Chris Cutrone with 99 Zu Eins on the dictatorship of the proletariat (video and audio recordings)

Chris Cutrone interviewed on “The dictatorship of the proletariat and the death of the Left”

“This is CC at his brilliant best. Explaining in common universalising language difficult complex categories. He manages to show very clearly that the task of reaching the mass of people by explaining in concrete terms the necessity of going beyond the present is more than achievable. Most importantly there is no defensiveness, there is no need, calmly and rationally explained very well. Many fear the requirement of reaching the “masses”. The task is to educate oneself to a level of competence that we can explain as CC does here what the problem is, what the solution may be and why it is necessary to attempt to achieve it. There is no Alternative preached Margaret Thatcher and those that have followed her since. Well there is you see. We have a world to win, when we do not know, but won it must be. Brilliant and so well teased out by Nadim. Well done all, inspiring stuff.”

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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The purpose of Marxism (video and audio recordings)

What is Marxism for?

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel discussion with Benjamin Studebaker, Donald Parkinson and James Heartfield at the 2022 Platypus Affiliated Society International Convention in Chicago on April 2, 2022 at Northwestern University.

Marxism is borne of critique. Critique is not mere criticism, not fault-finding or debunking or falsifying of things, but exploring conditions of possibility for change, and not merely accidental, random or otherwise “objective” change, as in entropic processes, but conditions for transforming things as subjective agents of freedom, the realization of potential in what exists beyond itself. Furthermore, critique is not opposition, not treating things as if from the outside, but finding potential from within things of which we are inextricably parts and participants. The aim of critique is to recognize the possibilities for being subjects rather than objects of change: not change as something that happens to us, but change for which we can claim responsibility as the product of our own action.

There was a socialist or communist movement before Marxism, originating in the early 19th century. Marxism was borne of the critique of an existing socialist and communist movement. Marxism sought to clarify the aims of a movement already under way, by critiquing it, finding its conditions of possibility in its symptomatic expressions, diagnosing its prognosis.

Socialism was not possible before capitalism. Nor was it necessary, nor even desirable. Marxism hence held a dialectical relationship between capitalism and socialism. For Marxism, capitalism is nothing but the possibility and necessity of socialism. Capitalism was for Marxism the crisis borne of the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production that were the product of the historical progress of bourgeois social relations. In this way, Marxism found the industrial forces of production pointing beyond the bourgeois social relations to be the expression of the self-contradiction of those social relations. What were these “bourgeois social relations,” according to Marxism? They were the social relations of labor: the exchange of labor as a commodity as the basis for society, emerging in and through and as the product of the dissolution of the preceding caste community of traditional civilization. Bourgeois society was the liberation of production through the emancipation of labor.

The bourgeois revolution regarded itself as the revolt of labor: the revolt of the Third Estate against the illegitimate authority of the religious and noble-aristocratic orders, the First and Second Estates. The Third Estate comprised all those who worked, as opposed to those who prayed and those who fought. Bourgeois right was the right of labor against the right of might, the right of conquest, upon which the preceding social and political order had been based, and which religious authority regarded as the Divine Right of God’s (or the gods’) will, in which “might makes right.” This was the rule of society for thousands of years — perhaps of nature for eons. Bourgeois society is one in which there are “no gods and no masters,” no traditionally sanctioned patriarchs and no slaves, but only human social rights: it was the rule of freedom over nature. Marxism regarded the struggle for socialism or communism to proceed from this already accomplished bourgeois emancipation. If there was still illegitimate power — not right based on labor and its exchange-relations in freedom — Marxism regarded this not as a holdover from the ancient past but a new modern problem due to capitalism. In this respect, Marxism regarded capitalism as the regression of bourgeois society — the regression from bourgeois freedom: “wage-slavery.” It was the regression from a history of freedom to pre-history, a reversion to nature.

Marxism regarded the emerging self-contradiction of bourgeois social relations in capitalism to point beyond the emancipation of labor from traditional civilization, which was found to be necessary but insufficient for full freedom. Alongside the subjective phenomenon of the socialist or communist movement for working class freedom emerging after the Industrial Revolution, there was a new objective phenomenon of a proletarianized working class, workers expropriated of the social property of their labor as self-possessing owners of commodities, their labor-power and its products as contributions to social cooperation, participating as bourgeois citizens in society through their labor. The “proletariat” refers to citizens without property in the Ancient Roman Republic: tribal Romans who were entitled to rights as citizens despite not owning property — which meant not possessing the land of Rome’s conquests. (Tribal Romans were a ruling class in the sense of an aristocratic warrior caste of conquerors ruling over subjugated peoples and territories.)

But in bourgeois society, property is not a physical possession claimed through conquest, but a social right recognized through the social relations of labor in free association and cooperation. Hence, a proletarianized working class in bourgeois society is a contradiction in terms, a phenomenon of the self-contradiction of society. For Marxism, it is the Industrial Revolution that divides the bourgeois Third Estate of labor and its social relations into antagonistic interests of capitalists and workers: owners of capital as the means of social production and owners of labor-power as a commodity that is increasingly stripped of its material contribution to social cooperation. This division was an expression of the self-contradiction of freedom in social production: the self-production of society and its free self-transformation.

This is why Marxism regards capitalism as a self-contradiction and crisis of production — and not a matter of unequal distribution and inequitable consumption. It is a crisis of society and its freedom. It is a real crisis of the basis or substance of society, in which workers as citizens lose their social rights, not intentionally or deliberately, but as a result of a seemingly “objective” process of the development of social production. It is not the result of ruthless exploitation or theft — which bourgeois society condemns as not only illegitimate but criminal — by others, but Marxism thought was the result of the actions of the workers themselves, and was their responsibility. Workers’ demands for the social value of their labor as participants in bourgeois cooperation — the cooperation of citizens in bourgeois society — is an engine driving the improvement of production, to realize and maximize the value of labor in the production of wealth, but undermines the social measure of wealth according to the time of labor, as industrial production — science and technology — outstrips the measure of human labor-time as the basis for the value of wealth in society. The unintended consequence of this is the devaluation of labor even while social wealth increases.

This is a complex phenomenon that is expressed at both a micro and macro level. It manifests as a phenomenon of the reproduction of the human species in the historical succession of generations, in which a surplus of workers is experienced as over-population — the crisis of the overproduction of both material wealth and of the human species itself. But Marxism regarded it not as surplus humanity but surplus labor and surplus capital, the waste of social production and of human life, pressing for a resolution. It was a contradiction of wealth and value, or of wealth and the means of appropriation of that wealth by society in its social relations of labor. The struggle for the appropriation of social wealth and its potentialities beyond itself between capital and labor is not a struggle for possession between groups but a self-contradiction of wealth and its social value in capitalism.

Thus Marxism regarded communism as the “real movement of history” in capitalism, namely the real potential possibility of industrial production pointing beyond bourgeois society and its relations of labor. But this real movement of history is contradictory. It is not only linear but also cyclical: it points backwards as well as forwards, as society struggles to restore the social value of labor even while the industrial condition of material production leaves it behind. The result of this contradictory movement of society in history is not only to divide the bourgeois Third Estate between workers and capitalists, but also and more importantly to divide the proletarianized working class between high-wage and low-wage sectors as well as between employed and unemployed, etc. in a disparity and hierarchy of exploitation and wealth and participation in social production within the working class, which takes place not only within local communities but between localities in global production; and not only in space but in time, for instance between generations, in which older workers might benefit from capitalism at the expense of younger workers or younger workers benefit at the expense of older ones.

In short, it creates competition between workers — competition within the working class — as a new dynamic of historical movement, fundamentally affecting the concrete forms of social production in capitalism, especially as the conditions for production are struggled over, economically, socially and politically. But this competition not only promotes innovation or improvement of production as in the original bourgeois vision, but actually undermines and destroys the basis of social production, and is less than even a zero-sum game, by devaluing both labor and capital, throwing human beings and concrete forms of production prematurely on the scrapheap of history before their full potentials are even begun to be realized.

In Marx’s own time, it appeared that the widening contradiction between bourgeois right — bourgeois social relations — and industrial production in society led directly to social and political crisis and antagonism — a political struggle — that demanded resolution. As Marx put it, the capitalists and workers both had bourgeois right — the right of the social value of labor in production, whether in the form of wages or capital — on their side, and that hence, “where right meets right, force will decide,” namely politics (not violence!). Hence, capitalism was a condition of “insoluble contradiction” and the “class struggle” was inevitable. This class struggle, however, was understood originally by Marxism to be not merely the antagonism of different social groups — capitalists and workers — but the struggle for the proletarianized working class to constitute itself as a social and political force and thus as a class: the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie. But since the working class not only suffers but benefits from capitalism — depending on wage-labor to survive and indeed to thrive — the class contradiction of the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie is not the same as the antagonism of the capitalists and the workers — which itself is not identical to the contradiction of capital and labor.

The workers’ labor is capital — it is for instance, circulating capital vs. fixed capital and variable vs. constant capital, according to Marx — and so the social antagonism of capital and labor is always also an antagonism within labor as well as an antagonism within capital. It was not enough for Marxism that the social disintegration of production in capitalism manifest as antagonism, for instance the Darwinian struggle for existence among capitalist firms or among many capitals — for example, between “national” capitals — but also such a struggle among workers  — including among “national working classes [sic]” or national sectors of the global working class.

What Marxism regarded as necessary was the self-constitution of the working class as a class in-itself objectively, through constituting itself as a class for-itself subjectively. For example, Marxism recognized that, for the value of labor as a commodity to be constituted in industrial (as opposed to artisanal) production at all requires collective bargaining; without collective bargaining, for instance through trade unions, labor is not even a commodity, not even a unit of social exchange, and there is no bourgeois social relation or bourgeois right of labor to be found at all — this is why liberal democratic bourgeois thought found labor union collective-bargaining to be necessary to not only preserve but constitute bourgeois social rights in capitalism.

But the workers’ struggle to constitute their social right in capitalism was for Marxism the constitution of the contradiction of capitalism: the contradiction of industrial forces by bourgeois social relations. Society itself seemed to face the crisis — choice — between supporting human labor in the working class and supporting scientific technique and technology in production. It is society as a whole that faces the choice and contradiction of capital vs. labor. This includes the working class in its collective bargaining as a social subject in capitalism — whether this takes place economically through trade union negotiation in private employment contracts, or as the public subject of citizenry in political democracy adjudicating law and policy.

For Marxism, the limits — the self-contradiction — that the proletarianized working class came up against in capitalism had already been faced in bourgeois society and liberal democracy, in both civil society and political democracy in the early 19th century, and the struggle for socialism or communism had emerged as a consequence of such limits being reached and contradictions made manifest as an inevitable impasse in history. But this contradiction and limit had manifested and reached an impasse in the socialist or communist movement itself, producing divisions and antagonisms in both theory and practice among the socialists who predated and lived into and as contemporaries of Marx’s own time.

Not only that, but the self-contradictory character of socialism had already been recognized in bourgeois economic, social and political thought and among bourgeois politicians — sometimes more acutely than among the socialists themselves. Not only Marxists and socialists, but bourgeois thinkers and political actors found the real movement of history to lead inevitably to socialism. Conservative bourgeois and reactionary observers in the 19th century bemoaned it, but nonetheless recognized the inexorable tide of history moving against them towards socialism. So the problem was one to be faced and overcome by the would-be reformers and “revolutionaries” of capitalism themselves, whether from among the workers or the capitalists. For Marxism, the class struggle was one over the direction of society within and beyond capitalism.

Marxism began by taking up and critiquing the crisis and confusion of contemporary reformers and revolutionaries as a matter of their self-contradictory social and political aspirations and visions — how these were not observations from outside but perspectives from within capitalism itself, from within its self-contradiction and crisis pointing not only to potential possibilities beyond itself but to its seemingly inevitable end.

The purpose of Marxism in its original historical moment was to serve as a critical faculty in the progress of the proletarianized working class’s struggle for socialism. It was to arm socialists with an awareness of the reasons for the historical crises besetting their own movement, and precisely in its success and forward motion. — But not only that success and forward motion but the movement itself ended long ago.

Today, by contrast, after the rise and fall of historical Marxism over a century ago, and due to its failure, capitalism no longer appears to have an inevitable end expressed by the possibility and necessity of socialism, but rather “socialism” seems to be a mere desire, a utopian vision divorced from practical reality, whether economic, political or social — for instance, an aspiration that, as the DSA’s Jacobin magazine founder and editor Bhaskar Sunkara put it recently, is “at its core moral and ethical in nature,” but which drives not inevitably towards its revolutionary realization but rather motivates capitalist reforms to render distribution more “equitable,” and this is primarily on a national-state and not international let alone global level. It necessarily and not accidentally avoids the contradiction of capital.

The problem of capitalism is today no longer faced let alone grasped as Marxism once did, as a self-contradiction of the workers’ struggles leading to the necessity of socialism as a historic task, but is just a matter of unbearably excessive social pathologies demanding capitalist political measures to try to deal with mounting discontents: Sunkara’s Jacobin/DSA is formulating solutions for capitalism to continue.

The current crisis of neoliberalism is not a terminal crisis of capitalism — not even one that could be made so politically — but merely an opportunity for the reconstitution of capitalism, and not through the self-constitution of the working class as an economic, social and political subject of history, but just as an electoral constituency of liberal democracy — and not even a subject of liberal democracy but an object of state policy.

Jacobin agonizes over its role as would-be professional managers of the working class; really, they are not even that but just self-deluded ideologues opining their craft of spin for the latest capitalist messaging — and not even policy. More or less unemployed Millennial and Zoomer workers watch YouTube videos as neurasthenics between anxious applications for their next gigs, seeking to explain the “reasons” for their endless misery. — Hopefully they will quickly forget them for the niche click-bait ephemera that they are, in favor of more mainstream and hence more socially rational pursuits.

This is why the existential crisis of humanity and society shows up today not in the battle of politics and democracy in a proletarianized society and its working class but rather in culture and psychology, about which Marxism has nothing to say beyond how these are already expressed by humanistic bourgeois culture in crisis, including its most radical anthropological questioning such as speculations on the “trans-“ or “post-human” condition of society in capitalism. It is not raised to the level of collective politics in public life — not even as technocratic management, which is just reified and ossified mechanized humanism — but devolves upon isolated individuals in private misery.

Supposed “Marxism” today is not the critical self-clarification it once was of a historic revolutionary or even reform movement for socialism, but is just an obscure justification for choosing among policies for managing a crisis that is no longer regarded as an insoluble contradiction and historical impasse, but has become naturalized as a permanent condition of society and of humanity, purported “human nature” itself — including the degraded condition of what passes for “politics” as the gang-warfare — telling you which “side” to be on — among the ruins and desperate new upshoots of chaotic permutation in the long disintegration of decaying bourgeois society in capitalism.

Marxism today has no purpose — there is no purpose to Marxism — but serves only as a reminder that there once was a purpose, a purpose to capitalism, in socialism. Without an existing struggle for socialism, Marxism has no purpose. Without the purpose of socialism, there is no Marxism. | P

Consciousness is essential — why the death of the Left is consequential: A rejoinder to Benedict Cryptofash


Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 145 | April 2022

BENEDICT CRYPTOFASH CRITICIZES me for using the “Left” as a concept for its alleged idealism and metaphysical essentialism.[1] But by identifying the “Left” with a group of people, e.g. members of Jacobin/DSA et al., Cryptofash reifies the phenomenon of the Left, and in the worst possible way, by personalizing it. But even in colloquial discourse it is well understood that Left and Right represent principles not people. This is why someone who was a Leftist can become a Rightist: he can change his mind.

The Left is not a thing but rather expresses a process; moreover the Left refers to the tendency or force of a historical process. Aaron Benanav criticized Platypus for its preoccupation with the Left rather than with class — similar to the criticism of Platypus by my old ex-comrades of the Spartacist League[2] — and referred as Cryptofash does to the Left as the Left-wing of capitalism, as if this disqualified the concept.[3] But Marxism always considered itself to be the consciousness of the historical tendency of capitalism that pointed beyond it and that was necessary in order to actually get beyond it. For instance, Lenin considered the Marxist approach to socialism to be overcoming capitalism on the basis of capitalism itself. But that tendency was self-contradictory in that it pointed both further beyond capitalism but also back to the reconstitution of its historical roots in bourgeois society — the society of labor. The modern labor movement of the proletarianized working class was itself the core engine of capitalist development, driving the industrial development of production, which contradicted and undermined and destroyed its bourgeois social relations, producing crisis. The problem with the present Left — and for the past hundred years — is that it no longer expresses the emerging and developing consciousness of the subject of a historical tendency — proletarian socialism — but rather the memory of something that proceeds today seemingly objectively — without a corresponding political movement aiming to go beyond it. In the absence of such a subjective consciousness of history as a phenomenon in practice, capitalism itself appears to regress.[4] This regression is something that can be observed in both long-term and short-term political processes.

In my previous article in this thread, I tried to explain very briefly the mind of original historical Marxism as a political movement.[5] I will now try to illustrate the point with the example of the leader of Jacobin/DSA, Bhaskar Sunkara, who recently took over the historically progressive liberal Nation magazine. Sunkara has apparently changed since he published an article in The Nation, “Reclaiming Socialism” (2015), in which, under the influence of my teachings in Platypus, he cited Kołakowski’s “Concept of the Left” to justify his political vision.[6] Back then, Sunkara’s influences were Lenin and Kautsky (from “when Kautsky was still a Marxist,” as Lenin put it[7]). But this is no longer the case.

More recently, Sunkara claimed that he was less a follower of Kautsky than of Ralph Miliband. This is in keeping with the 2017 statement written by Vivek Chibber to distinguish Jacobin/DSA’s perspective from that of the Marxism of Kautsky and Lenin, “Our Road to Power” — by contrast with Kautsky’s 1909 The Road to Power, which Lenin followed in the Revolution of 1917.[8] I addressed this on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, to which Sunkara and Leo Panitch replied, defending Miliband’s “Marxist” bona fides against my characterization of him as a “liberal” — a proponent of a liberal democratic road to socialism, very much like the reformist Revisionism of Eduard Bernstein et al. from more than fifty years earlier.[9] Miliband’s idea, with which Sunkara, Chibber and Panitch agreed, was that the capitalist state could not be overthrown and replaced by the working class’s own organizations in the dictatorship of the proletariat, but had to be worked through existing liberal democratic electoral means to a potential transformation of society — the endless dream of reformist social democracy (through the Democratic Party of all vehicles!) that has ensnared the Millennial Left like the generations before them. Most recently, Sunkara said that socialism was probably ultimately impossible in the U.S., but at least some “social democracy” was possible, by which he meant public sector and welfare state expansion.[10] This was an abandonment of Marxist ideas, or at least of their current relevance politically.

Perhaps Sunkara thinks he has remained consistent, but there seems to be some change of mind. Perhaps not in principle — perhaps he still finds socialism desirable but not possible, and ultimately not necessary to meet the needs of the present — but certainly in terms of practical politics and what he takes to be the “art of the possible,” which is the essence of politics. In so doing, he has abandoned the Left’s role in pushing — and transcending — the envelope of possibility and realizing hitherto unrealized potentials, not even necessarily in changing society but merely in renewing the Left and socialism or Marxism as a political tendency. Sunkara has abandoned the task of building a socialist party. Instead, Sunkara et al. among the Millennial Left have fallen back upon the dead traditions of the past post-Marxist “Left” — accepting and reinforcing the liquidation of proletarian socialism over the course of the past century, since Lenin’s time. This is why and how it takes the form of calls for a “new New Deal” etc.[11]

This downward trajectory in perspectives is a significant degeneration of consciousness on the part of a key leader of the Millennial Left. Five years ago I called it the death of the Millennial Left, in its liquidation into the Democratic Party.[12] It has only grown worse since then. I take Cryptofash’s objection to “Leftism” to be a symptomatic phenomenon of the same degeneration, but one which throws the baby out with the bathwater, in rejecting Jacobin/DSA’s road back to the Democrats. Cryptofash derogates consciousness by calling it “idealistic” and “metaphysical,” an “abstract” and so supposedly unreal “essence.” But then one must ask what the purpose of Cryptofash’s own writings is. What is the point of his arguments if all that matters is “material reality”? Indeed, in prioritizing empirical reality over consciousness, Cryptofash follows the present dead “Left’s” lead into accommodating the power of the status quo, abandoning the consciousness of how it could and should be changed — first of all, how the present “Left” must be fundamentally changed. Cryptofash’s “anti-Leftist Marxism” merely strikes a pose against the “Left.”

Marx followed Kant and Hegel’s — modern German Idealism’s — and bourgeois thought’s more general sense of the task of “consciousness” as the necessity of freedom: the struggle for freedom is motivated by consciousness of necessity. And the highest necessity is not base “material” need — the animal survival of the workers — but rather freedom: the necessity of changing the world, specifically of overcoming capitalism. It was a matter of Rousseau’s “general will” of society as more than the sum of its parts in the wills of its members, Kant’s “transcendental subject” of freedom, and Hegel’s “objective mind” (Geist, Spirit) as it develops in history. Marxism’s consciousness of “communism” was more specifically — and empirically — that of a political outlook and strategy for pursuing it and the reasons for this historically. Marx did not invent communism, which predated him, but critiqued it. Marx’s was moreover a “historical” critique of existing society in the contradictions of capitalism to be overcome, a “historical consciousness” or “consciousness of history” and its tasks: why socialism or communism arose as an ideology in the very specific phase of history in the Industrial Revolution. Marx thought that the world had only to recognize what it was struggling for in order to realize it.[13] Marx found the existing communist consciousness of his time to be lacking: its call to abolish private property resulted in a reification of labor rather than its overcoming, especially since capitalism itself already abolished private property.[14] But he thought that proletarian socialism as a movement was capable of learning the bitter lessons of its struggles — why it remained trapped in its opposition to and within capitalism. This learning process was the subjective factor of history. But what can be learned can also be unlearned.

Cryptofash exhibits a striking “historical” liquidation of the historical, reducing things like the splits of Marxism in revolution and civil war as mere “context,” which ends up affirming whatever happened. — I am reminded of my late professor Moishe Postone saying that capitalism will be overcome when it is good and ready, despite what the Left wants or thinks. The Marxist critique of history is lacking. The fact is that the workers’ movement for socialism has up to now failed, and this has affected history. The issue is the objective vs. subjective character of the proletarianized working class in capitalism. — In his last interview before he died, Postone claimed that we were presently witnessing the historical liquidation of the working class.[15] But for that to actually happen would require a subjective political act, leading to actually overcoming capitalism, since capitalism can objectively by (Marx’s) definition not do without workers. As long as there are desperately poor people willing or able to have their labor exploited, capitalism will continue — until the workers themselves put a stop to it. There is a necessity of politically achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat.[16] Communism as the “real movement of history” according to Marx is not merely an objective but a subjective issue: “theory gripping the masses” as a “material force”[17] also means the masses grasping theory — or at least a political ideology. That’s the role of the Left.

Antonio Negri had an idea that we were already living in communism but just didn’t realize it.[18] But the point of the Left is to realize it — not in the sense of just an idea or change of “consciousness” in the colloquial sense, but a critical theory helping make it happen in reality, in practice. The working class won’t be able to do so without a Left, without a theory of what they are trying to do in practice. Cryptofash’s desire to proceed separately from and in opposition to the Left, and without the necessity of Left theory and ideas, expects communism to happen on its own — with people as not the subjects but the objects of history. But people have perspectives and ideas, and those ideas and perspectives matter. We cannot afford to abdicate on helping to provide them. They are affected by the history of the Left and the historical self-liquidation of Marxism, which is not merely past but a continuing obstacle to the future.[19] The Left’s corpse is not something we can ignore.[20] We must remember history. | P

[1] “The Left is not the Right,” March 10, 2022, available online at <https://antileftistmarx.substack.com/p/the-left-is-not-the-right>.

[2] See “Platypus Group: Pseudo-Marxist, Pro-Imperialist, Academic Claptrap,” Workers Vanguard 908 (February 15, 2008), available online at <https://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/908/ysp-platypus.html>, where they wrote that “For Platypus, the fundamental social divide is not the class struggle of proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, but an amorphous and classless contest of ‘Left’ vs. ‘Right’.”

[3] See Benanav’s remarks on the panel discussion “Program and utopia,” Platypus Review 58 (July 2015), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2013/07/01/program-and-utopia/>.

[4] See The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression, Platypus Review 17 (November 2009), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century/>.

[5] “The Left is a concept — but social revolution is not: A response to ‘Benedict Cryptofash’,” Platypus Review 143 (February 2022), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2022/02/01/the-left-is-a-concept-but-social-revolution-is-not-a-response-to-benedict-cryptofash/>.

[6] The Nation, 150th Anniversary Issue 300.14 (April 6, 2015), March 23, 2015, available online at <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/red-any-other-name/>.

[7] “I. In What Sense We Can Speak of the International Significance of the Russian Revolution,” in “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch01.htm>.

[8] Jacobin, December 5, 2017, available online at <https://jacobinmag.com/2017/12/our-road-to-power>.

[9] See my “Lenin today,” Platypus Review 126 (May 2020), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2020/05/01/lenin-today/>.

[10] “The Promise (and Limits) of Social Democracy,” The Jacobin Show, June 6, 2021, available online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLl2fAydnhE>. — Actually, I don’t know when and where Bhaskar said this exactly; I couldn’t find it when looking for it now. Perhaps it was something I dreamed in the haze of the COVID pandemic lockdown. But I’m pretty sure he said it in some context or other, and it struck and stuck with me. See also “Biden Offers Fiscal Liberalism, not Social Democracy,” Jacobin Show, June 7, 2021, available online at <https://youtu.be/uTBGqc0O3oI>. ADDENDUM (4/1/22): I finally found it!  In the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities talk of March 2, 2021, “Tough Talks: Bhaskar Sunkara,” Sunkara said that, “Perhaps we will fall short of our loftier ambitions [of socialism], but we will still manage to win a more just United States that will at least have Medicare for All, and a living wage for all, and the chance for decent work for all,” online at <https://youtu.be/UpJ9iqvIdmY>.

[11] See my “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” Platypus Review 102 (December 2017 – January 2018), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>.

[12] See my “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100 (October 2017), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/>.

[13] See Marx’s September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, “For the ruthless criticism of everything existing,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1978), 12–15, available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>.

[14] Marx and Engels, “II. Proletarians and Communists,” in Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm>.

[15] “Marx in the Age of Trump,” Vienna Humanities Festival: Hope and Despair, September 17, 2017, available online at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJIaze-C2Qs>.

[16] See my “The dictatorship of the proletariat and the death of the Left,” Platypus Review 141 (November 2021), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2021/11/01/the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat-and-the-death-of-the-left/>.

[17] Marx, “Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm>.

[18] See Michael Hardt and Negri’s books Empire (2000), Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009) where this is elaborated.

[19] See my “Remember the future! A rejoinder to Peter Hudis on ‘Capital in history’,” Platypus Review 8 (November 2008), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2008/11/01/remember-the-future-a-rejoinder-to-peter-hudis-on-capital-in-history/>.

[20] See my “Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory politics today: ‘The Left is dead! — Long live the Left!,” Platypus Review 1 (November 2007), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2007/11/01/vicissitudes-of-historical-consciousness-and-possibilities-for-emancipatory-social-politics-today/>.

April 1, 2022 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Ukraine: More of the same

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 145 | April 2022

WHY IS THERE WAR? Because capitalism is self-contradictory, and this is expressed in conflicts among workers as well as among capitalists, and between “national” working classes and capitalist states, between politicians and political parties both within and between nation-states, and often these conflicts are violent. But this does not mean that economics determines politics in capitalism. Quite the opposite. Neither does politics determine economics. Indeed for Marxism politics means the “class struggle” — and the class struggle means overcoming capitalism in socialism — and anything less than that is not really politics at all — not struggle for the direction of our freedom — but just Darwinian struggle for existence and gangsterism: eating and being eaten.[1]

There is thus no alignment of economic and political interests. There is not only independence of politics from economics but also within politics. The Marxist approach to socialism is in crucial ways fundamentally different from capitalist (pseudo-)“politics” in that it seeks however conjuncturally — in revolution — to line up economic and political interests in proletarian socialism, but this is not normative and applies to literally no other form of politics and is moreover critical in character: that economics and politics should be made identical so that they can be overcome through their mutual contradiction. Indeed this is the very point of Marxism: in capitalism there is not only no alignment of economics and politics, but they are in direct contradiction to each other. The proletarianized working class is the most self-contradictory of all subjects of capitalism: they have no objective interest other than their self-abolition as laborers — though they have a subjective interest in their self-fulfillment as workers.[2] The workers’ individual and collective interests are contradictory.[3] The capitalist bourgeoisie can seem by contrast to have identical political and economic interests — and identical collective and individual interests — and hence appear to represent the interests of society as a whole in a non-self-contradictory way.

The lack of contradiction leads us to the slaughter. There is no reason whatsoever to doubt that the present conflict is between the Ukraine and Russia. Under present conditions it makes no sense to say that it is a conflict between Ukrainian and Russian capitalists to whom the Ukrainian and Russian workers and other people are subject. Nor does it make sense to say that this is a conflict between imperialism and anti-imperialism — however one might regard this, whether of U.S./NATO imperialism and/or Russian imperialism. This is not only because national-communitarian conflict predates the current crisis — the breakaway Russian-majority provinces in the Donbas region of Ukraine and Ukrainian nationalist militias as well as the Ukrainian government’s attempts to suppress them — but because there is no possible or potential alternative political leadership in the current conflict other than capitalist ones; only an alternative opposition to capitalist leadership would make the present leadership specifically capitalist as opposed to something else — other than simply nationalist.[4] The Ukrainians and the Russians have the leadership they do in this moment, and this shapes the nature and character of the conflict. There is no point to pointing to contrary “underlying causes” for this conflict other than the obvious ones: it really is Putin vs. Zelensky; and, yes, Zelensky is receiving support, albeit qualified, from the U.S. and NATO (as well as from the greater “international community” i.e. other capitalist leaders — from whom Putin also receives support, including from the U.S., for instance through oil sales). That war is a horror show and miserably sordid affair is captured well by the image of rusting Russian tanks swerving to crush fleeing cars and shooting up apartment blocks in their invasion of the Ukraine. — Superfluous labor and capital indeed.[5]

A Marxist approach hence has little if anything — perhaps nothing at all — to say beyond what in the capitalist policy debates is already being said.[6] For example, the “Realist” academic International Relations professor John Mearshimer has criticized the U.S. political consensus of liberal humanitarian interventionism and neoconservatism that has dominated policy for decades — except Trump.[7] As was observed recently by Christoph Lichtenberg of the former Spartacist “Trotskyist” Bolshevik Tendency, Fox News conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has a more accurate analysis of the Ukraine war and its causes than most ostensible “Marxists.”[8]

The “Left” has fallen out over Ukraine depending on which capitalist politicians they want to tail after and follow in the present conflict, cheering from the sidelines in the usual ways of unseemly sports spectatorship. Some on the “Left” are positioned as “anti-fascist” — whether Russian or Ukrainian — in Russia’s “military operation of denazification” of the Ukraine; others of the “anti-imperialist Left” lick their chops in hopes of a new anti-war movement — which will not happen out of fear that criticizing the Biden Administration will help Trump’s otherwise inevitable return to the U.S. Presidency: the “Left” in all its varieties is as ever switched on and off as needed by the Democrats; and the Democrats are beating the drums for war against Russia, convinced by their own lies about Trump and other Republicans’ “Russian collusion;” and anyway desperate to stem their coming rout in the 2022 midterm Congressional elections due to their cascade of failures from COVID to crime to inflation — and now Ukraine.

The Millennial Left was born in the anti-war movement against the George W. Bush Administration that vanished upon Obama’s election in 2008.[9] Its revival in Occupy Wall Street and other anti-austerity protests in the Great Recession led to the rebirth of the Democratic Socialists of America under the leadership of Jacobin magazine’s editorial board convened by Bhaskar Sunkara, boosted by the Bernie Sanders campaign that was part of the same moment as Trump’s election in 2016.[10] It is telling that DSA today is equivocal on the war: they have nothing new to say; neither does anyone. “World War III” is just yet another 1980s remake streaming on multiple platforms. Condoleezza Rice said that she didn’t want the “smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” but we know that was never going to happen. Now, after the death of the Millennial Left,[11] a new generation can come back full circle to the terrifying spectacle of war 20 years later — long enough to have forgotten the last war and requiring the same lessons to be learned — which weren’t — again.[12] They won’t be.[13] | P

[1] See my letter, “Platypus ‘position’ on ‘imperialism’,” published as “Platypus fuss” in the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker 964 (May 30, 2013), available online at <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/964/letters/>.

[2] See my “The dictatorship of the proletariat and the death of the Left,” Platypus Review 141 (November 2021), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2021/11/01/the-dictatorship-of-the-proletariat-and-the-death-of-the-left/>.

[3] See my “The negative dialectic of Marxism,” prepared opening remarks for the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion on “The politics of critical theory,” transcript published in Platypus Review 140 (October 2021), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2021/10/01/the-politics-of-critical-theory-2/>.

[4] See my “Internationalism fails,” Platypus Review 60 (October 2013), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2013/10/01/internationalism-fails/>.

[5] See Moishe Postone, “History and helplessness: Mass mobilizations and contemporary forms of anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (Winter 2006), available online at <https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture/article-abstract/18/1/93/31815/History-and-Helplessness-Mass-Mobilization-and>.

[6] See Spencer Leonard, “Nothing left to say,” Platypus Review 10 (February 2009), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2009/02/03/nothing-left-to-say-a-critique-of-the-guardians-coverage-of-the-2008-mumbai-attacks/>.

[7] See my “Why not Trump again?,” Platypus Review 123 (February 2020), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/why-not-trump-again/>.

[8] See the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion “Crisis in Ukraine! The Left and the Current Crisis,” held on March 10, 2022 in New York City: watch online at <https://youtu.be/Uyoe5ml05LQ>.

[9] See my “Iraq and the election: The fog of ‘anti-war’ politics,” Platypus Review 7 (October 2008), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2008/10/01/iraq-and-the-election-the-fog-of-anti-war-politics/>.

[10] See my “The Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s,” Platypus Review 82 (December 2015 – January 2016), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2015/12/17/sandernistas-final-triumph-1980s/>; Postscript on the March 15 Primaries, Platypus Review 85 (May 2016), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2016/03/30/the-sandernistas/>; and P.P.S. on Trump and the crisis of the Republican Party (June 22, 2016) appended to the prior Postscript.

[11] See my “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100 (October 2017), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/>.

[12] See my “Afghanistan: After 20 and 40 years,” Platypus Review 139 (September 2021), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2021/09/02/afghanistan-after-20-and-40-years/>.

[13] See my “1914 in the history of Marxism,” Platypus Review 66 (May 2014), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2014/05/06/1914-history-marxism/>.

| Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Chris Cutrone on Sensible Socialist on the death of the Left (video and audio recordings)

In this episode Kevin talks with Chris Cutrone about the thesis that the Left is dead. They discuss the Platypus Affiliated Society, what he means by the death of the Left, a brief history of the Left in the 20th century, a discussion of the Millennial Left, the question of the DSA and the gradualist approach, and much more.

Sensible Socialist on Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9zZW5zaWJsZXNvY2lhbGlzdC5jb20vZmVlZC8/episode/aHR0cDovL3NlbnNpYmxlc29jaWFsaXN0LmNvbS8_cD0zODE3?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahgKEwiw4vy7-q_2AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQxgs
Sensible Socialist Website: https://sensiblesocialist.com/2022/03/05/the-death-of-the-left-81/

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on Ukraine and post-politics (video and audio recordings)

Chris Cutrone of the Platypus Affiliated Society interviewed by Douglas Lain of Diet Soap / Sublation Media on the current state of the Left in the time of the Ukraine crisis and resurgent international war but more importantly in the recent and longue duree history of the past 100 years and the liquidation of Marxism and socialism and demise of the Millennial Left producing the present post-political or pre-political moment. 

Can the socialist Left become political? Chris Cutrone and Douglas Lain talk pseudo-politics, war as politics by other means, and why the task of socialism remains the same as they discuss his 2015 lecture “How is Platypus a Pre-Political Project?” Cutrone’s 2015 lecture https://youtu.be/iDiv7MioqJ8

Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on art and capitalism (video and audio recordings)

Chris Cutrone of the Platypus Affiliated Society joins Douglas Lain of Diet Soap/Sublation Media to discuss Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” This is a follow up to the 2/3/22 Critical Cuts video “Are NFTs Revolutionary?,” but Cutrone also offers a defense of Greenberg, discusses the limits of the SI, and wonders if it’s time for the Left and the working class to “realize the Spectacle.” Cutrone stays past the hour to discuss his art career and how it ended. Are all Marxists secretly would-be artists? Are all artists secretly would-be Marxists?

The Left is a concept — but social revolution is not: A response to “Benedict Cryptofash”

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 143 | February 2022

LESZEK KOŁAKOWSKI’S “THE CONCEPT OF THE LEFT” (1958) is useful for addressing what it means to say that there is a Left and a Right in Marxism.[1] It is derived from the Revisionist Dispute regarding Orthodox Marxism and the question of reform vs. revolution in the 2nd Socialist International. The actual occasion for Kołakowski’s article was Soviet Premier and Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin for “crimes against Leninism” and against socialism. What did this mean?

It goes back to the accusation against the Socialist Party-associated labor unions and the Marxist theorist Eduard Bernstein and his Revisionist associates in the 2nd International, who advocated reform struggles within liberal democratic capitalism at the expense of socialist revolution, that they were “opportunists.” This is what characterized them as the Right. Kołakowski describes this as adaptation to and expression of the “inertia of the status quo” that characterizes the Right as conservative.

By contrast, Orthodox and “revolutionary” Marxism upheld what Kołakowski called the Left as “utopia.” Kołakowski wrote that what characterized the Left was an “idea” and moreover its “negation” of the status quo, not programmatically as in a blueprint for a better society, but rather as a “mysterious and obscure” expression of historical potential and possibility that is not yet realized.

This goes back to the bourgeois revolutionary philosophy of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and others which contrasted what “is” with what “ought” to be, the process of becoming within a state of being that expressed what could and should be but “is not” yet. Marxism descended from this revolutionary philosophy of the era of bourgeois emancipation and enlightenment from traditional civilization.

So what is the difference that makes this such a contentious issue? Capitalism has its origins in the bourgeois revolution, but for Marxism expresses a potential beyond it: socialism/communism — “communism” as an Ancient religious ideal of collective equality; “socialism” as a modern political ideology stemming from the potential inherent in capitalism but not possible previously and not yet existing in historical reality.

The problem is not that the Marxist Left — the revolutionary political ideology and “[Hegelian] scientific theory” of historical Marxists such as Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, among others — is descended from bourgeois revolutionary philosophy, but rather that since the failure of Marxism historically to achieve socialist revolution in the early 20th century, capitalism itself has tried to adapt to the threat of proletarian discontent and disorder through “progressive liberal” democratic capitalist welfare-state measures and the national organization of capital accumulation.

Stalinism was an adaptation to this failure of world socialist revolution and assimilation instead to “progressive capitalism,” thus making Stalinism the modern expression of the Right wing of Marxism, expressing the inertia of history and society and becoming the ideology of the liquidation of the proletarian struggle for socialism. Trotsky called Stalinism the “antithesis of Bolshevism” — of Marxism.

The Left is dead today because it is the Right — not because it is the Left. The Left as a historical idea of Marxism motivating the proletarian struggle for the socialist transformation of capitalism has become instead a late bourgeois ideology of the “progressive” reform of capitalism. This already happened nearly 100 years ago and is still in effect very strongly today. Marxism is thus entombed in history.

The Left–Right distinction is not social but political and ideological in nature. Its meaning for Marxism comes from a division and split in the political party for socialism — the split of the 3rd Communist from 2nd Socialist International in the Russian Revolution and its world-historic aftermath: the old Socialists were the Right and the new Communists were the Left. From a Marxist perspective, the established Socialist Parties existing today are still the Right, despite being called the “Left.” Trotsky and his comrades called themselves the Left Opposition to Stalinism in the Communist International. They made a claim to uphold the true spirit of Marxism and proletarian socialist revolution that still haunts us today.

Lenin (in)famously observed that socialist ideology must come from outside the social and economic and political struggles of the working class within capitalism.  What was this “outside”? It wasn’t sociological — from bourgeois intellectuals — but rather historical: it comes from the past accumulation of experience of the bourgeois democratic revolution and its self-contradiction and defeat in capitalism. Lenin called socialists “Jacobins indissolubly connected to the workers movement.” This is the idea.

The workers movement comes from bourgeois discontents in capitalism: capitalism’s contradiction and betrayal of “equality of inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson — who importantly led the Left wing of the American Revolution). Only historical experience and its critical lessons can teach the proletarianized working class in capitalism that the goal of its struggle is beyond bourgeois emancipation and freedom, within which their struggles are otherwise inevitably circumscribed, reproducing capitalism.

Only a Marxist socialist Left could possibly lift the horizon of such struggle beyond capitalism. But only the working class can actually achieve the real goals of this struggle in social revolution. | P

[1] See Benedict Cryptofash, “The Left is not a concept,” Platypus Review 142 (December 2021 – January 2022), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2021/12/01/the-left-is-not-a-concept/>.

February 1, 2022 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed