Chris Cutrone discusses the meaning of Marxism today with Paul of Dark Centrism.
Category error: The Good and freedom under capitalism: Reply to Tom Canel’s caveats on Marxism
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review 185 | April 2026
For the little man . . . not only his own lack of freedom but that of others as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom.
— Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dämmerung (1926–31)[1]
Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.
— Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street (1928)[2]
TOM CANEL’S ESSAY on my debate with Benjamin Studebaker, between pursuit of freedom and the Good, tries to address my writing as a logical problem.[3] But it begins with a misapprehension: not I but Studebaker introduced the category of the “body” into our dispute about Platonism and Marxism. Not my argument but his hinges on the natural body as a phenomenon. For me it is a historical form of appearance in society; for him it is an emanation of the Good — falling away from it.
This raises the issue of how a natural biological species, which seemingly hasn’t changed fundamentally physically in many thousands of years, could nonetheless have its social relations change, profoundly. What are social relations? They are not merely relations between persons, but also relations to and with Nature (physical and historical) and to and with oneself. They thus form a cosmos — a cosmology.
Kant introduced a critique of the hitherto mechanical view of the universe, on the basis of Rousseau’s observation that the interaction of things changes the things. He sought to go beyond Newtonian physics to a more organic perspective that could grasp qualitative transformations in a process of change. This dialectical view of subject and object, as well as of practice and theory, was motivated by recognition of radical historical change expressed by political, economic, technical and scientific, as well as philosophical revolutions in the modern, bourgeois epoch, overthrowing entirely a prior form of society. Kant’s revolutionary philosophy has been profoundly influential, affecting critical reflection and self-consciousness in diverse ways in all domains. Kant overcame the antinomies of idealism vs. realism (AKA materialism), empiricism vs. rationalism, etc., but this has not prevented the recrudescence of such Ancient philosophical concerns in the subsequent capitalist era. I regard the return to pre-Kantian philosophy to be a symptom of the abandonment of this revolutionary perspective.
Marxism historically critiqued such regression in philosophy as expressing the decadence of bourgeois society. Theodor Adorno, for example, addressed the wide disparity between so-called “Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy” as posing the question of philosophy itself; also noting that philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche seemed to be offering not alternative but anti-philosophies, as did Marxism; and the sciences had taken leave of philosophy altogether in the 20th century, by contrast with the bourgeois Enlightenment, and in ways not yet true in the 19th century, when science and philosophy could still yet cross-fertilize productively.
Tom Canel asks:
Would an established emancipatory communism leave any moral / historical tasks unfulfilled? If not, there might not be a need for any communist virtues. Arguably, once human species being is no longer alienated from itself, the world historical task that the conjuncture would task us with would be to continue to perfect our species being by constantly extending human potential.[4]
But this is the wrong question. No doubt there will be tasks and possibilities beyond that of overcoming capitalism, which is how Marxism originally defined socialism/communism. New problems will arise. Capitalism was regarded as the self-contradiction, crisis, and destruction of historically achieved virtues of bourgeois society, pointing paradoxically to their fulfillment and transcendence beyond capitalism. Leon Trotsky, whose work Canel invokes, warned about illusions of negating bourgeois society and its values, for instance in the realm of culture and art (see Literature and Revolution and other writings, in which he rejected the very possibility of “proletarian” culture and art); but Vladimir Lenin, following Marx and Engels, also warned against prematurely disregarding bourgeois forms of politics and economics, including those developed self-contradictorily under capitalism, the horizon of “bourgeois right” which any attempted rule by the working class — the dictatorship of the proletariat — would still need to observe and respect, in practice as well as theory, at least in the transition from capitalism to socialism that working-class political revolution could only initiate and not complete instantly.
Would “human species-being” ever achieve an unalienated state? Will disalienation ever be complete? We cannot know this for certain. All we can know, according to Marxism, is the possibility and necessity of overcoming the present form of alienation, namely capitalism, and accept and pursue that task of socialism. Marx’s observation about human species-being was that it seemed radically historically transformable in ways not seen in other natural species. Our capacity for self-alienation was responsible for this potential — for freedom. Marx followed Rousseau in acknowledging alienation as our inevitable condition. To overcome one form of alienation is to produce another.
Humanity has developed capacities that transcend our physical biological nature, producing technical possibilities incommensurate with our sense-data perceptions and physical experience. Technology offers possibilities beyond the human body. The problem is that capitalism, based on the bourgeois social relations of human labor, keeps technology shackled to measures of commensurability with biological human life. This problem yields opposed desires and fears: anarcho-primitivism vs. techno-utopianism. Socialism beyond capitalism will realize both and neither of these projections. Both human nature and technology will be free to realize potentials not tied down to the other. As Walter Benjamin recognized, the body is itself a technology; and technology is an extension and prosthesis of the body. To master them is to allow them to more freely relate to each other than is possible under capitalism. What we want is that “the tool not dominate the man,” not to choose either the tool or the man. We want a “relation between men” to no longer appear as a “relation between things” (Marx), but this doesn’t mean rejecting the things.
Marx recognized alienation in all domains of social relations: alienation between people; alienation from Nature; and alienation from ourselves. But he also recognized further alienation: the alienation of the social relations from themselves; the alienation of labor as a social relation from its product; and technology itself as an alienated social relation. Capital as alienated labor transcends and not only negates labor. Disalienation doesn’t mean trying to achieve an unalienated state: alienation is our species-being. What changes is the form of the self-alienation of humanity. Today it is capital — capitalism. Reappropriating it will mean overcoming one form of alienation, not alienation per se.
But our task is to overcome this form of alienation, since it is manifestly self-contradictory and self-destructive: capital contradicts not merely humanity but itself; capital destroys not only humanity but itself. If capital merely destroyed humanity, it would not distinguish itself from all forms of culture and society, which have all demanded human sacrifice: the sacrifice of the human body and its good. All culture and society has been “inhuman”; that has never been enough to demand its change: only internal contradiction drives change. Naïve humanism is an insufficient basis for transformation: capital must be realized in order to be abolished. Anti-capitalism is mere sentimentality to which everyone can agree.
From the standpoint of bourgeois society in the present, as well as from any historical standpoint, the potential for freedom expressed by capitalism must challenge fundamentally any notions we can have of morality and ethics. It is truly “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche); and the freedom expressed by our reason, as developed by society, works for both good and ill, to our benefit and detriment (Rousseau): “man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” These are chains of our own making: so is any good that can be made on the basis of our natural potential — and of our historical enthrallment. More confusing still, the unfulfilled potential for freedom in capitalism is inseparable from its manifest harmful effects. Hence, Marxism regarded capitalism and its history as the basis for not merely unfreedom but freedom. To overcome our unfreedom we must master the freedom that it makes both necessary and possible.
The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.[5]
However capitalism, especially at this late stage, might make us doubt the potential for such mastery, we should not pessimistically accept the apparent limitations of our bodies, as they appear under capitalism, as a conditional qualification for deference in our pursuit of socialism. To accept Nature in the forms of appearance — the Good — as presented under capitalism means accepting capitalism. | P
[1] Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 52.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004), 487.
[3] Tom Canel, “Species being, the good, and Leon Trotsky: A response to the Chris Cutrone / Benjamin Studebaker exchange regarding ideology critique,” Platypus Review 183 (February 2026), <https://platypus1917.org/2026/02/01/species-being-the-good-and-leon-trotsky/>.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” 487.
Anti-imperialism and the “Left” today
Chris Cutrone
Presented at a panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society at the University of California Santa Cruz, with fellow speakers, Keith McHenry (Food Not Bombs) and Alex Dillard (ACP), March 12, 2026.
Platypus’s first public forum event was a panel discussion on imperialism, held in early 2007 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my students had initiated the reading group that became Platypus in the context of the Iraq anti-war movement. We asked the questions, “What is imperialism?” and, “Why should we be against it?” It was the first of Platypus’s panels discussing the historical death of the Marxist socialist Left and its potential rebirth.
I spoke on this public forum panel, and laid out the ideologically tendentious perspectives of “anti-imperialism” that were a problematic legacy of the 1960s New Left Vietnam anti-war movement, impeding the possibility of the reemergence of a socialist movement and politics.
An obscure fact of the “Marxist Left” of the era is that the Vietnam War took place in the context of the Sino-Soviet split: the conflict between the USSR and Communist China, which President Nixon eventually exploited to withdraw from the war in Southeast Asia. Several years later, China and Vietnam fought a brief war but a violent one with tens of thousands of casualties — for the Chinese, it was to fight against supposed “Soviet imperialism” of which Vietnam was an ally. Why? Because Vietnam had invaded Kampuchea — Communist Cambodia — and deposed the Khmer Rouge, to stop the “killing fields” there in which millions perished. Kampuchea was a Chinese ally — which at that time meant an ally of the U.S. in their joint opposition to the Soviet Union and its Eastern European Warsaw Pact countries; so the USSR and its allies could plausibly claim that Communist China was acting on behalf of “U.S. imperialism.”
The “Left” of the time claimed that after the Vietnam War and in the context of the 1970s global economic downturn, the U.S. was in decline and inter-imperialist competition was breaking out with Japan and Germany and greater Europe. — Instead, the U.S. led the global restructuring of capitalism into neoliberalism, which eventually brought down Communist Party rule in the East Bloc and the Soviet Union itself — all according to the long-term Nixon and Kissinger plan to open up China to capitalism and set the stage for renewed American hegemony in the 21st century, which it certainly did.
There are two opposed views of “imperialism” operating on the “Left” today. One is concerned with “U.S. imperialism” as the global hegemon enforcing world capitalism; the other is welcoming “multi-polarity” and the rise of “counter-hegemons” such as Russia and above all China — less so, the other BRICS countries, whose time seems to have passed.
There are some deliberate conflations and confusions of these matters, One older way of discussing such things was in terms of the “Global South”: by contrast, the “Global North” once included the Soviet Union and was concerned with “Soviet imperialism,” and had a decided “Third Worldist” orientation. Where does Russia fit into such a schema today: “imperialist” or “Global South”? Is China, as a share of the global economy nearly equal to its share of world population, still a “peripheral,” “developing” or “under-developed” country, or now a “core” country in global capitalism? Is Chinese economic and industrial development abroad, for instance in Africa, “imperialist” expansion or “neo-colonialism”? When Russian troops are stationed in other countries in support of allied regimes, does this turn those countries into Russian “colonies”?
I will cite Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who called anti-Americanism in the Vietnam War era “ideological.” Meaning, a form of misrecognition, something that conceals more than it reveals. This is true today — perhaps even more so than back then. On the American “Left,” anti-Americanism has the quality of inverted nationalism, suggesting that only American actions matter in world events.
This confusion has long historical roots, going back to the era of original historical Marxism at the turn of the 20th century.
The Communist Party of Great Britain’s writer for the Weekly Worker, Mike Macnair has claimed that the fundamental mistake made by Karl Kautsky, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and other Marxists of the Second or Socialist International, was that they misapprehended the end of the British Empire’s global capitalist hegemony as the end of capitalism itself. For instance, Lenin called the “imperialist” era of the time the “highest (possible) stage of capitalism.” This was counter-posed to Kautsky’s revisionist prognosis of “ultra-imperialism” as a possible alternative to WWI’s inter-imperialist competition and conflict: the joint cooperative exploitation of the world by the core capitalist countries. Lenin claimed that this fudged the issue and tried to avoid, not the inevitability of international war in imperialism, but rather the political crisis of capitalism that led to fierce political conflicts both within and among nation-states.
But the end of the British global hegemony should have led to proletarian socialist revolution and the transition out of capitalism. It is a tragedy that it wasn’t made into that. Indeed, we are living in the aftermath of that failure. The U.S. shouldn’t have replaced the British as the global hegemon, since it created a crisis of the American republic itself, which we are still dealing with today.
For Lenin, imperialism was a crisis of the politics of the state. There was already liberal and conservative anti-imperialisms manifesting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance by the American Anti-Imperialist League in the Spanish-American War, which signaled the entrance of the United States as an imperialist power on the stage of world history. The election of 1900 in the war’s wake was defined by the contention between the anti-imperialist and former Populist Democratic Party Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and Republican William McKinley who had prosecuted the war resulting in the U.S. acquisition of Puerto Rico and the Philippines and capitalist penetration of Cuba, running for reelection, with new Vice Presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt. Bryan lost and McKinley was soon assassinated by an immigrant anarchist in protest of the U.S. occupation of and counterinsurgency against independence fighters in the Philippines, bringing Roosevelt to power.
The Social Democratic Party candidate for President and former Democrat and Populist Eugene Debs distinguished the proletarian socialist approach to the problem of capitalist imperialism from the Republican progressive and Democrat conservative responses, expressing his Marxist understanding of the historical significance of the problem. Debs emphasized that the Anti-Imperialist League’s preferred candidate, William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic Party more generally expressed the conservative reaction against capitalism in the “wail and cry of the dying middle class,” whereas the Republicans, who were the dominant party since the Civil War and, until FDR’s electoral realignment of the capitalist Parties a generation later in 1932, represented capitalist “prosperity galore, give us four years more!” If the Republicans were the “imperialist party” and the Democrats the “anti-imperialists,” then the socialists were neither: they represented “industrial democracy” and overcoming capitalism itself — including of course the “imperialist” forms it took.
Imperialism was both a political and economic phenomenon, in the Marxist view. It was both an economic and political crisis in a historically advanced stage of capitalism. Hence both “progressive” and conservative capitalist politicians inevitably oriented around it, in an antinomical conflict that expressed the historical contradiction of capitalism itself. What were the symptoms of this crisis? Monopoly and finance capital; and the Bonapartist capitalist state — in the U.S. referred to as the “imperial Presidency.” This is not a form of capitalism, but a form of the crisis of capitalism. Is it still so today?
The crisis of capitalism manifested in the inter-imperialist conflict of the Great Powers leading to WWI was a political conflict, which is what made it an opportunity, a possibility and necessity of proletarian socialist revolution, to turn the imperialist war into a class — civil — war. But it was already a civil war among the capitalists. The Great Powers were part of the British-led global capitalist system. It was not a matter of national capitalist states — capitalism, from a Marxist perspective, was never a national proposition of separate individual countries, but always a world-historical one. It’s one world-historical crisis.
The question for Marxists was how to struggle for proletarian socialism in the context of the breakup of empires, with nationalist uprisings and conflicts. This was a subsidiary problem of the defining issue for Marxism, namely the relation between democratic and socialist revolution, going back to 1848: how was the proletariat to lead the democratic revolution in the era of capitalism so that it led to socialism? How not to be swamped by petit bourgeois democracy and liberal — including national liberal — radicalism and the limits of bourgeois revolution? How to ensure the independent initiative and leadership of the working class in the revolution, rather than subordination to the liberals and other bourgeois radical democrats, progressive or otherwise?
This is only a distant memory in light of today’s realities. It is a stretch, to say the least, to try to apply the political manifestations of Lenin’s time to the politics and supposed “geopolitical” conflicts of our time. Unlike Lenin’s time of the crisis of the British Empire and global hegemony , the political system of Pax Britannica in the emergence of industrial capitalism of the 19th century, this is not the end of the American empire or of U.S. global hegemony, but an opportunity and necessity of its renewal, within a broader revolution of capitalism, as happens every 40 or 50 years, economically and politically.
Trump represents the crisis of neoliberal politics in both the Democratic and Republican Parties — a crisis of electoral appeal, policy agenda and ideological justification after those of neoliberalism have worn off. It is also a crisis of post-neoconservatism and its policies and ideology. But we must ask the reasons for that ideology: the task of the 21st century as a second American Century. For it is not only Americans who might want it or not, but the world that might still need or even want American leadership and a global role for the U.S., both economically and politically. The entire world depends on the U.S. — Interestingly, the U.S. already depends far less on international trade than other countries — even less than China does.
Marxists of Lenin’s time were wary of ideological anti-British-ism as an excuse for politically reactionary and no less capitalist phenomena such as German “Great Power” aspirations. Marxists were not sympathetic to the rising capitalist powers against the ruling one. Today, this is complicated by China’s ideological claim to “Communist” politics. Is China a rising capitalist power against the U.S. or a force for socialism? What if it’s neither? Certainly, Russia is neither. The military conflicts of our time are in the Middle East and Central Asia, for instance not only Iran and Israel but Pakistan, India and China: where should socialists “side,” if at all, in such wars, potential and actual? Where does the U.S. stand in relation to them? How, if at all, should American socialists be oriented to the political problem of “imperialist” capitalism today, looking ahead to the struggle for proletarian socialism? How does imperialism and its conflicts point beyond capitalism, if at all?
The current war in the Middle East is misleading as an indicator of the future: it is more an expression of the unfinished business of the past, putting an end to long-simmering conflicts without a future: countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and Turkey want to move on. So do the people of Iran. Islamist ideology is a thing of the past.
Anti-Americanism is a Cold War relic of an ideology — already old in the 1980s when the Islamic Republic originated. It is weak and lame. It expresses a lack of imagination on the “Left.” But it is not true to original historical Marxism such as Lenin’s. It is an inverted American nationalism, especially among Americans. It is an apologia for non-American capitalism, such as that of the Europeans and Asians, but also Latin American, Middle Eastern and African capitalism.
Socialists today should be faced to the future, warned but not beholden to the historical phenomena and oppositions within capitalism of the past — history serving as a critical and not dogmatic resource for thinking about our possibilities and tasks today. “Imperialism” is a term from a bygone era that reminds us not of eternal realities but of our own failure to rise to the necessities of our time. Workers in the U.S., Asia and China, the Middle East and Europe, Africa and Latin America are jointly exploited and oppressed by capitalism, and so must struggle together to overcome it. Socialists in America should accept the responsibility of the central, leading capitalist country appropriate to this task. | P
Trump’s bid for a new Pax Americana
Weakest links in the “Axis of Evil”
Chris Cutrone
Donald Trump began his second term with a push for negotiated settlement with Iran, picking up from efforts at the end of his first term, which had been interrupted by Covid and his unseating in 2020. In the meantime, the October 7 attack had happened, prompting Israel to dismantle Iranian allies throughout the Middle East. This effort culminated in direct war between Iran and Israel in 2025, in the midst of US-Iran talks. Benjamin Netanyahu might have hoped to spike these negotiations, but Trump joined Israel’s bombing of Iran in order to end Israel’s war, turning it into a further lever against Iran for making a deal, and resisting Israeli calls for a “regime-change” crusade. Trump went so far as to offer the prospect of Iran joining the Abraham Accords, which had appeared originally designed to isolate and present a united Arab-Israeli front against Tehran. Trump proudly lists the Israel-Iran conflict as one of the “wars” he’s settled during his first year in office.
Now, protests have broken out in Iran. There have been several waves of such protests going back to 2009 and the Green Movement around controversial election results, disputed between reformers and conservative hardliners. Since then, the specter of regime collapse of some kind or another has loomed. Would the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council be swept aside by the IRGC and Basiji militias in a military coup? Would the veneer of “democracy” be stripped away? Or would there be a democratic revolution and a more radical political change, ending the Islamic Republic? Will a civil war erupt? Will Iran become another “failed state”?
Trump seems to be preparing for any eventuality. In a recent Truth Social post, he promised to “rescue” Iranians from violent repression by the regime. At the same time, as recently as Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago ahead of the New Year — the day after Volodymyr Zelensky came to discuss war and peace with Russia — Trump called for Iranian leaders to “take the deal” he’s been offering them. One of his first actions in his transition after election in November 2024 was to make contact with Iranian representatives about restarting talks. Was he sincere, or was it a ruse to trick them into lowering their guard? It is best to take Trump straightforwardly. He has said that Iranian leaders have two choices: deal or conflict. He threw out the JCPOA negotiated by Obama because he thought it was a bad deal, not because he wanted war. He wanted to avoid it. He seems justified in saying that Obama and Biden efforts had led to October 7, because it provided billions to Iran with which they could and did instigate trouble. Meanwhile, Trump’s tete-a-tete and desired détente with Russia’s Putin continues — as China’s Xi has accepted an invitation to visit Washington and Trump agreed to travel to Beijing later this year.
Venezuela and Iran are sideshows in this greater global drama. Geopolitically, the Russia-China alliance — in the wake of Putin’s disastrously miscalculated invasion of Ukraine — is bolstered by Iran and Venezuela, both of which are important sources of oil for China. Is it mere coincidence that Trump began to apply military pressure to Nicolás Maduro, and specifically the Venezuelan oil trade, at the same time as the protests in Iran? One might imagine that from a US policy perspective, protests broke out in the wrong country. But, really, it’s all the same. Trump can play Venezuela and Iran off each other. At the podium with Netanyahu, Trump disavowed seeking regime change in Iran. This is because the threat of destabilization of Iran is another reason for them to reach a deal, to save themselves.
By contrast, Maduro has now been removed from office by a US military operation, although his allies remain in control of the country. Maduro was indicted on drug trafficking charges at the end of the first Trump term in 2020, so, as far as the Administration is concerned, this is unfinished business. His capture recalls the US invasion to arrest Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989, also on drug charges. This is importantly law-enforcement action and not war. The truth is that the US is, as is said derisively, the “global cop,” and is in fact the only serious agency for law internationally. Maduro’s rights as a defendant at trial will be respected. The principles of the American Revolution whose 250th birthday we celebrate this year, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are not restricted by nationality, but are meant for everyone. Their practical reach is not a formality.
Trump’s presidency represents the coincidence of several historical crises and potential transitions out of them — a “polycrisis” that Trump is attempting to ride to a brighter American and global future. The Iranian Islamist regime coincides with the neoliberal era. Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 amid the US embassy hostage crisis during the Islamic Revolution; the hostages were released the same day as Reagan’s Inauguration in January 1981. Later, Reagan courted a serious impeachment threat in the Iran-Contra Affair; and his worst military calamity was suffered when Iran-supported Hezbollah militants in Lebanon attacked US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds and prompting their withdrawal.
Historically, the Shah was brought down by the 1970s economic crisis that disproportionately impacted the developing world, bringing the Sandinistas to power against a US-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in the same year. That same year, Washington successfully lured the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to suppress an American-supported Islamist insurgency there. The ultimate collapse of the USSR and its Eastern European allied regimes could be traced to their debacle in Afghanistan, from which had risen new leadership with Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, both dissidents from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Now, the crisis of neoliberalism that ended the Cold War and was shadowed by fundamentalist revolts against developmental states seems to be bringing history full-circle. There is even some prospect for a return of the Shah — his son — to Iran: The dual Persian and Shia Muslim identity can resolve either way, or a new combination of both. Persian nationalism after exhaustion of Islamism might be a welcomed change.
Iran, like many other countries, has struggled to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis, subsequent Great Recession, and Covid pandemic, the latter of which hit Iran particularly hard. The world economy is still hanging on American growth. After many years, it’s clear that no alternative is going to emerge, especially as Europe and China have precipitously slowed. This is the opportunity Trump is leveraging in political negotiations.
The Latin American Pink Tide has long run its course and ebbed. Chavismo has faded. Both Iran and Venezuela have bled their middle classes to massive emigration, from which they might not return but still maintain economic and political ties back home. The “Shahs of Sunset Boulevard” are waiting in Los Angeles for expanded business opportunities in Tehran. The mullahs are ready to change robes for suits. Trump is offering them the chance. He’s in no rush, but time might be running out for them.
The choice is not peace or war, but what new status quo will emerge after the conflict. What will be the outcome of the crisis? This is the end of an era. The game is over. Time to take the winnings and go home — to retire. During the Biden presidency, other actors moved to change facts on the ground in their long-term interests and as legacies. Their efforts have run aground and come to grief. Trump is providing an exit strategy to not only Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, but to Ukraine and Israel.
The world aflame is the condition for a renewed Pax Americana. That everyone is suspicious is no deterrent to Trump, but more leverage. Hamas was the first to recognize that their only hope was Trump. No mafia boss, whether Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli, or Iranian, can deal with Washington as an inherently duplicitous neoliberal technocratic policy blob. But they can deal with Trump. Can he talk them down from the ledge, or will they jump? | §
Originally published in Compact (January 5, 2026)
Objectivation of Spirit
Chris Cutrone
“The history of philosophy has meaning only insofar as we know the determinations of thinking within their own internal development. The later philosophies contain the principles of earlier ones, but are more concrete over against them. So our own philosophy [absolute idealism] necessarily is also the richest, the most concrete, since it is the result of the work of millennia. Everything is contained in this result.
“The Eleatic, Platonic, Aristotelian, and other such philosophies cannot be the philosophy of our own time. Our principles are of necessity more concrete than theirs, which arose when spirit still stood at a lower level of development.”
— Hegel, Lectures on Logic
Teaching
When I teach Marxism, I immediately distinguish the Socratic — Platonic — dialectic from the Rousseauian — bourgeois — dialectic of Kant, Hegel and Marx.[1] What makes them different? One way is that the former is a dialectic of thinking, presented as dialogue, arguing from opposite positions, and moving from error to truth; whereas the latter is an open-ended transformation of truth through successive overcoming of prior truths, and is in and of reality itself. But what reality? Social reality — social relations. Social relations were not always dialectical but they are in bourgeois society — in capitalism. There is a difference between a dialectic of philosophy and that of society.
But this is not in the way “Marxists” conventionally explain it, via Parmenides vs. Heraclitus, endless change, etc. “Marxists” are content to adopt a position in Ancient philosophical disputes and assert traditional ontological claims, i.e. “materialism” vs. “idealism.” But Kant and Hegel already transcended such antinomies. Plato is not already Hegel. (Let alone Marx.)
Cards on the table: I think of Ancient philosophers as tribal mystics. This is their truth. Theology and philosophy were not so separated — which is why they could cross-fertilize, e.g. Christianity’s regard for Plato and Aristotle as “Christians before Christ.” Or Muslims. When truths or virtues — gods — were eternal, this made sense. But we know differently.[2]
Philosophy
Kant began philosophy and Hegel completed it. Why? Because Kant established that metaphysics — ontology — is a matter not of the world or things in themselves but of the subject: metaphysical concepts and categories refer to our relations, both practical and theoretical. Because our practical relations change, our theoretical concepts change — philosophy changes. And the change is not only in form but substance. It is in our relations themselves. The subject changes, substantially. There was no philosophy in the modern sense yet because there was no subject. We are subjects in ways the Ancients were not. None of them. — As Adorno put it, “Before the formation of the individual in the modern sense,” there were “phases and societies in which there is no freedom[, and hence] are not only not rational but not human,” because there did not yet exist the subject “in the sense meaning not simply the biological human being, but the one constituted as a unit by its own self-reflection, the Hegelian ‘self-consciousness’.” (“Freedom and organized society,” Negative Dialectics, trans E.B. Ashton [Continuum, 1973], 218).
The Ancient definition of philosophy as concerned with the universal freed from all particulars — abstractions freed from the concrete, the noumenal freed from the phenomenal, the ideal freed from the real, the Good apart from all manifest phenomena — is an inherently elite conception, for those who were freed from the need to labor to survive — for those freed from the exigent needs of society and politics expressed by doxa. — Are capitalists today such an elite? Not really. They are manics, no more able to make good use of their leisure than anyone else. In the past, the priesthood and aristocracy also hardly made good on their exemption from labor, since they were consumed with other activities such as warfare and plumbing the depths of resisting temptation — “mortification.”
By contrast, modern philosophy, as articulated explicitly by Kant, was to articulate common sense, and did not consider itself more intelligent than the thinking of the common day-laborer, i.e. anyone and everyone. Philosophy was not apart from or above the community or humanity, but another activity that participated in everyday life: the world had become philosophical and philosophy became worldly in modern life and modern freedom. Freedom was not freedom from work — the freedom of a priestly or warrior caste exempted from subsistence labor — but the opposite: the people contributing and participating in freedom through labor; the social relations of bourgeois society in production and commerce.
Bourgeois society overthrew the old ruling castes in the Revolt of the Third Estate of Commoners: the first and only successful slave revolt in history. Ancient philosophy depended on and ratified slavery: it was the thought of slaveholders. Society was enslaved to the priests and warriors, legitimated by their theology and philosophy. God or the gods created the world as it was; and its rulers embodied the Good of the world. As Nietzsche put it, they defined the Good in terms of themselves. This was the essential Ancient heritage of philosophy. It is a particular Will to Power — that of the philosopher. — And who was the philosopher? That rare species of thoughtful warrior or priest.
Today
But bourgeois society completely overcame and surpassed the power of the Ancients — and the thought that emanated from that power. Ancient conceptions of philosophy itself were about the impossibility of thought — the Divine mystery of Being. Not only is any phenomenon separated fatally from the noumenon, but every concept of the Good is a falsification of it. It is a philosophy of the impossibility of philosophy. Not so for the moderns. The Enlightenment initiated by bourgeois society is about the possibility and necessity of philosophy: an activity of the highest necessity, freedom. It is not about a reverential humility acknowledging the folly of following particular transient phenomena, but the arrogance of “storming Heaven” and taking fire from the gods into our own hands, as an act of freedom. Philosophy was not about the invariant eternal but about what changes — and what changes as a result of our own action. This gives an urgency to social and political action in the present. The false that is overcome is no longer merely the false but the truth that changes. Revolutionary philosophy is about overthrowing existing truths in favor of new ones.
Such change is the expression and result of our freedom — the freedom of transformation in our relations. How does such freedom develop? In and through society, which transcends human beings and their capacities. Human beings have always been as intelligent — or stupid — as they are now. But society has become more intelligent: the original Artificial Intelligence, Rousseau’s “general will.” The subject is not the predicate but the result of freedom: freedom produces us. We are the manifestations of Spirit, parts of the general will and members of society. The objectivations of Spirit are its necessary forms of appearance of the substance of reality and not the inevitable deceptions of a fallen world separated from pure Ideas — separated from God or the Good.
Marxism
The issue of Marxism is not that of a closed dead doctrine vs. an open living tradition, but rather whether and how we still live in Marxism’s time; and whether apparent “developments” of Marxism in the last century have or have not helped us to grasp the problem of capitalism and the prognosis for overcoming it. Marxism was meant to overcome itself — its own necessity. But it was overcome instead by capitalism itself. Yet the problem of capitalism remains. Is there a point to prioritizing and centering original historical Marxism in our considerations of the task of socialism today? That is an open question. I do not assume it — I don’t presume the relevance of Marxism.
Furthermore, as regards how Platypus functions as an educational project, it was never meant to provide a general or basic education: it was never a foundations course — not even for the foundations of Marxism. Is there a point to maintaining the original meaning of historical Marxism, if only to contrast it against and throw a critical light on present “Leftist” thinking and action, allowing us to recognize the latter through a defamiliarization or estrangement-effect? For this is the actual purpose in Platypus conducting such primary internal education in what seems to be Marxist “scripture.” If the rest of the “Marxist Left” reads these texts — specifically, the “canon” of commonly referenced writings rather than the actual best works of Marxism (Lenin wrote far more and better than his Imperialism pamphlet, including on the issue of imperialism itself) — then familiarity with them is important to be able to engage the present “Left” and the problems of its conceptions and assumptions — not to simply share them, but to be able to cast them into critical relief.
There is no living tradition of Marxism — it died a long time ago. So that is simply not an option: there is no tradition to join — not even to resuscitate. At least not a ready-made one. Marxism cannot be reconstituted as a function of reading.
Where to begin one’s education in order to be able to approach Marx and Marxism? Does one begin with Plato and Aristotle? Marx himself was steeped in Classical Antiquity, including writing on the pre-Socratic materialism of Epicurus and Democritus — albeit in light of the controversies within and disintegration of Hegelianism in his own time. Platypus chooses to begin with Rousseau — we choose to begin with society and politics rather than philosophy, and moreover with modern rather than Ancient political thought.
Ancient and modern
This is not because we consider pre-modern thought, whether political or philosophical, to be evil or bad — wrong — but because it is simply inappropriate to the modern capitalist world. The change is important. We have been facing problems in the last couple of centuries not faced by Plato or Aristotle — not addressed in their political writings. Our problems wouldn’t even begin to make sense to them. As the modern poet Paul Valéry observed at the turn of the 20th century, neither space nor time nor matter nor energy are any longer what they were for time immemorial. This of course affects our social and political world. But we are still living very much in the shadow of problems raised by Rousseau, which subsumed those of Hobbes and Locke, who are hence less controversial than Rousseau — who thus remains importantly (and painfully) unassimilable and indeed undigestible. Kant observed that bourgeois society had already transcended Newtonian time and space. How much more so is this the case in industrial capitalism, which Kant himself couldn’t anticipate. This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to learn from those who preceded Rousseau — or Marx — of course not. But efficiency must be achieved and decisions made about priority and point of departure. We must begin with “all that is solid melts into air,” which didn’t just happen yesterday but already two centuries ago. It was not mere rhetoric or a figure of speech but literally the case. — By contrast, there is no such thing as “winged horses.”[3] Unfortunately.
There is something new and different that, as Hegel put it, “dawned on the world in Rousseau,” namely “freedom,” which “gave infinite strength to man, who thus recognized himself as infinite.” This is not the case as clearly, directly and unambiguously in Plato and Aristotle, the pre-Socratics or late Romans or early Church Fathers. Freedom is the problem of the modern era — not the Good as was true of the Ancients. God is dead and we have killed Him. The One is destroyed and we have destroyed it. “All that is holy is profaned.” Really. A long time ago.
Task
The question is whether and how are we going to address this freedom, which we not only recognize in thought but inhabit and embody in the modern world in new and different and indeed unprecedented ways? The issue is how the problem of capitalism is new, different and unprecedented. — It is not Plato and Aristotle’s condemnation of the rule of the merchants as the worst form of politics — which bourgeois social, economic and political thinkers such as Rousseau and his followers Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel also rejected as unacceptable. We don’t actually live under the rule of the rich, but of the capitalist state, and under the domination, not of the capitalist class but of capital, which is different.
This is why the blindness of Millennials to capitalism, due to the present problem of neoliberalism and its “billionaires,” is so urgent to overcome, to open young people’s eyes in their education, if there is to be any hope whatsoever to address let alone deal with the actual crisis of our time, politically and socially. We must actively counteract the ignorance and false assimilation of the past to the present. We are not in a cycle of civilization in which there is a temporary rise of mercantile power and its misfortunes, but in an entirely different epoch of history, consequential in a profound way never faced previously: politics has never had such stakes as today. It didn’t have the same substance as it does now. Capitalism is simply a new and different problem. The Ancients can’t help us. But Marxism might — if only to clarify things: the nature of the problem.
So what is to be done in the face of this monstrously daunting and fearsome task, to even begin to approach the political realm of our society in the present crisis of capitalism? Does anyone doubt that gargantuan changes are underway in our contemporary world, with almost unfathomable consequences looming on the horizon? And the terrifying magnitude of this is due to capitalism — this is the difference. This is the reason why people today might reach for Marx and the history of Marxism — rather than back to Plato and Aristotle.
Reading
But there is a qualitative transformation involved — a difference in meaning and reading in the case of Marx and Marxism as opposed to Ancient writings. Their purposes are different. Their substance is different. The nature and task of reason itself changes. We are thinking not merely about but in and through things completely unknown to the Ancients, and not only thinking differently about the same things. I am part of something different from what Plato and Aristotle were: the modern university is different from the Ancient Lyceum. So are its participants. Donald Trump is not Alexander the Great — Trump is far greater: more consequential. What is happening now is more important — at least potentially — than anything that ever happened before.
But more obscurely. This is where we must deal with the phenomenology of Spirit, the manifest phenomena of our freedom: the transformation of our social relations, which are cosmological in nature and character. And the phenomena of capitalism are the appearances of contradiction, in manifold forms. The self-contradiction of capitalism is different and greater than that of the Ancient world — if there was even such contradiction back then. We face an existential crisis today unknown to the Ancients. Obviously. As Marx stated in the Grundrisse, on modernity and its “becoming”:
the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.
It is comforting — but dangerously misleading — to imagine that only technology has changed and not our humanity. Homo sapiens might be the same as a biological species as it ever was, but humanity as a historical species has changed, fundamentally.
For Marxism to be truly — as opposed to falsely — meaningful, it has to challenge and not affirm us in what we already think. But for that we need to know what it actually was. It is the critical distance of original historical Marxism from our present concerns that is meaningful: how far we today fall short of the problems Marxism originally tried to address.
Marxism is not an answer or a solution but a question and a problem. It does not help us to know things so much as it tells us what we do not know. I am the Socrates of Marxism. As Habermas said in eulogy to Adorno about his students who had in their frustration protested against him, “They do not realize all that they are incapable of knowing in the present state of affairs.” Marxism tasks us. It is not a ready-made programme that can be followed — it never was, but certainly is not now.
Socialism
As I have written very clearly, my call for “socialist unity” is not predicated on Marxism.[4] It is not a Marxist unity project or even a Left unity project. It is based on working class unity and independence. But its purpose is socialist. It is not ideologically let alone philosophically exclusive.
My interest in original historical Marxism is in the horizon of the task it preserves. This has been severely lowered in the past century, to the extent that I know when I say “Marxism” others do not know what I mean, let alone its significance. Indeed, they cannot know. But the relevance of what I know — namely, what I think we are tasked with knowing — must be proved. It might not be relevant at all, let alone how it might be. But my Campaign for a socialist party is not about proving Marxism’s relevance. The starting-point is rather the problem of capitalism, which must be rendered a practical one rather than a merely theoretical issue. But what kind of practical problem? A problem specifically for the working class — not for investors (trust-fund babies) or the PMC. Not for intellectuals — other than as participants in a socialist movement of, by and for the working class. Not for philosophers. Not for the pursuit of virtues — other than the virtues required in the struggle for socialism. Marxism is not a virtue or the pursuit of virtues but a tool. Its usefulness must be proved in practice. But not right now. Right now, it is a sophisticated tool without application — without applicability. It is an artifact. This is why and how it can become an object of reverence. It suggests an occult mystery. But that is not what it was meant for.
Benjamin Studebaker and I first spoke on a panel hosted by Platypus on the purpose of Marxism, back in 2022.[5] I was and remain interested in his non-Marxist perspectives. But I am still interested in the perspectives of Marxism, and I think I have some things to teach about that. I think that their dialogue is most interesting and important in a practical context, rather than abstractly as mere theory. My Campaign for a socialist party is in part meant to create the practical context within which intellectuals have substantial things to think about, rather than formal schema or categories to compare (e.g., the Good vs. freedom). We need better matters to reflect upon, in order to improve and develop our thinking, whether Marxist or otherwise. But this is the kind of thing that must be demonstrated in practice. The solipsistic spell must be broken from outside. As an abstract proposition it will remain uncompelling — especially for intellectuals, given over to things of the mind.
Mind
But what mind? Hegel sought to address what he called objective mind — objective Spirit. The objective mind of our time is concerned, whether self-consciously or not, with the objective Spirit — of capitalism. The dialectic in which we are engaged is not directly those of members of society participating in politics, deciding our shared values, but only as mediated by our social relations — alienated in capital. As Marx described “commodity-fetishism,” as beset by “theological niceties and metaphysical subtleties,” it is “a definite relation between persons that takes the form of a relation between things.” Not mistakenly but objectively — and hence subjectively. The objectivations of Spirit are now those of capital, whether we recognize them as such or not. But we do recognize them. Everyone speaks of and thinks about capital and capitalism: capital goods, human capital, cultural capital, etc. The struggle for socialism I seek to pursue is concerned with what this means for the workers — in practice. What it might mean theoretically to the philosopher comes after that, if at all.
Object
Before there can be a subject, there must be an object. We need something to think about. We must objectify our pursuit of socialism. Before interrogating how we see things (in “theory”), first there must be something to see. Before we speak, we must have something to talk about. Something other than capitalism and its politics. My Campaign for a socialist party is doing things to see and talk about. Without this, there is really nothing to discuss — at least nothing to discuss beyond capitalism and the way people already see and talk about it: the things people are already doing as they are already doing them and how they already see and talk about them. Talk of the Good is talk about capitalism. (So is talk of freedom…) All philosophy today is the philosophy of capitalism. In both Platypus and my Campaign for a socialist party, I am pursuing something different. | §
[1] See my “Negative dialectic of Marxism,” opening remarks at the panel discussion on “The politics of Critical Theory,” with Dennis Graemer, Doug Lain and Douglas Kellner, Platypus Review 140 (October 2021), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2021/10/01/the-politics-of-critical-theory-2/>.
[2] See my “Ends of philosophy,” Platypus Review 108 (July–August 2018), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2018/07/30/ends-of-philosophy/>.
[3] See Benjamin Studebaker, “Doctrines, lenses and traditions,” November 12, 2025, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/doctrines-lenses-and-traditions>. Also, see my previous articles in response to Studebaker, “Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique,” Platypus Review 180 (October 2025), at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/10/01/social-relations-and-ideology-an-anti-critique/>; and “Is capitalism Epicurean and socialism Stoical?,” Platypus Review 181 (November 2025), at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/11/01/is-capitalism-epicurean-and-socialism-stoical-a-rejoinder-to-benjamin-studebaker-on-political-disturbance-and-social-freedom/>.
[4] See my “Socialist unity!,” Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025, available online at: <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>.
[5] See “What is Marxism for?,” Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/what-is-marxism-for/>.
Is capitalism Epicurean and socialism Stoical? Rejoinder to Studebaker
Is capitalism Epicurean — and socialism Stoical?
A rejoinder to Benjamin Studebaker on political disturbance and social freedom
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review 181 | November 2025
Benjamin Studebaker attributes modern social and political thought to Stoicism, which he understands to be at heart Neo-Platonist — by contrast with Plato’s own Platonism.[1] In his view, it comes down to us from late Hellenism — Alexandrianism? But is capitalism Epicurean, as Studebaker avers, and socialism Stoic? Studebaker rejects the vision of socialism as society going beyond politics, which he interprets as the impossible or undesirable state without “disturbance”: an inhuman dystopia.
I wrote previously in response to Studebaker on ideology and social relations in capitalism.[2] Here, I will take a different tack, and try to rejoin all of Studebaker’s criticisms together.
Studebaker describes himself as a “non-liberal pluralist” — a Hobbesian. But the struggle for socialism comes from reaching the limits of liberalism — not from rejecting or as an alternative to it. Socialism arises from the self-contradiction of liberalism in capitalism — the self-contradiction of bourgeois social relations. But liberalism and capitalism are not identical — or, their identity is only a “speculative” one. This is not a matter of principles or ideals but social reality itself. Hobbes was a modern — which means a liberal. There was an emancipation of bourgeois society from traditional civilization: the emancipation of labor and social cooperation. The issue is not the self-conscious political or economic order but society itself, which comprehends both the economic and political realms — and includes culture and psychology. It is the actual unity of theory and practice. This includes “philosophy.” All thinking in modern society is a function of modern society — even when it draws from Ancient sources. As Durkheim observed, forms of thought are social forms. They remain modern. Modern civil liberties and rights will not be politically constrained, as they subsist in social reality itself. Their abrogation remains a crime — against social freedom.
Studebaker challenges me to support “Medicare for all,” the demand of the Bernie Presidential campaign and central to the DSA’s reform program. But we already had “human infrastructure” — as opposed to physical infrastructure, which was denounced as “masculine” and bad for the environment — funded by the Biden Administration as a way of buttressing the “service economy” after the stresses of the COVID pandemic. This is backward-looking. The moment for radical health care reform has passed — even as it remains, as they say, core to the Democratic Party brand: even Obama now says that the Affordable Care Act should have been public and not private provision of health care. This is mere sloganeering. Trump flirted with the idea of public health care as a cost-cutting measure for American capitalism — to make it competitive with other advanced capitalist countries that have such government provision. But he soon realized that it was not impossible but unnecessary. The Democrats will dangle it forever — or for so long as it holds the attention of voters, which, like climate change, seems to be already passing as a political issue. I pointed out to Ben that the Republicans are correct that health care is not — cannot possibly be — a “right,” but is a “good”: a commodity, whether provided by the market or the state; either a cheap or expensive one.[3] Capitalism will adjust to the new situation if not new needs, with or without political action. As Trump is driving down pharmaceutical costs, he is also proud to point out that the private sector is already making great strides on carbon reduction, even in developing cleaner fossil fuel production and use. The issues of the future will be different.
Studebaker takes issue with what he calls “Quixotic socialism” — it’s unclear whether he includes me in this category, but he might.[4] Are we still fighting the battles of the past? But which past? The history of a dead movement — Marxism — might indeed seem to be tilting at windmills. But there be dragons. The issue, it seems, is the “progressive” wave in politics from Obama through Biden, cresting with Bernie Sanders and the Squad of AOC et al. (Zohran Mamdani?) during the Trump era. What did this have to do with socialism and capitalism? There is an evident disconnect between the “Left” — animated by Democratic Party issues — and Marxism. Is the latter merely a noble position belonging to a past world? Platypus poses two questions: Does Marxism even matter? And: What is Marxism? — What is the Left? If it is only the “Left-wing” of capitalism, then certainly Marxism is irrelevant. As Marx himself said, he did not discover class divisions or the class struggle of the workers — liberals already had.[5] (Marx only found the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat — which liberals of course reject.)
Is Studebaker’s dreaded stasis of “Epicureanism and Stoicism” just the “dynamic equilibrium” of capitalism itself, which he associates with neoliberalism’s termination of politics — which is now in political crisis and in the political process of transformation to post-neoliberalism? But he denies that this is taking place at all — thus agreeing with the DSA’s Vivek Chibber, who thinks that Trump is just another typical Republican President.[6] There is evidently a deep ambivalence about the passing of the “post-political” technocracy of neoliberalism, which has been underway since George W. Bush’s War on Terror, and certainly after Obama’s failed Presidency — or what the Aufhebunga crew has called “the end of the end of history.” Studebaker associates me with a broader traditional (“)Marxist(“) approach to socialism and its implicit agreement with a more endemic alleged eschewing of the political in the neoliberal era (which he thinks began with the post-WWII U.S.-led world “liberal political order” — why not in the U.K.-led post-1814 Pax Britannica, i.e. the capitalist era itself?) — or in liberalism tout court.
By contrast, Studebaker cites — against me — my own “Lenin’s liberalism,” where I wrote that the goal is to free politics from capitalism. But this was about the goal of proletarian socialism as a movement and as a revolution: the desideratum of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I wrote about this as follows:
Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Theodor Adorno, teasing out a “Hegelian” dimension to Lenin’s Marxism, derived from Lenin’s theoretical writings and political practice an elaboration of the Marxist theory of social mediation in capital, through the politics of proletarian socialism, that sought to recover Lenin from a bad utopian perspective of the desire to do away with politics altogether. Rather, such Marxist critical theory following Lenin understood overcoming the “alienation” and “reification” of capital as providing the possibility for the true practice of politics, a neglected but vital contribution Lenin made to the development of Marxism. Lenin did not attempt to destroy modern forms of political mediation, but rather to achieve the true mediation of theory and practice, in politics freed from society dominated by capital. This was the content of Lenin’s liberalism, his “dialectical” Marxist attempt, not to negate, but rather to fulfill the desiderata of bourgeois society, which capital had come to block, and which could only be worked through “immanently.”[7]
Nevertheless, the “utopian” horizon of socialism should be maintained. Because neither Lenin nor Marx and Engels, or Lukács, Adorno et al. tried to foresee what society beyond capitalism would be, defining it negatively as overcoming the unfreedom of capitalism, but only anticipated and pursued politically the dictatorship of the proletariat, I was similarly addressing the latter and not the former. Dialectically: since original historical Marxism considered the only true politics in capitalism to be that of the class struggle of the workers for achieving socialism (the rest being merely pseudo-politics or racketeering — mere power-struggles), the realization of this will be their exercise of social and political power, in order not to merely manage but overcome the problem of capitalism.
The dictatorship of the proletariat will thus still be a politics of capitalism. It will still need to be political. But it will be more truly political than can be the case under capitalism. It will be the final form of state — but not any state, but one in particular: the capitalist state. It is this state that will “wither away” along with capitalism in being overcome. This is the dialectical relationship between what Marxism called Bonapartism and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a final state.
Studebaker dislikes the Marxist theory of the state, regarding “Bonapartism” as too pejorative a characterization of the state, discouraging of politics.[8] But recognizing how and why we are politically alienated in capitalism is important if we are not to be misled — simply by remaining aware of how we are liable to be misled. As I wrote in my previous article in response to Studebaker, capitalism inevitably misleads us: it is what Marx called a “false necessity” that dominates us. This means that what appears necessary to us is precisely what must be overcome. But the problems that appear to us presently both must and cannot be worked through in their own terms. All of our problems stem from capitalism, and yet none of them can be solved in their own terms — none, not even the struggle against exploitation, leads out of but only more deeply into capitalism. It is for this reason that we have need of the state. It is a false need.
“False” is a tricky designation because it suggests the truth by contrast with it. We don’t know our true needs in capitalism — other than the need to overcome it. What Marxism meant by the “false consciousness” of ideology was its self-contradiction: contradictory consciousness. Capital accumulation is a self-contradictory necessity in capitalism: it is self-destructive and self-defeating even while it remains necessary. It is because of this self-contradiction of social necessity in capitalism that the state arose to meet it in the 1800s.
In many crucial and decisive respects the state as such — as we know it in capitalism — is unique, a new and different phenomenon specific to capitalism. For instance, there were no police or prisons before capitalism — before the Industrial Revolution. The state, as thus recognized by Marxism, is composed of the “special bodies of armed men.” This is not the more conventional, colloquial definition of the state as the legal-juridical constitutional order of politics. The fate of the specifically coercive state in this Marxist view is clear; what is more obscure is the fate of politics. Friedrich Engels wrote that it would involve the replacement of the “governing of men” by the “administration of things” — actually, the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon had first formulated it thusly (very little positive in Marxism is original to it).
Studebaker objects to this view, seeing in it the end of social freedom, which requires the “disturbance” that Epicureans and Stoics seek to avoid. But social disturbance need not be political in character — need not, as Marx described it, be a matter of “when right meets right, force will decide.” This is not even the case always today under capitalism, let alone beyond it in socialism. Bourgeois society is able to tolerate all kinds of difference: there is scope for a great deal of collective and individual right without conflict unknown to prior history.
Studebaker conflates the political with the social, restricting the social to the realm of agreement and characterizing the political as the domain of disagreement. Rousseau explained, following Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees as well as John Locke’s theory of property rights, that commercial competition was a form of cooperation. Rousseau’s social compact is implicit not explicit: it is the interdependence developed through the contract involved in any transaction — even what Hegel called “military transactions” in war. Society developed through antagonism and not only or even primarily concord. Social development has accelerated through commercial activity in ways that could never have been achieved through war.
And politics before capitalism was all about war — except in the American republic. Even Plato’s ideal state was a republic of war. It is important to note that the participants in the Ancient republic — ancient politics — were members of the warrior caste: the nobility/aristocracy. War might be “politics by other means;” but politics is not another means for war; and war is no longer the principal way to achieve political goals, let alone greater social freedom.
The socialist party I seek to lay a foundation for building might be a party for war — class war — but it will not be primarily a military party; however it will be a party with the required martial discipline to achieve power. Plato’s Republic banned all music except for marching.
Stoic resolve is necessary in order to avoid unnecessary disturbance in our Campaign. But the disturbance to be avoided is the torment of mistaken aspiration. Are we in global capitalism a civilization in decline? If so, the fall has been long — and we are nowhere near the bottom of it.
We already live in a unified world of peaceful cooperation — including competition — and interdependence that includes a great deal of diverse multiplicity without violent conflict. Pax Americana remains. Because we have been living through a period of economic and political crisis and transformation for the last 20 years, it might be easy to naturalize this, but we will forget that, despite this, commercial social relations and cooperative production at a global scale continue, largely unperturbed, nonetheless. ( — The horror is that open warfare with millions of casualties is inconsequential in the course of modern history. This means wars are actually unnecessary, even if the pathologies of capitalism still make them possible. The U.S. is correct to regard them as impermissible, even if in fact they are quite tolerable.) This is only increasingly the case over the course of the last 200 years of capitalism. It is an irreversible trend.
Studebaker asserts that Marxism was a phenomenon of “early capitalism” that prematurely declared “late capitalism,” but we need to accept living in “middle capitalism” for the foreseeable future.[9] But it was always both too late and too early for socialist revolution. It is a perennial need. This is because capitalism is in a constant state of “creative destruction” — actually, destructive creation — that is always planting the seeds for its future crises even while recovering from current ones. It moves, as Marx wrote, in “fits and starts.” The transition from capitalism to socialism can never come too soon and is always long overdue. The Industrial Revolution pointed directly to communism. We have been stuck in an incomplete transition and suffered from its pathology ever since. When the proletariat emerged in bourgeois society it was time to transcend it. Not every community has been tasked with overcoming itself, but capitalism is. By deferring the question of capitalism, Studebaker abdicates from it. By treating the Marxist philosophy of history as a Platonic “noble lie,” he inhibits true recognition of the task we face. We pay an accumulating price for deferring the task of building a socialist party that could take power.
Studebaker doesn’t like the idea of being “tasked,” thinking that this is somehow counterposed to the cultivation of virtue. He cursorily observes the scientific and technical progress of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, but downplays its significance. — A common misapprehension of Marxism is that it is technological determinism or technophilia. But the technology we currently have is what capitalism needs, and is neither the cause or problem nor the solution and answer to our suffering in modernity. Technology is a social relation — an alienated social relation. Its appearance is a key indication of the task we face in capitalism.
It must be consoling to think that we face the same problem as ever, but only in different forms. Perhaps we do. But the forms in which our problems appear still matter. We must deal with the specific problem of capitalism. That is not addressable in terms of capitalist politics.
Studebaker wants politics. He wants dissensus against the prevailing stale — rotten, disintegrating — default “consensus.” He just wants it to be true, meaningful political disagreement — rather than how it appears now: false, confused and meaningless — which means debating the “good.” No: the debates today are truly over the direction of capitalism — which everyone knows will not be detained over questions of the “good.” Those in power know very well that in the realities of global capitalism we are already far beyond questions of good and evil. But what if we are in a pre-political moment — so far as the issue of capitalism and socialism is concerned?
Studebaker wants a better conservative, liberal and socialist politics — or at least improved political discourse. But the only way to develop liberal and conservative political thinking and action would be in the face of the challenge of socialist politics, which is currently entirely absent. We only have debates between progressive and conservative perspectives that are largely beside the point since capitalism will conservatively and “progressively” reform as needed, not according to sentiment. To improve the overall political situation in capitalism, in the sense of any possible clarification of stakes, we need a socialist movement and politics. We need a socialist party. Without this, capitalist politics degenerates, both in theory and practice, inexorably.
As a former Bernie supporter, Studebaker is a populist; as a disappointed Sandernista, he is disenchanted with the prospect of fundamental political change — such as demanded by the pursuit of socialism. Democracy seems to be a more tractable issue — even if it has become chronic rather than acute. His main complaint is against the Democratic Party. He has said that Marx’s philosophy of history is good because it is useful to motivate a movement; but Marx’s theory of exploitation is good because it is true.[10] It is actually the opposite: the theory of exploitation is useful as a political analysis motivating the class struggle of the workers, but the philosophy of history is true — so far as capitalism is concerned. We are in a unique historical moment — tasked with overcoming pre-history and achieving true history: the true “progress in consciousness of freedom.”[11]
Bonapartism is the farce of the tragedy that appears in our political alienation.[12] It is a grotesque visage of our comedy. It is not a fetish for warding off the demon of politics, but a recognition of what possesses us in our political passions. It is not to purge the passions that we must exorcize the demon. But it is not to dispel the political but only its fetish. Shakespeare couldn’t play in Ancient Athens. Trump is not the Lear but the Hamlet of our politics, from which the domino has slipped in our “carnival of philosophy.” Can we learn from what has thus been revealed — or must we treat it as still concealed, hidden behind its death-mask?
I seek the participation of those such as Studebaker in building the social and political movement for a socialist party in the United States. All would-be socialists should be united in this effort — whether Platonic or not.
I don’t despair of the necessity of this task, which asserts itself objectively and not merely subjectively. It was abdicated by the Millennials, in favor of “progressivism.” But the needed “progress” of our moment in capitalism has been met by Trump, not the “Left.”
The political question of our time is overcoming capitalism. Its name is “socialism.”
As the young Marx wrote,
In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For even though the question “where from?” presents no problems, the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.[13] | P
[1] “The Buddha’s bastards,” October 3, 2025, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-buddhas-bastards>.
[2] “Social relations and ideology: An anti-critique,” Platypus Review 180 (October 2025), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/10/01/social-relations-and-ideology-an-anti-critique/>.
[3] See our discussion of my call for “Socialist unity!” (published in Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025, available online at: <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>), posted to my YouTube channel at: <https://youtu.be/BJer4nbmrCk?si=ApcYukrgjI8kDzVF>.
[4] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.
[5] Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852.
[6] Jacobin, July 14, 2025, available online at: < https://jacobin.com/2025/07/trump-foreign-policy-budget-gop>.
[7] “Lenin’s liberalism,” Platypus Review 36 (June 2011), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/>.
[8] “Beyond Bonapartism,” Platypus Review 166 (May 2024), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/beyond-bonapartism-breaking-statephobic-thought-taboos/>.
[9] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.
[10] See “What is Marxism for?,” panel discussion of April 2, 2022, recording available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5i4orxCAM>; transcript published in Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/what-is-marxism-for/>.
[11] Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
[12] See my “Bonapartism is not Bonaparte,” Platypus Review 177 (June 2025), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2025/06/01/bonapartism-is-not-bonaparte/>.
[13] Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, available online at: < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>.
Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review 180 | October 2025
[T]he ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1858)
UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.
In the midst of the manifest on-going social and political crisis of capitalism, people want something solid to believe in and ground to stand on: religion, nation, “race” — “politics.” Also: “philosophy.” (As well as, perhaps, “science”?)
But as Marx pointed out, in capitalism “all that is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is a moving proposition that we must engage from within and as part of its motion. There is no stable standpoint from which to view — theorize — it. But that doesn’t mean that it somehow isn’t real. Its shifting illusion is its reality. There is nothing else.
We are shaken but evidently not stirred — not stirred to action — but paralyzed. The incessant images flood over us. We reach out for the Truth. But it constantly escapes our grasp. We shrink back and collapse into ourselves.
Benjamin Studebaker has written a critique of “ideology critique” that offers an alternative “Platonist” reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and situates non-identity not as a matter of self-contradictory social relations and unfreedom but of thinking about the good.1
Studebaker proposes that where I say freedom he says good, and that freedom is best understood in terms of the good and the good should be understood in terms of freedom. He writes that the good must be the essential starting-point for “laddering up” to political goals.
But the pursuit of the emancipation and transformation of social relations is very different from that of the good.2 For the issue is not the good that resides in every body, but rather the social relations that develop the subjectivity of everyone.
Social relations are more than the sum of their parts: they express the “general will” that transcends the individual wills of interested parties. Social relations are the result of interaction that produces something beyond the individual actions. Society is a third party with an interest of its own. Social freedom means the freedom of society itself to develop.
Studebaker raises Louis Althusser’s approach to ideology in order to attack the limitations of Althusser’s “interpellation” as a theory of subjectivity that loses sight of the good. It seems that Studebaker understands — and disagrees with — “social relations” in such Althusserian structuralist terms, saying that it amounts to an “ontology” that he disputes.
Studebaker among many other Millennials prefers a political to a social or societal ontology. But he prefers not just any ontologization of politics, but one in particular, Plato’s. For Plato, politics is the bringing back together what has been divided and separated: the One. This is why Studebaker says that it is because we are in separate bodies that politics is necessary. No: that bodily differentiation does not even make society or social relations necessary. Plato’s ontology only allows for cycles of separation and return, appropriate to his world of agricultural production. It is no longer appropriate to the modern world of capitalist production.
What if it is only society — what Studebaker means by “politics,” as in the zoon politikon (“political animal”) — that allows for the differentiation of humanity, to become other than what it is or originally was, to transform its being? And this transformation is necessary.
This was what Marx thought — following from Rousseau, among others: social relations are not merely the relations between people or to others, but also to and with Nature and to and with oneself. Social relations are what allow and motivate the elaboration of diverse multiplicity and complexification of our being.
It is such a process of not only the realization of existing but generation of new potential that Marx found capitalism to constrain and distort — dominate. It is not about people but social relations. Capitalism was the domination limiting social freedom: the freedom to elaborate and transform social relations — society.
Social relations are not causal or determinative but conditioning and elaborative. Social relations are not structural but cosmological. The universe is still expanding. So are our social relations. So is our freedom.
“Ideology” in the original historical Marxist sense of “ideology-critique” meant the exploration of conditions of possibility for transforming our social relations from within them. As a Hegelian, Marx thought that manifest contradiction indicated the possibility and necessity for change. Capitalism was a new social — societal — self-contradiction — a self-contradiction of society, of social relations — that brought about a new task: socialism. Socialism was for Marx the highest form of “bourgeois ideology.” Marx critiqued socialist ideology according to its self-contradictory character: statist vs. anarchist; individualist vs. collectivist, reactionary vs. progressive, etc.
But the appearance of contradiction was not only a potential recognition but also and most importantly a misrecognition: misrecognitions are necessarily forms of recognition; forms of recognition are also necessarily forms of misrecognition. We must struggle in and through forms of misrecognition that are our only possible forms of recognition — we must struggle from within and on the basis of and find our way out of ideology. There is no breaking the spell or stepping outside of ideology. There is no leaving Plato’s Cave.
There will be no returning to the One. The yearning for totality is understandable given the manifest exhaustion of postmodernism and neoliberalism and the self-contradiction, fragmentation, and crisis of society in capitalism. But this does not actually return us to Plato’s Republic, a utopia that was never meant to be realized but only to get us thinking about politics. A very long time ago. What Plato and Aristotle meant by “politics” is not our social and political world. Their misrecognitions were different from ours. Their “ideology” was different from ours. Actually, they didn’t have ideology; only we have ideology — and hence only we have ideology-critique. Only we have Marxism. We need something more and other to think about the problem of capitalism and the political task of socialism. Only we need Marxism — only we need Marxist ideology-critique. It was not the critique of inadequate or contradictions between different definitions of the good, but of a self-contradictory freedom of our social relations, to which we are all subject, and of which we are all subjects.
We are not only bodies separated from the original One, but members of society — participants in social relations. There is a higher good and necessity we must serve than the good of our bodies: the freedom of society. The misery of capitalism might break our bodies, but its wrong is against society and its potential, which goes far beyond our physical selves. As Ortega y Gassett put it, what nature is for animals, history is for humans. We are more than the product of a natural or divine act, but at least in part produce our own being — our spiritual not physical being. It is not our existence as homo sapiens that is free but our humanity.
The zoon politikon is not an origin but a result. The point is that it changes. We are not political but become political in society. Society humanizes us: our social relations make us human — they also make us political. Society changes our humanity — constantly. It is the self-contradiction of our social relations in capitalism that jeopardizes our humanity — even to the point of placing the (supposed) physical needs of our bodies above it. Whereas all human cultures and communities, ever, have valued spirit above body. — Do we still?
At issue in politics is not our bodies but our social relations. It is a peculiar form of politics that is demanded and required by the problem of capitalism. If Durkheim recognized that society is an object sui generis, then the crisis of society in capitalism is a problem sui generis — a unique problem of politics unprecedented in history. Marxism is the “sui generis form of cognition” (Gillian Rose) prompted by the political problem of capitalism.
Ideology expresses the social origin of our manifest phenomena: the misrecognitions through which we must act politically to change society. It is the source of our cognition and the means through which we must cognize our reality. It is not a problem of consciousness but produces our consciousness. It is a cosmos in crisis, a cosmology of crisis — a total crisis and hence the totality one is looking for. But it is a negative totality of contradiction, and one which reproduces itself in and through that crisis. As Adorno wrote to his friend Benjamin: “The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.”3 The explosion is not the calamity but the potential and possibility of freedom, however only perceptible through its phantasmagoria. Its appearances don’t deceive but indicate: “The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal, his aphorism: ‘Know thyself.’ It is a difficult saying; for that god ‘hides nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way,’ as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to you?”4
Can we yet know ourselves as members of society, and read the writings on the wall of capitalism, directing us to the task of socialism? Can this be our politics — of freedom? | P
1 Benjamin Studebaker, “Beyond ideology critique,” Platypus Review 179 (September 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2025/09/01/beyond-ideology-critique/>.
2 Please see my conversation with Studebaker and Doug Lain (March 28, 2025), <https://youtu.be/PYuQTwCs-tM>.
3 Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin (August 2, 1935), in Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Rodney Livingstone, et al., trans. Anya Bostock, et al. (London: Verso, 2007), 111, 113.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), trans. Ian C. Johnston for The Nietzsche Channel.
Socialist unity!
Chris Cutrone
Originally published in Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025.
I am writing with an appeal to the would-be “socialist intelligentsia.” — Hear me, oh people! My plea is earnest! I come with good news, for the day is upon us! Hallelujah! It is time for socialism!
* * *
The Millennial Left tried to constitute itself through several attempts at “unity”: Left unity, Marxist unity, and class unity. The last is perhaps the most promising, but even it foundered on the question of what “class”: was it a PMC project in the end, despite not wanting to be so? Left unity couldn’t distinguish itself from “progressive liberal” capitalist politics — the conventional meaning of “Left”; and Marxist unity turned “Marxism” itself into a fierce bone of contention, never to be resolved.
It is time, now that all alternatives have failed, finally, for socialist unity. What would this mean? First of all, commitment to overcoming capitalism: a permanent “blood” oath not to accept any politics that does not have this as its aim — and refusing to pursue any other politics but socialist politics: giving ourselves totally, in a political sense, to this task.
But might we disagree on the meaning of capitalism and hence the meaning of socialism? Yes. But no matter: we will work out the meaning of both socialism and capitalism in practice — not ahead of time “theoretically.”
If so, then what will we collaborate on, in this “socialist unity”? Anything and everything that empowers the working class: socially, economically, politically. What does “empower” mean — and what does “working class” mean? I think we already know: anyone who has to work: who is not a proprietor, employer or boss. What kind of work? Any and all — but especially the work that produces the means of subsistence, of consumption and production: in all sectors and industries, the workers who enable and support others in their work. Everyone who contributes to the reproduction of labor and laborers, individually and collectively. What would it mean to empower them? To build up and develop the working class’s capacity to act independently, as a working class, socially, politically and economically. The end goal is an old one: “those who labor must rule.” Its necessity must be realized.
An expansive rather than narrow definition of labor is advantageous, politically, and fulfills our aspiration: to achieve a socialist politics of labor. The working class has yet to be defined, politically — even economically: it has yet to be brought into existence as such. As things are, there are workers but no working class: only socialism can bring it about.
We are starting out at a very preliminary stage in such an effort: We must create the bare rudiments and elements of a socialist movement of the working class.
We start with the intent: to build a socialist politics.
How to begin doing so? We must not be oriented by the conflicts and divisions within capitalist politics, but cut across them — and thus separate the working class into a force of its own.
We must not exclude anyone on merely “moral” grounds: rights and sins are not really in conflict; and what the capitalist state and its politics call “crimes” is often a matter of practical exigency and hypocritical convenience in capitalism — especially for the working class. Let the capitalist politicians debate the number of angels or devils on the head of a pin — let them demagogue their laws on specious “moral” grounds. The working class will always do what is necessary to survive. Allow everyone’s freedom of religion and ethical autonomy without guardianship: the workers don’t want to be anyone’s wards.
Issues which do not unify the working class as socialists must be accepted for what they are: real disagreements which we may not resolve immediately — perhaps ever. For example, socialist unity means including workers on both “sides” of the pro- and anti-abortion debate in seeking to empower the full and true reproductive freedom of the working class. There must be empowerment to have children or not as people see fit. No cookie-cutter solution will ever provide true freedom or justice.
Empowerment to social and political action means: political, economic and social freedom — self-determination and democracy; but: it also means civil liberties — minority and individual rights, against the state and against majorities. The working class cannot be corralled if it is to achieve socialism; otherwise, its freedom and interests will always be sacrificed to the necessities of capitalism.
Let the capitalist politicians fund and grant public welfare benefits and other provisions and infrastructure if they so wish and see fit, but have it taken out of the profits of capital, not taxed from the wages of labor or consumption purchases. It is their concern, not ours. We expect and rely on nothing from them. “Not one person or penny for this system!”
The working class must champion everyone’s rights if its own are to be preserved and advanced. Such rights are not already firmly established once and for all, but are constantly in the process of asserting themselves and emerging into recognition: we cannot know ahead of time what new needs and rights the workers will have moving forward; we can only know that they will have them. Much is already common sense, but this is constantly evolving. In order to allow such freedom to develop, socialists must defend every right the workers might assert, and encourage and facilitate achieving them in practice.
The current framework of politics and law in capitalism is severely limited, and geared to other needs: the needs and “rights” of capital. But the workers depend on capital and capitalism: their contradiction must be brought about; for now there is an apparent identity of interests — which capitalist politics exploits. The workers are bound to support capitalism out of self-interest.
We do not start with “anti-capitalism” — which would make no more sense than being anti-God. The working class must earn for itself the right and the necessity to overcome capital. Otherwise, the capitalists will always be able to confront them with the limitations of necessity — the need to sacrifice themselves for the greater interest in capital.
But because capital has contradictory interests, the working class is divided against itself: we are liable to be divided over them. Indeed, we start out divided on this basis. The working class is divided by capital. Their unity can only come about on the basis of the struggle for socialism — which means the task of overcoming their divisions. As socialists, we must not play into capitalist separation of the workers, preventing the working class from coming into existence.
In short, we must earn the right to be socialists. None of us have it to begin with. We are by default capitalists — capitalist politicians. Do we wish to remain as such? We must begin again.
This is the true task in which we are unified: the need for socialist politics is what produces the necessity of socialist unity.
This is what I had to tell you. — The rest will be history.
Socialists of the world, unite!
* * *
Recall:
Campaign for a socialist party in the U.S.
11 Theses
1.) We are exploring interest in starting a mass socialist political party in the U.S.
2.) Mass = more than a sect (small or large); Socialist = more than merely democratic or liberal; Political = going beyond social and economic actions, including but not primarily or limited to holding political office; Party = more than a movement or organization.
3.) This will be an unprecedented undertaking, and in many respects the first real political party in the U.S. — The only precedents are the old pre-World War I Socialist Party of America and, before that, the Republican Party of the mid-19th century.
4.) We want to include as much of the present avowed Left as possible, from liberals to anarchists; we find the existing Left to consist of talented organizers and thinkers, but they need a new and different context to be effective; now they are condemned to ineffectiveness — or to more or less support the Democrats.
5.) We are looking ahead to a decades-long, painstaking and patient but deliberate and serious process; the building of a mass socialist political party will fundamentally alter the political but also the social landscape in the U.S. and internationally — globally.
6.) The aim is to take governing power in the U.S. — This does not preclude and indeed aims at doing so in direct political cooperation with similar parties taking power in other countries.
7.) Now, in 2016, is a good time to begin this project, because of the disarray of the existing parties as well as of society. There is a window of opportunity with a new generation to embark on a political task and possibility that has been avoided since the 1960s New Left and also avoided since the 1930s Old Left — both of which were conditioned and distorted by the gravitational attraction of the Democratic Party as well as the dynamics of anti-Communism and the Cold War. We are past this now and so can proceed to build socialist politics free of such pressures.
8.) The Sanders campaign is a distraction from this task because it is a desperate attempt to reform the Democrats which will not happen; and even if it did, would not lead to socialism in any way.
9.) All existing Left social, economic, civic, legal and political activism — of all kinds — should be conducted under the political banner of the struggle for socialism. We need to make all these disparate struggles coherent for any of them to be effective. Such struggles should take place in and through a socialist party.
10.) In the immediate future, the goal is to reconfigure U.S. politics in terms amenable to a socialist Left: the Republicans should be the capitalist party; the Democrats should be the party of middle-class democracy. A socialist party should be for the working class in its struggle for socialism.
11.) Socialism will be the realization of the social potential made possible — but held back — by capitalism. We need a party to pursue the politics of this task. — Join us!
February 28, 2016
Protected: Musk v. Trump
Chris Cutrone book talk on Marxism and Politics at Montez Press Radio in NYC
Chris Cutrone interviewed by Erin Hagood on his book Marxism and Politics: Essays on Critical Theory and the Party 2006-2024 (2024), at Montez Press Radio in New York City, addressing the form and content of Marxism and writing, in light of the history of the Millennial Left.