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 Doug Lain on post-neoliberalism

Chris Cutrone and Douglas Lain discuss the meaning of the term “neoliberalism” and the ignominious end of the previous regime of accumulation. Cutrone takes Benjamin Studebaker to task over their differences in conceptualizing neoliberalism, highlighting contrasting interpretations of its historical and ideological implications.

The Millennial Left is unborn

Is there a Left in the 21st century?

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), 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

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on the Trump Administration

Chris Cutrone and Douglas Lain discuss the new Trump Administration’s attempt to unify the Executive Branch and dominate the administrative state. How should socialists understand these moves? Doug and Chris continue their discussion of the negative dialectic of Marxism and philosophical truth.

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. | §

Lenin on the 1912 U.S. Presidential election (audio recording)

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel, “The radicality of the American project,” with James Vaughn, moderated by Spencer Leonard, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 23, 2025.

Let me begin by reading a short article written by the Russian revolutionary social democratic Marxist Vladimir Lenin on the 1912 general election in the U.S. and its results:

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections

Published: Pravda 164, November 9, 1912

Wilson, a “Democrat”, has been elected President of the United States of America. He has polled over six million votes, Roosevelt (the new National Progressive Party) over four million, Taft (Republican Party) over three million, and the Socialist Eugene Debs 800,000 votes.

The world significance of the U.S. elections lies not so much in the great increase in the number of Socialist votes as in the far-reaching crisis of the bourgeois parties, in the amazing force with which their decay has been revealed. Lastly, the significance of the elections lies in the unusually clear and striking revelation of bourgeois reformism as a means of combating socialism.

In all bourgeois countries, the parties which stand for capitalism, i.e., the bourgeois parties, came into being a long time ago, and the greater the extent of political liberty, the more solid they are.

Freedom in the U.S.A. is most complete. And for a whole half-century — since the Civil War over slavery in 1860–65 — two bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has developed into the Republican Party.

Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of   spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.

This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.

And now the bipartisan system has suffered a fiasco in America, the country boasting the most advanced capitalism! What caused this fiasco?

The strength of the working-class movement, the growth of socialism.

The old bourgeois parties (the “Democratic” and the “Republican” parties) have been facing towards the past, the period of the emancipation of the Negroes. The new bourgeois party, the National Progressive Party, is facing towards the future. Its programme turns entirely on the question whether capitalism is to be or not to be, on the issues, to be specific, of protection for the workers and of “trusts”, as the capitalist associations are called in the U.S.A.

The old parties are products of an epoch whose task was to develop capitalism as speedily as possible. The struggle between the parties was over the question [of] how best to expedite and facilitate this development.

The new party is a product of the present epoch, which raises the issue of the very existence of capitalism. In the U.S.A., the freest and most advanced country, this issue is coming to the fore more clearly and broadly than anywhere else.

The entire programme and entire agitation of Roosevelt and the Progressives turn on how to save capitalism by means of bourgeois reforms.

The bourgeois reformism which in old Europe manifests itself in the chatter of liberal professors has all at once come forward in the free American republic as a party four million strong. This is American style.

We shall save capitalism by reforms, says that party. We shall grant the most progressive factory legislation. We shall establish state control over all the trusts (in the U.S.A. that means over all industries!). We shall establish state control over them to eliminate poverty and enable everybody to earn a “decent” wage. We shall establish “social and industrial justice”. We revere all reforms — the only â€œreform” we don’t want is expropriation of the capitalists!

The national wealth of the U.S.A. is now reckoned to be 120 billion (thousand million) dollars, i.e., about 240 billion rubles. Approximately one-third of it, or about 80 billion rubles, belongs to two trusts, those of Rockefeller and Morgan, or is subordinated to these trusts! Not more than 40,000 families making up these two trusts are the masters of 80 million wage slaves.

Obviously, so long as these modern slave-owners are there, all “reforms” will be nothing but a deception. Roosevelt has been deliberately hired by the astute multimillionaires to preach this deception. The “state control” they promise will become — if the capitalists keep their capital — a means of combating and crushing strikes.

But the American proletarian has already awakened and has taken up his post. He greets Roosevelt’s success with cheerful irony, as if to say: You lured four million people with your promises of reform, dear impostor Roosevelt. Very well! Tomorrow those four million will see that your promises were a fraud, and don’t forget that they are following you only because they feel that it is impossible to go on living in the old way.

As usual, the dialectic of Lenin’s argument is subtle and easily overlooked but unmistakable once noticed. It is the contradiction of freedom and capitalist political domination.

It is important to note how Lenin regarded Progressivism — in this case, that of Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party in the 1912 election — as expression of the depth of the crisis of capitalist politics and as a response to the proletarian socialist movement and its political parties. Indeed, for Lenin, the crisis of capitalist politics was itself a result of the rise of socialism as a political force.

Lenin understood the electoral results for Debs’s Presidential candidacy as at least potentially representing far more than the actual vote tally — which, was proportionally the highest percentage the Socialist Party of America ever received, although it received a greater raw number of votes later. It was not necessary an indication of civil-social organizing strength, in labor unions and other formations of working class power “on the ground” outside the formal political sphere. The Socialist Party called for workers to vote their interests and conscience, which according to local as well as national issues might vary from the more symbolic expression of voting for the Socialist candidates in any given electoral contest. The Socialists did not aim to achieve governing power, especially at the national level, through election, but rather used voting as a suggestive measure of potential popular support as well as electoral campaigns as platforms for propagandizing the cause of socialism.

Outside the U.S., it is significant that 1912 was generally a high water-mark of socialist electoral strength, for instance in Germany when the SPD became the largest single political party in the national Reichstag elections. Indeed, it was in response to this electoral triumph that the Prussian Imperial government began considering launching a war to potentially divide and thus stem the growth and possibly even smash completely the SPD– eventually a factor helping lead to the outbreak of WWI two years later in 1914.

For Lenin, political events in such disparate places as the U.S. and Germany were integral aspects of a world-historical situation of capitalism in which the working class’s movement for socialism was not merely responding to but actively shaping developments. This has not been the case in the same ways during the last hundred years, despite the Cold War and other phenomena of the 20th century. The reason is simply that the socialist movement in the core advanced capitalist countries has bever been as strong as during this era leading up to WWI, as expressed in the parties of the Socialist International.

While it is familiar and indeed a banal commonplace now for the Left to claim credit for any and all actions in capitalist politics as somehow a response and attempt to counteract or block its own efforts, this is a gross abuse of the kind of judgment Lenin exercised in his interpretations of contemporary political events.

So what was the basis for Lenin’s analysis of American politics in its moment? I would like to address what Lenin had to say about Eugene Debs as exemplar of American socialism, in order to try to understand Lenin’s criteria for socialist politics more generally. I will move backwards historically, from how Lenin evaluated prospects for socialist politics in the U.S. through the figure of Debs as this developed towards the crisis of the Marxist movement that unfolded in the first world war and the revolutions that broke out in its aftermath, in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy, and threatened to spread beyond.

Lenin considered Debs and the tendency he represented in American socialism as potential participants in the fledgling Third or Communist International that arose from the crisis of the Second or Socialist International in the war but was polarized definitively in the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

In 1919, at the time of the formation of the new Communist International, in response to the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the famous leaders of German Marxism, Debs wrote, in “The day of the people” that,

In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no sex, and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for worldwide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death!

From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.

“The Day of the People has arrived!”

Several years earlier, in 1915, the first year of the World War, Lenin had written to Alexandra Kollontai to instruct her investigation of American socialists, before the U.S. had entered the war and was still officially neutral. To Kollontai he wrote,

As regards the New York Volkszeitung, Grimm assured me today that they are quite Kautskian! Is that the case? I think our German pamphlet might help you to determine the “strength” of their internationalism. . . .

In a few days we are publishing here . . . a little pamphlet on behalf of the Zimmerwald Left. Under this name we should like to launch into international circulation, as widely as possible, our Left group at Zimmerwald (. . . [including Luxemburg’s] Polish Social–Democrats) . . . with its draft resolution and manifesto. . . . We rely on you to publish it in America in English too (for it is hopeless to do this in England: it has to be brought there from America) and, if possible, in other languages. This is to be the first publication by the nucleus of Left Social-Democrats of all countries, who have a clear, exact and full reply to the question of what is to be done and in which direction to go. It would be most important if you could succeed in publishing this in America, circulating it as widely as possible and establishing firm publishing links (Charles Kerr [in] Chicago; the Appeal to Reason [in] Kansas, etc.). . . .

Try establishing contact with them — if only in writing, should you not get to Kansas. Their little paper is sometimes not bad. Be sure to sound them out with our resolution of the “Zimmerwald Left”. And what is Eugene Debs? He sometimes writes in a revolutionary way. Or is he also a wet-rag Ă  la Kautsky?

I never doubted that [Morris] Hillquit would be for Kautsky and even to the right of him, because I saw him at Stuttgart (1907) and heard how afterwards he defended the prohibition against bringing yellow people into America (an “internationalist”!).

When assessing the prospects for the formation of the Communist international in 1918, Lenin had written that he included Debs among those “groups and currents within the social-patriotic parties more or less close to Bolshevism”: “the ‘League’ in the United States (or followers of Debs?).”

Lenin had read Debs’s declaration of opposition to the war:

Look at America — apart from everything else a neutral country. Haven’t we the beginnings of a split there, too: Eugene Debs, the “American Bebel” [analogue to the leader of the German SPD prior to WWI], declares in the socialist press that he recognises only one type of war, civil war for the victory of socialism, and that he would sooner be shot than vote a single cent for American war expenditure

Debs had written:

I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of rite plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight for the ruling class. . . . I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make it necessary. . . .

To which Lenin responded:

This is what Eugene Debs, the American Bebel, the beloved leader of the American workers, writes to them.

This again shows you, comrades, that in all countries of the world real preparations are being made to rally the forces of the working class. The horrors of war and the sufferings of the people are incredible. But we must not, and we have no reason whatever, to view the future with despair.

Lenin considered the revolutionary tradition strong in America. In his “Letter to American workers” in 1918, he wrote that,

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them.

Lenin continued:

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

Lenin recognized Woodrow Wilson, today considered a “progressive,” as an entirely conservative-reactionary political figure, representative of the Democrats as the conservative party in U.S. politics of the time, by contrast with the Republicans who had dominated American national politics since the Civil War. Indeed, if the Republican vote had not been split between Roosevelt and his former Vice President Taft, divided on the level and pace of progressive reforms of capitalism to be effected, then Wilson would never have won the Presidency in 1912. Wilson used his victory to racially segregate Washington DC and the U.S. military, in a bitter triumph for the Jim Crow Redeemer party at the national level.

As regards the 1912 election itself, when the world crisis of war and revolution was visible emerging on the horizon but not yet dawned, for his part, Debs considered Roosevelt’s reform effort to rationalize capitalism in 1912 to be “psychotic” — he considered its prospects not only dim but delusional. The fact that what Roosevelt proposed in 1912 was implemented 20 years later by his nephew-in-law FDR’s Administration, in a massive realignment of American politics that reversed the roles of its capitalist parties, should not be assumed to retrospectively validate Roosevelt’s perspective in 1912, since it was a very different moment, especially politically: not yet the Great Depression-era  crisis that led to fascism and world war. Indeed, Roosevelt did not necessarily anticipate world war in 1912 as, by contrast, the socialists of the Second International certainly did, in their understanding of the crescendo building of the imperialist height of world capitalism. | §