the political campaign of Texan computer systems engineer and entrepreneur billionaire Ross Perot, whose run in 1992 cost Reagan’s Vice President Bush Sr. reelection and allowed Bill Clinton to win with a minority of the votes. But in 2000 Trump left the Reform Party Perot had started when it was taken over by Reagan’s speech-writer Pat Buchanan, whom Trump called a “fascist,” decrying him as too Right-wing – too nationalist, too culturally conservative. 

So what was potentially squandered by the U.S. after the Cold War? It was called the “peace dividend” at the time. What was this based on? First, as I have written about Milton Friedman, it must be understood that neoliberalism was not anti- but post-Fordism, an attempt to realize the potential of Fordism. This is why Trump and his following can appear as harking back both to the 1950s and the 1990s – bookending the long New Left era. The post-Cold War New World Order announced by Bush Sr. at the time of the Gulf War in 1991 suggested not a peace dividend but the continuing of supposed “military Keynesianism” of the “permanent arms economy” in the “military-industrial complex” – which Eisenhower warned of in 1960. So we are haunted not only by the problems of neoliberalism but mid-20th century Fordism as well. The past Trump recalled was uncomfortable – to say nothing of his newfound fondness for William McKinley and embrace of the 19th century Gilded Age era of tariff industrial protectionism. It recalls a pre-Progressivism capitalism.

Trump had been somewhat assuaged by Clinton’s victory in 1992, but soon felt betrayed, specifically by Clinton’s embracing NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement that had been negotiated by the prior Bush  Administration and Clinton had denounced in his 1992 campaign — and had been Perot’s central target, famously warning of the “giant sucking sound” in the American economy and society it portended. 

Trump was a dissident to 1990s neoliberal globalization – also the target of the “Left” at the time, as seen in 1999’s Battle of Seattle, at which labor unions demonstrably dumped foreign goods, in a call-back of sorts to the Boston Tea Party of the American Revolution and War of Independence.

In 2000, at the end of the Clinton Presidency, and after Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution in Congress, giving rise not to the “vast Right-wing conspiracy” Hillary saw in the Monica Lewinsky affair but rather “Bipartisan Bill,” Trump was with Jesse Ventura in the Reform Party bolting from Buchanan’s American nationalist conservatism that abandoned Ross Perot’s original Reform Party’s common-sense Centrism. Soon afterwards, Trump supported Hillary Clinton’s run for Senate and invited the Clintons to his wedding to Melania.

George W. Bush won the 2000 election promising to abandon what he called the “arrogance” of Clintonian globalism, attacking Clinton and his VP Al Gore’s “nation-building” foreign policy. Of course 9/11 reversed this ironically and turned Bush’s Presidency into the neoliberal global crusade of the Project for a New American Century that had been hatched previously by Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright. Trump was an early critic of the War on Terror and rode discontents with the “forever wars” into the White House, becoming the peace President Obama only promised but failed to be: the clearest indicator of counties voting for Trump was military family density, bearing the brunt of the traumatic wars that became the longest in U.S. history. And military families are predominantly, overwhelmingly working-class, as the “poverty draft” had manned the U.S. military after the Vietnam era.

In 2016, Trump said he wanted the Republican Party to represent the working class and warned against it being the conservative party — he said American politics unlike other countries didn’t need a conservative party. He has often said that because he ran as a Republican he had to tailor his message to win Republican voters, but that it would have been different if he had run as a Democrat. He sought in his first term to craft a new bipartisan consensus, and even welcomed the new Democrat Congressional majority in the midterm election as an opportunity to ally with Democrats and break Republican resistance to his policies, for instance on infrastructure spending. 

I narrate Trump’s political career in order, as myself a Gen X Leftist, to show how it parallels discontents of the Left throughout these preceding decades: opposition to NAFTA and neoliberal globalization more generally; disaffection with the two Presidencies of the post-Reagan neoliberal era Clinton and Obama; and rejection of the cultural conservatism of the Reagan Revolution. While Trump was never a progressive, he was always a middle-of-the-road moderate — as has been and will always be the preponderant majority of the working class. Trump was and remains a “Reagan Democrat” — meaning someone who could represent the working-class “swing voters” that decide elections in capitalist politics, but who never agree with the self-conceptions of policymakers or campaign marketers, to whom both appealing to the working class appears as chimerical folly and Trump ultimately makes no sense. 

But a real socialist Left would have to make — better — sense of Trump’s appeal, while also sharing the frustration with capitalist politics and policy that he represents politically. Socialists would have to represent such discontents better than Trump does. Ever since Reagan or perhaps Nixon, the Republicans have represented dissent against the dominant Democratic Party progressive liberal political order — which the “Left” is oriented around.

I have spent the last 20 years accompanying the Millennial and now Zoomer Left as a teacher — I spent the prior 20 years, 40 in total now, as a Leftist, going back to my high school activism and reading from Marxism. The Millennial Left is now as old biologically as I am as a self-conscious Leftist and Marxist. I can say that the problems have remained the same throughout that time. And “nothing new” means precisely that something different must be done now on the Left. Rosa Luxemburg wrote about 40 years — an entire Biblical generation — in the desert. I can attest to that being my time. Is something possible now, in the new century and millennium, that wasn’t previously? If the older generations had to go under so that a new one could enter the Promised Land — or at least embark on the road to it — that time is now. Perhaps the Millennials were not the first of the 21st but the last of the 20th.

There was a time, a long time ago, namely more than a century now, when the socialist Left could and did make sense of working class discontents and aspirations to overcome the manifest problems of capitalism, and were able to build out of this a mass base for socialist politics, independently of capitalist politics. This was before socialism liquidated itself into capitalist progressivism starting in the 1920s and ‘30s and growing ever more desperate and implausible through the 1960s and ‘70s New Left, up through the recent failure of the Millennial Left. 

The Democrats have long been called the “graveyard of the Left” — more specifically, the “graveyard of movements” — but that means it’s where they go after they die, not what killed them. They committed suicide, as Leftist movements, and this is how they ended up in the Democratic Party, actually giving it new life. 

How did they kill themselves, politically? By abandoning their ambition. Why did they do so? Because they could see no way forward. This is where we are now: a sense of profound impasse. 

But Trump is moving forward. Does the Left hope only for Trump to be mired in their own inability to change: their “resistance”? 

At the outset of the Millennial Left, by contrast, it was capitalist politics that seemed resistant to change, and the Left that wanted to move things forward. 

This is where progressivism manifested its problem: Was socialism progressive, or did it seek to return to a lost past? Did the Millennials seek to undo neoliberalism, or to move beyond it? The socialist impulse gave way to progressivism, because socialism was embraced according to its neoliberal definition: welfare statism contra private property and civil social freedom. The freedom of the capitalists was disgusting; and the freedom of the workers was scary. 

The Democrats were not always the “progressive” capitalist party but only became so with FDR, and in many respects fully only after LBJ. The socialist Eugene Debs ended his political life in the late 1920s supporting the “progressive” Republican La Follette. This augured the later Communist Party support for FDR and his New Deal in the Popular Front against war and fascism that prevented neither. Closing the 20th century now means breaking with that tradition of Democratic Party progressivism that defined it. It was always and remains permanently the terminus of socialism.

The opportunity for moving on today for a potentially socialist movement and politics is the crisis of neoliberalism and the changes in capitalism resulting from it. But not at the level of policy but society. Back in the 1980s-90s, the Reagan Revolution was used as an excuse to abandon socialism — by my mentors Adolph Reed and Moishe Postone, for instance — and the Trump Revolution is being used similarly now. The problem is that would-be socialists never rose to the occasion of the crisis of capitalism met back in the 1070s-80s  by neoliberalism — and the Millennials failed to do so in the crisis of neoliberalism of the 2000s-10s, defining themselves against Trumpian post-neoliberalism, and seeing only a chimerical mirage of somehow undoing neoliberalism and returning to pre-neoliberal capitalism of the 20th century.

Ironically, both Trump and the Millennial Left yearned for a return to the 1990s boom era that was the height of neoliberalism, before the War on Terror and Great Recession. But both dressed up this nostalgia as a desire for a more mythic past that never was: perhaps the post-WWII “Golden Age,” or an even deeper past of humanity and true grit, whether of the 1930s Great Depression New Deal and its heroic “anti-fascism,” or of Gilded Age Second Industrial Revolution and Second International socialism against the Robber Barrons: the time of McKinley and William Jennings Bryan Populism that led to the Progressive Era. 

But — bookending the other side of the 20th century — Bryan’s Populism as well as Roosevelt’s Progressivism failed, leading instead to Woodrow Wilson and WWI: the 20th century of war, revolution and catastrophe, in fascism and communism; an end to capitalism — and its apocalyptic continuation after the end of the world. 

The Millennials tried but failed to snap out of this nightmare weighing from the past century, but were shocked by the rude awakening provided by Trump. — Their “awokening” in response was just a depressed return to restless sleep, an insistence on staying bedridden in the 20th century, long after its convalescence was over, in an endemic PTSD response. 

The Millennials refused to read the poetry of the Trumpian future, insisting instead that capitalism could not survive — if not capitalism, then the human race or the Earth itself, consumed in the AI Singularity of capitalism’s black hole in fossil fuel carbon reduction of all organic matter to ash in global warming/cooling/nuclear winter. As Marx Weber said, capitalism will end only with the last ton of fossil fuel burning up — he didn’t reckon nuclear fission’s infinite hellfire and brimstone.

No: it will continue. Cold fusion will give capitalism endless life — in deep space if need be, without even the Sun. Energy needs will be reduced to the mere molecular movement of digits. Not an event horizon of gravitational collapse, but an ongoing purgatory: the haunted afterlife in suspended animation that has followed the failure of socialism in the 20th century. 

But, as Mao said to Nixon, what the Left proposed the Right pushes through. History moves on. Even its end is not the end.

The Left, for its part, refusing to accept its death, will remain stuck in the 20th century, long after capitalism has already moved on in the 21st — ushered in by Trump. Its restless ghosts of the dead will tap on the windows but stay trapped behind glass, looking on from the oblivion, to which it has been permanently consigned, outside of history: a mere idea. 

A socialist Left that could meet the tasks of the 21st century has yet to come into existence. Can we anticipate it now? I used to think — when I first started teaching academically and soon after on the Left in and through Platypus — that we had moved out from under the postmodernism that dominated the late 20th century. Now it seems we are stuck right back in it — at least the so-called “Left” remains stuck there, still in the thrall of “French Theory” and under the shadow of Stalinism. But it didn’t always appear so. It seemed in the earlier 21st century that something struggled to be born in the Millennial Left.

Now that moment has passed. What remains is the ghost of its unfulfilled potential. It is not undead because it never lived. The Millennial Left seems to have been the last gasp of the 20th century, strangled in the grip of its dead hand.

In 2017 I announced that the Millennial Left is dead. Now I will say: The Millennial Left was unborn. | P

A Marxist science of politics (audio recording)

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel, “A Marxist science of politics?,” with Atiya Khan-Singh on “Decolonization in the Age of Anti-Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,” moderated by Edward Remus, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 24, 2025.

What is politics? It is the art of constituting the community. What is a science? A form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility. What is Marxism as a science of politics? It is knowledge of the constitution of modern capitalist society, and how this knowledge of society is made possible by capitalism itself.

Modern capitalism is, according to Marxism, defined, as a mode of production, by the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production.

Bourgeois society is the community of labor. Politics in capitalism is the art of constituting the community of labor in the industrial age.

The industrial age is that of the Industrial Revolution: the process of automation. We are still living in capitalism insofar as we are in the community of labor contradicted by the process of automation.

This is a specific society with a specific condition, task and form of politics. To achieve adequate knowledge of this society and its politics requires a specific kind of science. Namely, a conception of contradiction is necessary. Moreover, what is needed is a conception of how a contradiction points to a potential change from within itself: a dialectical conception of contradiction. But such a knowledge — self-consciousness — is peculiar to capitalism and how it points beyond itself to socialism.

Political science as a discipline is a fairly late phenomenon. It is from the end of the 19th century at the earliest, but really from the 20th century. James Burnham in The Machiavellians dated the birth of political science to Machiavelli, but really to Italian Elite Theory of the turn of the 20th century. What is remarkable, then, is the birth of modern political science as a contemporary response to Marxism — and its 20th century efflorescence as a response to the failure of Marxism.

Marxism is commonly accused of lacking a political theory — lacking an account, let alone a science of politics. Specifically, it is said to have a deficient understanding of politics as such, instead attributing politics to economics.

But what about Marxism as a social science — a science of society? Is society reducible to economics? The bourgeois social relations of production are not merely economic: they are legal-juridical.

Marx’s critique of political economy was a critique of the self-consciousness of bourgeois society: political economy was social theory: a theory of social relations. Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, for instance, were moral philosophers — neither economists nor political philosophers.

Moral philosophy was descended from theology, as part of the broader descent of philosophy from religious thought.

What is the history of science — of knowledge? What is the history of our consciousness of society? The first form of knowledge of society was through religion: our community in and with the Divine; our Divine community.

The first state or polis was that of a religious community. It was understood to have been created by a Divine act, creating a fundamental and originary relation between the community and Divinity. The ruling class was the priestly caste, called the First Estate in European Christendom. In this way our first knowledge of society was through our knowledge of the Divine character of the polis.

The other ruling class of traditional civilization, the Second Estate, was the warrior caste. Often the Divine act that established the community was a war, whether a human war on Earth or a war of God or the gods in Heaven, or a combination of both. God aided the humans or humans aided God in their victory. If a community or a people or a god perished, this was itself understood as a Divinely preordained fate. As such the Divine act that established or abolished a community was outside of time, standing either at the beginning or the end.

What was the “rational kernel within the mystical shell,” in Marx’s language, of such a conception? That history itself was identical with the time of the community, defined throughout its course by its origin and telos.

The modern world of bourgeois society overthrew the gods and secularized time, making history identical with this process of revolution. The American conservative thinker Eric Voegelin criticized Marxism for seeking to “immanentize the Eschaton” or trying to make Heaven on Earth. But this was not Marxism’s doing but that of bourgeois society itself.

Bourgeois society’s social relations of labor humanized the Divine act of creating community, placing it in social cooperation itself. Rather than a singular Divine act, this Divine character of community became the unfolding process of history itself through human action.

Not Carl Schmitt’s “Divine violence” of political theology that identifies the community with God and deifies politics itself, but rather Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “vita active” of the “human condition.” Both were contemporaries of the apocalypse of modern society in the 20th century, in which the action of politics became deeply uncertain. How can we know the truth of political action? This is the fundamental question of political science as a modern knowledge of society and its self-conscious direction — not human secular action merely as the unconscious phenomenon of the Divine acting through it.

James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution tried to summarize the lessons of Italian Elite Theory of the early 20th century, synthesizing Mosca, Sorel, Michels and Pareto to grasp the dynamics of modern politics as a “managerial revolution” as the latest of Pareto’s “cycle of elites.” Burnham borrowed from Marxism the idea of history as succession of modes of production, but eliminated the dialectical character of capitalism in Marx’s view, which made it very different from other historical phenomena.

Gaetano Mosca supposedly innovated from Marxism’s focus on the subaltern’s revolutionary class struggle, turning instead to the issue of the reproduction of the ruling class. 

If the bourgeois Third Estate of Commoners had overthrown the Divine violence of the gods and the ruling castes, replacing them with the constitution of society by labor, then Burnham took from Mosca a reinterpretation of the ruling class as the organizers and managers of production, with changes driven by military or technical developments. —The gods were replaced by the Divine force of technology, and entrepreneurs as the new priests and warriors, bringing about an apocalyptic change of social production and its community. 

The industrial forces contradicting the bourgeois social relations of production in Marx’s view became instead a deus ex machina of the Divine force of nature on the stage of history victimizing the poor laboring humans. 

Far from bringing about Heaven on Earth, Hell had descended upon Creation instead. 

The struggle of elites in capitalism reverted back to more or less civilized or barbaric wars over the interpretation of the will of the gods between rival warrior-priests — as history had always been, the revelation of the inscrutable and mysterious Divine, to which we had to submit and bear witness. 

Was “science,” then, merely what it had always been, the religious veneration of the Divine, led by holy men, who might turn out not to be Saints but doing the Devil’s work, leading us astray from the proper reverence we owed our Creator as Lord, Savior and Redeemer? 

Marx called this the “fetishism” of the last stage of prehistory. Burnham’s Marxist contemporaries Adorno and Horkheimer called it the “veil of technology” that was so visibly thin it demanded to be pierced through. 

But what made such consciousness — as opposed to Burnham’s reification of alienated technology, society and politics — possible? 

According to Marxism, it was contradiction itself that produced consciousness — that made knowledge possible. This followed from Hegel’s discovery that knowledge itself — Absolute Knowing — was borne of the struggle for freedom in and through a condition of self-contradiction and its recognition. “Class struggle” was not against an evil Master — who was merely the character-mask of conditions, and not their cause or responsible actor — but a process of self-recognition borne of contradiction. 

Such contradiction was not a Divine force — which would amount to a fetishization and mystification or deification of the dialectic itself — but actually the specific knowledge of a specific society in a certain era of history. 

Dialectical and historical materialism was the adequate consciousness produced by the self-contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of labor in the industrial era of production at the moment of its revelation. It was the necessary consciousness of the proletarianized working class in its struggle to overcome capitalism — where capitalism itself was not the evil magical spell conjured by the ruling class — perverse priests heretically violating Divine Creation in the Satanic Mills of their devices — but the alienated society produced and reproduced by cooperative labor, contradicting and demanding overcoming itself. 

Political science was not meant to be yet another iteration of pondering the Divine, but the consciousness of revolution in history. 

This recognition, already nearly 200 years old, is the meaning of Marxism as a science of politics, called for by capitalism. | §