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 pollical 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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Chris Cutrone with Bryce Nance and Mikey Downs on Marxism, A.I. and capitalism

“Mikey and I [Bryce Nance] are joined by our friend Chris Cutrone to discuss Marxism and the world we live in today. There is a lot of hubbub going around about Artificial Intelligence and what it might do, or might be doing, or might have done already, to the economy and to political and social relations, and to the possibility of Freedom itself. We don’t answer any of these questions, that’s not really the way this works, but I think the overarching conversation can only benefit from Chris’ sober take on the situation. Come along as we interrogate notions of Labor and Value, Production and Exchange, Appropriation, Power, and many others, in a new world that includes a powerful externalized structure made of fractally abstracted Intellectual Labor that we call A.I.!”

Morbid Symptoms: Chris Cutrone vs. Alexander Mckay and Tara Van Dijk on Trotskyism and Stalinism

Chris Cutrone debates Marxism, Trotskyism and Stalinism (including Maoism) with Alexander Mckay of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute (U.K.) and Tara Van Dijk of Morbid Symptoms podcast.

Post-debate debrief with Doug Lain for Sublation Media.

(Chris Cutrone prepared opening remarks:)

A long time ago, when I was in college and a member of the orthodox Trotskyist Spartacus Youth Club associated with the Spartacist League, I watched a rerun of the Star Trek Original Series episode, “The Omega Glory,” from 1968, in which a post-apocalyptic civilization was beset by war between the Yangs and the Kohms — I thought that this is what the end of history would look like: Maoists vs. Trotskyists!

I consider Stalinism to be, simply, Right-wing Marxism. — A Right-wing liquidation of Marxism. It’s easy to understand why Communists in the Soviet Union and China have had to pretend to be “Marxist,” since they seemed to represent the Russian Revolution’s outcome. But there is no excuse for anyone who is not an apparatchik with vested interests in this pretense to accept this.

I am not sure why you are Stalinists: are you ignorant; opportunists; or do you want to be the hangmen of the revolution? Would you be Marxist at all if there were no “actually existing socialist states” to admire from afar?

Similarly, I am not sure what I am here to defend about myself: my ideas; my practical strategy; or my soul.

Actual Stalinists and Maoists have rejected Dengism as Revisionism and post-Mao China as a fascist-led state-capitalist country.

Mao himself said, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, that the supposed “Left-wing followers of Marx often become fascists.”

Stalin and Mao themselves would regard you are Revisionists — or as “useful idiots.”

In my time, back in the day, anti-Revisionist Maoism was represented by the Maoist International Movement, or MIM Notes, and J Sakai’s book Settlers represented this tendency. But they would have — rightly — rejected your perspective as non- and even anti-Marxist.

But divisions among Stalinists are longstanding: there was the Sino-Soviet split between Mao and Khruschev; the Sino-Vietnamese war; and the various African, Asian and Middle Eastern civil wars in which Communist China and the Soviet Union fought on opposite sides and chewed up countries as cannon-fodder in wars that had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever. Each side called the other “imperialist,” and had spurious pseudo-“Marxist” explanations for why this was so.

There was also the U.S.-China alliance under Mao against the Soviet Union, which involved these armed conflicts.

Mao claimed to uphold Stalin against Khruschev’s denunciations, but even Mao said that Stalin’s Purge Trials were wrong — too bureaucratic and authoritarian. His solution was the Cultural Revolution; his slogan was “bombard the [Communist Party] headquarters.” But now you defend the Chinese Communist Party — Mao was calling to bombard the people in China you have placed your hopes in; he was calling to bombard you.

On Israel-Palestine and the Gaza war, if I can speak personally: I was horrified by the Oct. 7 attacks, but not because of the atrocities against civilians, but because of what I expected the Israeli response would be. I identify spontaneously with the Palestinians, not the Israelis — and this is precisely why I oppose Hamas. Leaving aside the question of the struggle for socialism entirely, I am opposed to terrorism, which I consider liberalism with bombs and reformism with guns — as Lenin called it. And he meant targeted attacks on the state, not communitarian violence against civilians. To defend it is to defend the slaughter of Palestinians that was its intended result: Hamas wanted this “genocide” to happen (they call it “martyrdom”), and that’s why they are wrong — from a proletarian socialist perspective.

Yes, Lenin said about Marxists who had qualms about the 1916 Easter Uprising, which had significant participation by Irish socialists, that if you can’t stomach petit bourgeois outrages, you will not be able to support the revolution. But he meant the proletarian socialist revolution. Whereas today we have nothing but petit bourgeois outrages — and petit bourgeois “radical” cheerleaders or spectators.

We have had a century of so-called Third World revolution: it has not brought the world closer to socialism. But it has distorted the minds of Western “Leftists” such as yourselves.

Which brings me to practical strategy. I have two distinct tracks: Platypus and my Campaign for a Socialist Party. I notice that the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute’s mission is “education and analysis.” This makes you no different from any other “Left” tendency, which I consider to be inherently limited to propaganda — mis-education. There is no political practice whatsoever. There is “analysis,” supposedly, which since it is divorced from any viable political strategy, is just tendentious ideology. Platypus addresses the dead “Left” reduced to mere trafficking in misunderstood ideas, which serve only to justify, in a crackpot way, what are capitalist politics and policies, to a very limited audience of virtual fanboys (and girls).  In Platypus we are trying, at the level of ideas, to “clear ideological obstacles” to a real proletarian socialist movement. It is an inherently limited project. We are addressing the “Left,” which is of course a petit bourgeois milieu.

By contrast, my Campaign is taking on the practical tasks of laying some kind of foundation for a proletarian socialist movement and politics. As I have said repeatedly, this will necessarily look like anarchism — or like grassroots “long-march” Maoism. So be it. But unlike the anarchists, we won’t fetishize social action and oppose political action — the eventual struggle for state power, and building a party to achieve it — on principle; unlike the Maoists, we won’t tail after supposedly “progressive” or “working-class” capitalist politics, which, again, has clearly led nowhere — nowhere but capitalist politics — since the 1970s. Similarly, however, we are addressing “Leftists” — petit-bourgeois radicals — who might want to serve as potential cadres of what, to actually be socialist, must become a working-class movement. We’re not there yet.

The 20th century leaves a lot of treacherous debris — and unexploded ordinance — from the disintegration of Marxism and proletarian socialism. I recognize that we are beginning today from scratch. But we have to avoid the traps awaiting the ignorant or unwary.

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

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on social relations and ideology, and ICE in Chicago and Gaza peace

Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain his article “Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique” published in The Platypus Review issue 180 (October 2025), written in response to Benjamin Studebaker’s article “Beyond ideology critique” in Platypus Review 179 (September 2025). In the second half Parrot Room, Cutrone and Lain discuss Trump’s Gaza peace plan and the ICE raids and National Guard deployments to Chicago and Portland, Oregon.