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

Chris Cutrone

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

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

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

Published: Pravda 164, November 9, 1912

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Day of the People has arrived!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debs had written:

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

To which Lenin responded:

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

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

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

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

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

Lenin continued:

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

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

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

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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February 7, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

U.S. apologist?

Chris Cutrone

Letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker 1522 (January 23, 2025).

Paul Demarty’s article, “Rise of lifeboat imperialism” (Weekly Worker 1521, January 16, 2025) cites my essay published in Compact Magazine (January 9, 2025) on the prospects of U.S. expansion into Greenland, disputing my assertion that the U.S. has treated its opponents as “Slave States”: repetitions of the fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War. 

Demarty raises Cambodia as a disproving counterexample. But the U.S. did not simply “carpet-bomb Cambodia” but targeted Vietnamese Communist forces operating there during a larger war. The Cambodian government was not the opponent of the U.S., nor of course were the people of Cambodia — or of Vietnam: certainly, they were not the enemies of the people of America. The U.S. did not demand “unconditional surrender” of them but a negotiated settlement. That says something. 

Even so, the U.S. war in Southeast Asia was a crime, and one that was opposed by many people and for many good reasons — including vociferously and notably by the original “containment” Cold War strategist himself, George F. Kennan. Still, the Communists committed many crimes of their own against the people of Vietnam, Laos and, needless to say, Cambodia. 

It’s long past time for us to remember this history differently, and no longer somehow as still a live issue when it is not. The Cold War is over, for over a generation now. After suffering millions of deaths and the permanent poisoning of its territory to last through the generations as effect of its war, Vietnam now depends for security on a military and economic alliance with the U.S. against threats from its ancient neighbor and enemy, China. 

There was a broad Anti-Imperialist League that was formed to oppose the U.S. governing let alone fighting a horrific counterinsurgency in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, on entirely liberal and democratic grounds, and in the name of American freedom. As Mark Twain indelibly wrote, “Shall we give those poor things a rest?” But Aguinaldo, the great Filipino nationalist, admitted that their historic choice was not actually independence but dependence on either Japan or the U.S. 

Socialists in the U.S. have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of U.S. government actions, but for the future course of society and politics, a long-term task for which we only have the barest rudiments of resources with which to begin building today. 

As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living — not the dead, who have no claim on us. As Fanon said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed before we were born. 

We must, as Thaddeus Stevens said, transform the heritage of slavery (and worse) to free the world — and thus honor the sacrifices that have brought us to the place and opportunity we inhabit now, and only now. We must wake from what Marx called the “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living” and heed the “poetry of the future.” It’s long past time. 

There will be a future for capitalism. Will there be for socialism? 

January 23, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Why not Greenland?

The future belongs to America — so should Greenland.

Chris Cutrone

[Albanian]

Recently, in a scene recalling the X-Files, NASA satellite imagery discovered the ruins of an old U.S. nuclear weapons base, Camp Century, under the permafrost in Greenland, an abandoned relic of the Cold War. Its resurfacing is an apt metaphor for Donald Trump’s proposal to expand U.S. territory into the circumpolar North, which seems to have come out of nowhere, but in fact draws upon a long history. 

When Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in 1940, Britain and later the United States invaded and occupied Iceland. Four years later, Iceland ended its union with Denmark and became an independent republic. Greenland could certainly have followed. Both islands remain of strategic importance for NATO, which makes Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland for military reasons seem redundant: Doesn’t Greenland already occupy a forward position regarding the Arctic and Russian threats? But perhaps Trump aims to abolish NATO — as he has threatened and his critics have accused him of planning to do—after all. Maybe it is not merely a ruse or negotiating position, but a real prospect. Greenland seems to be part of the calculation. 

Trump’s suggestion has prompted the indigenous people of Greenland to demand their independence. Meanwhile, the King of Denmark has added Greenland and the Faroe Islands to his Royal Coat of Arms, but Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has sent out mixed signals. Don Jr. is visiting Greenland as I write this. 

Trump’s calling Canada the “51st State” caused the downfall of its “governor,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The president-elect has since declared the benefits of a union with Canada that would erase the “artificial border.” But political frontiers represent history and its after-effects. The early Scandinavian — Viking — contact with the New World informs the Danish claim to Greenland. (The Inuit who make up most of the population now actually arrived later.) 

The U.S.-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin demanded Canada from the British in the treaty settling the American War of Independence. After the Civil War, the victorious Union offered to take Canada as the compensation the British owed for their support of the Confederacy. Secretary of State William H. Seward had to settle for purchasing Alaska. Canada, then, remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars. It remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing. 

Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again. Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America. Perhaps saying so blatantly what is nonetheless a fact is in bad taste. Whether literally or figuratively, the gesture is unmistakable. This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States. It is an evergreen promise. America is revolutionary or it is nothing. The United States of America liberated the world twice — three times with the Cold War. Its mission continues. 

(This is no time of abandon the Monroe Doctrine, which was not about U.S. supremacy but protection of American freedom.)

Ever since the Civil War, the United States has demanded unconditional surrender from its enemies. It has treated all its opponents as it did the Confederacy — as echoes of the counterrevolution, the threat of undoing the revolution. The Confederates regarded the values of the revolution — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all equally — as mistaken. So have all of America’s opponents. They have been and remain Slave States.

But the revolution cannot be undone. The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas — the rest of America — might still follow and not oppose it. 

The real question, though, is how America still follows the revolution. Trump seems to accept its call. The United States does not desire to rule but only to free people and places. How it does so has come now to be in doubt. But there will be no retreat to Little America. The sheer scope of American power won’t allow it. Can America find itself again — re-found itself — on these frontiers? 

The alliance between Washington and Beijing forged by Nixon and Kissinger ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union. It was supposed to shape the next century, and it has done so. Unfortunately, the original intention of the pact for the two countries — both victors of World War II, but one more damaged by it — to keep each other honest, has failed, as did that of the original Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union. 

Vladimir Putin, in interviews he conducted with Oliver Stone before Trump’s first term and after the Russian seizure of Crimea, stated that while he accepts American predominance, Washington cannot possibly govern the world. Recalling that throughout U.S. history, Russia has been its ally in all wars except one (namely, the War of 1812 — the Napoleonic Wars), he advised that regional powers such as Russia and China be allowed their own domains. The problem is that their neighbors won’t consent, hoping instead for American protection. 

Trump is decried by his political opponents in both the Democratic and Republican Parties as an “isolationist” — the old pejorative from the pre-World War II era. But ever since Woodrow Wilson’s War to End All Wars, to “make the world safe for democracy,” which was forced on America by Europe (that is, by the counterrevolution), American involvement in global affairs has been a given. Theodore Roosevelt had already negotiated the end of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and had warned against America coming into conflict with either Japan or Germany, which he saw menacing on the horizon.  

Trump has promised to end the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza; to launch no new wars; and invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his Inauguration, extending the hand of friendship to the only potential rival of American power. Xi politely demurred, not needing the reminder of the vitality of American democracy. 

Trump has not ruled out a military solution to either the Greenland or Panama Canal issues that he has identified. He did, however, rule it out for Canada — ironically enough, considering its origins as the redoubt of America’s foes in the Revolutionary War. Is Trump’s audacious overture to his second term a prelude to a new geopolitical competition — a new Cold War or even World War III? Or is it rather a preview of a restored American world leadership, as Trump apparently intends? 

The key to hard bargaining is willingness to walk away from a deal rather than accept bad terms. Trump is wagering that his negotiating partners are at least as in need of peace as America, and that in the wake of both the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, the world depends on American recovery. 

The danger is that the United States might overplay its hand. It might not be a time for brinksmanship or confrontation. It might not be a matter of tests of strength. But it might require a match of wills. 

Washington has been bogged down by policy impasses and decided lack of vision in the new millennium. Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who briefly opposed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2020, speculated at the 2024 never-Trump Republican counter-convention in Milwaukee that winning the Cold War had doomed America. He might have meant that China was the ultimate beneficiary of the fall of the Soviet Union. But such pessimism is unrealistic. The post-Cold War crisis is indeed being met — however undesirably to Walsh and the GOP old guard — by Trump. Unlike China or Russia, America has greater resources for political change in direction and leadership. There is a refusal to see the obvious regarding Trump: that he represents the “hope and change” that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him. 

The gravitational attraction of the United States is in its social and not merely its economic power. This extends to its political capacities. There are many sources of power, not just one, and this creates a much more resilient polity than one finds in America’s would-be enemies. 

Over the course of American history, every 40 or 50 years has seen a crisis that called for renewal. Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, Jackson’s 1828 election, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Reagan Revolution all changed the political parties and the nature of their competition, fulfilling Jefferson’s estimation that a revolution would be needed every generation or so. We are living through such a shift now. 

While there might not exactly be a plan, there is a vision. Trump setting his sights on Greenland might seem to prove his critics right about the danger of his folly. It symbolizes the apparent absurdity of the moment. But it would be wrong to fall back on the lack of imagination that has afflicted U.S. politics for far too long. 

The neglected and forgotten Danish colony in the Western hemisphere captures something of the nature of Trump’s character, which is bombastic but not empty. Where others have been complacent to let spaces lie unutilized, he has set to building. Could this be done on the mostly vacant territory of the world’s largest island? Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities — the necessity for American growth and change. 

In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future. Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again. | §

Originally published in Compact (January 9, 2025).

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


Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 145 | April 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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