âNothingâs ever promised tomorrow today. . . . It hurts but it might be the only way.â â Kanye West, âHeard âEm Sayâ (2005)
âYou can’t always get what you want / But if you try, sometimes you find / You get what you need.â â The Rolling Stones (1969)
KANYE WEST FAMOUSLY INDICTED President George W. Bush for ânot caring about black people.â Mr. West now says that itâs the Democrats who donât care about black people. But he thinks that Trump does indeed care.
West, who received an honorary doctoral degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a few years ago, intends to move back to Chicago from Hollywood, which he describes as The Sunken Place.
Westâs wife Kim Kardashian convinced President Trump to free Alice Johnson, a black grandmother, from jail, and to initiate the criminal justice sentencing reform legislation called the âFirst Step Act.â Prisoners are being released to join the workforce in which the demand for labor has been massively increased in the economic recovery under the Trump Administration. The reason for any such reform now, after the end of the Great Recession, will be this demand for workers â no longer the need to warehouse the unemployed.
Trump ran on and won election calling for âjobs, jobs, jobs!,â and now defines his Republican Party as standing for the âright to life and the dignity of work,â which was his definition of what âMake America Great Againâ meant to him. This will be the basis now for his reelection in November 2020, for âpromises kept.â
The current impeachment farce is indeed what Trump calls it: the Democrats motivated by outrage at his exposure of their shameless political corruption, with the Biden family prominently featured. After trouncing the infamous Clintons in 2016, Trump is keeping this drumbeat going for 2020. Donât expect it to stop. The Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the moment he was elected, indeed even beforehand, but finally got around to it when Trump exposed them â exposed their âfrontrunner.â
Trump has held out the offer of bipartisan cooperation on everything from trade to immigration reform. He went so far as to say, when congratulating the Democrats on their 2018 midterm election victories, that he would be potentially more able to realize his agenda with a Democrat-majority Congress, because he would no longer have to face resistance from established mainstream Republicans opposed to his policies. In his State of the Union Address to Congress this year, Trump contrasted the offer of negotiation and cooperation with the threat of investigations. As it turns out, the FBI, CIA and other U.S. government security services personnel who have tried to indict Trump out of political opposition are now finding themselves the targets of criminal investigation. At least some of them are likely go to prison. The bloated national security state is dismayed and in retreat in the face of Trump. â Good!
What is the argument against Trumpâs reelection? That he is utterly unbearable as a President of the United States? That Trump must be stopped because the world is running out of time? Either in terms of the time spent by separated children being held under atrocious conditions in appalling immigration detention centers, or that of glaciers falling into the ocean? Both of these will continue unabated, with or without Trump. The Democrats neither can nor will put a stop to such things â not even slow them.
What is the argument for electing the Democrats, then? A Green New Deal? â Will never happen: Obama promised it already in 2008. That they will restore âcivilityâ to American life? Like we had under Obama? In other words, the same conditions, but with a comforting smile instead of an irritating smirk?
But Trumpâs supporters became annoyed with Obama, and have been reassured by Trumpâs confidence in America: Trumpâs smile is not sarcastic; Obamaâs often was. Donât the Democrats deserve that grin?
Will the Democrats provide free quality health care for all? â Not on your life!
Neither will Trump. But not because he doesnât want to: he definitely does; he thinks that itâs absurd that the wealthiest country in world history cannot provide for its citizens. But what can you do?
The last time national health care was floated as a proposal was by Nixon. But it was defeated by Democrats as well as Republicans. Nixon floated UBI (Universal Basic Income), too â but it was opposed by the Democrats, especially by their labor unions, who â rightly â said that employers would use it as an excuse to pay workers that much less. Abortion was legalized when fewer workers were needed.
But that was a different time â before the general economic downturn after 1973 that led to the last generation of neoliberalism, austerity and a society of defensive self-regard and pessimism. Now, it is likely we are heading into a new generation-long period of capitalist growth â and optimism. â At least, itâs possible. Nixon and Mao agreed that âwhat the Left proposes we [the Right] push through.â
Are we on the brink of a new, post-neoliberal Progressive era, then? Donât count on it â at least not with the Democrats! They wonât let their Presidential nominee next year be Bernie Sanders. â Probably, they wonât even let it be Warren, either. And anyway, after Obama, no one is really going to believe them. Even if Bernie were to be elected President, he would face a hostile Democratic Party as well as Republicans in Congress. Itâs unlikely the Squad of AOC et al. will continue to be reelected at all, let alone expand their ranks of Democratic âsocialistsâ in elected office. The DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) have already peaked, even before the thankless misery of canvassing for Democrats â not âsocialistsâ â in the next election. The future belongs not to them, but to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping hosted by Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Climate change must be stopped by China.
(The clearest indicator of American counties voting for Trump in 2016 was density of military families â not due to patriotism but war fatigue: Trump has fulfilled his promise to withdraw from the War on Terror interventions while funding the military, and is the peace President that Obama was supposed to be, drawing down and seeking negotiated settlements with everyone from North Korea to the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Taliban in Afghanistan; the Neocons are out and flocking to the Democrats.)
The arguments against Trump by the Democrats have been pessimistic and conservative, distrustful and even suspicious of American voters â to which he opposes an unflappable confidence and optimism, based in faith in American society. Trump considers those who vote against him to be mistaken, not enemies. But the Democrats consider Trump voters to be inimical â deplorable and even irredeemable.
My Muslim friends who oppose Trump â half of them support Trump â said that after his election in 2016 they found their neighbors looking at them differently â suspiciously. But I think it made them look at Americans differently â suspiciously. But itâs the same country that elected Obama twice.
If Trumpâs America is really the hateful place Democrats paint it to be, for instance at their LGBTQ+ CNN Town Hall, at which protesters voiced the extreme vulnerability of âtrans women of color,â then it must be admitted that such violence is perpetrated primarily not by rich straight white men so much as by âcis-gendered heterosexual men â and women â of color.â â Should we keep them in jail?
The Democrats’ only answer to racism, sexism and homophobia is to fire people and put them in prison. â Whereas Trump lets them out of jail to give them a job.
Perhaps their getting a job will help us, too.
So: Why not Trump again? | §
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. ( . . . )
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the former head of the often contrarian Marxist group The Platypus Affiliated Society and in this podcast, we discuss the possibility of realizing philosophy.
In this episode of Symptomatic Redness, Derick Varn and Lexi Kay of Swampside chats. Chris Cutrone took on a variety of relatively hostile questions for a few hours. This is part one and is available for everyone. Derick Varn is a former member of the Platypus Affiliated Society. Can Cutrone hold his ground when facing hostile questions? Find out.
Prepared opening remarks presented at the closing plenary of the 11th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, April 6, 2019, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A complete audio recording of the event, including response by Richard Rubin and audience Q&A, is available online at: <https://archive.org/details/Redeeming20thCentury040619>.
A SENIOR TEACHING COLLEAGUE of mine at the University of Chicago revised the college core syllabus, which he said needed to be âbrought into the 21st century.â What he really meant by this was brought into the 20th century â specifically, the late 20th century. But the 20th century was determined by the 19th century. There was very little that was new, and most of it was bad. I spoke at previous conventions about 1873â1973, 1917â2017 and 1918â2018.[1] In those discussions, I divided the 100-year cycles into their first and second halves of 50 years. What was new was Marxism and anti-Marxism. As Marxism died and its memory faded in the second half of the last century, there was absolutely nothing new. My colleague invoked ideas that had their genesis in the early 20th century as anti-Marxism: for example, Foucault â Heidegger â Nietzsche.
The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm defined the âshort 20th centuryâ as the period 1914â91, from WWI to the fall of the Soviet Union. But perhaps the 20th century could be defined not by the catastrophe of world war in 1914 but the failure of the world socialist revolution in 1919, which was already prefigured by the capitulation of Marxism in 1914 â and the war certainly contributed to not only the crisis and the revolutionary opportunity but also the counterrevolutionary reality, in whose brutality the war continued.[2] 2019 marks the centenary of 1919, which was not the failure of the revolution, as we marked last year in 2018 as a function of both 1918 and 1968, but the triumph of the counterrevolution.
100 years
This year we observe the 100th anniversary of the defeat of the German Revolution in 1919 and the 30th anniversary of the collapse of Stalinism in 1989. It is unclear to me which of these takes priority in my talk now. I therefore want to build upon the last two years of anniversaries I have observed in my remarks at the annual Platypus conventions, namely, the centenaries of 1917 and 1918, and 50 years of 1968.
In my remarks last year on 1918â2018 as the âcentury of counterrevolution,â I thematized the issue of the presence of the revolution in the counterrevolution as the converse and complement to the issue of 1917 as the presence of the counterrevolution in the revolution. Usually, the 20th century is treated by the âLeftâ as one of accomplishment. The supposed advances and gains of the 20th century take two forms: the so-called âactually existing socialismâ of the East in the Stalinist-ruled states of the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba; and the social-democratic welfare state in the West. Today, in 2019, we are faced with what has been evident for the past few years: the reemergence of the legacies of neo-Stalinism and neo-social democracy, both of which are called âsocialism.â In the Democratic Socialists of America and in the Momentum movement of the U.K. Labour Party, we see both tendencies present. In the abiding âcontinuing strugglesâ of âanti-imperialismâ and âanti-fascismâ â including âanti-sexismâ and âanti-racismâ â we find the united front of neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism: street-fighting as well as imposed government and para-state civil society â corporate and academic â âhate speechâ code restrictions.
This is because, as Trotsky and the Frankfurt School
observed already back in the 1930s, the liquidation of historical Marxism after
the failure of the world proletarian socialist revolution of 1917â19
was present in both Social Democracy and Stalinism. They are the twin
headstones at the grave of Marxism. In the 1930s, Trotsky treated both equally
as varieties of reformist opportunism, whose residual differences were actively
liquidated at the time in the Popular Front Against War and Fascism. Trotsky
anticipated by one year the official announcement of the Popular Front in 1935
with his âFrench Turn,â having his followers join the official
social-democratic parties world-wide in 1934. The fact that these parties had
betrayed Marxism both in WWI and in the revolutions that followed, that Social
Democracy was on the side of active counterrevolution as opposed to Stalinismâs
apparent continuity with the revolution, did not matter one bit to Trotsky:
Stalinism was just as proven in his mind to be counterrevolutionary; and
social-democratic parties were just as potentially transformable into
revolutionary socialist parties as the ostensibly ârevolutionaryâ Communist
Parties could have been.
The first assumption I must ask you to entertain is that both Social Democracy and Stalinism were forms of avoidance of the struggle for socialism in the 20th century, and that everything accomplished under their auspices was actually stepping back and away from and not towards socialism. As such, both Stalinism and Social Democracy represented obstacles to socialism. â Here, the anarchists and âLeft communistâ Marxists would apparently agree. But historically, this was the perspective shared by the Frankfurt School and Trotsky, both of which must be distinguished from and recognized properly in their opposition to such âLeft communismâ and anarchism, for both Trotsky and the Frankfurt School represented the memory of original historical Marxism, and of its last protagonists, Lenin and Luxemburg, among others.
The forms of the liquidation of Marxism in the post-failed revolutionary aftermath of the 1920sâ30s are various, but have continued to endure ever since then: they express the same problems we see on the âLeftâ today, in both its neo-Stalinist and neo-social democratic guises. â These problems are also present in anarchism and so-called âLeft communism.â As such, they express not only problems of the âLeftâ but the political antinomies of capitalism itself. In this sense, they were not new problems of the 20th century, but old problems that Marxism had already addressed and at least theoretically âovercomeâ in the 19th century â at least, Marxism had appeared to have overcome these problems. This is the reason for Platypusâs emphasis on pre-WWI Marxist history, to find the sources for 20th century problems that were originally obvious to Marxists historically but in the meantime have become obscure, elusive and intractable today. While it would seem that history proved in fact that the old problems had not actually been overcome by Marxism, such a perspective would assume that we somehow âknow betterâ today, that the 20th century had provided lessons that have been learned â even if some anarchists had already warned of them in the 19th century. So it is incumbent upon me in my defense of and advocacy for Marxism to prove otherwise.
Redemption
The question of the potential âredemptionâ of the 20th
century hinges on the question of historical âprogress.â If progress has been
made since 1919, then no redemption of the 20th century is really necessary: we
can simply build upon past practices in the present and proceed accordingly. So
the issue of redemption is actually based on the reverse evaluation, that the
20th century did not progress beyond the original issues of historical Marxism,
and indeed regressed below it. This was the assumption of both Trotsky and the
Frankfurt School by the 1930s. They regarded the problems of Stalinism and
Social Democracy as repetitions of past problems that Marxism had already
consciously processed in its history before WWI.
The âLeftâ has tried to preserve itself through
appropriating past history in a certain way. The paradox â actually
a contradiction â is as follows: On the one hand, the âLeftâ treats itself
as independent of the dominant society in capitalism, thus treating the society
it seeks to change as outside of itself (perhaps treating the presence of
capitalist society within itself as an outside contagion to be fought against
and expelled); on the other hand, the âLeftâ claims the supposed âprogressâ of society
in the 20th century as its own, as the result of its own doing.
But this is the way capitalist society always grasps itself:
as an autonomous subject trying to take hold of an extrinsic object. Originally,
by contradistinction, Marxism characterized itself â âcommunismâ or âproletarian
socialismâ â
as the âactual self-consciousness of the real movement of history.â Both
Stalinism and Social Democracy (reformist Revisionism) followed original
Marxism in this, by identifying themselves with the real movement of history.
The problem is that history and its movement in capitalism is self-contradictory, and is thus non-identical with itself. So, in identifying oneself with history, one inevitably falls into a partial, one-sided antinomical perspective that privileges some aspects of historical movement over others. The âLeftâ thus leaves itself at the mercy of capitalism and is merely tossed about by the Sturm und Drang of its contradictions and historical changes. When one looks soberly and honestly at the actual history of the action and thought of the âLeftâ â Stalinism and Social Democracy, as well as anarchism and âLeft communism,â and liberalism, too â in the 20th century, one finds it always on all sides of all issues. The âLeft,â in one form or another, has variously justified and supported in certain moments of history even imperialism and fascism. It has been pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist, pro-fascist and anti-fascist â revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. The actual history in its violent vicissitudes is hence forgotten â repressed. The way this is done is to resolve history by ironing it out, and rest content that, through it all, âprogressâ has been made in the end. â That is, until the next historical shift of capitalism unsettles history once again, throwing progress into doubt.
Antinomies
I have raised one set of antinomies already, namely, anti-imperialism and anti-fascism (the subject of a prior convention talk of mine in 2011[3]). There are others. For instance, parliamentarism-electoralism as opposed to extra-parliamentary activity, or the battle of the âballotsâ vs. that on the âstreets.â There is also âanti-exploitationâ vs. âanti-oppression,â or socio-economic âclassâ vs. ârace, gender and sexuality.â In the time of the historical origins of Marxism, there was also âsocialâ vs. âpolitical actionâ â the debate which broke up the First International Workingmenâs Association, in the original split in socialism between anarchism and Marxism. There is also the antinomy of political and economic struggles. What one will find today is that all tendencies on the âLeftâ are actually riven by such divisions, still. For instance, all these oppositions are present in the DSA and in Labourâs Momentum movement.
This shows that the 20th century is still with us â
as is indeed the 19th century. That is actually cause for hope. The fact that
such antinomies still beset the âLeftâ shows that the problem of capitalism as
Marxism originally understood it has not been overcome â if only we can continue to recall
it.
These antinomies must be regarded properly as forms for the
social and political movement of capitalism itself. Capitalism is internally
divided and destroys itself periodically, only to reconstitute itself again,
through its characteristic social and political struggles, whether between âclassesâ
or ânations,â etc. So the first task of redeeming the 20th century would be to
recognize properly that the only âprogressâ made was progress in capitalism â namely, actually the regression from socialism, at least as
far as the political struggle for socialism as Marxism originally understood it
is concerned.
Hypothetically, the perpetuation of capitalism also means
sustaining the possibility for socialism. The only question is how this
potential possibility is manifest and grasped in practice and theory. There, we
can observe an obvious regression in political potential for socialism from the
early 20th century to today. â Unless we assume that the election and
policies of âsocialistâ Democrats and Labourites and/or demands of those
engaged in street fighting or guerilla warfare immediately promise the
achievement of socialist revolution, which I think we have reason to doubt: the
mid-20th century is not about to be repeated.
Indeed, the implementation of what would now be considered
âsocialistâ policies by either elected officials or leaders of political revolutions
in the 20th century can be considered today as part of the history of capitalism â the history for whatever
potential for socialism exists concretely in the world today, which is after
all how Marxism originally addressed capitalism to begin with: capitalism is
the possibility and necessity for socialism.
Oscillation â vicissitude
Towards the end of his life, my old professor Moishe Postone
raised the specter of history oscillating between liberal and authoritarian
state-centric forms of capital â this was always Postoneâs great
apprehension and suspicion of Platypus with our positive appraisal of Lenin and
Trotsky â
so that the state-mediated capitalism succeeding the original liberal forms of
capitalism in the early 20th century reverted by the end of the 20th century to
neoliberalism, but might be followed by another phase of statist capital as a
result of the crisis of neoliberalism in the 21st century. I addressed this phenomenon
of reaction against the failure of Marxism in my Platypus convention
Presidentâs report in 2012, in the wake of the demise of Occupy Wall Street, on
â1873â1973:
The century of Marxism: The death of Marxism and the emergence of
neo-liberalism and neo-anarchism.â
What is striking now is how, at the terminus of the Millennial Left, anarchism has been nearly completely suppressed in favor of statist forms of âsocialism,â in both neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism. This is very different from where the Millennial Left originally started out, in the new Students for a Democratic Society (established in the same year, 2006, as Platypus), steeped as it was in neo-anarchism, especially as inherited from the 1990s anti-globalization and avowedly âpost-â if not simply âanti-political Leftâ of Generation X. Despite the anti-imperialism of the anti-war movement at that time, which prioritized defense of Third World regimes against the U.S., this neo-anarchism persisted through #Occupy. It can be seen in the more general anti-austerity movement in response to the post-2008 global economic crisis. But as the Great Recession wore on, eventually there was a turn to state-oriented and capitalist electoral politics, for instance with SYRIZA in Greece, but also Podemos in Spain â despite the latterâs avowedly âanti-politicalâ stance, which, unlike SYRIZA, failed to take power and faded, Podemos having lost out to the traditional Socialists.
The turn towards the Labour Party in the U.K. through Momentum under Jeremy Corbynâs leadership and towards the Democrats, first via Bernie Sandersâs campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for President, and then through its ostensibly âsocialistâ progressive liberal fringe, the Democratic Socialists of America, after the Brexit vote and Trumpâs election, shows the utter collapse â indeed, I called it the âdeathâ â of the Millennial âLeft.â[4] âMarxismâ was originally disputed by the Millennial Left in opposition to both Social Democracy and Stalinism, but now has been completely assimilated to these two latter legacies. Whatever potential possibility and hope for opportunity of historical change that had come with the Millennial Left was expressed by its rejection of the traditional identification of Marxism with statism. Now this has disappeared. This repeated the failure of the 1960s New Left to overcome the problems of its elders in Stalinism and Social Democracy and subsequent assimilation to their legacy.
As I wrote in âThe Sandernistas,â about the Millennial Leftâs enthusiasm for Bernie, what âsocialismâ means is merely return to the New Deal and Great Society government programs of the Democratic Party in the 20th century.[5] Similarly, the Corbynistas want to return to the old Labour policies before neoliberalism. Where has the original âanarchistâ spirit of the Millennials gone? â This is as striking as the disappearance of ostensible âlibertarianâ discontents from the Republican Party under Trump, however they are still expressed positively in moves to criminal justice reform as well as âfree speechâ efforts against Political Correctness that Trump has initiated. Trump remains the central phenomenon of our time, however shadowed by militant neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism in response to him. The crisis of neoliberalism will deepen before it abates. In any case, the center of action remains the state. What the âLeftâ wants above all is to unelect Trump and reverse the Brexit vote, to which everything else is subordinated. The calls for increased welfare provisions, nationalization of industry and other capitalist state reforms are just enabling fictions.
Statism and anarchy
today
Significantly, I myself would characterize the task of
socialism today as essentially âanarchistâ in nature, but not as âpost-politicalâ
as with post-New Left neo-anarchism, but rather pre-political, namely, the necessity to organize the potential for
civil-social action independent of the state and capitalist politics, as a
precondition for any kind of political formation let alone socialist
party-building. This must be distinguished sharply from âmovement-â or
âbase-building,â however, in that they are, by contrast, dependent on their
converse and complementary phenomenon, electoralism: the âmovementâ is always
understood as a pressure-tactic on elected officials, whether in government or
legislative-parliamentary opposition. The ostensible âbase-buildingâ is
according to the model of âcommunity organizingâ and NGO activism, that is, as
civil society constituencies for electoral parties, especially in the
neoliberal mode of privatized outsourcing of political action. In this way, I
would distinguish the actual present historical necessity from the past
neoliberal model which expressed not a return to but actually the thinning-out
of civil society and capitulation to statism, however post-Fordist in character.
The âLeftâ today is stuck in the characteristic post-New Left neoliberal
modality of social-movement activism, which is actually just a training ground
for NGO lobbyism and its group identity-politics and professional-managerial cultural
racketeering. Any pre-socialist organizing today would need to cut sharply
across the established divisions in the capitalist-state management of civil
society. The crisis of neoliberalism provides an opportunity for this â
which the Millennial Left in its death is precisely avoiding.
The new phase of capitalism now emerging from the crisis of
its past neoliberal forms since the 1970s will offer possibilities for such
organizing, as existing civil society is destroyed and reconstructed according
to the new needs of capital. This is an opportunity to return to the original
Marxist vision of socialism as immanent to and building upon the foundations of
capitalism. The statist turn of the Millennial Left fails at this in its
clinging to the established prior forms of neoliberal capitalism embodied by
the existing Democrat and Labour Parties, which will be as slow to change now
as they were in the face of the neoliberal shift beginning in the 1970s â
they didnât complete their turn for another 20 years, in the 1990s. The
Millennials joining them now will be their unopposed official leadership in 20
yearsâ time, just as Hillary and Bill Clinton came to power in 1992, 20 years
after their youthful participation in the (losing) 1972 McGovern Democrat campaign
for President. The Millennials will learn through their defeats now how to
adapt to capitalist politics in the long run, as usual, through a backward and
shamefaced movement â by contrast, the avowed Right will be more
straightforward, unabashed, and hence successful. This will give the
Millennialsâ electoralism and statist orientation an apparently more
âprincipled and responsibleâ character, by contrast to the more blatant
opportunism of the Right in pushing through whatever capitalism requires. But
âresistanceâ or not, the overall drift is the same.
History
By contrast to Postone, I regard neoliberalism as a form of statism and not anti-statism, with anarchism and libertarianism always marginalized fringe ideological phenomena, and so post-neoliberalism will not require any profound changes in capitalist politics at the level of the state, which however requires periodic fine-tuning. The mid-late 20th century New Left, with its characteristic confusions about the capitalist state, mistaking it as a compromise formation with socialism (in this way recapitulating the old opportunist reformist Revisionism), was always deeply ambivalent in its neo-anarchist social-movementism, by the 1980s resigning itself to and even celebrating its powerlessness as some principled virtue â the âLeftâ itself came to be actually identified with such powerlessness, mocking the original 1960s New Left vision of âbe realistic, demand the impossible.â That is not going to change in the least with the present electoral turn of the Millennial Left. The resulting statist managerial professionals emerging from the Millennial generation will always be regarded as bastard children and not recognized as the Leftâs own â just as the 1980s yuppies and the 1990s Clintons were never recognized as the offspring of the New Left that they were. But the continuing âLeftâ on the marginal fringe wonât matter at all, other than as the usual paragon of hypocritical denial for which the New Left has served as eminent historical example. See the âlong march through the institutionsâ through which New Left Maoists gave us academic âLeftâ blather, charter schools and Obamaâs Presidency. Before them, the Old Left Stalinists had always been what they ended up being, bureaucrats of corporate management and the capitalist state â many more of them lived out illustrious post-WWII careers than were purged by McCarthyism, in which they had not been âcooptedâ or âsold outâ but rather fulfilled their original 1930s youthful Great Depression vision for reformed capitalism.
As Lenin observed and Adorno repeated 50 years later, the apparent rebirth of anarchism in the wasteland of the defeat of Marxism was only a symptom of historical failure and never more than a return of a âghostâ (or, as Lenin put it, a âphantasmâ).[6] But the ghost was not actually of anarchism itself but rather of what Marxism originally had been, the effective union of social and political action. That the historical mission accepted by Marxism became divided between the reduction of politics to statism and the reduction of social freedom to capitalist anarchy is the symptom that must be worked through towards any possibility for socialism.
Historically, Marxism already traversed this path, in the 1860sâ70s, in the prelude to the mass socialist parties of the late 19th â early 20th centuries. Marxism emerged ascendant and anarchism diminished in the 1880sâ90s, and the Second Industrial Revolution expanded the ranks of the proletariat and of socialist politics internationally through the Second or Socialist International, as the geopolitical order of capitalism found new players in the rise of Germany, Japan and the United States, and the older 19th century British and French socialist traditions were taken up and subsumed by Marxism. At the same time, Bonapartist states in the industrializing countries led capitalism into a new and even greater era. The freewheeling Gilded Age saw the most massive quantitative transformations in the history of civilization. The Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century resulted in mass socialist parties unprecedented in world history, and within a generation they were prepared to take power.[7] This produced what Luxemburg and Lenin regarded as the welcome âcrisis of Marxismâ itself, which they took as opportunity to clarify the tasks of socialism. We are nowhere near such a condition today. Indeed, the question of the meaning of socialism is being suppressed through its advocacy: precisely when everyone is claiming to be âsocialistâ its memory is being buried. Socialism currently is being not constituted but liquidated. The last time this happened was in the mid-20th century, when Stalinism and Social Democracy liquidated Marxism and adapted to continuing capitalism. It is happening yet again.
Redeeming the 20th century, then, means recognizing its repetition today. The reigning statism of the Millennial Left arriving at adulthood, whether neo-social-democratic or neo-Stalinist, is the death-mask imposed upon it by its 20th century forebears, smothering it from birth â especially the 1960s New Left, internalizing, through âantiâ-authoritarian rebellion, the mocking face of state âsocialism.â Any haunting reminders of anarchism that may trouble its conscience moving forward will be a mere spectral apparition and no living spirit of socialism. That spirit can only find life in a rebirth of Marxism, which for now exists outside and against the stream of the present, and, like Benjaminâs Angel of History, sees not a chain of events, carrying us helplessly from one âdamned thingâ to another, but only one single mounting catastrophe.[8] As for Benjamin, the only hope is not in the flow of time, but in the monstrous abbreviation and compression of history that can blast the continuity of the present. | P
[6] See V.I. Lenin, âLeft-Wingâ Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), Chapter 4 âThe Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled,â available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch04.htm>; and Theodor W. Adorno, âResignationâ (1969), trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 292.
[8] Walter Benjamin, âOn the concept of historyâ (1940), AKA âTheses on the philosophy of history,â in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-64. Available online at: <https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html>.
“Chris Cutrone is a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, a professor at The School of Art Institute of Chicago, and a returning guest to the Zero Books podcast. He is the author of a controversial essay entitled âWhy Not Trump.â The piece was a half-hearted endorsement of Trump as the better adversary for the left, an opinion that is not at all self-evident today under Trump. However, this week we discuss the late Moishe Postone as well as Adolph Reed in the context of the death of politics.”
MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as âbourgeois ideology.â This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. Thereâs little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine âideology.â It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)
So what is meant by philosophy as âideologyâ?
This goes to the issue of Marxist âideology-critique.â What did Marxism mean by ideology as âfalse consciousnessâ? âFalseâ in what way? For if bourgeois ideology were considered the ideology of the sociological group of the bourgeoisie â capitalists â then there would be nothing âfalseâ about it: it would be the consciousness adequate to the social being of the ruling class; it would be the true consciousness of the bourgeoisie. So it must be false not for the bourgeoisie but rather for others â for the âproletariat.â This kind of âclass analysisâ of ideology would be concerned that the workers not fall for the ideology of the ruling class. It would be a warning against the workers adopting the idealism of the bourgeoisie that would blind them to their real social condition in capitalism. The idea here is that somehow the workers would remain ignorant of their exploitation by the capitalists if they remained mired in bourgeois ideology.
Of course Marxism was originally no such âmaterial analysisâ â debunking â of wrong thinking. No.
Rather, the original Marxist ideology-critique â Marx and Engelsâs ideology-critique of bourgeois society â was the immanent dialectical critique of the way society in capitalism necessarily appears to its members, bourgeois and proletarian â capitalists and workers â alike. It was the critique of the true consciousness of the workers as well as of the capitalists.
Now, that formulation just lost me 99% of ostensible âMarxistsâ as well as all of the rest of the âLeft,â whether socialist or liberal, who do indeed think that the poor benighted workers and other subaltern need us intellectuals to tell them what their true social interests are.
This is not what Marxism â Marx and Engels â originally thought, however.
Marxism began with the critique of socialism, specifically with the critique of the most prominent socialist thinker of Marx and Engelsâs formative moment in the 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon â who coined the term âanarchismâ â claimed that he respected only three authorities, intellectually, Adam Smith, Hegel and the Bible!
Marxism is usually thought of as the synthesis of German Idealist philosophy, British political-economy, and French socialist politics. But what Marxism actually was was the immanent dialectical critique of these three phenomena, which Marx and Engels considered three different forms of appearance of the same thing: the most advanced bourgeois ideology of their time, of the earlyâmid 19th century. They were all true expressions of their historical moment, of the Industrial Revolution. But as such, they were also all false.
Proudhon wrote of the âphilosophy of misery,â attacking the heirs of Adam Smith in Utilitarianism â James Mill and Jeremy Bentham â and other contemporary British political economists such as Malthus and David Ricardo and their French counterparts. Marx wrote his first major work on political economy and the class struggle in industrial capitalism as a critique of Proudhon, cleverly inverting its title, The Poverty [Misery] of Philosophy.
I was deeply impressed by this work â and especially by its title â when I first read it as an aspiring young âMarxistâ in college. It signified to me a basic truth, which is that the problem of capitalism and its potential overcoming in socialism was not a matter of âphilosophy,â not a problem of thinking. Reading further, in Marxâs 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, I read and deeply internalized Marxâs injunction that âcommunism is a dogmatic abstractionâ which was âone-sided,â expressing the same thing as its opposite, private property, and, like bourgeois society itself, was internally divided, for instance, between collectivism and individualism, and so could not be considered a vision of an emancipated future society, but only a negation of the present. I had read in Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto their critique of âreactionary socialism,â and their observation that everything of which communism stood accused was actually the âspecterâ of what capitalism itself was already doing â âabolishing private property,â among other things.
This all told me that, for Marx and Engels at least, the problem of bourgeois ideology was not a matter that could be addressed let alone rectified by proper methodology â by a kind of right-thinking opposed to it.
In short, I recognized early on that Marxism was not some better philosophy.
Marxism was not a philosophical critique of philosophy, but rather something else entirely. For instance, Marx and Engelsâs critique of the Young Hegelians was not as philosophers, but in their philosophical claims for politics. This was also true of Leninâs critique of the Machians among the Bolsheviks (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908). The critique was of the relation between philosophy and politics. It was thus also not a political critique of philosophy.
Ends
I have titled my talk here, âEnds of philosophy,â after the title for the week in our Platypus primary Marxist reading group syllabus when we read Karl Korschâs 1923 essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the recommended background reading for todayâs discussion. In the syllabus week title as well as here, I intend to play on the multiple meanings of the word âends.â What are the ends of philosophy, according to Marxism, in terms of its telos, its goals, its purposes, and its satisfaction; what would it take to attain and thus overcome the aspirations of philosophy?
Specifically, what would it take to satisfy bourgeois â that is to say, modern â philosophy? What would make philosophy superfluous?
This is posed in the same way that Marxism sought to make labor as social value superfluous. How does labor seek to abolish itself in capitalism? The same could be said of philosophy.
What would it take to bring philosophy to an end â to its own end? Not by denying the need for philosophy, but by satisfying it.
But there have been other moments, before (and after) Marxism, which sought to overcome philosophy through its satisfaction, through satisfying the need for philosophy.
The need for â the necessity of â philosophy in the modern world is different from its need previously â fundamentally different. The need to account for freedom in bourgeois emancipation was new and different; this did not motivate and inform traditional philosophy. But it fundamentally tasked modern philosophy â at least the philosophy that mattered most to Marxism, the Enlightenment and German Idealism at its culmination. But the need for philosophy in capitalism is also different from its need in the bourgeois revolution.
Please allow me to address several different historical moments of the end of philosophy. I use this concept of moments of the âend of philosophyâ instead of alternative approaches, such as varieties of âanti-philosophy,â because I think that trying to address Marxism as an anti-philosophy is misleading. It is also misleading in addressing other such supposed âanti-philosophies,â such as those of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Existentialism, Heidegger, etc., as well as other traditions entirely, such as the Enlightenment philosophes contra âphilosophy,â or Empiricism and Analytic Philosophy contra âmetaphysics.â (For instance, Heidegger sought the potential end to âthousands of years of Western metaphysics,â going all the way back to Plato.) Yet all these various phenomena express to my mind a common issue, namely the problem of âphilosophyâ per se in the modern era, both in the era of bourgeois emancipation and subsequently in capitalism.
What is âphilosophy,â such that it can experience an end? It is not merely its etymological meaning, the love of knowledge, or wisdom, or the love of thinking. Philosophers are not merely smart or sage â not merely sophists, clever thinkers: philosophy cannot be considered merely the mastery of logic or of semantics. If that were true, then most lawyers would be better philosophers than most avowed âphilosophers.â
The end of philosophy cannot be considered an end to sophistry, finally putting the clever fellows down. It cannot be considered an analogue to Shakespeareâs âFirst, we kill all the lawyers.â It is not meant to be the triumph of Philistinism. Although you might think so from a lot of âMarxistâ deprecation of philosophy, especially as âbourgeois ideology.â Such âMarxistsâ want to put a stop to all mystification by putting a stop to the mystifiers of bourgeois society, the lackeys â the paid liars â of the capitalist bourgeoisie. They want to stop the âphilosophersâ from pulling the wool down over the eyes of the exploited and oppressed. This is not my meaning. â This was not even Socratesâs (Platoâs) meaning in taking down the Sophists.
Authoritarianism
Philosophy cannot be considered, either negatively or positively, as the arrogation of all thinking: it is not some Queen of the Sciences that is to make proper sense of and superintend any and all human thought in every domain. It is not the King of Reason; not the thought-police. Marxism did not seek to replace philosophy in such a role. No. Yet this seems to be precisely what everyone wants from philosophy â or from anti-philosophy. They want their thinking dictated to them.
Korsch addresses this as âBonapartism in philosophy:â we seem to want to be told how and what to think by philosophers â or by anti-philosophers. It is an authoritarian impulse. But one that is an authentic expression of our time: capitalism brings forth its own Philosopher Kings.
This is not at all what the immediate predecessors for Marxist thought in philosophy, Kant and Hegel, considered as their task: Kant, in âbeginningâ philosophy (anew), and Hegel in âcompletingâ this, did not seek to replace the thinking of others. No. Precisely the opposite: they sought to free philosophy, to make it âworldly.â They thought that they could do so precisely because they found that the world had already become âphilosophical.â
After them, they thought there would no longer be a need to further develop Philosophy as such, but only the need for philosophical reflection in the various different diverse domains of human activity. Our modern academic institutions reflect this: one receives the PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, in Chemistry, meaning one is qualified to âdoctor,â to minister and correct, to treat the methods and attendant thinking â the âphilosophyâ â of the science of chemistry, without however necessarily becoming an expert specialist âphilosopher of science,â or studying the specialized discipline Philosophy of Science per se. According to LukĂĄcs, such specialized knowledge as found in academia as well as in the various technical vocations â such as law, journalism, art, etc. â exhibited âreificationâ in capitalism, a disintegrated particularization of atomized consciousness, in which losing the forest for the trees was the very predicate of experience and knowledge. But this was the opposite of what Kant and Hegel had expected. They expected not disintegration but the organic, living and changing relations of diverse multiplicity.
Marx found a very different world from Kant and Hegelâs, after the Industrial Revolution. It was not a philosophical world in capitalism â not an âenlightenedâ realm of âsober senses,â to which bourgeois philosophy had aspired, but something much darker. It was a âphantasmagoriaâ of âcommodity fetishism,â full of beguiling âmetaphysical subtleties,â for which one needed to refer to the âmist-enveloped regions of religionâ for proper models. In capitalism, bourgeois society was sunk in a kind of animism: a world of objects exhibiting âtheological niceties.â
There was a need for a new Enlightenment, a Second Enlightenment specific to the needs of the 19th century, that is, specific to the new needs of industrial capitalism, for which the prior thinking of bourgeois emancipation, even at its best, for instance by Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel, was not equipped to adequately address. It needed a new recognition of the relation between social being and consciousness.
But for Marx and Engels, this new task of enlightenment was something that could not be accomplished philosophically â could not be brought to fruition in thinking â but only in actual political struggle and the transformation of society.
History
This was because, unlike the emancipation of bourgeois society, which took several centuries and came to consciousness of itself as such only late, no longer cloaking itself in the religious garb of Christianity â the Protestant Reformation as some return to true Christianity of the original Apostles, freed from the corruptions of the Church â and arrived at self-consciousness only at the end of its process of transformation, in the 18th century. As Hegel put it, âThe Owl of Minerva [that is, knowledge] flies at dusk:â proper consciousness comes only âpost-festum,â after the fact of change.
But Marx and Engels found the task of socialism in capitalism to be motivated by a new need. The proletarianization of the bourgeois social relations of labor â the society of cooperative production in crisis with the Industrial Revolution â required a new consciousness of contradiction, a âdialecticalâ and âhistoricalâ âmaterialism,â to properly recognize its tasks. As Marx put it, the social revolution of the 19th century â in contradistinction to the bourgeois revolution â could not take its poetry from the past, but needed to take its poetry from the future. This was quite a paradoxical formulation, especially since Marx and Engels explicitly abjured âutopian socialism,â finding it a realm of images of capitalism, and not of a world beyond it.
This was because they found the workersâ struggles against the capitalists to be motivated by bourgeois consciousness, the consciousness of the bourgeois revolution. Socialism was born in the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, for instance, in the former Jacobin Babeufâs Conspiracy of Equals, still motivated by the aspirations of âliberty, equality and fraternity.â Proudhon, for example, was motivated in his anarchist socialism, avowedly, by Adam Smith and Hegel (and the Bible) â animated, unabashedly, by bourgeois political economy and philosophy.
Marx and Engels didnât think that this was wrong, but only inadequate. They didnât offer an alternative to Proudhon â to Smith and Hegel (or the Bible!) â but only a critique of how bourgeois thought mystified the crisis and task of capitalism. The world necessarily appeared in bourgeois terms â there were no other terms. There was no other form of consciousness. There was no other philosophy. Nor was there a need for a new philosophy.
Bourgeois philosophy, for Marx and Engels, had successfully summed up and appropriated all prior philosophical enlightenment. They agreed with Kant and Hegel. Bourgeois social thought had successfully summed up and completed all prior thinking about society. Marx and Engels neither disputed nor sought to replace it. They were concerned only with its self-contradiction in capitalism. Not its hypocrisy, but its authentic antinomies, which both drove it on and left it stuck. The bourgeois âend of historyâ turned out to be the opposite of what it intended: not a final stage of freedom, but rather a final stage of unfreedom; the crossroads of âsocialism or barbarism.â
Impossibility
This affected the status of philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy no longer described freedom but rather unfreedom. Or, more dialectically, it described both: the reproduction of unfreedom in the struggle for freedom. As a result, the task of freedom was no longer expressed by the need for all human activity to achieve an adequate â Hegelian â philosophically reflective self-consciousness, but rather to realize in practice and thus recognize in consciousness the limits of such self-consciousness, of such philosophical reflection. There was a crisis in radical bourgeois philosophy. The crisis and decay of Hegelianism was an authentic historical phenomenon, not a mistake.
Like liberal democracy, philosophy in capitalism was no longer itself, and was no longer tasked with becoming itself, attaining its aspirations, but rather was tasked with overcoming itself, superseding its achievements. The achievements of bourgeois emancipation seemed ruined in the 19th century.
Indeed, capitalism already accomplished such self-overcoming of bourgeois society, but perversely, negating itself without satisfying itself. In so doing, it constantly re-posed the task of achieving itself, as an impossible necessity. Bourgeois philosophy became the opposite of what it was, utopian. Not worldly philosophy, but an ideal, a mere notion, mocked by the real, ugly and anything-but-philosophical world.
Because of this â precisely because of this â bourgeois philosophy did not end but constantly reinvented itself, however on an increasingly impoverished basis. It radically revolutionized itself, but also, in so doing, radically undermined itself.
Philosophy remained necessary but proved impossible. It disintegrated, into epistemology, ontology and ethics. They went their separate ways. But they also drove themselves into blind alleys â dead-ends. This actually indicates the task of philosophy to overcome itself, however in perverted form.
Metaphysics
So, what is philosophy? One straightforward way of answering this is, simply, metaphysics. Kant, following Rousseau, had overcome the division and opposition between Rationalism and Empiricism by finding a new foundation for metaphysics. This was the Kantian âCopernican Turnâ and ârevolutionâ in philosophy. But it was not simply a new metaphysics, but rather a new account of metaphysics â of philosophy â itself. Moreover, it was revolutionary in an additional sense: it was not only a revolution, but also accounted for itself as revolutionary. This is because it was a metaphysics of change, and not merely change but radical qualitative transformation: it was a revolutionary account of the fundamental transformability of the substance of philosophy itself. In short, it was a philosophy of freedom. It was the self-reflection of practical freedom in society â that society made human lifeâs transcendence of nature possible, at all, but in so doing created new problems to be worked through and overcome.
It is precisely this metaphysics of freedom, however, that has gone into crisis and disintegrated in capitalism. This has been the expression of the crisis and disintegration â the decay â of bourgeois society.
The goal of philosophy in overcoming itself is to free thinking from an overarching and underlying metaphysics at all. Kant and Hegel thought that they had done so already, but capitalism â in its crisis of the metaphysics of bourgeois society â revealed that there was indeed an underlying and overarching metaphysics still to be overcome, that of social practice â society â itself. The self-production and self-overcoming of the subject in its socially and practically objective activity â labor â needed to be overcome.
The end of philosophy â the end of a singular metaphysics, or of metaphysics per se â aims at the freeing of both action and thinking from any unitary framework. It is the freeing of an ever-expanding and limitless â without end â diverse multiplicity of new and different forms of acting, being and knowing.
Postmodernism was, as Moishe Postone put it, âpremature post-capitalism.â It aimed at the freeing of the âsmall-s subjects from the big-S Subject.â It also aimed at freedom from capital-H History. It meant overcoming Hegelâs philosophy of history.
We already live in such freedom in bourgeois society, however perverted by capitalism. Diverse activities already inhabit different realms of being and call forth different kinds of ethical judgments. Doctors and lawyers practice activities that define being â define the ârights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happinessâ â in different ways, and are hence ethically bound in different ways. Doctors discipline themselves ethically differently from scientists. Among scientists, Biology has a different epistemology from Physics: there are different methods because there are different objects. There is no âphilosophyâ in the sense of a metaphysical logic that encompasses them all. Lawyers, for example, practice differential ethics: prosecutors and defense attorneys in criminal law are bound by different rules of behavior; the practice of civil law is ethically distinct from criminal law; the rules of evidence are different. We do not seek to bind society to one form of knowledge, one code of conduct, or one way of life. There is no âphilosophyâ that could or should encompass them all. It would be arrogant to claim that there is one singular logic that can be mastered by anyone for governing everything.
Bourgeois society has already established well the reasonable limits to philosophy and its competence.
In Ancient civilization there were differentiated realms of being, knowing and acting. There was a caste system, in which there were different laws for peasants; for merchants; for artisans (and for different kinds of artisans, for different arts and different sciences); and for the nobility; and for the clergy. But they were unified in a Divine Order of the Great Chain of Being. There was heterogeneity, but all with a single origin in God: all of Godâs creatures in all of Godâs Creation. That mystery was to remain unknown to Man â known only to God. There was a reason for everything, but only God could know it. There was not philosophy but theology, and theology was not to arrogate to itself the place of the Mind of God, but only ponder Manâs place in and relationship to it. Theology established the limits to manâs knowledge of God: we knew only what God had revealed to us, through his Covenant. We all heard the Word of God; but God told His different creatures different things. In overcoming theology, philosophy did not seek to replace it. It sought to explore the mind of man, not to relate to and limit itself with respect to the Mind of God. It was not concerned with Divine or Natural limits, but with freedom.
There is no possible one single or once-and-for-all account of freedom, for then freedom would not be free. There is no possible account of âbeingâ free, but only of becoming free. And there is only one such account, that of bourgeois emancipation from traditional civilization. It was to set free all the diverse and multiple activities of mankind, in relation to other humans, to Nature, and to ourselves.
Overcoming
Marx was both a Hegelian and departed from Hegel, with a historical and not a philosophical difference. As Marx put it, for Hegel himself the Hegelian system was not ready-made and finished as it was for those who came after. As Marx observed, Hegelianism went into crisis for real historical reasons, not due to misunderstanding by his followers; but rather the crisis came from Hegelian philosophyâs actual contact with the world, and that world had become as internally contradictory in capitalism as Hegelianism became in contact with it. The Hegelian dialectic is both appropriate and inappropriate to the problem of capitalism. The crisis and disintegration of Hegelianism was a crisis of metaphysics â of philosophy â at a higher and deeper and not a lower or more superficial level from Hegelianism. Hegelianism was falsified not in itself but by history. But Hegelianism was also borne out by history as the last word in philosophy â in metaphysics. Marxism cannot be purged of its Hegelianism without becoming incoherent; Marxism remains Hegelian, albeit with what LukĂĄcs called an âadditional twistâ in the âpure historicization of the dialectic.â
If society in capitalism remains bourgeois in its ideals, with the goal of providing opportunities for social labor, materially, it has become its opposite: as capitalist, it prioritizes not labor but capital, and at the expense of labor. This means society is tasked with the material challenge of overcoming its ideals. But, as Marx recognized, this can only be done on the basis of this societyâs own ideals, in and through their self-contradiction. In philosophy, this means the task expressed by the self-contradiction of Hegelianism.
Capitalism is the model of the Marxist-Hegelian procedure of immanent dialectical critique: this is how capitalism itself moves, how it reproduces itself through self-contradiction. Capitalism is its own practical critique, reproducing itself by constantly overcoming itself. As Marx put it, the only limit to capital is capital itself; but capital is the transgression of any and all limits. It is the way capitalism overcomes itself, its dynamic process of change, which is its unfreedom, its self-limitation. The Marxian horizon of freedom beyond capitalism is freedom beyond the Hegelian dialectic, beyond the bourgeois dialectic of transformation â beyond labor as a process of self-overcoming through production.
There thus remains a unitary metaphysics binding all social practices, dominating, constraining and distorting their further development in freedom under capitalism: the bourgeois right of labor. The form of total freedom in bourgeois emancipation â self-production in society â has become in capitalism the form of total unfreedom. The social condition for labor has become that of the self-destruction of labor in capital. The goal of labor in capital is to abolish itself; but it can do so only by realizing itself â as self-contradiction. Hegelâs ânegative labor of the conceptâ must be completed; short of that, it dominates us.
Overcoming this will mean overcoming metaphysics â overcoming philosophy. At least overcoming philosophy in any way known â or knowable â hitherto. | P
Earlier this summer, I visited Athens and made a pilgrimage to Aristotleâs Lyceum. I was struck by the idea that perhaps what I am doing in Platypus is essentially the same as what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were doing back in Ancient Greece. Spencer and I were recently discussing the recurrent trope of Aristotle and Marx, apropos of todayâs discussion of Marxism and philosophy, and he recalled his feeling nauseous when reading Castoriadisâs famous essay on Aristotle and Marx, published in the same issue of the journal Social Research alongside Moishe Postoneâs seminal essay, âNecessity, Labor and Time.â Spencer said he had felt sick at the thought that nothing had changed since Aristotleâs time.
I recalled how Frantz Fanon wrote, in Black Skin, White Masks, that he would be happy to learn that an African philosopher had corresponded with Plato, but this wouldnât make a difference for 8 year-olds in Haiti and the Dominican Republic forced to cut sugar cane for a living. This compares well to the former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who, writing from her exile in Cuba on Black Lives Matter, referred to black Americans as âAfricans lost in America.â But are blacks any less lost in Africa today? Am I an Italian or Irish lost in America, too? I often feel that way, that my peasant ancestors were dragged into bourgeois society to ill effect, to my present misery. What would it mean not to be lost? Was I returning home, in a sense, when, as an intellectual, I returned to Aristotleâs school in Athens? Was I any less lost in Athens?
Adorno wrote, in his inaugural lecture on âThe idea of natural history,â that âI submit myself, so to speak, to the materialist dialectic.â What he meant of course was that he could only speak misleadingly of submitting himself to the materialist dialectic, as if he would not already be dominated by it, whether he was conscious of his submission or not. This reminds us of Trotskyâs statement to his recalcitrant followers who rejected Hegelianism that, âYou may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.â
Why should we be interested in âphilosophy,â then? Adorno did not mean that he was submitting himself to Marxism as the âmaterialist dialecticâ in the sense of submitting to Marxâs thought. No. He meant, as we must mean in Platypus, that he accepted the challenge of Marxâs thought as thinking which registered a greater reality, as a challenge and call to task for Adornoâs own thinking.
Foucault wrote about his chagrin that just when one thinks one has overcome Hegel, Hegel is still there smiling back at you. This rather paranoid claim by Foucault as a mental phenomenon has a real meaning, however, which is that Hegel still speaks in some unavoidable way to our real condition. What is meant by âHegelâ here, of course, is the entirety of the alleged âMaster Narrativeâ of the Western philosophical tradition culminating in bourgeois modernity.
Engaging philosophy then, is not being told how to think, but allowing oneâs thinking to be challenged and tasked in a specific way. It is a microcosm of how society challenges and tasks our thinking, whether we are inclined to it or not.
Historical philosophers are not some âdead white malesâ the authority of whose thinking threatens to dominate our own; we do not, or at least ought not, to read philosophy in order to be told how to think. No. The philosophy that comes down to us from history is not the dead weight of the past, but it is part of that past. And the past is not dead or even really past, since past actions still act upon us in the present, whether we like it or not. Marx reminds us that, âMan makes history, but not according to conditions of his own choosing.â
We cannot avoid the past, but we are concerned with the symptomatic attempts to free ourselves from the past by trying to avoid it. Especially on the âLeft,â and especially by ostensible âMarxists.â
As Korsch reminds us, among other ways, this can take the form of trying to avoid the âphilosophicalâ aspects of Marxism.
We might recall that Korschâs essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the background reading for today, was the very first text we read in the Platypus reading group. This was before it was called Platypus, of course, but it was still our first collective discussion of a reading as a group. Our reading was predicated on opening up, not philosophy, but rather the political foundations for Adornoâs thinking. It was meant to help lead my academic students of Adorno, not from Marxism to philosophy, but rather from philosophy to Marxism.
This is the intention of todayâs event as well: we come full circle. Perhaps indeed nothing has changed. | P
Presented at the Left Forum 2018 on the panel âHas âthe Leftâ Accommodated Trump (and Putin)? A Debate,â with Ravi Bali, Brendan Cooney, Anne Jaclard, Daphne Lawless and Bill Weinberg, organized by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative at John Jay College in NYC on June 2, 2018. A video recording of the event is available online at: <https://youtu.be/tUvBeXO02JY>.
AS A MARXIST academic professional and a gay man living in a Northern city, married to a nonwhite Muslim immigrant, it would have been beneficial to me for Hillary Clinton to have been elected President of the U.S. That would have served my personal interests. No doubt about it.
I am opposed to all of Trumpâs policies.
I am especially opposed to Trump on his signature issue, immigration. But I was opposed to Obama on this as well, and would have been opposed to Hillary too. I am opposed to DACA and its hierarchy of supposedly âdeservingâ recipients. âFull citizenship rights for all workers!â
One response to Trump was a Mexican nationalist slogan, in response to Trumpâs âMake America Great Again!,â âMake America Mexico again!â But, as a Marxist, I go one step further: I am for the union of Mexico and the U.S. under one government — the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Trump made Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions wear hats saying âMake Mexico Great Again Also.â This was wholly sincere, at least on Trumpâs part but probably also for Sessions and Giuliani. Why not? If I am opposed to making America great again, then I suppose I am also opposed to making Mexico great, too.
For the purposes of the struggle for socialism I seek to pursue, I wish Hillary had won the election. All the anti-Trump protest going on is a distraction from the necessary work, and, worse, Trump feeds discontent into the Democrats as the party of âopposition.â With Hillary in office, this would have been less the case — however, we must remember that, had she won, Hillary still would have faced a Republican Congressional majority, and so we would have still heard about how important it would be to elect Democrats this year!
I am opposed to Trumpâs law-and-order conservatism. Not that I am against law and order per se, mind you, and perhaps I am not even so opposed to the order and law of society as it is now. I play by the rules and follow the law. Why wouldnât I? — And, anyway, honestly, who here doesnât: ârebels,â all?
But I am aware that laws are selectively enforced and that the social order is run by those who donât always play by the rules — donât always play by their own rules! I am aware that the social order and the law are used as excuses for things that are not so lawful and orderly, for things that are not so social. I am aware of Trumpâs demagogy.
But it is funny watching the established social and political order go into fits over Trumpâs insistence on law and order!
Trumpâs election gave the âLeftâ something to do — they should be grateful! They would have been bored under Hillary. Especially after 8 years of Obama. âFascismâ is much more exciting, isnât it?
I would have been grateful if Hillary had been elected instead — Saturday Night Liveâs jokes about Hillary are much funnier than about Trump.
My family voted for Trump — mostly. My mother and my brother and his wife voted for Trump. But my father voted for Hillary. When Hillary collapsed due to fatigue from pneumonia, my father dutifully went to get his pneumonia shot. But my mother previously had voted twice for Obama; Iâm not sure if my father did, too — he might have voted for McCain and Romney.
In the primaries, I intended to vote for Bernie, but it turned out the Democrats sent the wrong ballots to my precinct (which was more likely to vote for Bernie than other precincts: I thus personally witnessed in action the Democratsâ suppression of votes for Bernie in the primaries), so I went to the (empty) Republican line and voted for Trump. — In November, too: I knew that Hillary would win Illinois, but I wanted her to win by one vote less: no sense rewarding the Democrats for being greedy.
I expected Trump to win.
From the very moment that Trump descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy, I thought he could win. As time went on, I increasingly thought that he would win.
I had mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I dreaded the shit-show that ensued in Trumpâs campaign and that I knew would only get worse if he was elected.
But on the other hand, I felt an obligation as a teacher to prepare my students for Trumpâs victory. — If he had not won, nothing would have been lost: my students didnât require any special preparation for a Clinton Presidency. But if Trump won, I knew that there would be a great deal of confusion — and scare-mongering by the Democrats. I couldnât stand by and watch my students be lied to.
I had lived through the Reagan Revolution and watched The Day After on television along with everyone else. I heard Reagan denounced as a âfascistâ by the âLeftâ and experienced the multiple anti-climaxes of Mondale and Dukakis. The world hadnât ended. As an adult, I lived through the George W. Bush Presidency, 9/11 and the War on Terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crash, and the âchange we can believe in,â the election of the First Black President. In all that time, not much changed. At least not much attributable to the Presidency.
So I didnât expect much to change with Trump either.
But I did expect a lot of hysterics in response. I knew that my students would be scared. I wanted to protect them from that.
So I sought to get out ahead of it.
My students asked me to write a statement on the election in the beginning of the new academic year before the election, something short that could be handed out as a flyer.
So I wrote, âWhy not Trump?â — which is why I was invited here to speak to you now: to answer for my alleged crime. It was not an endorsement, nor an equivocation, but an honest question: Why not Trump? Perhaps it was too philosophical.
As I wrote in that article, I thought that the mendacity of the status quo defending itself against Trump was a greater threat than Trump himself. I was prompted to re-read Hannah Arendtâs article on the Pentagon Papers, âLying in Politics:â she said that the ability to lie was inextricably connected to the ability to create new things and change the world.
I donât know.
I did find however a difference in quality and character between Trumpâs lies and the Democratsâ.
The only argument I found for Hillary was that we lived in the âbest of all possible worldsâ — as Voltaireâs Professor Pangloss described it in Candide. I didnât want to be Professor Pangloss. I wanted to spare my students that.
But perhaps we did live in the best of all possible worlds under Obama, and would have continued to do so under Hillary. Perhaps Trump really has ruined everything for everyone. Perhaps the world has come to an end.
I donât know.
I wish Hillary had won — so I could have found out. | P
– Lorraine Cohen, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, USA âRosa Luxemburgâs theory of leadership: An Alternative ApproachâÂ
– Edward Remus, Ronald Williams Library, Northern Illinois University, Chicago “American Bernstein, American Luxemburg: Views of the SPD’s revisionist dispute and great schism from the Socialist Party of America, 1900-1918âÂ
– Henry Holland, Hamburg, Germany âBeyond Nationalisms: Spontaneity and Working-Class Organization in Scotland, 2012-2017 through the lens of Luxemburgâs dialecticâÂ
Presented as the Presidentâs report at the closing plenary of the 10th annual international convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on April 7, 2018. Full audio recording of discussion available online at: https://archive.org/details/CenturyCounterrevolution
RECENTLY, I CAME ACROSS a 1938 article by the âLeft communistâ Paul Mattick, Sr., titled âKarl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler.â In it, Mattick asserted that the reformist social democracy that Kautsky ended up embracing was the harbinger of fascism â of Nazism.[1] There is a certain affinity to Friedrich Hayekâs book on The Road to Serfdom (1944), in which a similar argument is made about the affinity of socialism and fascism. If Marxism (e.g. Kautsky) led to Hitler, as Hayek and Mattick aver, then this is because the counterrevolution was in the revolutionary tradition. The question we face today is whether and how the revolutionary tradition is still within the counterrevolution. For that is what we live under: it is the condition of any potential future for the revolutionary tradition whose memory we seek to preserve.
2018 marks two anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of the failed German Revolution of 1918; and the 50th anniversary of the climax of the New Left in 1968.
Moishe Postone died this year, and his death marks the 50th anniversary of 1968 in a certain way.
A strange fact of history is that both Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Father but bitter political opponent, whose Presidency Jefferson unseated in his Democratic-Republican Revolution of 1800, John Adams, died on the precise 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to the day, on July 4, 1826. John Adamsâs dying words were âJefferson still lives.â He was mistaken: Jefferson had died several hours earlier. But he was correct in another, more important sense: Jefferson had lived just long enough to see the survival of the American Revolution for its first half-century.
Perhaps Moishe Postone lived just long enough to see the survival of the New Left 50 years later. If that is true, however, then he lived just long enough to see the survival of not the revolution but the counterrevolution.
As I presented all the way back at our very first annual Platypus convention in 2009, in my contribution to The Platypus Synthesis, on âHistory, theory,â the Spartacists and Postone differ on the character of historical regression: Postone taking it to be the downward trend since the missed opportunity of the New Left in the 1960s; while the Spartacists account for regression since the high-point of the revolutionary crisis after WWI in which the October Revolution took place in 1917. But perhaps we can take the occasion this year to date more precisely the regression affecting both the Spartacists and Postone, the failure of the German Revolution of 1918, whose centennial we mark this year.
The question of historical regression raises its potential opposite, that is, history as Hegel took it to be, the progress in (the consciousness of) freedom. What we face in 2018 is that the last 50 years and the last 100 years have not seen a progress in freedom, but perhaps a regression in our consciousness of its tasks, specifically regarding the problem of capitalism. Where the Spartacists and Postone have stood still, waiting for history to resume, either from 1918 or from 1968, we must reckon with not history at a standstill but rather as it has regressed.
In this we are helped less by Hegel or Marx than by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose essay on âThe Use and Abuse of History for Lifeâ (1874/76) I cited prominently in my Platypus Synthesis contribution. There, I quoted Nietzsche that,
âA person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. . . . People or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. . . . It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past after the fact, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. . . .
âHere it is not righteousness which sits in the judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force. . . .
â[But there is a danger in the] attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past after the fact, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. It is always a dangerous attempt, because it is so difficult to find a borderline to the denial of the past and because the second nature usually is weaker than the first.â[2]
So the question we have always faced in Platypus is the borderline between freeing ourselves from the past or rather participating in its liquidation. Are we gaining or losing history as a resource? In losing its liability we might sacrifice history as an asset. We must refashion history for use in our present need, but we might end up â like everyone else â abusing it: it might end up oppressing rather than freeing us.
Indiana Jones, who as we know was a Professor of Archaeology, in the 1989 film The Last Crusade, said that âArchaeology is about the search for fact, not the search for truth â for the search for truth, see Philosophy!â If Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can get it, then certainly we should!
In our approach to history, then, we are engaged not with its âfactsâ but with the truth of history. We are not archeologists: we are not antiquarians or historians â at least not affirmatively: we are not historicists. The events and figures of the past are not dead facts awaiting discovery but are living actions â past actions that continue to act upon the present, which we must relate to. We must take up the past actions that continue to affect us, and participate in the on-going transformation of that action. How we do so is extremely consequential: it affects not merely us, today, but will affect the future. History lives or dies â is vital or deadly â depending on our actions.
We are here to consider how the actions of not only 50 years ago in 1968 but 100 years ago in 1918 affect us today. But to understand this, we must consider the past actions that people 100 years ago in turn were affected by. We must consider the deeper history that they inherited and sought to act upon.
Last year we marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the closing plenary panel discussion at our international convention in which I participated, alongside Bryan Palmer and Leo Panitch, I raised the possibility that, after a century, we had the opportunity of approaching this history differently. There, I said that,
âThe paradox of 1917 is that failure and success are mixed together in its legacy. Therefore, the fact that 1917 is becoming more obscure is an opportunity as well as a liability. We are tasked not only with understanding the opportunity, but also with trying to make the liability into an asset. The various ways in which 1917 is falsely claimed, in a positive sense â we can call that Stalinism, we can call it all sorts of things â has dissipated. We have to try to make use of that. What has faded is not the revolution, perhaps, but the counter-revolution. In other words, while not entirely gone, the stigmatization of 1917 throughout the 20th century and the horror at the outcome of revolution [i.e., Stalinist repression] â these are fading. In that way we might be able to disentangle the success and the failure differently than it has been attempted in the past.â[3]
This year we must reckon with the changing fortunes over the last century, not of the revolution, but rather of the counterrevolution. If not the revolution but the counterrevolution has disappeared, perhaps this is because it has become invisible â naturalized. It is so much the fundamental condition of our time that we donât even notice it. But that does not mean that it doesnât continue to act upon us. It might be so powerful as to not even provoke resistance, like atmospheric pressure or gravity. The effort it takes to read history against the grain â Benjamin said it must be done with the leverage of a âbarge-poleâ[4] â is in denaturalizing this history of the counterrevolution, to make it visible or noticeable at all. Can we feel it? This has changed over the course of the past century. In the first half-century, from 1918 to 1968, the naturalization of the counterrevolution took certain forms; in the last half-century, since 1968, it has taken other forms. We can say indeed that the action of the counterrevolution provoked more resistance in its first 50 years, from 1918â68, than it has in its second 50 years, from 1968 to the present. That would mean that 1968 marked the decisive victory of the counterrevolution â to the degree that this was not entirely settled already in 1918.
As Richard [Rubin] pointed out at my presentation at this yearâs 4th Platypus European Conference in London, on âThe Death of the Millennial Left,â there has been nothing new produced, really, in the last 50 years. I agreed, and said that whatever had been new and different in the preceding 50 years, from 1918 to 1968 â Heideggerâs philosophy, for example â was produced by the counterrevolutionâs active burial of Marxism. Max Weber had remarked to Georg LukĂĄcs in 1918 that what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in the October Revolution and its aftermath would mitigate against socialism for at least 100 years. He seems to have been proven right. But since 1968, such active efforts against the memory of Marxism have been less necessary. So we have had, not so much anti-Marxism, as the naturalization of it. Ever since 1968, everyone is already a âMarxistâ â as Foucault himself said â precisely because everyone is already an anti-Marxist. This is how things appear especially this year, in 2018. And necessarily so.
The failure of the 1918 German Revolution was not only that, but was the failure of Marxism as a world-historical movement. As Rosa Luxemburg posed the matter, the failure of revolution in Germany was the failure of revolution in Russia. 1918 and 1917 are inextricably linked. But the failure of 1918 has been hidden behind the apparent success of 1917. The failure of 1917 wears the deceptive mask of success because of the forgetting of the failure of 1918.
Marxism failed. This is why it continues to fail today. Marxism has forgotten its own failure. Because Marxism sought to take up the prior â bourgeois â revolutionary tradition, its failure affected the revolutionary tradition as a whole. The victory of the counterrevolution in 1918 was the victory of counterrevolution for all time.
What do we mean by the âcounterrevolutionâ?
Stalin declared the policy â the strategy â of âsocialism in one countryâ in 1924. What did it mean? What was it predicated upon? The events in Germany in 1923 seemed to have brought a definitive end to the post-WWI revolutionary crisis there. Stalin concluded therefore that Russia would not be saved by revolution in Germany â and even less likely by revolution elsewhere â but needed in the meantime to pursue socialism independently of prospects for world revolution. Stalin cited precedent from Lenin for this approach, and he attracted a great deal of support from the Communist Party for this policy.
Robert Borba, a supporter of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, speaking at our 4th European Conference in London earlier this year, addressed the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism in response to Hillel Ticktin on the panel discussion of â50 Years of 1968,â as follows:
âHillel [Ticktin] defined Stalinism as socialism in one country, which supposedly cannot exist. It is not viable. We should think seriously about what that means. Imagine you are Lenin in 1918. You have led a revolution. You are counting on the German revolutionaries to come to your aid, as you envision this whole process of revolution throughout Europe. But it does not happen. Now what do you do? Say, âThis cannot exist, it is not viable,â and give up? Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did not give up. The proletariat had taken power in one country. The imperialists were invading. They did the best they could for the world revolution. They retained a base from which to spread revolution. To give that up would harm the interests of oppressed humanity.â[5]
This blackmail of the necessity to âdefend the gains of the revolutionâ is crucial to understanding how the counterrevolution triumphed within the revolution â how Bolshevism led to Stalinism.
Even supposed âTrotskyistsâ however ended up succumbing to the exigencies of supposedly âdefending the gainsâ â Trotsky himself said that an inability to defend the gains of the revolution would mean an inability to advance it: Trotsky was still addressing Stalinism as a retreat. His followers today are even more willing than Trotsky himself to defend any and all purported âgainsâ â but at the expense of possibilities for any advance. What was perhaps a temporary necessity for Trotsky has become permanent for the supposed âLeft.â
So-called âMarxismâ today is in fact an agency of the counterrevolution â has become part of the counterrevolutionâs on-going action â which is why it is not surprising that the âLeftâ today even champions the counterrevolution â by denouncing the revolutionary tradition. But this didnât happen just recently, but has been going on increasingly over the course of the past century. First, in small ways; but then finally comprehensively. Equivocations became judgments against the revolutionary tradition. It began in marked ways at least as early as the late 1960s. For instance, in 1967 Susan Sontag wrote, in the formerly Communist- and then Trotskyist-affiliated journal Partisan Review, that,
âIf America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. . . . The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone â its ideologies and inventions â which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.â[6]
Sound familiar? It is a voice very much for our time! Here, Sontag explicitly rejects the revolution â âparliamentary government,â the âemancipation of women,â and âMarxâ included â because of its âeradication of autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads,â and as âwhat this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.â Letâs accept this characterization of âWestern white civilizationâ by Sontag, but try to grasp it through the revolution. For this is what revolution does: eradicate the prior form of civilization. What is America the âculminationâ of, exactly? Letâs look to its Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, and think about the American Revolutionary leader alongside the protagonist of the 1918 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg.
I will start with the concluding scene of the 1995 film Jefferson in Paris. Here, Jefferson negotiates a contractual agreement with his slave James Hemings for the freedom of himself and Sally Hemings and her children â Jeffersonâs own offspring. It is observed by his white daughter. This scene encapsulates the revolution: the transition from slavery to social contract.
In the 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg, Sonja Liebknecht says to Luxemburg in prison that, âSometimes I think that the war will go on foreverâ â as it has indeed gone on forever, since we are still fighting over the political geography and territorial results of WWI, for instance in the Middle East â and, responding to Luxemburgâs optimism, about the mole burrowing through a seemingly solid reality that will soon be past and forgotten, âBut it could be us who will soon disappear without a trace.â In the penultimate scene of the film, Karl Liebknecht reads the last lines of his final article, âDespite Everything,â and Luxemburg reads her last written words, âI was, I am, I shall be!â â referring however to âthe revolution,â not Marxism![7]
Luxemburgâs âI was, I am, I shall be!â and Liebknechtâs âDespite everything!â â are they still true? Is the revolution still on-going, despite everything? If not Luxemburgâs, then at least Jeffersonâs revolution?
But arenât Thomas Jefferson and Rosa Luxemburg on âopposing sidesâ of the âclass divideâ â wasnât Luxemburgâs Spartakusbund [âSpartacus Leagueâ] on the side of the slaves (named after a Roman slave who revolted); whereas, by contrast, Jefferson was on the side of the slave-owners? No!
To quote Robert Frost, from his 1915 poem âThe Black Cottage,â
â[T]he principle
That all men are created free and equal. . . .
Thatâs a hard mystery of Jeffersonâs.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isnât true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman [Jefferson] got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.â[8]
How will we reconsider it for our age? Apparently, we wonât: Jeffersonâs statues will be torn down instead. We will take the âeasy wayâ and âdecideâ that Jeffersonâs revolutionary character âsimply isnât true.â This has long since been decided against Luxemburgâs Marxism, too â indeed, as a precondition for the judgment against Jefferson. As Max Horkheimer said, âAs long as it is not victorious, the revolution is no good.â[9] The failure of revolution in 1918 was its failure for all time. We are told nowadays that the American Revolution never happened: it was at most a âslaveholderâs revolt.â But it certainly did not mark a change in âWestern white civilization.â Neither, of course, did Marxism. Susan Sontag tells us so!
Platypus began in 2006 and was founded as an organization in 2007, but we began our conventions in 2009. In 2018, our 10th convention requires a look back and a look ahead; last year marked the centenary of 1917; this year marks 1918, hence, this specific occasion for reflecting on history from Platypusâs point of view. What did we already know in 2006â08 that finds purchase especially now, in 2018? The persistence of the counterrevolution. Hence, our special emphasis on the failure of the 1918 German Revolution as opposed to the âsuccessâ of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which has been the case throughout the history of our primary Marxist reading group pedagogy. But we should reflect upon it again today.
I would like to refer to some of my convention speeches for Platypus:
In my 2012 convention Presidentâs report, â1873â1973: The century of Marxism,â I asserted that the first 50 years saw growth and development of Marxism, as opposed to the second 50 years, which saw the steady destruction of the memory of Marxism.[10]
So today, in regarding 1918â2018 as the century of counterrevolution, I ask that its first 50 years, prior to 1968, be considered as the active counterrevolution of anti-Marxism, as opposed to the second 50 years, after 1968, as the naturalization of the counterrevolution, such that active anti-Marxism is no longer necessary.
But I would like to also recall my contribution to a prior convention plenary panel discussion in 2014, on âRevolutionary politics and thought,â[11] where I asserted that capitalism is both the revolution and the counterrevolution. To illustrate this, I quoted a JFK speech from 1960:
âWe should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.â
Kennedy was speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York:
âI 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.â[12]
With Kennedy, the counterrevolution, in order to be successful, still needed to claim to be the revolution: the counterrevolution still struggled with the revolution. By the end of the 1960s â at the other end of the New Left â however, this was no longer the case.
We can observe today that what was lacking both in 1918 and in 1968 was a political force adequate to the task of the struggle for socialism. The problem of political party links both dates. 1968 failed to overcome the mid-20th century liquidation of Marxism in Stalinism and related phenomena, in the same way that 1918 had failed to overcome the capitulation of the SPD and greater Second International in WWI, and thus failed to overcome the crisis of Marxism.
For this reason, we can say, today, 50 years after 1968, that the past 100 years, since 1918, have been the century of counterrevolution. | P
[1] Available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1939/kautsky.htm>.
[2] âHistory, theory,â available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2009/06/14/the-platypus-synthesis-history-theory/>.
[3]Platypus Review 99 (September 2017), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2017/08/29/1917-2017/>.
[4] Walter Benjamin, âParalipomena to âOn the Concept of Historyââ (1940), Selected Writings vol. 4 1938â40, Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 407.
[5] â50 years of 1968,â Platypus Review 105 (April 2018), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2018/04/01/50-years-of-1968/>.
[7] Karl Liebknecht, âDespite everythingâ (1919), in John Riddel, ed., The Communist International in Leninâs Time: The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents 1918â19: Preparing for the Founding Conference (New York: Pathfinder, 1986), 269â271; Rosa Luxemburg, âOrder prevails in Berlinâ (1919), available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm>.
[8] In North of Boston, available on-line at: <http://www.bartleby.com/118/7.html>.
[9] Horkheimer, âA discussion about revolution,â in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926â31 and 1950â69 (New York: Seabury, 1978), 39. Available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/readings/horkheimer_dawnex.pdf>.
[10]Platypus Review 47 (June 2012), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2012/06/07/1873-1973-the-century-of-marxism/>.
[11]Platypus Review 69 (September 2014), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2014/09/05/revolutionary-politics-thought-2/>.
[12] Available online at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25785>.
A book talk on the newly published collection of essaysMarxism in the Age of Trump(Platypus Publishing, 2018) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on March 9, 2018.
