Michael Woodson interviews Chris Cutrone on capitalism, post-neoliberalism and prospects for socialism in the 21st century, for the radio program Living Art on WKPFT 90.1 FM, Houston, Texas, broadcast in two parts, May 28 and June 4, 2020. Part 1 addresses the difference between Ancient and Modern or traditional civilization and bourgeois society; Part 2 addresses the new contradiction of capitalism with the Industrial Revolution and the task of socialism.
“Socialism in the 21st century” article referenced in the interview available at:
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )
The present is characterized not only by a political crisis of the global neoliberal order but also by differing interpretations of the cause of this crisis: capitalism. If we are to interpret capitalism, we must also know how to change it. We ask the panelists to consider the following questions: – What is capitalism? – Is capitalism contradictory? If so, what is this contradiction and how does it relate to Left politics? – How has capitalism changed over time, and what have these changes meant politically for the Left? – Does class struggle take place today? If so, how, and what role should it play for the Left? – Is capitalism in crisis? If so, how? And how should the Left respond? – If a new era of global capitalism is emerging, how do we envision the future of capitalism and what are the implications of this for the Left?
ACCORDING TO MARX, capitalism is the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production.[1] The effect of this self-contradiction of bourgeois society in industrial production is the division of capital and labor. It is from this division that the opposed classes of capitalists and workers derive. The class struggle between workers and capitalists is a phenomenon — the phenomenal expression — of the self-contradiction of capitalism. It expresses labor’s contradiction with itself — which is also capital’s contradiction with itself. When referring to “capital and labor” there are actually just two forms of capital — Marx called these “variable and constant” as well as “fixed and circulating” capital — and both refer to labor — Marx called capital “alienated labor.” Labor and capital are two aspects of the same thing in capitalism. The bourgeois social relations of production are the social relations of labor.
The usual oppositions posed by the labor
movement and by socialism, such as profit vs. human needs (and the needs of the
natural world beyond humanity), are expressions of this self-contradiction of
society in capitalism, the needs of capital as opposed to the needs of labor. The
contradiction of capital is not external but internal.
Marx described capitalism as “false
necessity.” What he meant by this was not simply wrong necessity, but rather self-contradictory
necessity. For the needs of capital and the needs of labor are the same. In
becoming opposed in capitalism, there is the conflict of labor with itself as
well as of capital with itself.
In capitalist politics, there is another
phenomenon — expression — of capital’s self-contradiction, namely, the disputes
among capitalist politicians over government policy, which can also express
conflicting interests of different capitalists, including different sectors of
industry, between different capitalist nation-states, etc. Workers employed in
different occupations as well as in industries can thus have different and
conflicting interests, competing over the priorities of social investment in
capital. The opposed aspects of capital — and of labor — are inseparable. Labor
cannot be extricated from capital any more than capital can be from labor.
The goal of socialism is to realize capital
as well as labor — to negate labor as well as capital. It is to realize as well
as negate — overcome — capitalist necessity. What would such Aufhebung [sublation] mean?
Discontents in capitalism take various
different and even opposed forms. The history of socialism itself as well as
the history of capitalism expresses self-contradictory desires and goals. At
different moments in the history of capitalism, the goals of socialism have
taken various different and indeed opposed forms. For instance, socialism has
variously regarded its goals as realizing the potential of capitalist
production as opposed to abolishing capitalist production: achieving
hyper-industrialism versus returning to subsistence primitivism[2]
have both found home at one time or place or another in the struggle for
socialism. Socialism could be defined as both and neither of the opposed
alternatives that capitalism generates as its own positive goals and its own
self-negations. All the various opposed demands arising from the discontents in
capitalism will be both fulfilled and negated — overcome — in socialism.
Capital seeks to abolish labor and labor
seeks to abolish capital — but more importantly in capitalism capital seeks to
abolish itself and labor seeks to abolish itself. By making labor more
productive it becomes less necessary; by producing excess capital it becomes
more superfluous — less a real measure of social value. Labor seeks to abolish
itself in capitalism, and thus to abolish capital, tasking socialism.
Only by encompassing the wide variety of
discontents within the working class and across the history of its developments
in capitalism could the political movement for socialist revolution to overcome
capitalism become adequate to its task and mission, by becoming conscious of it.
Since capital is the product of labor and labor the product of capital, this
would mean encompassing the divisions among the capitalists as well as within
capitalism itself as a total movement of society. The achievement of socialist
revolution would be when the working class can take responsibility politically
for capitalism as a whole. In so doing, the working class would confront the
choices posed by the contradictions of capitalism that are otherwise expressed
by the conflicts between the different capitalists and thus among workers of
the world. All the conflicts exhibited in the world must be grasped as
expressions and various forms of the self-contradiction of capitalism. Such
conflicts are necessary — to be
overcome.
The false necessity of capitalism as
self-contradictory but opposed real needs can only be truly engaged and
overcome from the standpoint of universal world history.[3]
This can only take place from within the social antagonisms of capitalism, and
not from partial, single-sided aspects of its contradictory totality.
The “workers of the world must unite”
because the world is united in its self-contradiction and crisis in capitalism.
The laborers must themselves take up and overcome the social relations of labor
in crisis in capitalism by assuming the socialist political responsibility for
capital that is eluded by capitalist politics.
Otherwise, the social conflicts in capitalism — between and among its capitalists and workers — will reproduce its contradictions forever. | P
[2] See the articles in the Platypus Review issue #125 (April 2020) published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first observation of Earth Day, April 22 (the same date as Lenin’s birthday), in 1970 (thus on the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s birth in 1870), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/category/pr/issue-125/>.
Presented at a Platypus teach-in on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 22, 2020. Video recording available online at: <https://youtu.be/01z8Mzz2IY4>.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF LENIN’S BIRTH, I
would like to approach Lenin’s meaning today by critically examining an essay
written by the liberal political philosopher Ralph Miliband on the occasion of
Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970[1]
— which was the year of my own birth.
The reason for using Miliband’s essay to frame my discussion
of Lenin’s legacy is that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America magazine Jacobin republished Miliband, who is
perhaps their most important theoretical inspiration, in 2018 as a belated
treatment of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — or
perhaps as a way of marking the centenary of the ill-fated German Revolution of
1918, which failed as a socialist revolution but is usually regarded as a
successful democratic revolution, issuing in the Weimar Republic under the
leadership of the SPD Social-Democratic Party of Germany. There is a wound in
the apparent conflict between the desiderata of socialism and democracy, in
which the Russian tradition associated with Lenin is opposed to and by the
German tradition associated with social democracy, or, alternatively,
“democratic socialism,” by contrast with the supposedly undemocratic socialism
of Lenin, however justified or not by “Russian conditions.” The German model
seems to stand for conditions more appropriate to advanced capitalist and
liberal democratic countries.
Ralph Miliband is most famously noted for his perspective of
“parliamentary socialism” But this was not simply positive for Miliband but
critical, namely, critical of the Labour Party in the U.K. — It must be noted
that Miliband’s sons are important leaders in the Labour Party today, among its
most prominent neoliberal figures. Preceding his book on parliamentary
socialism, Miliband wrote a critical essay in 1960, “The sickness of
Labourism,” written for the very first issue of the newly minted New Left Review in 1960, in the
aftermath of Labour’s dismal election failure in 1959, Miliband’s criticism of which
of course the DSA/Jacobin cannot
digest let alone assimilate. The DSA/Jacobin
fall well below even a liberal such as Miliband — and not only because the U.S.
Democratic Party is something less than the U.K. Labour Party, either in
composition or organization. Miliband’s perspective thus figures for the DSA/Jacobin in a specifically symptomatic
way, as an indication of limits and, we must admit, ultimate failure, for
instance demonstrated by the recent fate of the Bernie Sanders Campaign as an
attempted “electoral road” to “socialism,” this year as well as back in 2016 — the
latter’s failure leading to the explosion in growth of the DSA itself. Neither
Labour’s aspiration to socialism, whether back in the 1960s or more recently
under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, nor the DSA’s has come to any kind of even
minimal fruition. Thus the specter — the haunting memory — of Lenin presents
itself for our consideration today: How does Lenin hold out the promise of
socialism?
Previously, I have written on several occasions on Lenin.[2]
So I am tasked to say something today that I haven’t already said before. First
of all, I want to address the elephant in the room (or is it the 800lb
gorilla?), which is Stalinism, the apparent fate of supposed “Leninism” — which
is also a demonstrated failure, however it is recalled today in its own
peculiar way by the penchant for neo-Stalinism that seems to be an act of
defiance, épater la bourgeoisie [shock
the bourgeoisie], on the part of young (or not so young) Bohemian “Leftists,”
in their deeply disappointed bitterness and antipathy towards the political
status quo. “Leninism” means a certain antinomian nihilism — against which
Lenin himself was deeply opposed.
An irony of history is that Lenin’s legacy has succumbed to
the very thing against which he defined himself and from which his Marxism
sharply departed, namely Narodnism, the Romantic rage of the supposedly
“revolutionary” intelligentsia, who claimed — understood themselves — to
identify with the oppressed and exploited masses, but really for whom the
latter were just a sentimental image rather than a reality. Lenin would be
extremely unhappy at what he — and indeed what revolution itself, let alone
“socialism” — has come to symbolize today. Lenin was the very opposite of a Mao
or a Che or Fidel. And he was also the opposite of Stalin. How so?
The three figures, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky, form the
heart of the issue of the Russian Revolution and its momentous effect on the
20th century, still reverberating today. Trotsky disputed Stalin and the Soviet
Union’s claim to the memory of Lenin, writing, in “Stalinism and Bolshevism” on
the 20th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in 1937, that Stalinism was the
“antithesis” of Bolshevism[3]
— a loaded word, demanding specifically a dialectical
approach to the problem. What did Lenin and Trotsky have in common as Marxists from
which Stalin differed? Stalin’s policy of “socialism in one country” was the
fatal compromise of not only the Russian Revolution, but of Marxism, and indeed
of the very movement of proletarian socialism itself. Trotsky considered
Stalinism to be the opportunist adaptation of Marxism to the failure of the
world socialist revolution — the limiting of the revolution to Russia.
This verdict by Trotsky was not affected by the spread of
“Communism” after WWII to Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, and, later,
Cuba. Each was an independent ostensibly “socialist” state — and by this very fact
alone represented the betrayal of socialism. Their conflicts, antagonism and
competition, including wars both “hot” and “cold,” for instance the alliance of
Mao’s China with the United States against Soviet Russia and the Warsaw Pact,
demonstrated the lie of their supposed “socialism.” Of course each side
justified this by reference to the supposed capitulation to global imperialism
by the other side. But the point is that all these states were part of the
world capitalist status quo. It was that unshaken status quo that fatally
compromised the ostensibly “socialist” aspirations of these national
revolutions. Suffice it to say that Lenin would not have considered the outcome
of the Russian Revolution or any subsequently that have sought to follow in its
footsteps to be socialism — at all. Lenin would not have considered any of them
to represent the true Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat,” either. For Lenin,
as for Marxism more generally, the dictatorship of the proletariat (never mind
socialism) required the preponderant power over global capitalism world-wide,
that is, victory in the core capitalist countries. This of course has never yet
happened. So its correctness is an open question.
In his 1970 Lenin centenary essay, Miliband chose to address
Lenin’s pamphlet on State and Revolution,
an obvious choice to get at the heart of the issue of Lenin’s Stalinist legacy.
But Miliband shares a great deal of assumptions with Stalinism. For one, the
national-state framing of the question of socialism. But more importantly,
Miliband like Stalinism elides the non-identity of the state and society, of
political and social power, and hence of political and social revolution. Miliband
calls this the problem of “authority.” In this is evoked not only the
liberal-democratic but also the anarchist critique of not merely Leninism but
Marxism itself. Miliband acknowledges that indeed the problem touched on by
Lenin on revolution and the state goes to the heart of Marxism, namely, to the
issue of the Marxist perspective on the necessity of the dictatorship of the
proletariat, which Marx considered his only real and essential original
contribution to socialism.
In 1917, Lenin was accused of “assuming the vacant throne of
Bakunin” in calling for “all power to the soviets [workers and soldiers
councils].” — Indeed, Miliband’s choice of Lenin’s writings, The State and Revolution, written in the
year of the 1917 Russian Revolution, is considered Lenin’s most anarchist or at
least libertarian text. Lenin’s critics accused him of regressing to
pre-Marxian socialism and neglecting the developed Marxist political
perspective on socialist revolution as the majority action by the working
class, reverting instead to putschism or falling back on minority political
action. This is not merely due to the minority numbers of the industrial
working class in majority peasant Russia but also and especially the minority
status of Lenin’s Bolshevik Communist Party, as opposed to the majority
socialists of Socialist Revolutionaries and Menshevik Social Democrats, as well
as of non-party socialists such as anarchist currents of various tendencies,
some of whom were indeed critical of the anarchist legacy of Bakunin himself.
Bakunin is infamous for his idea of the “invisible dictatorship” of conscious
revolutionaries coordinating the otherwise spontaneous action of the masses to
success — apparently repeating the early history of the “revolutionary
conspiracy” of Blanqui in the era of the Revolution of 1848. But what was and
why did Bakunin hold his perspective on the supposed “invisible dictatorship”? Marxism
considered it the corollary — the complementary “opposite” — of the Bonapartist
capitalist state, with its paranoiac Orwellian character of subordinating
society through society’s own complicity in the inevitable authoritarianism — the
blind social compulsion — of capitalism, to which everyone was subject, and in
which both and neither everyone’s and no one’s interests are truly represented.
Bakunin’s “invisible dictatorship” was not meant to dominate but facilitate the
self-emancipation of the people themselves. — So was Lenin’s — Marxism’s — political
party for socialist revolution.
Lenin has of course been accused of the opposite tendency from anarchism, namely of being a Lassallean or “state” socialist. Lenin’s The State and Revolution drew most heavily on Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, attacking the Lassalleanism of the programme of the new Social-Democratic Party of Germany at its founding in 1875. So this raises the question of the specific role of the political party for Marxism: Does it lead inevitably to statism? The history of ostensible “Leninism” in Stalinism seems to demonstrate so. The antinomical contrary interpretations of Lenin — libertarian vs. authoritarian, statist vs. anarchist, liberal vs. democratic — are not due to some inconsistency or aporia in Lenin or in Marxism itself — as Miliband for one thought — but are rather due to the contradictory nature of capitalism itself, which affects the way its political tasks appear, calling for opposed solutions. The question is Marxism’s self-consciousness of this phenomenon — Lenin’s awareness and consciously deliberate political pursuit of socialism under such contradictory conditions.
The history of Marxism regarding rival currents in socialism
represented by Lassalle and Bakunin must be addressed in terms of how Marxism
thought it overcame the dispute between social and political action — between
anarchism and statism — as a phenomenon of antinomies of capitalism, namely,
the need for both political and social action to overcome the contradiction of
capitalist production in society. This was the necessary role of the mass
political party for socialism, to link the required social and political
action. Such mediation was not meant to temper or alleviate the contradiction
between political and social action — between statism and anarchism — but
rather to embody and in certain respects exacerbate the contradiction.
Marxism was not some reconciled synthesis of anarchism and
statism, a happy medium between the two, but rather actively took up — “sublated”
so to speak — the contradiction between them as a practical task, regarding the
conflict in the socialist movement as an expression of the contradiction of
capitalism, from which socialism was of course not free. There is not a
question of abstract principles — supposed libertarian vs. authoritarian
socialism — but rather the real movement of history in capitalism in which
socialism is inextricably bound up. Positively: Lenin called for overcoming
capitalism on the basis of capitalism itself, which also means from within the
self-contradiction of socialism.
Lenin stands accused of Blanquism. The 19th century
socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui gets a bad rap for his perspective of
“revolutionary conspiracy” to overthrow the state. For Blanqui, such
revolutionary political action was not itself meant to achieve socialism, but
rather to clear the way for the people themselves to achieve socialism through
their social action freed from domination by the capitalist state.
Miliband is at best what Marx/ism would have considered a “petit
bourgeois socialist.” But really he was a liberal, albeit under 20th century
conditions of advanced late capitalism. What does this mean? It is about the
attitude towards the capitalist state. The predecessor to Bakunin, Proudhon,
the inventor of “anarchism” per se, was coldly neutral towards the Revolution
of 1848, but afterwards oriented positively towards the post-1848 President of
the 2nd Republic, Louis Bonaparte, especially after his coup d’état establishing the 2nd Empire. This is because Proudhon,
while hostile to the state as such, still considered the Bonapartist state a
potential temporary ally against the capitalist bourgeoisie. Proudhon’s
apparent opposite, the “statist socialist” Ferdinand Lassalle had a similar
positive orientation towards the eventual first Chancellor of the Prussian
Empire Kaiserreich, Bismarck, as an ally against the capitalist bourgeoisie — Bismarck
who infamously said that the results of the 1848 Revolution demonstrated that
not popular assemblies but rather “blood and iron” would solve the pressing
political issues of the day. In this was recapitulated the old post-Renaissance
alliance of the emergent bourgeoisie — the new free city-states — with the
Absolutist Monarchy against the feudal aristocracy.
The 20th century social-democratic welfare state is the
inheritor of such Bonapartism in the capitalist state — Bismarckism, etc. For
instance, Efraim Carlebach has written of the late 19th century Fabian
socialist enthusiasm for Bismarck from which the U.K. Labour Party historically
originated[4]
— the Labour Party replaced and inherited the role of the Liberal Party in the
U.K., which had represented the working class, especially its organization in
labor unions. The Labour Party arose in the period of Progressivism — progressive
liberalism — and progressive liberals around the world, such as for instance
Theodore Roosevelt in the U.S., were inspired by Wilhelmine Germany that was
founded by Bismarck, specifically Bismarck as the founder of the welfare state.
Bismarck’s welfare state provisions were made long before the socialists were
any kind of real political threat. The welfare state has always been a police
measure and not a compromise with the working class. Indeed socialists
historically rejected the welfare state — this hostility only changed in the
1930s, with the Stalinist adoption of the People’s Front against fascism and
its positive orientation towards progressive liberal democracy.
Pre-WWI Wilhelmine Germany was considered at the time progressive
and indeed liberal, part of the greater era’s progressive liberal development
of capitalism — which was opposed by contemporary socialists under Marxist
leadership. But by conflating state and society in the category of “authority,”
further obscured by the question of “democracy,” Miliband expresses the
liquidation of Marxism into statism — Miliband assumes the Bonapartism of the
capitalist state, regarding the difference of socialism as one of mere policy,
for instance the policies pursued by the state that supposedly serve one group —
say, capitalists or workers — over others. This expresses a tension — indeed
contradiction — between liberalism and democracy. This contradiction is often
mistaken for that of liberalism versus socialism, as for instance by the
post-20th century “Left” going back to the 1930s Stalinist era of the Communist
Party’s alliance with progressive liberals in support of FDR’s New Deal, whose
history is expressed today by DSA/Jacobin.
For Lenin, by contrast, the issue of politics — and hence of
proletarian socialism — is not of what is being done, but rather of who is
doing it. The criterion of socialism for Marxism such as Lenin’s is the
activity of the working class — or lack thereof. The socialist revolution and
the political regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not for Lenin the
achievement of socialism but rather its mere precondition, opening the door to
the self-transformation of society beyond capitalism led by the — “dictatorship,”
or social preponderance, preponderance of social power — of the working class.
Without this, it is inevitable that the state serves rather not the interests
of the capitalists as a social group but rather the imperatives of capital,
which is different. For Lenin, the necessary dictatorship of the proletariat was
the highest form of capitalism — meaning capitalism brought to highest level of
politics and hence of potentially working through its social
self-contradictions — and not yet socialism — meaning not yet even the
overcoming of capitalism.
By equating the capitalist welfare state with socialism,
with the only remaining criterion the democratic self-governance of the working
class, Miliband by contrast elided the crucial Marxist distinction between the
dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism. For Miliband, what made the
state socialist or not was the degree of supposed “workers’ democracy.” — In
this way, Miliband serves very well to articulate the current Jacobin/DSA identification of its
political goals with “democratic socialism.” But, like Miliband, Jacobin/DSA falls prey to the issue of
the policies pursued by the state as the criterion of socialism, however
without Miliband’s recognition of the difference between (social-democratic
welfare state) policies pursued by capitalist politicians vs. by the working
class itself.
Lenin pursued the political and social power — the social
and political revolution — of the working class as not the ultimate goal but
rather the “next necessary step” in the history of capitalism leading — hopefully
— to its self-overcoming in socialism. As a Marxist, Lenin was very sober and
clear-eyed — unsentimental — about the actual political and social tasks of the
struggle for socialism — what they were and what they were not.
In harking back to the manifest impasse of the mid-20th
century capitalist welfare state registered by Miliband, however through
identifying this with the alleged limits of Lenin’s and greater Marxism’s
consciousness of the problem, but without proper recognition of its true nature
in capitalism, those such as Jacobin/DSA
actively obfuscate, bury and forget, not Marxism such as Lenin’s, or the goal
of socialism, but rather the actual problem of capitalism they are trying to
confront, obscuring it still further.
The “Left” today such as DSA/Jacobin wants the restoration of pre-neoliberal progressive
capitalism, for instance the pre-neoliberal politics of the U.K. Labour Party —
or indeed simply the pre-neoliberal Democrats. Their misuse of the label
“socialism” and abuse of “Marxism,” including even the memory of Lenin and their
bandying about of the word “revolution,” is overwrought and in the service of
progressive capitalism. This is an utter travesty of socialism, Marxism, and
the memory of Lenin.
On the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, we owe him at
least the thought that what he consciously recognized and actually pursued as a
Marxist be remembered properly and not falsified — and certainly not in the
interest of seeking, by sharp contrast to Lenin, the “democratic” legitimation
of capitalism, which even liberals such as Ralph Miliband acknowledged to be a
deep problem afflicting contemporary society and its supposed “welfare” state. By
reckoning with what Marxists such as Lenin understood as the real problem and
actual political tasks of capitalism, there is yet hope that we will resume the
true socialist pursuit of actually overcoming it. | P
Postscript: On Jacobin’s defense of Miliband contra Lenin
Longtime DSA member and Publisher and Editor of Jacobin magazine Bhaskar Sunkara
responded to my critique of Ralph Miliband by interviewing Leo Panitch of the Socialist Register on Jacobin’s YouTube broadcast Stay at Home #29 of April 27, 2020.[5]
Sunkara has previously stated that rather than a follower of Lenin or Kautsky,
he is a follower of Miliband. Sunkara and Panitch were eager to defend Miliband’s
socialist bona fides against my
calling him a liberal, but what they argued confirmed my understanding of
Miliband as a liberal and not a socialist let alone a Marxist. The issue is
indeed one of the state and revolution. It is not, as Panitch asserted in the
interview, a matter of political “pluralism” in socialism.
Panitch, who claims Miliband as an important mentor figure,
spoke at a Platypus public forum panel discussion in Halifax in January 2015 on
the meaning of political party for the Left, and observed in his prepared
opening remarks that in the 50 years between 1870 and 1920 — Lenin’s
time —
there took place the first and as yet only time in history when the subaltern
have organized themselves as a political force.[6]
In his interview with Sunkara on Miliband, Panitch now claims that Lenin’s strategy
—
which was that of 2nd International Marxism as a whole, for instance by Karl Kautsky,
Rosa Luxemburg, Eugene Debs et al —of replacing the capitalist state with
the organizations of the working class that had been built up by the socialist
political party before the revolution, was invalidated by the historical
experience of the 20th century. Instead, according to Panitch, the existing liberal
democratic capitalist state was to provide the means to achieve socialism. This
is because it is supposedly no longer a state of capitalists but rather one
committed to capitalism: committed to capital accumulation. But Marxism always
considered it to be so: Bonapartist management of capitalism in political liberal
democracy.
Panitch claims that Miliband’s critique of the U.K. Labour
Party was in its Fabian dogma of “educating the ruling class in socialism
through the state,” whereas socialists would instead “educate the working class
in socialism through the state.” But Lenin and other Marxists considered the
essential education of the working class in the necessity of socialism to take
place through its “class struggle” under capitalism — its struggle as a class to
constitute itself as a revolutionary force — in which it built its civil
social organizations and political parties aiming to take political and social —
state —
power. Panitch condemns Lenin for his allegedly violent vision of the overthrow
of the capitalist state and replacing it with a revolutionary workers state —
the infamous “dictatorship of the proletariat” always envisioned by Marxism.
Thus Panitch condemns the Marxist perspective on proletarian socialist revolution per se. But the question for Lenin and other Marxists was not revolution as a strategy — they were not dogmatic “revolutionists” as opposed to reformists — but rather the inevitability of capitalist crisis and hence the inevitability of political and social revolution. The only question was whether and how the working class would have the political means to turn the revolution of inevitable capitalist crisis into potential political and social revolution leading to socialism. By abandoning this Marxist perspective on revolution — which Miliband himself importantly did not rule out — Panitch and Sunkara along with Jacobin/DSA do indeed articulate a liberal democratic and not proletarian socialist let alone Marxist politics. | P
Presented on a panel with Jamal Abed-Rabbo (Democratic Socialists of America), Patrick Quinn (Solidarity, Democratic Socialists of America) and Earl Silbar at the closing plenary discussion of the 2020 Platypus Affiliated Society International Convention, April 4, 2020.
The 21st century
Last year at the Platypus international convention closing plenary discussion, I spoke on the issue and problem of “Redeeming the 20th century.” There I commented on the phenomenon of the neo-social democratic and neo-Stalinist turn of the Millennial Left in the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 and the Jeremy Corbyn-aligned Momentum caucus of the U.K. Labour Party. I titled my talk “Statism and anarchy today” and addressed the phenomenon of socialism and Marxism being mistakenly identified with statism and freedom being mistakenly identified with the anarchy of capitalism. — I have been thinking a lot lately about Karl Popper’s liberal “open society” of freedom and unavoidable risk contra socialism’s false and self-defeating promise of security.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election and sudden explosion of growth of the DSA Democratic Socialists of America in response to Trump, I declared the Millennial Left “dead.” At the time, it was commented that my declaration was “sublimated spleen” — repressed melancholy at the losses of the Millennial Left. Now, regarding the growing wave of disease about to engulf us and desperate attempts to stem the menacing tide of misery from economic and other social devastation and dislocation, I am struck by how the Millennial generation has had to endure the worst catastrophes to have occurred during my lifetime, the War on Terror, the Great Recession, and now perhaps the worst plague in more than a century — the gravest scourge since the 1918 Spanish Flu. This does not change the verdict of history, which, as the young Nietzsche recognized, is not merciful let alone sympathetic in its judgments, but is rather relentlessly ruthlessly “critical.” As Marx observed, in his historical moment, and at his similarly relatively young age of 25 years, it is necessary to be “ruthless” in the “critique of everything existing.” And as Engels observed, quoting Goethe’s Mephistopheles, “everything that exists deserves to perish.” — Is this the perishing we deserve?
Back to basics
In the
interest I serve that Marxism not perish entirely, I want to get back to basics
and define the task of socialism properly. This means defining the problem of
capitalism properly.
First, it is important to address what capitalism is not. It is not greed or profiteering, nor is it exploitation — all recognized sins and crimes in this society. Capitalism is not a social system or moral order or set of values — it is a crisis of the social system, moral order and set of values. The society we live in is bourgeois society. We live in bourgeois values and morality. Capitalism is the contradiction of that society and its values. And contradiction does not mean hypocrisy.
Georg Lukács
observed the phenomenon of “reification” in capitalism, and described this,
among other things, as a reversal of cause and effect.
We commonly identify capitalism with class inequality and hierarchy and its resulting relationships of exploitation, but we are given to think that this is the cause of the problem of capitalism, rather than, as Marxism properly recognized, as the effect of capitalism.
Marxist recognition of
capitalism
For Marxism, after the Industrial Revolution, capitalism exhibits a crisis of the value of labor in social production. But the value of labor, specifically of labor-time, is still the measure and still mediates the value of social production in capitalism. In short, and without explaining how this works in Marx’s view, it is the self-contradiction of the value of labor time that produces as a result the conflict between the value and social right of capital with the social right and value of wage-labor. In capitalism there is a conflict of social rights between labor and capital; but Marxism understood this as a conflict of labor with itself, since capital was nothing but alienated labor. Reification in Lukács’s sense meant a reversal of cause and effect such that capital appeared as a thing separate from labor; but as Nikolai Bukharin put it, in The ABC of Communism, capital is not a thing but a social relation. Specifically, it is the self-contradictory social relation of labor with the means of production, or, the contradiction of two aspects of value in social production, capital and labor, namely, between past accumulated dead labor and present living labor.
The self-undermining and self-destructive character of the disparity between the diminishing value of human labor-time in industrial social production and capital as the “general social intellect” of technique and organization in production and the reproduction of society — what my old professor Moishe Postone described after Marx as the “shearing effect” and resulting antagonism between labor and the needs of its reproduction and its results and effects in society — has its expression in the phenomena of inflation, the necessity of interest in credit, and finance as the necessary form of speculation — namely, the claim of the past and present on the future — in investment in production.
The result
of massive and constantly increasing productivity in industry is the cheapening
of labor and thus the cheapening of value. But this cheapening threatens the
value of investment and its speculation, hence the crisis of social value in
capital. Attempts to preserve value in capital result in accumulation and
concentration, producing a separate capitalist class of investors, who, in
Marx’s words, are not rich because they are captains of industry, but rather
become captains of industry merely because they are rich: they are capitalists
in the sense of not merely owners of capital, but rather are the agents and
servants of capital. Capital does not follow the dictates of the capitalists;
but the capitalists follow the dictates of capital.
Capital is not profiteering, because profiteering is compelled by constantly diminishing value in capital, to preserve the value of investment. All production in capitalism is in this sense profit-driven, but not because profit is the goal or the ends of production, but rather because profit is the means by which capital preserves its value. Workers have an interest in the profitability of the capital that employs them, to preserve social investment in their work.
Marxism thus considered capitalism to be a general social compulsion to produce and preserve value in the form of capital to which all — everyone — in society are subject. In this sense, everyone in capitalism is a capital-ist, namely a follower of capital.
And capital
does not mean money; rather, as we already call it, “human capital,” labor
itself is a form of capital, and is of course the most important form of
capital: Marx called it “variable” as well as “circulating capital.”
Crises of
value in capital characteristically result — as in the recent Great Recession
— in the twin phenomena of superfluous labor and superfluous money: money that
cannot find investment as capital; and labor that cannot find employment in
social production. This results in the destruction of existing concrete forms
of production — the destruction of the concrete manifestations of capital —
which means the depreciation of money and the unemployment, starving and perishing
of the workers, the idling of machines and factories, the bankruptcy and
dissolution of firms etc.
All of this
is to help explain what Marxism originally meant by capitalism being, not a
social system, but rather a contradiction of the bourgeois social relations by
the industrial forces of production. Bourgeois social relations, for instance
private property, meant the social relations of labor — for as we know from
the bourgeois revolutionary thinker John Locke, the social rights of property
are based in the social rights of labor — namely, the self-ownership of the
workers to freely dispose of their labor as a commodity, for instance in the
employment contract. For Marxism, industrial production represented the
self-contradiction of the social relations of labor.
As Marx and
Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto,
it was capitalism itself which abolished — undermined and destroyed — private
property, not only in the form of capital but also and most importantly in the
form of labor: industrial production abolished the value of labor as a
commodity. Nonetheless, this constant self-destruction of value was the
occasion for its reconstitution and reproduction in different concrete forms
after each crisis in value. In short, so long as there were starving workers
desperate for employment, the social value of labor would be reconstituted —
however it was subject to self-destruction, restarting the cycle of capital
accumulation again.
The true task of socialism
Socialism
arose, from the perspective of Marxism, from this constant self-contradiction,
crisis, destruction, and demand for the reconstitution of the social value of
labor. As such, socialism was an expression of capitalism, namely, an
expression of the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial
forces of production. As the advocacy of the social value of labor, socialism
was an expression of the demands of the reconstitution of the bourgeois social
rights of labor, namely, its social value.
As all
serious thinkers of capitalism have recognized, capital is meant to be a means
to the ends of social production, namely, of serving and sustaining a society
of labor. That capital has reversed this and become an end in itself and social
labor a mere means to capital, this is the perversion that is denounced as
capitalism, or the subordination and domination of society to the dictates of
capital, to the compulsion to produce, reproduce and preserve the value of
labor after it has been diminished, undermined and destroyed by industrial
production.
In this sense, the task of socialism that Marxism recognized in industrial capitalism already nearly two centuries ago remains today.
However, the clarity that Marxism achieved about the true nature and hence purpose or end of this true task of socialism, to overcome the social relations of labor, has been obscured and lost. Instead, we have at present calls for socialism, as were posed already before Marx and Marxism, by pre-Marxian socialism, more naively and less critically consciously, based on preserving the value of labor. Even calls for UBI Universal Basic Income, for instance in the recent Presidential campaign of Andrew Yang, are based on the social value of labor that fails to find monetary compensation on the market.
Supposed “socialism” today means the state and hence political management of capitalism — the administrative maintenance of the working class when capital fails to do so. But this means trying to preserve capitalism against its own self-contradiction and crisis in social production.
Finally, a note on another way that capitalism is characteristically misrecognized, namely as competition and resulting individualism, including the competition of social groups in capitalism as “individuals,” for example, nations and other concrete collectives (hence nationalism and other forms of competitive communitarianism): it is the self-contradiction and crisis of value in labor that drives workers against each other competitively in zero-sum games for survival — rather than, as the original consciousness of bourgeois society recognized, a function of the development of cooperation, to lose one’s job in an obsolescent industry that loses to competition just means switching to a new and different form of employment. This development of social cooperation in production still occurs in capitalism, of course, but it is the tendency of diminishing and self-undermining value of labor in capitalism that renders such development fragmentary and unfulfilled, unnecessarily destructive and wasteful. So individualism and competition are, again, not the cause but rather the effect of the problem of capitalism. | §
A Democratic Party primary election day livestream interview with the contrarian Chris Cutrone from the Platypus Affiliated Society by Douglas Lain for Zero Books podcast will cover his new essay “Why Not Trump Again?”, the Bernie Sanders campaign, the coronavirus, and what is left of the Left.
THE CURRENT POLITICAL POLARIZATION in the U.S. is not Democrat vs. Republican or the minorities of race, gender and sexuality against straight white men: It is between the politics of free stuff vs. the politics of jobs — demands for more free stuff vs. demands for more jobs.[1]
“Democratic socialist” candidate for Democratic Party
nomination for President Bernie Sanders has responded to charges that he is
actually a communist with the assertion that the U.S. is already socialist, but
it is a socialism for billionaires. The kernel of truth in this is that there
is already government subsidy and other kinds of support for capital. The
question is, why is this so? Corruption? Or rather is it actually in the
interest of society? Of course it is the latter — the general interest of
capitalist society, which both Parties serve (as best they can).
Karl Marx observed that the productive activities of general
social cooperation are a “free gift to capital.” What did he mean? The social
process of production is not at all reducible to the paid wage-labor of
capitalist employees, but includes the activity of everyone in society. As
Frankfurt School Director Max Horkheimer wrote, in “The little man and the
philosophy of freedom,” “All those who work and even those who don’t, have a
share in the creation of contemporary reality.”[2]
Whether in terms of Andrew Yang’s proposed “freedom dividend” of free money for all in a UBI or free public education and health care for all, the question is not who’s going to pay for it, but rather how can capital make use of it. These are not anti-capitalist demands but demands for the better functioning of capital. The question is, what are we going to do in our society with all the fruits of our production — with all our free stuff? How can we make it benefit everyone? Is it just a matter of better shaving off more crumbs?
Yang proposes that the invaluable but currently unpaid labor
of mothers, inventors and artists should be supported by society. Marx called
this the communism of the principle of “from each according to ability, to each
according to need” in a society in which the “freedom of each is the
precondition for the freedom of all.” We already live in capitalism according
to this principle, but capital fails to fulfill it.
The Democrats propose to make capital fulfill its social responsibility; the Republicans think it already does so as best as possible, and any attempts at government intervention to make it do better, no matter how well intentioned the reforms, will actually be counterproductive. The result will be stagnation and lack of growth, undermining society along with capital. Without people working there can be no greater social benefits of production; without jobs there can be no free stuff.
This is the essential difference in U.S. politics or really
in capitalist politics everywhere: progressive capitalism vs. conservative
capitalism. Not spendthrift vs. frugality or kindheartedness vs. cynicism or
liberality vs mean-spiritedness, nor is it optimism vs. pessimism or idealism
vs. realism. It is a division of labor in debate over advocating how to keep
people working and how to distribute freely the products of their labor. It is
not a difference in principle or one of honesty vs. deception: both sides are
sincere — and both sides are self-deceiving.
Marx observed that the free gift to capital is the “general
social intellect.” But that general social intellect has become the “automatic
subject” of capital. How do we make it serve us, instead of us serving it? All
politicians in capitalism want the same thing. The problem is that capitalist
politics is not as intelligent as the society it represents. This is the true
meaning of socialist politics — to realize the general social intellect — which
today unfortunately is inevitably just a form of capitalist politics, whether
by Sanders, Yang or Trump. They all want to better serve us — which means
better serving capital. | P
[1]
See my “Robots and sweatshops” as well as “Why not Trump again?,” Platypus Review 123 (February 2020); and
“The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution
today,” PR 102 (December 2017 –
January 2018) and “The future of socialism: What kind of illness is capitalism?,”
PR 105 (April 2018), available online
at: <https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/robots-and-sweatshops/>, <https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/why-not-trump-again/>,
<https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>
and <https://platypus1917.org/2018/04/01/the-future-of-socialism-what-kind-of-illness-is-capitalism/>.
[2]
Horkheimer, Dawn & Decline: Notes
1926–31 and 1950–69 (New York: Seabury, 1978), 51.
Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (CPUSA) and Bertell Ollman at Columbia University on February 22, 2020.
“We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”
* * *
“I am delighted to come and visit. Behind the fact of [Fidel] Castro coming to this hotel, [Nikita] Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad they came to the United States. We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”
— Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York during his 1960 presidential election campaign, October 12, 1960
ANY REVOLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES will express the desire to preserve, sustain and promote the further development of the original American Revolution. The future of socialism, not merely in North America but in the whole world, depends on the fate of the American Revolution. But the “Left” today denies this basic truth.
Marx called the United States Civil War the alarm bell tolling the
time of world socialist revolution in the 19th century. That did not happen as
he wanted, but the subsequent rise of the massive world-transforming force of
American capitalism signaled — and still signals today — the task of
socialism.
My old comrades in the Spartacist League had a slogan, “Finish the Civil War!” It was vintage 1960s New Leftism in that it was about the Civil Rights Movement and overcoming de jure Jim Crow segregation as a legacy of failed Reconstruction. More than 50 years later, we can say that the task is more simply to complete the American Revolution. Former President John Quincy Adams (the son, not the father), speaking before the United States Supreme Court in the Amistad case advocating the freedom of slaves who rebelled, foresaw the future U.S. Civil War over the abolition of slavery and called it “the last battle of the American Revolution.” He did not foresee capitalism and its new tasks and future battles.
The American Socialist Eugene Debs famously said that the 4th of
July was a socialist holiday and that American Revolutionary figures such as
Jefferson and Lincoln belonged to the struggle for socialism — and not to the
capitalist political parties of Democrats and Republicans. Today, more than 100
years later, this remains no less true.
Up to the 1960s New Left, the American and global Left and
socialists and Communists all used to know this basic truth. — Indeed
mainstream capitalist politics acknowledged this fact of the ongoing task of
the American Revolution: Kennedy claimed the revolutionary heritage for the
U.S. against the Soviet Union; even Nixon in 1968 at the Republican National
Convention before his election called for a “new American Revolution.”
Today, Bernie Sanders and Trump call themselves not politicians but leaders of a movement; Sanders calls for a “political revolution” in the name of “democratic socialism.” What they mean of course is an electoral shift to support new policies. In 1992, when conceding to Bill Clinton’s electoral victory after 12 years of Republican rule, George Herbert Walker Bush (the father, not the son) said that the U.S. accomplishes through elections what other countries require civil wars.
We are discussing the meaning of the American Revolution for the
Left today because we face a general election later this year.
Such elections for the President and Congress, which have
stakes at a global and not merely national level, raise issues of the U.S.
political system and its foundation in the American Revolution. The future of
the American Revolution is at stake.
In the recent Trump impeachment farce, there was at least the
pantomime of conflict over the future of the American Republic: Was Trump a
threat to the Republic? — Were the Democrats and their allies in the Deep State
permanent bureaucracy? There has been an evident crisis of legitimacy of
the political order.
Do the rather mild and moderate policy reforms Trump has been implementing
and seeks to accomplish amount to a Constitutional crisis — threaten a civil
war? Despite the overheated language of the Democrats, Trump’s confident and
rather blasé attitude, and the matter-of-fact Constitutional arguments by his
lawyers and Republican Senators and Congressmen seem appropriate — indeed
unimpeachably correct.
What about “fascism”? This favored word on the Left and even among
Democrats speaks to the threat of civil war — extra-legal action and perhaps
violence. There has been the so-called “resistance” — a term that Attorney
General Barr said implied the danger of civil war and even revolution: he also
said, in the same speech before the Federalist Society last year, that the U.S.
Presidency embodied the “perfected Whig ideal of executive authority” as
envisioned by Locke and the English Glorious Revolution — that is, a
revolutionary ideal of political authority.
Mao said to Nixon in China that one finds among the Left-wing
followers of Marx actual fascists. He was contrite about the results of the
Cultural Revolution and admitted its pathology. — Today’s Maoists and DSA Democratic
“socialists” ought to listen and take heed.
It is not a matter of wanting the revolution but rather of its
actuality.
The struggle for socialism will not be according to the fevered
fantasies of today’s supposed “revolutionaries.” A socialist revolution will
take place — if at all — on the basis of a mass desire to save society, not
destroy it. Capitalism will appear as the threat to America, not
socialism.
The problem is the exaggerated rhetoric of mainstream politics
today. It expresses a partial if distorted truth, that capitalism recurrently
produces crises in society, over which political conflicts take place. We are
in the midst of such a crisis now — expressed by the crisis of the major
capitalist political parties symbolized by Trump and Sanders.
It has happened before. The Great Depression brought a sea-change
in American and indeed world politics: in the U.S., a change of the political
party system through FDR’s New Deal Coalition overturned the more than 50-year
post-Civil War and Reconstruction dominance of the Republican Party. The 1960s
experienced a new crisis and change of politics with an upheaval among the
Democrats and bringing forth not only the New Left but the New Right that
triumphed 50 years after the New Deal. 50 years after the 1960s, today we are
experiencing another change out of the crisis of the New Right — the crisis of the
Reagan Coalition of neoliberalism and neoconservatism and of the culture wars
that came out of the New Left and the crisis of American society that followed.
The Democrats have desperately sought to stem
the tide of Trumpian post-neoliberalism — and
indeed against the swell of support for Bernie Sanders’s Democratic
“socialism.” They have done so on the basis of their prior existing post-’60s
neoliberal electoral coalition of wealthy progressives, ethno-cultural and/or
“racial” minorities, liberally educated women and others, queers and what
remains of organized labor. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and immigrant rights
activists have protested not only against Trump, but have hounded Bernie and
his Sandernistas, the much-maligned “Bernie Bros” and Millennial hipster straight
white male Brocialists more generally — the “Squad” of Congressional
Representatives AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley
notwithstanding.
Last year’s New York Times 1619 Project led by
journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones — aimed at
delegitimating Trump after the failure of the Russia collusion hoax, in what Editor
Dean Baquet called the “shift from Russia to race” —
took the occasion of marking the quart-centenary of the arrival of African
slaves in the English colonies and explicitly sought to negate the American
Revolutionary founding in 1776.
Trump’s
Presidency seems to prove the invalidity of the American Revolution, and indeed
has implied that its meaning was confined to privileged white males who must at
all cost be cowed in the public sphere. It seems obvious that women, blacks and
other minorities have no stake in and must disavow the American Revolution. The
idea of a kind word being said about the American Revolutionaries — the
Founding Fathers — nowadays seems importune if not simply a provocative offense
and outrage — the Tory Alexander Hamilton’s musical fame under Obama
notwithstanding.
This is a sad
commentary on our historical moment today. It speaks to the utter and complete
destruction of the original historical Left, socialism and Marxism —the
complete triumph of counterrevolutionary ideology over everything from
Classical Liberalism onwards. Such ideology ensures the continuation of
capitalism.
However, this is a historical phenomenon only 50 years or so old. And it speaks not to the future but the past. The Millennials blew their chance to relate to history in new ways that challenged and tasked them beyond post-’60s doxa.[1]
The problem is
that the recent and ongoing crisis of the post-’60s neoliberal political order
has been expressed either by Trump and his new direction for the Republican
Party or by a nostalgic desire to reconstitute the old Democratic Party New
Deal Coalition that fell apart a half-century ago, symbolized by the old New
Leftist Sanders and the reanimation of the post-’60s collapse into the
Democratic Socialists of America, both of which date to the Reagan Revolution
era of the 1980s and its “resistance” to that time’s neoliberal changes in
capitalism. This does not augur new possibilities but holds to old memories
from a time many if not most were not yet even alive. Its spectral — unreal — quality
is evident.
“The past is not
dead; it is not even past.” And: “Those who do not learn from history are
condemned to repeat it” — are condemned to be trapped by it. These banal
catch-phrases can hide but also reveal a meaningful truth: that we are tasked
by history, whether or not we recognize it. American history continues,
regardless. The U.S. President is indeed, as is said, “the leader of the free
world.” As Trump says, America is the greatest country in world history; as his
impeachment prosecution declared, his Senate jury is the “highest deliberative
body in the history of the world.” This is simply — and undeniably — true. Why
and how it was constituted so, historically, is an unavoidable fact of life,
for people here and around the world, now and for the foreseeable future. — Can
we live up to its task?
My own rejoinder
to Trump’s Make America Great Again is to Make America Revolutionary Again. — But
no one else on the Left seems to be seeing the sign of the times. Instead,
everyone seems eager to rescue the neoliberal Democrats from the dustbin of
history. Even Bernie must genuflect to their PC orthodoxy. — But not Trump!
This is indeed a
time of reconsideration of history and its haunting memories. The question is
whether they must, as Marx said, remain “traditions of dead generations
weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” or can they be redeemed
by the struggle for freedom in the present. It seems that the Millennial Left
of the last two decades has joined the dead generations that came before it.
Any rebirth of a true socialist Left and of a Marxist recognition of its actual
tasks and possibilities must reckon with the history that has been abandoned by
recent generations, starting at least since the 1960s, and pursue its
unfulfilled potential.
Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds 1910-30 (Part 1)” with Aglaya K. Glebova and chair Florian Grosser with discussant Monica C Bravo.
Chris Cutrone
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of “revolutionary” art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotsky’s Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible “revolutionary culture” actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.
The history of Marxism is contemporary with and parallels the history of modernism in art. Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term “modernity” to refer specifically to the 19th century, and initiated modernism in both artistic practice and theory, is, like Marx, a figure of the 1848 moment. Modernism in art emerged around this central crisis of the 19th century, namely the capitalism resulting from the Industrial Revolution.
The relationship between modernism and Marxism was a potentially fraught one, however. In the aftermath of the post-WWI revolutionary wave, mostly Marxism became hostile to modernism, describing it as bourgeois decadence — a symptom of the decay of bourgeois society and culture in capitalism. Pre-WWI Marxism had a similar estimation of the culture of advanced capitalism, but less simply derogatorily than the utter condemnation by Stalinist repressive Socialist Realism seen in the 1930s and after. Stalinism regarded modernism as formalist and individualist, and raised earlier bourgeois art as a “Socialist Realist” and Humanist standard against it.
Leon Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, was a Marxist, like Lenin himself, whose sensibilities were formed in the pre-WWI era. Called upon to weigh in on debates within the Communist Party about state patronage of art in the Soviet Union, Trotsky wrote his book Literature and Revolution, which sought to clarify the Marxist attitude towards modern art, especially purportedly revolutionary and even supposedly “proletarian” art. Trotsky was unequivocal that there was and could be no such thing as proletarian art, but only bourgeois art produced by working class people. This is because as a Marxist, the terms bourgeois and proletarian were not sociological but rather historical categories. For Marxism, bourgeois society and culture had been proletarianized in the Industrial Revolution, but this did not produce a new society and culture but rather the proletarianized bourgeois society and culture went into crisis, exhibiting self-contradiction — unlike the bourgeois society and culture that had emerged out of Medieval civilization in the Renaissance.
The bourgeois social culture and art in the crisis of capitalism, like its economics and politics, demanded the achievement of socialism. This was the proletarian interest in modern art: the authentic democratization of culture and art that capitalism both made possible and constrained, giving rise to only distorted expressions of possibility and potential. Modernist art for Trotsky could not be considered a new culture but rather an expression of the task and demand for transcending bourgeois society and culture.
This is the value of art as an end in itself, taking itself as its own end or purpose; hence, l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake, is an expression of freedom, in both the bourgeois emancipation of production for its own sake and the Humanistic value of life in itself — a value unknown in traditional culture, which elevated morality above life, and subordinated aesthetic production to ritual or cultic community values.
This meant that the history of society, including its transformation in bourgeois emancipation and crisis in capitalism, could find expression in the history of art. The Marxist approach to art is hence primarily historical in character.
Later, towards the end of his life, in 1938, a decade and a half after his book Literature and Revolution, Trotsky wrote a series of letters to the American journal Partisan Review in which the art and literary critic Clement Greenberg first published. In his letters on “Art and politics in our epoch,” Trotsky described their relation as follows — please allow me to quote from Trotsky at some extended length, for in a few paragraphs he sums up well the attitude of Marxism towards art:
“The task of this letter is to correctly pose the question. “Generally speaking, art is an expression of man’s need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion. . . . “The decline of bourgeois society means an intolerable exacerbation of social contradictions, which are transformed inevitably into personal contradictions, calling forth an ever more burning need for a liberating art. Furthermore, a declining capitalism already finds itself completely incapable of offering the minimum conditions for the development of tendencies in art which correspond, however little, to our epoch. It fears superstitiously every new word, for it is no longer a matter of corrections and reforms for capitalism but of life and death. The oppressed masses live their own life. Bohemianism offers too limited a social base. Hence new tendencies take on a more and more violent character, alternating between hope and despair. The artistic schools of the last few decades – Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism – follow each other without reaching a complete development. Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society. “To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably . . . unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution. . . . “The real crisis of civilization is above all the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Stalinism is the greatest element of reaction in this crisis. Without a new flag and a new program it is impossible to create a revolutionary mass base; consequently it is impossible to rescue society from its dilemma. But a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of “leading” and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. . . . Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws – even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.”
There are several key ideas to be noted here. To begin with, that Trotsky — that is to say, Marxism — does not seek to provide an answer but rather only to correctly pose the question of the relation of art to politics in capitalism and any struggle for socialism: it is not prescriptive of a solution, but only diagnostic of a problem. That art is a “protest against reality,” no matter whether “conscious or unconscious, optimistic or pessimistic,” still a “protest,” whether expressing “hope or despair” — a very peculiar proposition that would not apply to art before capitalism, or before modernism. Adorno famously characterized art as the “expression of suffering” — also a description specific to the history of art in capitalism. And that art cannot save society — as the revolutionary cultural modernist Bohemians of the Russian Revolutionary era claimed — indeed, it cannot even save itself. Not least because it is a specialized activity on a very narrow base: the oppressed masses live their own lives, from which art is necessarily separated and exists apart.
So what can art do, according to Trotsky — according to Marxism? It can express the suffering of capitalism in which the “intolerable exacerbation of social contradictions . . . are transformed inevitably into personal contradictions,” and hence express a task, the “ever more burning need for a liberating art” expressed by every “really creative piece of work.” Art can express a need — but could not itself satisfy that need. This is the translation of the famous Marxist formulation, that bourgeois society in capitalism stood at a crossroads of “socialism or barbarism,” or, as Trotsky put it, art along with the greater society will “rot away” inevitably under capitalism.
Clement Greenberg’s essay on “Avant-garde and kitsch,” published the following year after Trotsky’s letters on art in Partisan Review, described the barbarization of bourgeois art in capitalism as its “Alexandrianism.” Art in capitalism became instantly transfixed, and, as such, museumified, leading a paradoxical undead existence or only as a spectral after-life of its emancipation in bourgeois society. Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness, published in the same year as Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, described this greater effect in society as “reification” or thing-ification, as the “spatialization of time,” what Marx called the congealing of human action in capitalism in the form of capital as “dead labor” which dominates living labor. Greenberg described the avant-garde as the attempt to set Alexandrianism in motion, and, as such, imitating the processes of art. Kitsch, in which Greenberg included Socialist Realism, by contrast, imitated the avant-garde, but exhibiting an apparent timeless value, as opposed to the avant-garde’s “superior consciousness of history.” This was modeled on Marxism itself, as the political avant-garde of bourgeois society in capitalism. Marxism distinguished itself from the rest of bourgeois intellectual culture and politics only by its critical historical consciousness, of its fleeting ephemeral specific moment, as Benjamin described it in his “Theses on the philosophy [or, concept] of history,” the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) of revolutionary necessity that “blasts the continuum of history,” to which culture — barbarism — inevitably conforms, as kitsch.
Trotsky’s Marxist assertion that “art is a protest against reality” is based on the earlier bourgeois recognition by Kant and Hegel that art, as Geistig or Spiritual activity, seeks not to express what is, not to affirm what exists, but rather to express what ought to be, the potential and possibility for change: art is the expression of freedom. Greenberg’s avant-garde expresses a fleeting historical potential for transformation that kitsch obviates, neglecting the task of freedom in favor of a timeless naturalization of art. Benjamin wrote in his essay on “The author as producer” (1934) that the task of artists is to teach other artists: as he put it, the artist who doesn’t teach other artists teaches no one. Benjamin called this artistic “quality,” which he distinguished from political “tendency.” Benjamin went so far as to assert that art could not be of the correct — socialist — political tendency if it failed to have formal aesthetic quality. Such quality was primarily educative in value: it demonstrated and educated the potential transformation of aesthetic form itself, for both viewer and producer.
Adorno’s posthumously published draft manuscript Aesthetic Theory — which references Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution as a key departure for his approach — concludes with a criterion for judging the art that lives on in capitalism despite the self-evidence of even its right to exist having been long since lost, that art is the “writing of history” of “accumulated suffering.” Marxism’s essential legacy for considering the history of modern art, especially as consciousness of the condition of failed socialist emancipation from capitalism formulated by Benjamin, Adorno, Greenberg and others in the post-revolutionary crisis era of the 1930s, is this memory of accumulated suffering — the suffering from the unrealized potential of both art and society. | §
STARTING WITH THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION, there have been two contrary tendencies in the development of social production: increased automation lowering socially necessary labor-time; and the desperation of people rendered superfluous as workers.
For Marxism, this presented a social and political
task for the working class to demand higher wages for fewer hours.
An alternative to this would be for workers to try to
fight against technology — the Luddites.
Conversely, the capitalists could invest in machines
instead of labor.
Thus was born the antagonism between wage-labor and
capital.
The outcome of the class struggle between the workers
and capitalists was to be the realization of the potential for both increased
production and the reduction of human toil: socialism.
However, since machine production created a permanent
class of unemployed people, there would always be a demand for work that could
be exploited by the capitalists to pay lower wages.
Paying lower wages decreases the market for produced
goods, which means a drive for higher profitability, leading to further pursuit
of cost-efficiency in production as well as depression of wages.
That leads to both robots and sweatshops.
Disparities and imbalances between capitalist profits
and workers’ wages lead to periodic crises in which there is money that cannot
find profitable investment and workers who cannot find employment.
But eventually balance is restored through the
cheapening of money-capital — and the cheapening of labor.
New forms of work are developed to serve new
technologies of production. — Until the next crisis begins the cycle all over
again.
This meant that the working class as a whole — both
employed and unemployed — needed to be organized as a social and political
force to ensure increased social wealth and to prevent exploitation.
Since this is a matter of the organization of society
as a whole — including internationally, and indeed globally, in the
cosmopolitan exchange of wage-labor and capital — it requires the political act
of taking state power: world socialist revolution. | P
