A cry of protest before accommodation? The dialectic of emancipation and domination

Chris Cutrone

The following was written for distribution as a flyer [PDF] at the occupation protests.

HOW ARE WE to regard the history of revolutions? Why do revolutions appear to fail to achieve their goals? What does this say about consciousness of social change?

One common misunderstanding of Marx (against which, however, many counter-arguments have been made) is with respect to the supposed “logic of history” in capital.

The notion of a “historical logic” is problematic, in that there may be assumed an underlying historical logic that Marx, as a social scientist, is supposed to have discovered. Marx’s (and Engels’s) idea of “science,” however, is not the conventional one of recognizing objective facts independent of the scientific observer, but rather the Hegelian one of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility.

This philosophical approach to “science” began with Kant, and regards theoretical concepts as self-critical reflections arising from practice. In other words, Hegelian “science,” in the original Marxist sense of Marx and Engels’s use of the term, is the attempt to raise practice to greater self-awareness. “Consciousness” is formed in the dialectic of theory and practice. Furthermore, consciousness develops in a dialectic with “social being.”

This is because Marxism was not concerned with how social being “determines” consciousness, but with how both social being and consciousness can change. It was the unfreedom of this process of change in modern society that Marx sought to address in his critical account of capital. For Marx, the “logic of capital” was not a logic at all.

Capital was, in Marx’s view, a process of social disintegration, in fits and starts, and no wheel of history — at least not in terms of freedom.

In what way was Marxist thought and political practice “critical?” Marx sought to raise greater awareness of the potential possibility of the transformation of society in freedom, which meant as a function of changes in consciousness as well as in social being. Following Kant and Hegel, Marxism asks: is consciousness merely to be the Stoical recognition and submission to inevitable change?

How are we to regard the history of the Left?

One plausible way regards the history of political change as belated response to social development. In this view, revolutions come about as adjustments to processes of social change already underway or completed. Political revolution crowns the achievement of social transformation, as the old order reveals itself to be already gone. Knowledge appears only in retrospect: according to Hegel, the “Owl of Minerva flies at dusk.”

But what of the obverse? What if revolution was only the delicate beginning of change, and consciousness its dawning awareness? Then failure would be explicable: failure to think or act.

L: Stokely Carmichael, leader of the Black Power turn of the Civil Rights Movement; R: Bayard Rustin.

As Bayard Rustin described the Black Power turn of the late 1960s, “Passionate self-assertion can be a mask for accommodation.” ((Quoted in John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York: Free Press, 2003), 475. See also: Rustin, “The Failure of Black Separatism,” Harper’s Magazine (January 1970); Adolph Reed, “Black Particularity Reconsidered,” Telos 39 (1979), later expanded as “The ‘Black Revolution’ and the Reconstitution of Domination,” in Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Reed, “The Limits of Anti-Racism: Vague Politics about a Nearly Indescribable Thing,” Left Business Observer 121 (September 2009), available on-line at: <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html>.)) This spoke to the entire 1960s moment. In hindsight, it is difficult to disagree with this diagnosis.

At the time, such a disenchantment of protest was regarded as a conservative response to a potentially revolutionary situation.

But the point was that the apparent revolution was not the one the revolutionaries claimed to want, but rather one that used their discontents for other purposes. This involves a complex theory of social change that is worth considering. How might avowedly “revolutionary” ideology repress actual possibilities?

We are living in a time of change. The question is whether and how we can claim to be bringing this change about. Or, is the change already happening, beyond our control, and are we merely, in protest, registering our pain in the transition, as we accommodate and adapt to it?

Can politics be something more and other than the process of submission to domination? Is the goal of emancipation possible? History seems to show otherwise. ((See Cutrone, “Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons: 1979, 1789, and 1848,” Platypus Review 33 (March 2011).))

If we imagine that history is on our side, we threaten to rationalize a course of change already underway that we have yet to control. Our protest against it may already be our resignation to it, in the guise of calling us to task.

The world is changing. The question is whether and how we are a function of that change. | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review 42 (December 2011–January 2012).

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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Whither Marxism? Why the occupation movement recalls Seattle 1999

Chris Cutrone

The following was written for distribution as a flyer [PDF] at the occupation protests.

THE PRESENT OCCUPATION movement expresses a return to the Left of the late 1990s, specifically the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle.

They both have taken place in the last year of a Democratic U.S. Presidential administration, been spearheaded by anarchism, had discontents with neoliberalism as their motivation, and been supported by the labor movement.

This configuration of politics on the Left is the “leaderless” and “horizontal” movement celebrated by such writers as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth), John Holloway (Change the World without Taking Power), and others.

A dominant theme in the self-understanding of the 1990s-era Left was, as in the current occupation movement, “resistance,” rather than pressing for reforms — let alone revolution. ((See Michael Albert, Cutrone, Stephen Duncombe, and Brian Holmes, “The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and ‘Resistance’: The problematic forms of ‘anti-capitalism’ today,” Platypus Review 4 (April 2008).))

From the 1990s to the present

The collapse of Stalinism in 1989 began a period of disorientation and retreat for the avowed “Marxist” Left in the 1990s. This changed in the late 1990s, as disenchantment with Clinton grew.

Something similar has taken place ever since Obama’s election, amid the financial crisis, in 2008. The anti-war movement collapsed with the end of the Bush II administration. There is a lesson to be learned about the treacherous political effect of election cycles.

The bailout of Wall Street at first prompted a Right-wing response, the “Tea Party” movement. But, after some brief rumblings in campus occupations against austerity in 2009, ever since the Republicans captured a Congressional majority in the 2010 midterm elections, there has been a shift towards Left-wing discontents, beginning with the Wisconsin State House occupation.

Looking back, the movement that emerged in the late 1990s (finding an exemplar in Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela ((See Marco Torres: “The dead Left: Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution,” Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))), blossoming in the 1999 Seattle protests, was dealt a sharp blow, right after the Genoa G-8 protests in summer 2001 that sought to build upon Seattle, by the 9/11 attacks.

The standard narrative is that the anti-globalization movement was spiked and diverted by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath — perhaps even intentionally so, as the Left-wing 9/11 “truth” movement (indicatively prominent in the current occupation movement) was paranoid that the U.S. (or Israeli) government, and not al Qaeda, had perpetrated the attacks. Anti-globalization protest became occluded in the “War on Terror” era.

2000s anti-imperialist “Marxism”

The Left that developed in the 2000s was in contrast to the 1990s. The 2000s Left saw the return of the “Marxist” political organizations, pulling the strings of the anti-war coalitions after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, especially in the lead-up to and after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. ((See Kevin Anderson, Cutrone, Nick Kreitman, Danny Postel, and Adam Turl, “Imperialism: What is it, why should we be against it?,” Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))

The preceding 1990s Left consciousness expressed by Hardt and Negri et al. was displaced, precisely because the apparent reassertion of traditional great-power “imperialism,” regarding the U.S. neocons as the essential political players in the post-9/11 wars, defied notions of global neoliberal “Empire.”

The anti-war movement of the 2000s meant a more traditional “Left” of political sectarian groups orchestrating a protest movement that had as its target a Republican U.S. administration. This meant that the anti-war movement inevitably became a shill for the Democrats, especially after Bush’s re-election in 2004, as most of the sentiment of “Left” opposition to the wars was taken from the so-called “realist” vs. neocon foreign policy perspectives of many Democrats, European statesmen, and even some Republicans. ((See Cutrone, “Iraq and the election: The fog of ‘anti-war’ politics,” Platypus Review 7 (October 2008).))

Post-Obama

Obama’s election dispelled the Left that yearned for a Democratic administration, revealing the bankruptcy of the “Marxist” Left opposing Bush’s wars.

But the “anti-imperialist” turn in the 2000s had been regrettable from the perspective of the 1990s Left activists who had crystallized their experience in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001, as well as in the burgeoning “World Social Forum” movement.

The younger generation of Leftists who came of age around the anti-war movement was divided between those who received their political education from Marxism vs. anarchism. The young leaders in the new Students for a Democratic Society were, for example, mentored in the Chomskyan and Parecon perspective of Z-magazine writers Michael Albert, et al. The new SDS struggled to be more than an anti-war cause. Anti-Marxism informed the new SDS’s “anti-ideological” bias, whose echoes return today in the occupation movement. ((See Laurie Rojas, “Red-baiting and ideology: The new SDS,” Platypus Review 9 (December 2008).))

Certainly the “Marxism” of the anti-war movement’s “anti-imperialism” was deeply problematic, to say the least. The financial collapse and deepening economic crisis after 2008 is better ground for the Left than the U.S. wars of the 2000s had been. The issue of capitalism has re-emerged.

It is only right that such inadequate “Marxism” falters after the 2000s. Today, the “Marxist” ideological Left of sectarian organizations struggles to catch up with the occupation movement and threatens to be sidelined by it — as Marxist groups had been in Seattle in 1999.

It is a measure of the bankruptcy of the “Marxist” Left that organizations could only rejuvenate themselves around the anti-war movement, in terms of “anti-imperialism,” submerging the issue of capitalism. But that moment has passed.

“Anti-capitalism”

In its place, as in Seattle in 1999, an apparently unlikely alliance of the labor movement with anarchism has characterized the occupation movement. Oppositional discontents, not with neoconservatism and imperialism as in the 2000s, but with neoliberalism and capitalism as in the 1990s, characterize the political imagination of the occupation movement. This is the present opportunity for Left renewal. But it is impaired by prior history.

The issues of how capitalism is characterized and understood take on a new importance and urgency in the present moment. Now, properly understanding capitalism and neoliberalism is essential for any relevance of a Marxist approach. ((See Platypus Historians Group, “Finance capital: Why financial capitalism is no more ‘fictitious’ than any other kind,” Platypus Review 7 (October 2008); and “Friedrich Hayek and the legacy of Milton Friedman: Neoliberalism and the question of freedom (In part, a response to Naomi Klein),” Platypus Review 8 (November 2008).))

The discontents with neoliberalism pose the question of capitalism more deeply and not only more directly than imperialism did. A Marxist approach is more seriously tasked to address the problem of capitalism for our time.

The need for Marxism is a task of Marxism

Anarchism and the labor movement, respectively, will only be able to address the problem of capitalism in certain and narrow terms. Marxist approaches to the labor movement and anarchism are needed. ((See Cutrone, “Against dogmatic abstraction: A critique of Cindy Milstein on anarchism and Marxism,” Platypus Review 25 (July 2010).))

The need for Marxism becomes the task of Marxism. Marxism does not presently exist in any way that is relevant to the current crisis and the political discontents erupting in it. Marxism is disarrayed, and rightfully so.

The danger, though considerable, is not merely one of the labor movement and the broader popular milieu of the occupation movement feeding into the Democratic Party effort to re-elect Obama in 2012. Rather, the challenge is deeper, in that what is meant by anti-capitalism, socialism, and hence Marxism might suffer another round of superficial banalization and degradation (“We are the 99%!”) in responses to the present crisis. The Left may suffer a subtle, obscure disintegration under the guise of its apparent renaissance.

Nonetheless, this is an opportunity to press the need for Marxism, to reformulate it in better terms and on a more solid basis than was possible during the anti-war movement of the 2000s.

This is the gauntlet that both anarchism and the labor movement throw down at the feet of Marxism. Can Marxist approaches rise to the challenge? ((See Cutrone, “The Marxist hypothesis: A response to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’,” Platypus Review 29 (November 2010).)) | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review 41 (November 2011).

Lenin’s politics

Chris Cutrone

A rejoinder to David Adam on Lenin’s liberalism

Stalin, Lenin, and Mikhail Kalinin in 1919. Kalinin was the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, or head of state of the Soviet Union, 1919–46.

THE PRINCIPAL MISTAKE MADE by those who contemplate Lenin’s political thought and action is due to assumptions that are made about the relation of socialism to democracy. Lenin was not an “undemocratic socialist” or one who prioritized socialism as an “end” over the “means” of democracy. Lenin did not think that once a majority of workers was won to socialist revolution democracy was finished. Lenin was not an authoritarian socialist. ((See my “1917,” in The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression, Platypus Review #17 (November 2009), available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2009/11/18/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century-1917/>))

Socialism is meant to transcend liberalism by fulfilling it. ((See my “Lenin’s Liberalism,” Platypus Review 36 (June 2011), available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenin%E2%80%99s-liberalism/>)) The problem with liberalism is not its direction, supposedly different from socialism, but rather that it does not go far enough. Socialism is not anti-liberal. The 20th century antinomy of socialism versus liberalism, as expressed in Isaiah Berlin’s counterposing of “positive and negative freedoms” or “freedom to [social benefits] versus freedom from [the state],” ((See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), in Four essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969).)) or the idea that social justice conflicts with liberty, travesties (and naturalizes) and thus degrades the actual problem, which is not a clash of timeless principles—liberalism versus democracy—but a historically specific contradiction of capitalism. To clarify this, it is necessary to return to a Marxist approach, such as Lenin’s.

The error consists of addressing a dialectical approach to politics such as Lenin’s in an undialectical and eclectic manner, as if there were a number of criteria to be checked off (anticapitalism, democracy, etc.), rather than a set of intrinsically interrelated historical problems to be worked through together. The actual dialectic of the historically interrelated developments of capitalism, democracy, and the struggle for socialism demands a dialectical approach in both practice and theory. The reason that various moments of Lenin’s thought and action can appear contradictory is due to an undialectical interpretation of Lenin, not to Lenin himself. Lenin is subject to the same interpretive problem as Marx: the question of Lenin cuts to the heart of Marxism. ((See Tamas Krausz, “Lenin’s Legacy Today,” Platypus Review #39 (September 2011), available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2011/08/31/lenin%E2%80%99s-legacy-today/>))

This is recognizable by way of considering Lenin’s various discussions of the state, political parties, and society. ((See Spartacist League, Lenin and the Vanguard Party (1978). Available online at: <http://www.bolshevik.org/Pamphlets/LeninVanguard/LVP%200.htm>)) Lenin assumed that these were not the same thing and did not assume that “socialism” meant making them into the same thing. Most of Lenin’s readers (both followers and detractors) either praise or denounce Lenin, mistakenly, for his supposed attempts to make society into an undifferentiated totality. Not only what Lenin said, but what he did shows otherwise. Furthermore, one must take into account how Lenin avowedly sought to be true to Marx, whether one judges Lenin to have been successful in this or not. Therefore, at least in part, one must reckon with the problem of evaluating Lenin as a Marxist.

It is a fundamental error to regard Lenin as a largely unconscious political actor who was reduced to theoretically “justifying” his actions. Readers often commit the fallacy of projecting their own inclinations or fears onto Lenin and misinterpret him accordingly. On the contrary, one must address what Lenin said and did in terms of the coherence of his own self-understanding. For this, it is necessary to regard the historical, that is, social and political, circumstances within which Lenin not only acted but spoke. From the various available records, Lenin did not write treatises but political pamphlets, moreover with propagandistic purpose, including his most “theoretical” works such as The State and Revolution (1917).

What is clear is that Lenin did not advocate the partyification of the state (or statification of the party) or the statification of society—in this crucial respect, Lenin remained a “liberal.” Both of these phenomena of Stalinization post-date Lenin and need to be addressed in terms of a process beginning after Lenin’s medical retirement, the dangers of which Lenin was well aware and against which he struggled, in vain, in his final years. ((See Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle (New York: Pantheon, 1968).))

The ban on factions that seems to impugn Lenin’s motives and show a supposed continuity between him and Stalin can be addressed rather straightforwardly. Lenin came in 1921 to advocate banning organized factions—not dissent!—within the Russian Communist Party, precisely because of the differentiated realities of the party, the state, and society in the Soviet workers’ state of the former Russian Empire. Many careerist state functionaries had joined the party (though, according to Lenin, they deserved only to be “shot”), and the party-controlled state faced a deeply divided society, in which he thought that the party could become a plaything in the hands of other state and greater societal forces. The ban on factions was meant not only to be merely a temporary measure, but it should be noted that Lenin did not call for such ban on factions in the Communist International, which was considered a single world party divided into national sections. The ban on factions was meant to address a danger specific to the Bolsheviks being a ruling governmental party under certain conditions, and it was inextricably tied to the contemporaneous implementation of the New Economic Policy. One might interpret the ban as directed against the Left, whereas in fact it was directed against the Right, that is, directed against the power of the status quo in the former Russian Empire swamping the politics of social revolution. So, the ban on factions was a self-consciously limited and specifically local compromise to Lenin’s mind, and not at all the expression of any kind of principle. It is a serious mistake to regard it otherwise. The fact that the ban on factions helped lead to Stalinism does not make it into an “original sin” by Lenin. Revolution beyond the Soviet Union was the only way to ameliorate the problems of Bolshevik rule, as Rosa Luxemburg, for one, recognized. ((See Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Tragedy” (1918). Available online at: <http://www.marx.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/09/11.htm>.))

The other mistake, indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of the relation of the struggle for proletarian socialism to democracy and the politics of the state, is to regard problems of economics and politics as similar in kind. There is no contradiction between democracy in politics and hierarchy of authority in various concrete activities, whether economic or military. The question is one of social and political leadership and responsibility. Is a factory responsible only to its own employees, or to society as a whole? Lenin was certainly not a syndicalist or “council communist,” that is, Lenin did not think that socialist politics can be adequately pursued by labor unions or workers’ councils (or more indeterminate “democratic assemblies”) alone, but this does not mean Lenin was undemocratic. The issue of democracy in economic life cannot be considered in an unmediated way without doing violence to the societal issues involved. The point of “democratizing the economy” is not to be understood properly as simply workplace democracy. This is because socialism is not merely a problem of the organization of production, let alone merely an economic issue. Socialism is not merely democratic. Rather, democracy poses the question of society and, from a Marxist perspective, the “social question” is capitalism. Marxism recognizes the need for democracy in capitalism. Lenin addressed the possibility of overcoming the necessity of the state or, more precisely, the need for democracy. Marxism agrees with anarchism on the goal of superseding democracy, but disagrees on how to get there from here. Marxism recognizes the need for a democratic state posed by capitalism that cannot be wished away.

The society and state in question were addressed by Lenin with respect to the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which is, importantly, not a national state. His vision was for a workers’ state at a global scale. Because the bourgeois state is a global and not a national phenomenon, neither is the Marxist vision of the “workers’ state.” Lenin did not pursue a national road to socialism. As a Marxist, he recognized that, under capitalism, “the state”—of which various national states were merely local components—was essentially the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.” This did not mean that there were no political struggles among the capitalists to which various nation states could and did become subject. Rather, the need for socialism was tied to a need for a global state as well as a truly free global civil society already expressed under capitalism. ((See Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant on History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963).)) Only by understanding what Marx meant by the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” in liberal democracy can we understand what Lenin meant by the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a revolutionary “workers’ state.” ((The reason why the global state under capital tends toward liberal democracy at the core but tolerates tyranny in its subordinate domains or peripheral extremities is the expediency or convenience of opportunism; despotism in the center, by contrast, is highly politically contentious and untenable. Indeed, it has led to world wars.))

Lenin was a liberal because he understood the necessity of politics within the working class, which does not and cannot take place outside the domains of bourgeois rights and politics, but which is rather inevitably and necessarily part and parcel of them. Lenin did not advocate the unmediated politicization of society, which he knew would be regressive, whether understood in authoritarian or “libertarian” terms. The Soviet workers’ state in Lenin’s time was indeed like the Paris Commune of 1871, if it had been led by Marx and Engels, had fought off Versailles, and had held on to power.

The Russian Revolution presented new problems, not with regard to socialism, which was never achieved, but rather with regard to the revolution, which failed. Like the Commune, the revolution that opened in 1917 was abortive. Isolation in Russia was defeating: the failure of the German Revolution 1918–19 was the defeat of the revolution in Russia. Stalinism was the result of this defeat, and adapted itself to it. Lenin already contended with this defeat, and distinguished his Marxism from both Right opportunism and ultra-Leftism. ((See Lenin, “Left-wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920). Available online at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/>.)) The question is, what can we learn about this failure, from Lenin’s perspective?

Because democratic discontents, the workers’ movement, and anti-capitalist and socialist political parties, operate in a differentiated totality of bourgeois society that must be transformed, they are subject to politicization and the problems of democratic self-determination that liberal bourgeois society has historically placed on the agenda. Proletarian socialism, in Lenin’s view no less than Marx’s, does not nullify these problems but seeks to allow them a fuller scope of activity. Lenin advocated not only a workers’ “state,” but also workers’ political parties and other workers’ civil society institutions such as labor unions and workers’ publications, which the struggle for socialism necessitated. This is true after the revolution even more than before because the workers’ social revolution is meant to build upon the existing society. Lenin was an avowed Marxist “communist.” As Marx put it, communism seeks a society in which the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” ((Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Available online at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm>.))

Both “libertarian” and authoritarian tendencies in socialism tend to avoid the importance of Lenin’s Marxism on this score, because both tendencies tend to conflate society and politics. This is not only anti-liberal but illiberal—and un-Marxist—whether understood hierarchically or “democratically.” Capitalism is already a “grassroots” and thus a democratic phenomenon, and not merely a baleful hierarchy of authority: its problem goes beyond democracy.

The proletarian socialist revolution, in Lenin’s view as well as Marx’s, was not meant to bring about the Millennium, but rather to clear certain obstacles to the struggle for the working class’s social and political self-determination (not exclusively as a matter of the state), which Marx and Lenin thought could lead society beyond capitalism. Moreover, this was conceived largely “negatively,” in terms of problems to be overcome. The revolution, in Marxist terms, does not produce an emancipated society ready-made, but only, perhaps, political forms through which emancipatory social transformation, otherwise blocked by capitalism, might be pursued and developed further. Lenin, like Marx, thought that overthrowing both the rule of capitalist private property in the means of production and the subjection of society to the vicissitudes of the market, the classic demands of proletarian socialism as it had developed after the Industrial Revolution, might allow this.

Neither Marx nor Lenin came with blueprints for an emancipated society in hand. Rather, Lenin, following Marx, advocated pursuing the forms of the struggle for socialism that had emerged historically in and through the development of the workers’ movement itself. Historical Marxism did not formulate independent schemes for emancipation, but sought the potential social-emancipatory content of emergent political phenomena in light of history. Lenin as well as Marx advocated the workers’ right to rule, but followed other socialists in doing so. It is necessary to address Lenin as a consistent advocate of workers’ power, and consider how he understood the meaning of this in the struggle for socialism.

Socialism in the original Marxist sense that Lenin followed does not seek to undo but rather tries to press further the gains of historically “bourgeois” liberal democracy. Liberalism is not meant to be negated but fulfilled by democracy, just as bourgeois society is not meant to be torn down but transcended in overcoming capitalism. Liberal and democratic concerns need to answer to the historical tasks of emancipatory social transformation, not timeless political “principles.”

Lenin himself was very clear on this, even if neither most of his supposed followers nor his detractors have been. The problem is anti-Marxist interpretive bias that is blinding. | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review 40 (October 2011).

A defence of Marxist Hegelianism — response to Mike Macnair

Chris Cutrone

I am writing in response to Mike Macnair’s 2003 critical review of John Rees and David Renton’s books (“‘Classical Marxism’ and grasping the dialectic,” Weekly Worker 495, September 11, 2003), cited in Macnair’s critique of Platypus (“No need for party?,” Weekly Worker 865, May 12, 2011; “Theoretical dead end,” Weekly Worker 866, May 19, 2011; “The study of history and the Left’s decline,” Weekly Worker 868, June 2, 2011; and “Divided by a common language?,” Weekly Worker 872, June 30, 2011). I wish to refer also to my three letters and article in response, “Platypus” (Weekly Worker 866, May 19, 2011), “Fish nor fowl” (Weekly Worker 867, May 26, 2011), “The philosophy of history” (Weekly Worker 869, June 9, 2011) and “Useful Platypus” (Weekly Worker 873, July 7, 2011).

I find Macnair’s analysis and critique of the political motivations and potential consequences of Rees’s affirmative account of Marxist Hegelianism compelling and good. I agree with Macnair’s conclusion that, despite Rees’s former SWP/UK leader Alex Callinicos’s anti-Hegelian Althusserianism, Rees considering “historical experience summed up in theory” was intrinsically connected to the SWP’s concept of the party as one which “centralises experience”, with all the problems such a conception entails.

I wish to offer a rejoinder to Macnair’s idea that such problematic conceptions of theory and political practice have roots in Lenin, Luxemburg and Lukács, Macnair’s analysis of whom I find to be false. Also, I do not think that Macnair quite gets Hegel, although I agree with his characterisation (in “Against philosopher kings,” Weekly Worker 749, December 11, 2008) that “philosophy — as such — is inherently only a way of interpreting the world”, and so limits Hegel’s work for the political purposes under consideration. Furthermore, I agree with Macnair’s interpretation of Lenin with respect to the purposes of his polemical defence of Marxist approaches to philosophy in Materialism and empirio-criticism (1908). Moreover, I agree with his central point that philosophical agreement cannot be the basis of agreement on political action.

However, as Nicholas Brown responded to comrade Macnair’s question at the opening plenary on ‘The politics of critical theory’ of the Platypus convention in Chicago on April 29, it is not possible to ‘Hegelianise’ Marx, because Marx was more Hegelian than Hegel himself (Platypus Review 37, July 2011). That is, Marx tried to achieve the ‘Hegelian’ self-consciousness of his own historical moment. The question is, what relevance has Marx’s Hegelianism today, and what is the relevance of taking such a Hegelian approach to the history of Marxism subsequent to Marx?
Dialectical spiral

Lukács, Lenin, Luxemburg

I disagree that Lukács’s “subject” of history is the point of view or relative perspective of the proletariat as the revolutionary agent that must assert its “will”. Rather, I take Lukács to be following Lenin and Luxemburg (and Marx) quite differently than Macnair seems to think, in that the workers’ movement for socialism is the necessary mediation for grasping the problem of capital in its “totality”, that the workers must not remake the world in their image, but rather lead society more generally beyond capital. Hence, as Macnair characterises the approach of the Kautskyan “centre” of the Second International, the socialist workers’ movement must be a leading, practical force in democratic struggles beyond the workers’ own (sectional) interests in the transformation of society as a whole.

I disagree that Lenin made a virtue of necessity in the Russian Revolution after October 1917 and adopted a voluntarist (and substitutionalist) conception of the working class and the political party of communism. Rather, Lenin consistently criticised and politically fought against those tendencies of Bolshevism and in the early Third International. I do not think that Lenin’s newly found ‘Hegelianism’ after 1914 was the means by which he achieved (mistaken) rapprochement with the ‘left’.

The key is Luxemburg. I do not think she was a semi-syndicalist spontaneist/voluntarist, or that she neglected issues of political mediation: she was not an ‘ultra-left’. I take her pamphlet, The mass strike, the political party, and the trade unions (1906), to have an entirely different political purpose and conclusion. It was not an argument in favour of the mass strike as a tactic, let alone strategy, but rather an analysis of the significance of the mass strike in the 1905 Russian Revolution as a historical phenomenon, inextricably bound up in the development of capital at a global scale, and how this tasked and challenged the social democratic workers’ movement (the Second International and the SPD in particular) to reformulate its approach and transform itself under such changed historical conditions, specifically with regard to the relation of the party to the unions.

Luxemburg’s perspective was neither anarcho-syndicalist/spontaneist nor vanguardist, but rather dialectical. The mass strike was not a timeless principle. For Luxemburg, 1905 showed that the world had moved into an era of revolutionary struggle that demanded changes in the workers’ movement for socialism. A contradiction had developed between the social democratic party and (its own associated) labour unions, or ‘social democracy’ had become a self-contradictory phenomenon in need of transformation.

Furthermore, I take Lenin’s critiques of Kautsky for being “non-dialectical” to be very specific. This is not a critique of Kautsky ‘philosophically’ (although it does speak to his bad practices as a theorist), but politically. It is about Kautsky’s non-dialectical approach to politics: that is, the relation of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness, in and through the concrete mediations of the historically constituted workers’ movement. Kautsky failed in this. Lenin agreed with Luxemburg in her Junius pamphlet (1915) that the problem was Kautsky thinking that the SPD’s Marxism (that is, what became Kautsky’s USPD) could “hide like a rabbit” during World War I and resume the struggle for socialism afterward. Or, as Lenin put it in his Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (1916) and Socialism and war (1915), contra Kautsky’s theory of ‘ultra-imperialism’, the world war must be seen as a necessary and not accidental outcome of the historical development of capitalism, and so a crisis that was an opportunity for revolutionary transformation, and not merely, as Kautsky thought, a derailment into barbarism to be resisted. This was the essential basis for agreement between Luxemburg and Lenin 1914–19.

I do not think the separation of the pre-World War I Lenin from Luxemburg is warranted, especially considering their close collaboration, both in the politics of the Russian movement and in the Second International more generally, throughout the period 1905–12 and again 1914–19. Throughout their careers, Lenin and Luxemburg (and Trotsky) were exemplars of the Second International left, or ‘radicals’ in the movement. They all more or less mistook Kautsky to be one of their own before August 1914. Also, Kautsky himself changed, at various points and times — which is not to say that Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky never changed.

But the question is the nature and character of such change, and how these figures allow us to grasp the history of Marxism. It is not about learning from their trials and errors, I think, but rather from the example of their ‘consciousness’, not merely theoretically, but practically. Moreover, the history of Marxism must be approached as part and parcel, and the highest expression, of the history of post-1848 capital.

Hegelianism

Lukács’s ‘Hegelian’ point was that “subjective” struggles for transformation take place in and through “necessary forms of appearance” that misrecognise their “objective” social realities, not in terms of imperfect approximations or more or less true generalised abstractions, but specifically as a function of the “alienated” and “reified” social and political dynamics of capital. Capital is “objective” in a specific way, and so poses historically specific problems for subjectivity.

The reason for Marxists distinguishing their approach from Hegel is precisely historical: that a change in society took place between Hegel’s and Marx’s time that causes Hegelian categories, as those of an earlier, pre-Industrial Revolution era of bourgeois society, to become inverted in truth, or reversed in intention. Marx’s idea was that the “contradiction” of bourgeois society had changed. Thus the dialectical “law of motion” was specific to the problem of capital and not a transhistorical principle of (social) action and thought. Marx’s society was not Hegel’s. The meaning of Hegel had changed, just as the meaning of the categories of bourgeois society had changed. Labour-time as value had become not productive (if not unproblematically) — as in Hegel’s and Adam Smith’s time, the era of ‘manufacture’ — but destructive of society; as a form of social mediation, wage-labour had become self-contradictory and self-undermining in the Industrial Revolution, hence the ‘crisis of capital’.

One fundamental disagreement I have with Macnair’s approach, in which I think I follow Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukács and Marx, is with the idea that the potential transformation of capitalist society involves the confrontation of two antithetical social principles, of the workers (collectivism) vs the capitalists (individual private property). Capital, as Marx understood it, is not based on the mode of existence of the capitalists, falsely generalised to society as a whole, but rather that of the workers. This is not a top–down, but a bottom–up, view — shared by Smith, for example. As Lukács put it, the fate of the worker becomes that of “society as a whole” (“Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat” [1922] part 1, ‘The phenomenon of reification’ in History and class consciousness: studies in Marxist dialectics [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971], 91). The contradiction of capital is the contradiction of the workers’ — not the capitalists’ — existence in society. For Marx, capital is a social mode of production and not merely a relation of production. As a mode of production, capital has become increasingly self-contradictory. As a function of capital’s historical development, through the Industrial Revolution, in which the workers’ own increasing demands for bourgeois rights, to realise the value of their labour, and not merely capitalist competition, played a key, indispensable role, bourgeois society became self-contradictory and self-undermining. That is, the workers centrally or at base constituted the self-destructive, social-historical dynamic of capital through their labouring and political activity. This development culminated in the crisis of world war and revolution 1914–19.

As Lenin put it in The state and revolution, the social relations of bourgeois society — namely, the mutual exchange of labour as the form of social solidarity in capital — could only be transformed gradually and thus “wither away,” and not be abolished and replaced at a stroke (The state and revolution chapter 5, ‘The economic basis of the withering away of the state’, part 3, ‘The first phase of communist society’). The proletarian socialist revolution was supposed to open the door to this transformation. The potential for emancipated humanity expressed in communism that Marx recognised in the modern history of capital is not assimilable without remainder to pre- or non-Marxian socialism.

As Marx put it, “Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society” (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). This was because, according to Marx, “Communism is a dogmatic abstraction and . . . only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property” (letter to Arnold Ruge, ‘Ruthless criticism’, September 1843). Marx was not the pre-eminent communist of his time, but rather its critic, seeking to push it further. Marxism was the attempted Hegelian self-consciousness of proletarian socialism as the subject-object of capital.

As Lukács’s contemporary, Karl Korsch, pointed out in ‘Marxism and philosophy’ (1923), by the late 19th century historians such as Dilthey had observed that “ideas contained in a philosophy can live on not only in philosophies, but equally well in positive sciences and social practice, and that this process precisely began on a large scale with Hegel’s philosophy” (Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” [1923], in Marxism and Philosophy trans. Fred Halliday [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008], 39). For Korsch, this meant that ‘philosophical’ problems in the Hegelian sense were not matters of theory, but practice. From a Marxian perspective, however, it is precisely the problem of capitalist society that is posed at the level of practice.

Korsch went on to argue that “what appears as the purely ‘ideal’ development of philosophy in the 19th century can in fact only be fully and essentially grasped by relating it to the concrete historical development of bourgeois society as a whole” (40). Korsch’s great insight, shared by Lukács, took this perspective from Luxemburg and Lenin, who grasped how the history of the socialist workers’ movement and Marxism was a key part — indeed the crucial aspect — of this development, in the first two decades of the 20th century.

The problem we have faced since then is that the defeat of the workers’ movement for socialism has not meant the stabilisation, but rather the degeneration, disintegration and decomposition, of bourgeois society — without the concomitant increase, but rather the regression, of possibilities for moving beyond it. This shows that the crisis of Marxism was a crisis of bourgeois society, or the highest and most acute aspect of the crisis of capital: bourgeois society has suffered since then from the failure of Marxism.

Crisis of Marxism

The ‘crisis of Marxism’, in which Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky took part (especially in 1914–19, but also in the period leading up to this, most significantly from 1905 on), and Lukács tried to address ‘theoretically’ in History and class consciousness and related writings of the early 1920s, was (the highest practical expression of) the crisis of bourgeois society.

This crisis demanded a Marxist critique of Marxism, or a ‘dialectical’ approach to Marxism itself: that is, a recognition of Marxism, politically, as being a self-contradictory and so potentially self-undermining historical phenomenon (a phenomenon of history — hence the title of Lukács’s book, History and class consciousness), itself subject to necessary “reification” and “misrecognition” that could only be worked through “immanently”. This meant regaining the “Hegelian” dimension, or the “self-consciousness” of Marxism. This is because Marxism, as an expression of the workers’ “class-consciousness”, was — and remains — entirely “bourgeois”, if in extremis. While self-contradictory in its development, the socialist workers’ movement, including its Marxist self-consciousness, pointed beyond itself, ‘dialectically’ — as consciousness of the bourgeois epoch as a whole does.

Georg Lukács, People's Commissar for Education and Culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic, 1919

I follow Adorno’s characterisation of the problem of workers’ consciousness and the necessary role of intellectuals, which he took from Lenin, in his letter to Walter Benjamin of March 18, 1936: “The proletariat . . . is itself a product of bourgeois society. . . . [T]he actual consciousness of actual workers . . . [has] absolutely no advantage over the bourgeois except . . . interest in the revolution, but otherwise bear[s] all the marks of mutilation of the typical bourgeois character. This prescribes our function for us clearly enough — which I certainly do not mean in the sense of an activist conception of ‘intellectuals’. . . . It is not bourgeois idealism if, in full knowledge and without mental prohibitions, we maintain our solidarity with the proletariat instead of making of our own necessity a virtue of the proletariat, as we are always tempted to do — the proletariat which itself experiences the same necessity and needs us for knowledge as much as we need the proletariat to make the revolution” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Correspondence with Benjamin,” New Left Review I/81 [September–October 1973], 66–67).

The problem we face today, I think, is the opacity of the present, due to our lack of a comparably acute, self-contradictory and dialectical expression of the crisis of capital that Marxism’s historical self-consciousness, in theory and practice, once provided. | §

Oiriginally published in The Weekly Worker 878 (August 11, 2011) [PDF].

Response to Andrew Coates on “negative dialectics”

The following was originally posted as a comment on Andrew Coates, “Platypus versus Weekly Worker: negative dialectics” (July 12, 2011).

We in Platypus consider our project to be Marxist in the sense that the necessary agent of social transformation remains the working class. Looking back on history, it becomes clear to us that the highest moments of social potential have coincided, not unproblematically, however, with the high points of the workers’ movement for socialism.

The question is if and how the working class is presently constituted as a political force. We don’t think it is.

For it is not only the case, for us, that the “Left is dead!,” but also that the labor movement is dead.

This is perhaps the bitterest pill to swallow. But we think that the labor movement and the Left share fates: that one cannot advance without the other, and that they both go down together.

In this sense we would agree with Luxemburg and Marx concerning “social democracy.” But this then poses the further question of in what ways Marx, Luxemburg, et al. were (“immanent”) critics of the social-democratic workers’ movement, or, of proletarian socialism, and not merely its advocates.

Furthermore, the issue is not simply “democracy” but also “liberalism,” that is, what is the relation between individual and collective social freedom?

On “instrumentality,” there is a common misunderstanding of Frankfurt School Critical Theory on this score: “reason” becomes “instrumentalized” not in the way people exercise it, but rather as a function of the social-historical logic of capital. Our reason is reduced to an instrument of the reproduction of capital.

So it becomes a matter, not of thinking our way out of capital, but of pushing further and more acutely the immanent logic of capital, and trying to raise it to consciousness (this is the notorious “Hegelianism”).

The question is whether that is happening today or not.

On “Bonapartism” the issue is not whether conjuncturally the capitalist bourgeoisie has lost control here or there, but rather how the logic of capital has escaped effective human control, especially in terms of politics, ever since 1848. The index of this train-wreck of capitalism is the “authoritarian” character of politics, in which no one really believes that the political measures taken will solve the social problems, but everyone submits to them, in “bad faith,” anyway. Bourgeois society in its continued decadence has sacrificed not merely the workers’ social empowerment and freedom, but that of all members of society.

Not only the working class, but importantly also the bourgeoisie, individually and collectively, submits itself to the strong and arbitrary state. For it’s quite unclear that the state today acts in the capitalists’ interests, other than by default. As Marx put it, the capitalists are less worried about losing their rights than they are afraid of the workers gaining theirs. The issue is the general trend of capitalism becoming more illiberal, ever since 1848, and what are the political and social-psychological phenomena of this taking place.

As Adorno put it, it becomes easier to believe the lie one knows is a lie than to struggle for more uncertain and dangerous emancipation. This is what it means to advance through history with one’s back turned, transfixed by the horror of the past. But, according to Benjamin, it is not we humans who do this, but rather the “angel of history,” who has ceased to be our guardian companion and instead has become our horrified reflection. History, in Hegel’s philosophical sense of the story of reason in freedom, has abandoned us.

“Those who labor must rule.” Platypus agrees with this Marxist truism. But we ask the question of why this is so. We do not assume it.

Why does the workers’ movement for socialism express emancipatory potential?

In avoiding this question, as the basis for critically thinking and practically working through (supposedly) “anticapitalist” politics, the present (dead/pseudo-) “Left” instead (at best) reifies the “proletariat.” Rather than seeking to push (the contradictions of) working class politics further, the “Left” cheerleads what the working class is already doing, ignoring how the struggle for socialism, as it was pursued in Marx and the best Marxists’ times, has long since ceased.

The critical conversation on the death of the Left that we in Platypus seek to host is not between ourselves and others, but among the broadest range of “Leftists” today who can contribute to expressing the buried but remaining historical tasks of human emancipation that were once more acutely (and not uncontradictorily) expressed by the historical Left and Marxism. This is not a directly political project, but an indirect one.

We seek to manifest the force of history in the present “dialectics at a standstill.” As Adorno put it, the “less popular” aspect of the Hegelian dialectic is its “static side.” But this expresses the condition that “The law that, according to the Hegelian dialectic, governs the restlessly destructive unfolding of the ever-new consists in the fact that at every moment the ever-new is also the old lying close at hand. The new does not add itself to the old, but is the old in distress” (Adorno, “Reflections on class theory,” in Can one live after Auschwitz? A philosophical reader, Stanford 2003, 95). | §

Response to Mike Macnair’s critique of Platypus on philosophy of history

Chris Cutrone

I am writing to respond to Mike Macnair’s critique (“Divided by a common language?,” Weekly Worker 872, June 30, 2011) of my article on “The philosophy of history” (June 9).

J.P. Nettl’s biography of Rosa Luxemburg can be plausibly considered his life-work and not ancillary to his primary intellectual concerns because it was the product of almost 20 years of thinking, not the 3 years of intensive writing that produced his book. Nettl’s preface to his book clearly indicates this, that immediately after WWII his imagination was captured by the history of pre-WWI Marxism in the SPD and Luxemburg in particular, but that the controversial nature of the subject made him ruminate long on it, and forgo available sources of support for his study of it, before publishing his 1,000 page book in 1966. Let’s be clear: Nettl was not a Marxist. But that should not anathematize any insights he may have had.

About “imperialism” and “authoritarianism,” I was concerned to show their interrelated character, which I sketched only in very broad outline: the general historical trend of post-1848 Bonapartism, all the way up to the present. As Marx and Engels put it, Bonapartism expressed a situation in which the capitalists could no longer and the workers not yet rule society (see Engels’s 1891 introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France, 1871). I agree with Mike Macnair, that, e.g. Bukharin’s explanation of imperialism’s effect on the socialist workers’ movement, the political compromise of the metropolitan workers with respect to their national states, is better than the idea that they were economically “bought off” (I disagree however that the latter was Lenin and Trotsky’s essential perspective). I agree as well that the virtue of such an emphatically political explanation is that it can account for similar phenomena in the periphery.

But this raises the issue of what I have called “authoritarianism,” or willing support for the status quo and hostility to alternatives, and the subjectivity for doing so, again. Why are the workers more often conservative, even virulently and self-destructively so, than not? The explanation of (some) workers’ support for fascism by reference to their peripheral character (i.e., the unemployed or “lumpenized”) is what indeed “dodges the issue.” While the SPD and KPD’s refusals to fight a civil war against fascism in Germany in 1918–21 and circa 1933 may have been of decisive, conjunctural importance, this itself is what requires explanation (it also leaves aside the Italian case). It cannot be laid simply on bad leadership — on the parties’ bad decisions — without reference to the workers’ fear, or lack of support for better action, which was broken, however briefly, in Germany in 1918–19, but precisely as a civil war among the workers. The contrast of 1918–19 with 1933 could not be more clear: as Adorno put it, 1919 already decided what came later (see “Those Twenties,” 1962, in Henry Pickford, ed., Critical Models, Columbia University Press, 1998).

The issue of Hegelianism is a difficult one: how to include the “subjective factor in history.” I think this turns on how one understands Marx’s critique of Hegel. I don’t think that Marx’s reference to the “real” is in an empiricist sense, but rather in Hegel’s sense of the actuality of the rational in the real. The issue turns on the relation of essence and appearance, or, with what necessity things appear as they do. What is essential is what is practical, and what is practical is subjective as well as objective. Theoretical reflection on the subjective must use metaphysical categories that are not merely handy but actually constitutive of social practices in which one is a subject. The commodity form is not a generalization from experience.

All of this, however, is largely beside the point regarding Platypus. For the conversation we seek to host is not between ourselves and others, but much more widely on the avowed Left, and among those with far greater experience than what is available among our own members. We serve only to facilitate, even if we have to elbow our way in, provocatively, to make the space for such conversation, otherwise foreclosed. We consider the need for such conversation to be more ideological than practical at present.

I am glad that comrade Macnair recognizes that Platypus may “serve a useful anti-sectarian purpose in near-future politics. It is also possible that it serves a useful political purpose by hammering home the bankruptcy of both the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ left.” This is precisely what we intend. Though I think it is potentially much more, if Platypus does successfully what Macnair thinks it might, I for one will be happy to allow the “guide to history” through which we understand our own efforts to be considered a “useful myth.” | §

Originally published in The Weekly Worker 873 (July 7, 2011).

Philosophy of history of the Left and Marxism: “authoritarianism” and “imperialism” — response to Mike Macnair

Chris Cutrone

Mike Macnair’s critique of Platypus in “The study of history and the Left’s decline” (Weekly Worker 868, June 2, 2011) takes issue on the philosophy of history of Marxism. I would like to clarify this, and the senses in which I used the terms “authoritarianism” and “imperialism” in my letters of May 19, 2011 (Weekly Worker 866) and May 26, 2011 (Weekly Worker 867), in response to Macnair’s two articles written after his attendance at the Platypus 2011 convention in Chicago, “No need for party?” (Weekly Worker 865, May 12, 2011), and “Theoretical dead end” (Weekly Worker 866, May 19, 2011).

Historiography of Marxism

First, however, I would like to address the issue of historiography with respect to the SPD in the 2nd International era. Carl E. Schorske (in German Social Democracy 1905–17: The Development of the Great Schism, 1955), and James Joll (in The Second International 1889–1914, 1974) are, among others, important historical sources for my and other Platypus members’ views. But I don’t think that what Macnair calls a “source-critical” approach to history should be attempted with reference to historians’ biographies, which does not clarify but potentially compounds the problem of philosophy of history.

On J.P. Nettl, I would point to his substantial essay on “Ideas, intellectuals, and Structures of Dissent,” collected in Philip Rieff, ed., On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (1969). I dispute Macnair’s characterization of Nettl’s concerns. I think Nettl’s biography of Luxemburg was his life-work and not ancillary. As a liberal/non-Marxist, there are perhaps some issues to be taken with Nettl’s work on Luxemburg, but Nettl’s views as a political scientist were drawn from his long and close study of Luxemburg and her relation to Marxism, not applied by Nettl to Luxemburg from elsewhere. For Nettl, the history of Marxism raised questions about the possibilities of politics per se. Hence, the importance of Nettl’s argument.

Thus, Nettl’s article on “The German Social-Democratic Party 1890–1914 as Political Model” (Past and Present 30, April 1965) argued that Luxemburg’s views, as expressed in Reform or Revolution? and The Mass Strike, among other writings, were not actionist but concerned with the transformation of the SPD in which the Marxist Left had a stake. Luxemburg and Lenin were not opposed to the formation of workers’ political parties as necessary instruments of emancipation, but they were aware of the dangers inherent in this, from a Marxist perspective on the historical development of capital, in which such workers’ organizations (including labor unions) were inevitably bound up. In other words, how, e.g., the SPD was a phenomenon of the history of capital, or, more precisely, how the workers’ movement for socialism was part of the historical development of capital, and did not somehow oppose it from outside. In this sense, there was an affinity of Eduard Bernstein’s views on “evolutionary socialism” with Luxemburg’s, but they drew the opposite political conclusions: where Bernstein found the transformation of capital through reforms to be ameliorative, Luxemburg found a deepening crisis. This was Luxemburg’s thesis in Reform or Revolution?, that only reformists separated social reform from political revolution, because Marxism recognized that reforms deepened the crisis of capital and made revolution not less but more necessary.

Benjamin and Adorno

I dispute Macnair’s characterization of Benjamin and Adorno’s philosophy of history as attempting to generate “useful myths.” Rhetorical and literary style aside, Benjamin and especially Adorno were rigorous Marxists and Hegelians who engaged the issues of “historical materialism” as manifested after the failure of Marxism. Benjamin and Adorno were not postmodernists avant la lettre, despite their spurious late pomo popularity. Rather, Benjamin and Adorno, like Lukács and Korsch (from whom they took direct inspiration), followed Luxemburg and Lenin’s judgments about the crisis of Marxism as the crisis of bourgeois society that Marxism itself, as part of the ideology and practical political leadership of the international social-democratic workers’ movement, had brought about.

Benjamin and Adorno challenged the linear-progressive conception of history, recovering from the history of Marxism what might appear to be an obscure point, but one addressed, for example, by Plekhanov as history moving in a “knotted line,” and by Lenin as history moving in “spirals” of repetition and crisis (see Lenin’s 1915 Granat Encyclopedia entry on “Karl Marx”). This Hegelian-Marxist approach to the dialectics of history was digested usefully by Lukács, as a discussion of historical “moment” and “process” in “Tailism and the Dialectic” (Lukács’s unpublished 1925 defense of History and Class Consciousness).

Hegel and Kant

The Hegelian — and Kantian — point is that the relation between theory and practice is not one of empirical deduction from trial and error in which an always imperfect theory is corrected, but “inductive,” in that the concrete “material” object of practice is the concretization of abstractions, and, furthermore, the object of practice is indeed first and foremost the human subject, i.e., the “subject-object” of transformation. The question is the adequacy of the relation of theory and practice. Metaphysical (“theoretical”) categories refer not to a world extrinsic to human subjectivity, but to the world constituted socially in and through such categories, which are always eminently practical as well as theoretical. So, in the most pertinent example, the “commodity form” is, for Marxists, a category of social relations, which gives it an effective social reality, different from physical nature. Macnair seems not to have attended to the Kantian revolution in philosophy from which Hegel, Marx, Lukács, Benjamin and Adorno followed.

How this matters for the philosophy of history is that history is not a compendium of past facts but a social relation of the “present” with itself. The past is not “past” but present, and present “historically.” So, for Benjamin and Adorno (following Lukács and Korsch, who followed Lenin, Luxemburg, and Marx and Engels on this point), the question was how to reckon the history of Marxism and the greater socialist workers’ movement as symptomatic expression of the history of capital, or, how the “proletariat” was and could become the transformed “subject-object of history.” Lukács’s term for the self-alienated character of this “subject-object” condition of the working class in capital was “reification.” “Reification” referred not to the workers’ quotidian consciousness in capitalism, but to the “class consciousness” of the workers, as expressed by Social Democracy (and “Marxism”) at its height. For Lukács and those who followed, “reification” meant Kautsky.

Abuse of theory

Nettl has a great line about how Kautsky attempted “to invest certain observed phenomena with the normative sanction of Marxist theory.” Nettl cited Parvus against Kautsky: “All the guts knocked out of [Marxism]. Out of Marx’s good raw dough Kautsky made Matzes” (82). Kautsky abused theory, making it serve as justification or rationalization — as most “Marxists” do — rather than as a provocation to the self-reflection of consciousness, in the Hegelian sense.

While it may be tempting to oppose such apparent static/immobilized (or “contemplative”) consciousness with action(ism), Lukács knew well that the opposition of static and dynamic was an antinomy of capital itself, that capital moved through a dialectic of the antinomy of the dynamic and the static in history. This is where the recovery of the Hegelian dimension of Marxism was critical: Marxism itself had become “vulgarized” in its self-understanding, and had failed in taking a dialectical approach to itself as a historical phenomenon, as a symptom of the history of capital. Marxism had succumbed to the “bourgeois” (pre-Kantian) view of (linear) progress through trial-and-error, the asymptotic view of knowledge, in which, as Benjamin put it, mordantly citing, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Dietzgen as pathological example of Social Democratic progressivism, “Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.” History has proved otherwise.

Philosophy of history

Benjamin and Adorno’s challenge to such a “progressive” view of history, which they thought was ideologically blinding, was not irrationalism any more than Hegel was. It does not call for “myth,” but a different philosophy of history than the empiricist-deductive one. Dialectics is not a matter of estimating probability, but grasping inherent possibility in history.

Paul Klee's 1920 painting, "Angelus Novus" ("The New Angel") was not the traditional votive guardian, but, according to Benjamin, looked upon the historical unfolding of humanity with horror at the mounting catastrophe.

As Adorno put it, in his 1942 essay “Reflections on Class Theory,” in response to both Benjamin’s “Theses” and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto, “According to [Marxian] theory, history is the history of class struggles. But the concept of class is bound up with the emergence of the proletariat. . . . By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being, political economy became the critique of history as a whole. . . . All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory. This gives us a pointer as to how we can recognize what history is. From the most recent form of injustice, a steady light reflects back on history as a whole. Only in this way can theory enable us to use the full weight of history to gain an insight into the present without succumbing in resignation to the burden of the past. [Marxism has been praised] on account of its dynamism. . . . Dynamism is merely one side of dialectic: it is the side preferred by the belief in practicality. . . . The other, less popular aspect of dialectic is its static side. . . . The law that, according to the Hegelian dialectic, governs the restlessly destructive unfolding of the ever-new consists in the fact that at every moment the ever-new is also the old lying close at hand. The new does not add itself to the old but is the old in distress” (Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, 2003, 93–95).

Authoritarianism

This brings me around to the issues of “authoritarianism” and “imperialism,” which have different usage for me than the colloquial ones. Adorno co-authored the famous study on The Authoritarian Personality. This followed from the earlier Frankfurt School Studies on Authority and the Family. A commonplace misunderstanding of Frankfurt School Critical Theory is that it attempted to synthesize Marxist and Freudian psychoanalytic approaches, but this view is mistaken. Rather, Freudian psychoanalysis was itself taken by Adorno et al. to be a symptom of the historical development of capital. Freud’s categories were taken to be descriptive, and then resituated, critically, in a Marxian view of historical development of society. In this view, Marx was not ignorant of Freudian insights, but rather it was only as a function of the later social-historical development of capital that human “psychology” appeared as it did to Freud. A contemporary of Benjamin and Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, in his early work on “Ideology as a Material Force” published later in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, pointed to how Marxism had failed to apprehend the “progressive” character of fascism; in other words, how fascism had expressed, however pathologically, the social-historical transformation of capital in the early 20th century better than “vulgar,” economic-determinist Marxism had been able to do. Hence, fascism’s ideological and political victory over Marxism. For Reich, (the failure of) Marxism was responsible for fascism. Fascism expressed the workers’ “fear of freedom,” which Marxism, in its false rationalism of “economic interest,” had failed to overcome. Workers had a subjective, “psychological” interest in unfreedom that Marxism needed to address.

What this meant to Benjamin and Adorno, following Lukács’s view on “reification,” was that Marxism had failed to address “authoritarianism” dialectically, as a function of the transformation of capital. In the Marxian view, the workers’ movement for socialism is itself the most important “self-contradictory” and self-alienated phenomenon of the history of capital. This is why Marx began with the critique of socialism, or, why the “critique of political economy” is the critique of the necessary and symptomatic consciousness of the socialist workers’ movement.

Imperialism

What I raised in my letter (published in The Weekly Worker 867, May 26, 2011) concerning the changed “organic composition of capital” is this: that the “mass” proletarianization of the core capitalist countries was the result, as Marx discussed in Capital vol. I on “the working day,” of politically variable social conditions of wage labor that, with increased worker empowerment, cause a shift from variable to constant capital, or, from labor-time intensive sweatshop to automated machine production, requiring ever less labor-input and resulting in ever greater value-crises.

This, in turn, affected the conditions of “colonialism.” Whereas colonies in the classical bourgeois era of the emergence of modern capital were sites of market expansion, in the late era of “imperialism” or “monopoly capital,” colonies become raw material resource-extraction zones feeding metropolitan industry. The humanity of not only those who were thus “colonized” but also of the metropolitan proletariat hence became superfluous, not even a “reserve army of unemployed” but a fascist rabble, subject to more or less desperate authoritarian politics. This was already true of the post-1848 world Marx addressed in Bonapartism (also evinced contemporaneously by Bismarck and Disraeli), but became even more so subsequently. The question is why the workers supported authoritarian politics, and how the workers’ movement for socialism was not free of this effect. (In this sense, Hayek’s critique of socialism in The Road to Serfdom is apposite.)

This is the world in which we continue to live today, but without the proximal history of the late 19th–early 20th century social-democratic workers’ movement and its Marxist political leadership that, in a “dialectical” (self-contradictory) way, participated in the history that brought these conditions into being — producing the need for world revolution that is Marxism’s legacy. | §

Originally published in The Weekly Worker 869 (June 9, 2011) [PDF].

To the shores of Tripoli

Tsunamis and world history

Chris Cutrone

United States Navy Lieutenant Stephen Decatur and his men from USS Enterprise attacking the Barbary pirate ketch Mistico on December 23, 1803. Painting by Dennis Malone Carter (1827–81).

“AFTER ME, THE DELUGE,” the saying attributed to Louis XV (1710–74), would have been better said by his son and heir Louis XVI, who was soon thereafter overthrown by the French Revolution that began in 1789.[1] Muammar Qaddafi has said something similar, that if he is overthrown Libya will be condemned to chaos. Qaddafi even claims to be fighting off “al-Qaeda.” Perhaps he is.

On the one hand, this is all clearly self-serving on Qaddafi’s part. On the other hand, the kernel of truth in such a statement, specifically with regard to Libya, might bear scrutiny.

The U.S. administration that attacked Libya before Obama was that of Ronald Reagan. Reagan’s foreign policy advisor and United Nations ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, famously distinguished between “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” dictatorships, and thought that the U.S. should support the former and oppose the latter because of the relative ease with which the former could transition to democracy as opposed to the latter, whose pathology ran deeper, and so the effects would prove more lasting obstacles to freedom.

The comparison of Libya to its neighbor Egypt in the recent uprising against Mubarak seems to prove Kirkpatrick’s point. Egypt seems poised on a relatively painless transition to democracy, while Libya portends a much darker future, with or without Qaddafi. One might also, for good measure, point out the more intractably “totalitarian” tyranny of the political regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose potential democratic replacement is also highly uncertain, not least because its Islamic Revolution in 1979 was “democratic” in ways that the origins of the Egyptian or Libyan regimes were not.

Back in the 1980s, another famous dictator who was toppled, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, warned that if his “New Society” was overthrown it would mean only the return of the traditional oligarchy of wealthy families, to the detriment of the people. While the Philippines today is certainly more politically democratic, and in this sense “free,” than under Marcos, his prediction has come spectacularly true. The Philippines today is ruled by its traditional wealthy families, unimpeded, rather than by the upstart cronies cultivated under Marcos, himself a parvenu intolerable to the old Filipino elite. Furthermore, the rate of growth and development in the Philippines has stagnated, and is today much lower than it had been under Marcos. The wealth gap is much greater and poverty levels much worse at the bottom, and more endemically pervasive in the Philippines today than before. The Philippines remains, and will remain, just as swamped, in some ways worse than it was under Marcos.

Many of the former republics of the USSR after the collapse of Stalinism are as well.

But what is the point of saying so?

The potential further development of Libya after the passing of Qaddafi suggests something darker than what happened after “People’s Power” in the Philippines, in terms of violence and other forms of overt brutality — as opposed to the “softer” brutality that continues to prevail in the Philippines, as elsewhere. Libya may become more like Somalia. Or Yemen. Or Afghanistan or Iraq. Who knows?

If Qaddafi thought that the tsunami that hit Japan would distract the U.S. from attacking his regime and allow suppression of the rebellion in Libya, he was mistaken. Rather, Qaddafi underestimated the global deluge of capital, at whose leading edge the U.S., for better or worse, operates. The flood was not to spare Qaddafi. It always stands poised to crash, cresting menacingly somewhere off shore. The rebels in Libya may have wished it to rain down on Qaddafi like a Biblical plague on the Pharaoh, tearing down the pride of his sinful glory. It will. But it may not spare them, either. There is little if any justice to history. Especially to a place like Libya, history happens.

Protest against the U.S./NATO/UN bombing of Libya is no less hopeless than Qaddafi is.

Interior of the ancient Berber city of Ghadames, Libya.

Qaddafi’s regime was, like Marcos’s in the Philippines — and the “totalitarian” regimes of the USSR and Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. that Kirkpatrick and Reagan opposed — a “modernizing” project. Horrifically so. Perhaps this is what Kirkpatrick actually had in mind in her distinction between “authoritarian,” meaning more traditional, and “totalitarian” dictatorships — and why the former would end up being more benign than the latter. Perhaps.

The tsunami hits Japan, March 11, 2011.

Qaddafi moved the Berbers out of their traditional community in Ghadames into new apartment buildings. The ancient city — hallucinatory in its cavernous complexes — was left intact and preserved as a cultural museum. It still stands, alluring next to the decrepit hovels the modern high-rises have become. Perhaps the Berbers will return to their ancient city, evacuated by Qaddafi. But really it is no longer there, even if it remains in Libya. The deluge has not spared it. Nor will it. The only difference is how hard the wave might hit. | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review 34 (April 2011).

[1]. See my “Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons: 1979, 1789, and 1848,” Platypus Review 33 (March 2011).

Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons

1979, 1789, and 1848

Chris Cutrone

THE UPRISING IN EGYPT, which followed soon after the toppling of the old regime in Tunisia, succeeded in bringing down Hosni Mubarak on February 11, the 32nd anniversary to the day of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.  Already, before this timely coincidence, comparisons between the Iranian Revolution and the revolts gripping the Arab world had started to be made.  But other historical similarities offered themselves: the various “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Central Asian states and Lebanon in recent years; and the collapse of Communism in the Soviet bloc and beyond (the former Yugoslavia) starting with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  Behind these revolutions on the pattern of 1989 stood the event of which 1989 itself had been the bicentennial, the Great French Revolution of 1789.  The Bastille is to be stormed again, anew.  Who would not welcome this?

A more pessimistic, if no less invidious comparison offered itself, especially prior to Mubarak’s ouster: the equally dramatic but failed Green Movement in the election crisis in Iran that marked 30 years of the Islamic Revolution in 2009.[1] Just as the Green Movement posed the question of reforming the Islamic Republic, events in Egypt have raised the specter of authoritarianism continuing, despite everything, albeit without Mubarak as tyrant.  Indeed, comparisons of Egypt with Iran, both in 1979 and 2009, are telling in several different respects.  To be sure, the emancipatory prospects in Egypt today are even more remote than in Iran in either 1979 or 2009.  If there is a more fruitful comparison to be made it is with Iran not in 1979 but 2009.

The destruction of the Left, historically, has been naturalized more completely in present-day Egypt than it had been in Iran by 1979.  Going back to the 1950s, because of Nasserism’s subordination and suppression of the Left, the strongest opposition movement in Egypt today is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has a longer history and is much stronger than Khomeini-style Islamism had been in Iran on the eve of the Islamic Revolution.  While the Khomeiniite Islamic Republic has destroyed the Left more completely in Iran since 1979, it is also the case that the reform movement in the Islamic Republic has had a longer history of organization — for almost 20 years, now — than the opposition in Egypt has at present.  The prospects for organized reform, in other words, ran deeper in Iran at the moment of the Green Movement election crisis in 2009 than is the case in Egypt today.  This poses both more radical possibilities and dangers for Egypt than in Iran two years ago.  The Green Movement could beat a retreat in the face of defeat in ways that the unfolding crisis in Egypt might not be so controlled.  But this spiraling out of control that has raised much greater radical prospects in Egypt, as opposed to Iran in 2009, may prove to be the case at least as much for ill as for good.  The military has been able to come to the rescue of the state in Egypt, and this has been met with joy not angry disappointment.  What links both eruptions of democratic discontent, in Iran and Egypt, then, is their authoritarian outcome.

Putting aside the rather superficial narratives that emphasize how events in Egypt and Tunisia disprove the supposed intractability and lack of “democratic” spirit in the Arab or Muslim world — as if this needed proving — we must nevertheless ask about the legacy of the history of the Left — its defeats and failures — that condition present possibilities.  The history of the Left, both locally and globally, and reaching back for generations, is important, perhaps not so much for the obvious reasons — a relative lack of “democratic institutions” in one or another part of the world, or, indeed, globally, today, by contrast with the past — as that it raises the question of history per se.  What resources does history provide to the present?  For the comparisons — however invidious — with the situation in and for Egypt are all historical in nature.  So the question of history and its effects presses for consideration.  Whether one approaches the matter of historical precedence with hope or anxiety, still, there is the question of how appropriate to the present any reach for such precedence may truly be.  Like any event, the massive popular uprising in Egypt is in important ways unprecedented and new.  This is its power.  It demands its moment in the sun and refuses all comparisons, insisting upon its sui generis character, which it cannot be denied, even if it is not yet fully revealed.[2] What impresses itself is how much this moment will be allowed to realize itself — to make its departure from previous history.  Or, conversely, how it will be drawn back into and subsumed by history’s ineluctable force.  Why should we care about history, when emancipation makes its attempt at escaping its dead hand? — How is the unfolding present already history?

Gamal Abdel Nasser during the 1956 Suez Crisis.

Beneath the elation — if not euphoria — of the international Left at the popular overthrow of Mubarak is the fundamental ambiguity and so radical ambivalence of democratic revolution in our time. But this has been so not only since 1979 or 1989 but 1789.  However, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, whatever its tortured career and the opposed judgments about it, democratic revolutions since then have been dogged by the specter of failure.  One thing that cannot be said of 1789 is that it failed, however ambiguous was its success.  Yet a repressed, largely unknown, and importantly failed moment has haunted the history of modern revolutions, the event that prompted Marx’s famous phrase about history “weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living”: 1848.  “The Spring of the Nations” in 1848, the revolutions in France, Germany and beyond, has completely escaped the imagination of present considerations of the moment of democratic revolution.  This present absence is itself quite revealing, and needs to be addressed.  For it may be that comparison with 1848 is the most obscure but important of all.

For Marxism, 1848 is the canon of failure.  What once made Marxism — whose founding political statement was 1848’s Communist Manifesto — such an important force in the world was its awareness of the problem of 1848, or, why 1789 has kept repeating itself over and over in modern history, but without success.  The converse of the Manifesto’s rousing call to action, to treat history as the “history of class struggles,” was Marx’s writing the history of his present moment, the culminating climax and failure of the 1848 Revolution in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.[3] But these two of Marx’s most widely quoted writings were documents of both promise and defeat.

What made the 1848 Revolution so important to Marx and subsequent Marxism was the light that it shed on the history of the bourgeois revolution.  1848 was both the last of the classical bourgeois revolutions and the first of the socialist revolutions that have marked the modern, bourgeois era.  Henceforth, the fates of liberalism and socialism have been indissolubly tied — even if their connection has been extremely fraught.  Liberalism could not do without socialism, nor socialism without liberalism.  Every democratic revolution since 1848 has faced this two-fold task — and has, without exception, foundered on the shoals of its contradictions.  Marxism was the attempt to transcend the antinomy of individual and collective freedom — or of liberalism and socialism in “social democracy” — to realize both, by transcending both.  Marx and Engels emblazoned this demand in their Manifesto with the slogan of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!,” which was to be realized in the “freedom of each” as the “precondition for the freedom of all.” — Importantly, Marx and Engels were the originators of neither of these catchphrases for what “communism” meant.  The twin fates of liberalism and socialism after 1848 have shared in the failure of this Marxist vision for emancipation.[4]

What explains the undemocratic outcomes of democratic revolution in the modern era?  Certainly one can take only so much comfort in Thomas Jefferson’s saying that a revolution every generation or so is a good thing — as if frequent revolutions are necessary to restore democracy.  Or, if so, the reasons for this must still be explained, beyond “corruption,” the perennial complaint of the subaltern.  Whence does this recurrent “corruption” of the democratic moment spring?  And why does it manifest itself so much more dramatically at some times than others?  Perhaps revolution is not always such an unambiguously good thing.  Especially if, as Marx put it, it threatens to be the “first time as tragedy” and the “second time as farce.”  What comes of revolution if it is taken to be fate?  There is nothing so “revolutionary” as capital itself.

The 1848 Revolution had secured universal suffrage and established the 2nd Republic in France, but at the price, wryly observed by Marx, of bringing an authoritarian demagogue, Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew), to power — to the horror of liberal democratic sentiment at the time — as its first elected President, promising to “save society.”  It is because Bonaparte overthrew the 2nd Republic, and established a 20-year 2nd Empire that followed at the end of his term as President less than four years later, that the massacre of the workers in June 1848 did not become forgotten as a historical footnote and regarded as merely a bump in the road of democracy, for it came to presage the authoritarian repression of society that followed, in which members of the bourgeoisie became subject to the same treatment first meted out to the rebellious workers.  Marxists used the term “Bonapartism” to describe this phenomenon of suppression of democracy with popular assent, which has repeated itself so consistently in history after 1848 — for instance, in “Nasserism” in Egypt and other forms of Arab nationalism (the so-called “Arab Revolution”) in the 1950s–60s.  Such Orwellian reality of all subsequent history has its beginning, with Marx, in 1848.  The soldier held aloft triumphantly on the shoulders of democratic demonstrators in the streets of Cairo already wears the mask of Bonaparte — not the greater but the lesser.  For such turns of modern revolution, after 1848, do not vouchsafe progress, however dubiously, but rather wager its foolhardy chances, mocking them.  As Horkheimer put it in the 1920s, after the ebbing of the failed world revolutionary wave of 1917–19, “As long as it is not victorious, the revolution is no good.”[5] So, the question becomes, what would be the conditions for true victory?  What success can we aspire to win?

Egyptian military officer cheered on by demonstrators in Cairo.

Marx attempted to capture this problem in his demand that the revolution “take its poetry from the future” rather than the past.  But if this is more than the banal statement it appears at first glance, then it raises a rather obscure difficulty: In what way can present revolution draw upon the emancipatory energy of the future? And Marx’s dedicated follower Walter Benjamin’s caveat echoes closely behind, that faith in the future sapped the strength of the revolution, which, Benjamin wrote, needed to be “nourished with the image of enslaved ancestors rather than liberated grandchildren.”[6] But we may need both imaginations — of emancipation and redemption — today.  The question is, how so?

Marx and the history of Marxism still speak, even if their voices are drowned out in the clamoring din of the present.  In history after 1848, Marx understood a world — the present — caught between past and future.  Marx’s term for this historical world, “capital,” refers to the radical ambivalence of the present: its being already past, accumulating all of history and annexing the future, continually crowding the moment off stage; and its constant liquidation of that history, the incessant consumption of the moment in light of a future that never arrives.  Past and future seem to recede infinitely beyond the horizons of a present that is as perpetual as it is empty and futile, trapped, static but constantly in motion.  So we resign ourselves to the present’s eternal passing and recurrence, in which “everything changes” and yet “remains the same.”

Hosni Mubarak and son Gamal cast votes in the last election.

Egyptians may be driven today by the specter of enslaved ancestry, provoked by the force of what Benjamin described as the “hatred” and spirit of “self-sacrifice” necessary to make a bid for history.  But they are also certainly prompted, as Benjamin put it, to “activate the emergence brake” on the “locomotive” of history that would otherwise condemn posterity.[7] They may be motivated not only to redeem past sacrifice but to prevent future loss that could yet be rendered unnecessary.  It is not that Mubarak’s rule became too long or old, but that it threatened to become indefinite — the leering face of the son — that provoked the demand for its end, precisely at the risk of the present.  “I don’t care if I die,” the sentiment widely expressed around Tahrir Square, is the signal moment to which Benjamin’s philosophy of history attends: to bring time to a halt.  But such resolve expresses the will to live, although not merely to continue life unchanged.

Not only are we history, but the future will be.

The problem we must face is that the imagination of emancipation — which defines the “Left” as such[8] — is today divided, between the desperation of wishing for the unprecedented new, and desiring for return to the missed moments of opportunity, the potential embodied in past attempts, however failed — attempts at both the escape from and the redemption of history.  1789, 1848, 1871, 1917, 1979, 1989: they will not return — thank God!  But we mourn them nonetheless.  What was lost with them?  Perhaps nothing.  An emancipated future beckons; however, it eludes our grasp, outrunning us in the onrush of time.  “Time waits for no one.”  The future grants no refuge.  There is no peace, not even of the graveyard.  As Benjamin put it, “Even the dead are not safe.”  But history remains.  It may be unavoidable — as much as the future is.  So, the question is, what are we going to do with it?  If we are trapped between past and future, perhaps we will not be crushed but can bring them together and galvanize their force even more powerfully in the present: we are pulverized all the more surely for trying to slip the vise.  Past failures may dispirit, and bewildering, dystopic futures may threaten.  Or: History and utopia can both be enlisted to the aid of the present.  If only.

“What now?,” Egypt asks us. We do not ask it.  This question should be posed, not as it is wont, as a hope or a fear, but as a task, however exclaimed or whispered.  It is not to be answered with exuberance or resignation, but determination.  The resolution that not only are we, inevitably, history, but the future will be. | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review #33 (March 2011).

1. See Danny Postel, Kaveh Ehsani, Maziar Behrooz and Chris Cutrone, “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,” Platypus Review 20 (February 2010), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2010/02/18/30-years-of-the-islamic-revolution-in-iran/>.  See also my “Failure of the Islamic Revolution: The Nature of the Present Crisis in Iran,” Platypus Review 14 (August 2009), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2009/08/24/the-failure-of-the-islamic-revolution/>.

2. See Hamid Dabashi, “The False Anxiety of Influence,” Al Jazeera English, February 12, 2011. Available on-line at: <http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201121215216318526.html>.  Undeniably, as Dabashi writes, “From Tehran to Tunis to Cairo and beyond, our innate cosmopolitan cultures are being retrieved, our hidden worlds discovered, above and beyond any anxiety of influence.”

3. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Originally published in 1852. Available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/>.

4. See my “Marxist Hypothesis,” Platypus Review 29 (November 2010), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2010/11/06/the-marxist-hypothesis-a-response-to-alain-badous-communist-hypothesis/>.

5. Max Horkheimer, “A Discussion about Revolution,” Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–31 & 1950–69 (New York: Seabury, 1978), 39.

6. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1969), 260.

7. Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’,” Selected Writings vol. 4 1938–40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 402.

8. See Leszek Kolakowski, “The Concept of the Left,” in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (New York: Grove, 1969), 144–158.

The Marxist hypothesis

A response to Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis”

Chris Cutrone

Against Badiou

ALAIN BADIOU’S RECENT BOOK (2010) is titled with the phrase promoted by his and Slavoj Žižek’s work for the last few years, “the communist hypothesis.”[1] This is also the title of the Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review[2] on the historical significance of the 2007 election of Nicolas Sarkozy to the French Presidency.[3] There, Badiou explains his approach to communism as follows:

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, “communist” means, first, that the logic of class — the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity — is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.[4]

Badiou goes on to state that,

As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts — the slaves led by Spartacus, the peasants led by Müntzer — might be identified as practical examples of this “communist invariant.” With the French Revolution, the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.[5]

Badiou thus establishes “communism” as the perennial counter-current to civilization throughout its history.

Badiou divides what he calls the modern history of the “communist hypothesis” into two broad periods, or “sequences,” from 1792–1871 and from 1917–76. The first, from Year One of the revolutionary French Republic through the defeat of the Paris Commune, Badiou describes as the “setting in place of the communist hypothesis.” The second, from the October 1917 Revolution in Russia to Mao’s death and the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China, Badiou calls the sequence of “preliminary attempts at . . . [the] realization [of the communist hypothesis].”[6]

The two periods remaining in this historical trajectory sketched by Badiou, 1871–1917 and 1976 to the present, Badiou describes as “intervals” in which “the communist hypothesis was declared to be untenable,” “with the adversary in the ascendant.”[7]

But the period from 1871–1917 saw the massive growth and development of Marxism (alongside and indeed bound up with the last great flowering of bourgeois society and culture in the Belle Époque[8]), and culminated in the crisis of war and revolution, which Badiou’s account avoids — or, more precisely, evades. That is, this period raises the question of Marxism as such, and its significance in history.

The Marxist hypothesis

A very different set of historical periodizations, and hence a different history, focused on other developments, might be opposed to Badiou’s. Counter to Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” which reaches back to the origins of the state in the birth of civilization millennia ago, a “Marxist hypothesis” would seek to grasp the history of the specifically modern society of capital, the different historical phases of capital as characterized by Marx’s and other Marxists’ accounts, beginning in the mid-19th century. But, as the Nietzsche scholar Peter Preuss put it, “the 19th century had discovered history and all subsequent inquiry and education bore the stamp of this discovery. This was not simply the discovery of a set of facts about the past but the discovery of the historicity of man.”[9]

Marx is the central figure in developing the critical recognition of history as an invention of the 19th century.[10] (The other names associated with this consciousness of history are Hegel and Nietzsche; relating these three thinkers is a deep problem, long pondered by Marxists.[11])

The Marxist hypothesis is based on Marx’s theoretical and political engagement with the problem he articulated throughout his life, from the Communist Manifesto to Capital, and includes the political thought and action inspired by and seeking to follow and develop upon Marx. This problem is the historical specificity of capital — and hence of history itself. For the Marxist hypothesis is that capital is the source of what Kant called “universal history.”[12]

By contrast with Badiou’s history of the “communist hypothesis,” a history of the “Marxist hypothesis” will be complicated, layered, not quite linear, and non-evental. It is divided into the different periods in the history of Marxism: from 1848–95, the publication of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto to Engels’s death, to 1914–19, the crisis of Marxism in war and revolution; and from 1923–40, post-Bolshevik Marxism, to 1968–89, the “New Left” and the collapse of “Communism.” These are periods in the history of Marxism, which are conceived as the history of what Marx called “capital.” This is the history of capital and its potential overcoming, as expressed in the history of Marxism.[13]

Such history is motivated by the need for what Karl Korsch called, in his 1923 essay “Marxism and Philosophy,” the historical-materialist analysis and critique of Marxism itself, or a Marxist history and theory of Marxism.[14] This would be a history of the emergence, crisis, and decline of Marxism as expressing the possibility of getting beyond capital, as Marx and the best Marxists understood this. Today, as opposed to Korsch’s time in 1923, this would include consideration of the possibility that the potential Marxism expressed missed its chance, and has carried on only in a degenerate, spectral way, until passing effectively into history. That such an account is possible at all is what motivates the fundamental “hypothesis” of Marxism, or the Marxist hypothesis — the hypothesis that Marxism, as a perspective and politics, could be the vital nerve center of modern history. For Marxism is the grandest of all Grand Narratives of history, with reason. Today, the question is what was Marxism?

For most Marxists in the 20th century (and hence also for Badiou), the period of Marxism from 1871–1917, which saw the foundation and growth of the parties of the Second International, was the era of “revisionism,” in which Marxist revolutionary politics was swamped by reformism. But this was also the period of the struggle against the reformist revision of Marxism by Marx and Engels’s epigones, such as Bebel, Bernstein, Kautsky, and Plekhanov. This struggle against reformism was conducted by the students of these very same disciples of Marx, and involved a complex change, itself an important historical transition, in which the students were disappointed by and came to surpass their teachers.[15]

The greatest achievement of the struggle against reformism in the Second International was the Bolshevik leadership of the October Revolution, followed by the (however abortive) revolutions in Germany, Hungary and Italy, and the establishment of the Third “Communist” International.[16] The world crisis of war and revolution 1914–19 should be regarded properly as the Götterdämmerung of Marxism, which raised the crisis of capital to the realm of politics, in a way not seen before or since. The crisis of Marxism 1914–19 was a civil war among Marxists. On one side, the younger generation of radicals that had risen in and ultimately split the Second International and established the Third International, most prominently Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, led the greatest attempt to change the world in history. They regarded their division in Marxism as expressing the necessity of human emancipation.[17] That their attempt must be judged today a failure does not alter its profound — and profoundly enigmatic — character.[18]

The stakes of the Revolution attempted by the Second International radicals, inspired by Marx, cannot be overestimated. For Marx and his followers, the epoch of capital was both the culmination of history and marked the potential end of pre-history and the true beginning of human history, in communism.[19] As Walter Benjamin put it, “humanity is preparing to outlive culture, if need be”[20] — that is, to survive civilization, as it has been lived for an eon.[21]

The specter of Marx

While Marx and Engels had written of the “specter” of communism, today it is the memory of Marx that haunts the world. This difference is important to register: Marx and Engels could count on a political movement — communism — that they sought to clarify and raise to self-consciousness of its historical significance. Today, by contrast, we need to remember not the historical political movement so much as the form of critical consciousness given expression in Marxism. This must be traced back to the thought and political action of Marx himself.

If Marx is mistaken for an affirmer and promulgator of “communism” as opposed to what he actually was, its most incisive critic (from within), we risk forgetting the most important if fragile achievement of history: the consciousness of potential in capital. As Marx wrote early on, in an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge that called for the “ruthless criticism of everything existing,” “Communism is a dogmatic abstraction and . . . only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property.”[22]

The potential for emancipated humanity expressed in communism that Marx recognized in the modern history of capital is not assimilable without remainder to pre- or non-Marxian socialism. Marx’s thought and politics are not continuous with the Spartacus slave revolt against Rome or the teachings of the Apostles — or with the radical egalitarianism of the Protestants or the Jacobins. As Marx put it, “Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.”[23] Communism, as a form of discontent in capital, thus demanded critical clarification of its own meaning, and not one-sided endorsement. For Marx thought that communism was a means and not an end in itself.

So what does it mean that, today, we continue, politically, to have “communism” — in Badiou’s sense of demands for “radical democratic equality” — but not “Marxism?” Badiou’s periodization of the history of modern communism in the history of civilization dissolves Marxism into one of its constituent parts — or at least submerges it in this history. But Marx sought, in his own thought and politics, to comprehend and transcend the specifically modern phenomenon of communism, that is, the modern social-democratic workers’ movement emerging in the 19th century, as a constituent of capital, as a historically specific form of humanity. So, what would it mean, today, to view the history of the modern society of capital through the figure of Marx? The possibility of such a project is the Marxist hypothesis.

“Marx-ism”

It goes a long way in making sense of the most important historical figures of communism after Marx, such as Engels, Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Bukharin, Lukács, Stalin, and Mao, among others, to evaluate them as followers of Marx. It is significant that they themselves sought to justify their own political thought and action in such terms — and were regarded for this by their political opponents as sectarian dogmatists, disciples of Marxism as a religion. But how did they think that they were following Marx? What are we to make of the most significant and profound political movement of the last two centuries, calling itself “Marxist,” and led by people who, in debate, never ceased to quote Marx at each other? What has been puzzled over in such disputes, and what were — and are still, potentially — the political consequences of such disagreement over the meaning of Marx?

Certainly, Marxism has been disparaged as a religion, and Marx as a prophet. (For instance, Leszek Kolakowski dismissed Marxism as the “farcical aspect of human bondage.”[24]) But what of Marx as a philosopher? If Marx has been widely discredited as a political thinker, nevertheless, in 2005, for instance, a survey of BBC listeners polled Marx as the “greatest philosopher of all time,” well ahead of Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche, and others. On the face of it, this does not seem like a particularly plausible judgment of Marx, either in terms of his own thinking and practice or of “philosophy” as a discipline, unless Marx’s philosophy is understood as indicating how we have not yet overcome the problems he identified in modern society.[25] As far as the reputation of Marx as a thinker is concerned, we seem to have been left with “Marxism” but without Marx’s own “communist” politics: “Marxism” has survived as an “analysis,” but without clear practical importance; “communism” has survived as an ethic without effective politics. How might we make sense of this?

The Marxist hypothesis is that the relation between Marx and “communism” needs to be posed again, but in decidedly non-traditional ways, casting the history of Marxism in a critical light. For it is not that communism found a respected comrade in Marx — perhaps more (or less) estimable than others — but that Marx’s thought and political action form an irreducibly singular model that can yet task us, and to which we must still aspire. Hence, the continued potential purchase of “Marx-ism.” The question is not, as Badiou would have it, what is the future of communism, but of Marx.

To address any potential future of Marxism, it is necessary to revisit Marx’s own Marxism and its implications.

Marx in 1848

Marx pointed out about the revolution in Germany, in which he immediately involved himself after writing the Manifesto, that the capitalists were more afraid of the workers asserting their bourgeois rights than they were of the Prussian state taking away theirs. This was not because of a conflicting class interest between the capitalists and Junkers (Prussian landed aristocracy), but rather because of the emerging authoritarianism in post-Industrial Revolution capital, at a global scale. For such authoritarianism was also characteristic of the revolution of 1848 in France, in which Napoleon’s nephew Louis Bonaparte’s rule, as the first elected President of the Second Republic (1848–52), and then, after his coup d’etat, as Emperor of the Second Empire (1852–70), could not be characterized as expressing the interest of some non-bourgeois class (the “peasants,” whom Marx insisted on calling, pointedly, “petit bourgeois”), but rather of all the classes of bourgeois society, including the “lumpenproletariat,” in crisis by the mid-19th century.[26] As Marx put it mordantly, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), bourgeois fanatics for order were shot down on their balconies in the name of defense of the social order.[27] The late 19th century rule of Napoleon III and Bismarck — and Disraeli — mirrored each other. Marx analyzed the authoritarianism of post-1848 society, in which the state seems to rise over civil life, as a situation in which the bourgeoisie were no longer and the proletariat not yet able to master capital.[28] This was the crisis of bourgeois society Marx recognized. Badiou’s account, on the other hand, is rather a history of ruling class power opposed by the resistance of the oppressed. As early as 1848 Marx was not a theorist of classes but capital, of which modern socio-political classes were “phantasmagorical” projections.[29] Marx sought to situate, not capital in the history of class struggle, but history in capital,[30] to which social struggles and their history were subordinate.[31]

Napoleon III and Bismarck after the French defeat at Sedan, 1870.

Capitalism, communism, and the “state of nature”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had raised a hypothetical “state of nature” in order to throw contemporary society into critical relief. In so doing, Rousseau sought to bring society closer to a “state of nature.” Liberal, bourgeois society was a model and an aspiration for Rousseau. For Rousseau, it was human “nature” to be free.* Humans achieved a higher “civil liberty” of “moral freedom” in society than they could enjoy as animals, with mere “physical” freedom in nature. Indeed, as animals, humans are not free, but rather slaves to their natural needs and instincts. Only in society could freedom be achieved, and humans free themselves from their natural, animal condition.[32] When Rousseau was writing, in the mid-18th century, the promise of freedom in bourgeois society was still on the horizon. Bourgeois society aspired to proximity to the “state of nature” in the sense of bringing humanity, both collectively and individually, closer to its potential, to better realize its freedom. With Marx, communism, too, aimed for the realization of this potential. The imagination of a “primitive communism,” closer to a “state of nature” of unspoiled human potential, recapitulated the Rousseauian vision of bourgeois society as emancipation. But, in capitalism, bourgeois society had come to violate its own promised potential. It had become a “state of nature,” not in Rousseau’s sense, but rather according to Hobbes, a “war of all against all” — a conception that Rousseau had critiqued. Society was not to be the suspension of hostilities, but the realization of freedom. Moreover, humanity in society exhibited a “general will,” not reducible to its individual members: more than the sum of its parts. Not a Leviathan, but a “second nature,” a rebirth of potential, both individually and collectively. Human nature found the realization of its freedom in society, but humans were free to develop and transform themselves, for good or ill. To bring society closer to the “state of nature,” then, was to allow humanity’s potential to be better realized. Communism, according to Marx, was to follow Rousseau, not Hobbes, in realizing bourgeois society’s aspirations and potential. But, first, communism had to be clear about its aims.

Communism: not opposed to, but in, through, and beyond the bourgeois society of capital

The Marxist hypothesis is that Marx’s thought and politics correspond to a moment of profound transformation in the history of modern society, indeed, in the history of humanity: the rise of “industrial capital” and of the concomitant “social-democratic” workers’ movement that attended this change. This was expressed in the workers’ demand for social democracy, which Marx thought needed to be raised to greater self-consciousness to achieve its aims.[33] Marx characterized the moment of industrial capital as marking the crisis in modern society — or even, an event and crisis in “natural history”[34] — in which humanity faced the choice, as Luxemburg put it (echoing Engels) of “socialism or barbarism.”[35] This was because classical bourgeois forms of politics that had emerged in the preceding era of the rise of manufacturing capital in the 17th and 18th centuries, liberalism and democracy, proved to be inadequate to the problems and tasks of modern society since the 19th century — Marx’s moment. With Marx, humanity faces a new, unforeseen task. However, unfulfilled, this task has fallen into neglect today.[36]

In the transformed circumstance of capital, liberalism and democracy became necessary precisely in their impossibility, and thus pointed to their “dialectical” Aufhebung — completion and transcendence through negation, or self-overcoming.[37] Liberalism and democracy became not only mutually contradictory but each became self-contradictory in capital. It is thus not a matter of communism versus liberal democracy — as Badiou and Žižek take it to be. Communism was, for Marx, the political movement that pointed to the possibility of overcoming the necessity of liberalism and democracy, or the transcending of the need for “bourgeois” politics per se. But this was to be achieved through the politics of the demands for the bourgeois rights of the working class. Marx regarded the socialism and communism that had emerged in his time as expressing a late, and hence self-contradictory and potentially incoherent form of bourgeois radicalism — expressing the radicalization of bourgeois society — but that demanded redemption. Marx sought the potential in capital of going beyond demands for greater liberalism and democracy. Subsequent “communism” lost sight of Marx on this, and disintegrated into the 20th century antinomy of socialism and liberalism.[38] The Marxist hypothesis is that Marx recognized the possibility, not of opposition, but of a qualitative transformation, in, through, and beyond bourgeois society. | §

Originally published in The Platypus Review #29 (November 2010).

1. Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010). The book is printed in a pocket-sized red hardcover on which is emblazoned a gold star — a Little Red Book (viz., Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung) for our time?

2. Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 (January–February 2008), 29–42.

3. The other book to originate from Badiou’s 2008 essay in New Left Review is The Meaning of Sarkozy (London: Verso, 2008).

4. Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” 34–35.

5. Ibid., 35.

6. Ibid., 35–36.

7. Ibid., 36–37.

8. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Those Twenties,” Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 41–48, originally published in 1961, in which Adorno stated that, “Already in the twenties, as a consequence of the events of [the failure of the German Revolution in] 1919, the decision had fallen against that political potential that, had things gone otherwise, with great probability would have influenced developments in Russia and prevented Stalinism.” So, “that the twenties were a world where ‘everything may be permitted,’ that is, a utopia . . . only seemed so” (43). Indeed, according to Adorno, “The heroic age . . . was actually around 1910” (41). See note 13, below.

9. Peter Preuss, Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 1.

10. See Louis Menand’s 2003 Introduction to the republication of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003), originally published in 1940, in which Menand cites Wilson’s statement that “Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment” (xvi). Furthermore, Menand points out that,

Marxism gave a meaning to modernity. . . . Marxism was founded on an appeal for social justice, but there were many forms that such an appeal might have taken. Its deeper attraction was the discovery of meaning, a meaning in which human beings might participate, in history itself. (xiii)

11. See, for example, Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2006).

12. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant on History (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 11–25.

13. For instance, the title of Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) indicates what the historical era of “imperialism” meant to Lenin and other contemporary Marxists: the eve of revolution. The self-understanding of the Marxists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries grounded the history of Marxism itself in the history of capital, even if their propagandistic rhetoric had the unfortunate character of calling the crisis of capital expressed by Marxism “inevitable.” See note 18, below.

14. See Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy,” Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2008). Originally published in 1923. Also available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/korsch/1923/marxism-philosophy.htm>.

15. See Lars T. Lih’s extensive work on Lenin’s “Kautskyism,” for instance in Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008).

16. In a portentous first footnote to his book What is to be Done? (1902), available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm>, Lenin put it this way:

Incidentally, in the history of modern socialism [there] is a phenomenon . . . in its way very consoling, namely . . . the strife of the various trends within the socialist movement. . . . [In] the disputes between Lassalleans and Eisenachers, between Guesdists and Possibilists, between Fabians and Social-Democrats, and between Narodnaya Volya adherents and Social-Democrats . . . really [an] international battle with socialist opportunism, [will] international revolutionary Social-Democracy . . . perhaps become sufficiently strengthened to put an end to the political reaction that has long reigned in Europe?

17. See Leon Trotsky, “Art and Politics in Our Epoch,” a June 18, 1938 letter to the editors of Partisan Review, available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm>:

Not a single progressive idea has begun with a “mass base,” otherwise it would not have been a progressive idea. It is only in its last stage that the idea finds its masses — if, of course, it answers the needs of progress. All great movements have begun as “splinters” of older movements. . . . The group of Marx and Engels came into existence as a “splinter” of the Hegelian Left. The Communist [Third] International germinated during [WWI] from the “splinters” of the Social Democratic [Second] International. If these pioneers found themselves able to create a mass base, it was precisely because they did not fear isolation. They knew beforehand that the quality of their ideas would be transformed into quantity. These “splinters” . . . carried within themselves the germs of the great historical movements of tomorrow.

18. See Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy:

[A] transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed “like a nightmare” on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers’ movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. (67–68)

I have elaborated further on the significance of Korsch’s important essay in my review of Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (2008), Platypus Review 15 (September 2009), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2009/09/03/book-review-karl-korsch-marxism-and-philosophy/>.

19. Adorno, in “Reflections on Class Theory” (originally written in 1942), provides the following unequivocally powerful interpretation of the perspective of Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto:

According to theory, history is the history of class struggles. But the concept of class is bound up with the emergence of the proletariat. . . . By extending the concept of class to prehistory, theory . . . turns against prehistory itself. . . . By exposing the historical necessity that had brought capitalism into being, political economy became the critique of history as a whole. . . . All history is the history of class struggles because it was always the same thing, namely, prehistory. (Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003], 93–94.)

20. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” Selected Writings vol. 2 1927–34 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 735. Originally published in 1933.

21. The term used to describe this effect is the “Anthropocene.” Jeffrey Sachs, in the second of his 2007 Reith Lectures, “Survival in the Anthropocene” (Peking University, Beijing, April 18, 2007, available online at <http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2007/lecture2.shtml>), characterized it this way:

“The Anthropocene” — a term that is spectacularly vivid, a term invented by one of the great scientists of our age, Paul Crutzen, to signify the fact that human beings for the first time have taken hold not only of the economy and of population dynamics, but of the planet’s physical systems, Anthropocene meaning human-created era of Earth’s history. The geologists call our time the Holocene — the period of the last thirteen thousand years or so since the last Ice Age — but Crutzen wisely and perhaps shockingly noted that the last two hundred years are really a unique era, not only in human history but in the Earth’s physical history as well.

22. Marx, “For the ruthless criticism of everything existing,” letter to Arnold Ruge (September, 1843), in Robert Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 12–15. Also available online at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm>.

23. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 93. Also available online at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm>.

24. Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents in Marxism (New York: Norton, 2005), 1212.

25. See Robert Pippin, “Critical Inquiry and Critical Theory: A Short History of Nonbeing,” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (Winter 2004), 424–428, also available on-line at: <http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Pippin.html>. Pippin wrote that,

[T]he dim understanding we have of the post-Kantian situation with respect to, let’s say, “the necessary conditions for the possibility of what isn’t” . . . is what I wanted to suggest. I’m not sure it will get us anywhere. Philosophy rarely does. Perhaps it exists to remind us that we haven’t gotten anywhere. (428)

26. See Marx, The Class Struggles in France 1848–50 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

27. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader:

Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism.” . . . Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned . . . in the name of property, of family . . . and of order. . . . Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms . . . the “saviour of society.” (602–603)

28. Engels summed this up well in his 1891 Introduction to Marx, The Civil War in France (1871), in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 620.

29. See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 165.

30. See my “Capital in History: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left,” Platypus Review 7 (October 2008), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2008/10/01/capital-in-history-the-need-for-a-marxian-philosophy-of-history-of-the-left/>.

31. See Platypus Historians Group, “Introduction to the History of the Left: Changes in the meaning of class struggles,” Platypus Review 3 (March 2008), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2008/03/01/introduction-to-the-history-of-the-left-changes-in-the-meaning-of-class-struggles/>.

32. See Rousseau, The Social Contract, Ch. 8 “Civil Society,” trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968), 64–65. Originally published in 1762.

33. See Marx, “For the ruthless criticism of everything existing.”

34. See note 21, above. See also Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History” (originally written in 1932), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos 57 (1985): “[I]t is not a question of completing one theory by another, but of the immanent interpretation of a theory. I submit myself, so to speak, to the authority of the materialist dialectic” (124).

35. See Luxemburg, The Crisis in German Social Democracy (AKA The Junius Pamphlet, originally published in 1915), available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/index.htm>.

36. See Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy:

[Marx wrote, in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), that] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.” This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch. (58)

37. On this point, see some of Marx’s earliest writings, which provided the points of departure for his more mature work, such as “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (1843), “On [Bruno Bauer’s] The Jewish Question” (1843), and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).

38. But, for Marx and Engels, there was no necessary contradiction between the freedom of the individual and that of the collective, or, in this sense, between liberalism and socialism: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader, 491, also available on-line at: <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm>).

For further discussion of this antinomic degeneration and disintegration of the original Marxian perspective, see my “1917” in The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a theory of historical regression, Platypus Review 17 (November 2009), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2009/11/18/the-decline-of-the-left-in-the-20th-century-1917/>. See also: Platypus Historians Group, “Friedrich Hayek and the legacy of Milton Friedman: Neo-liberalism and the question of freedom (in part, a response to Naomi Klein),” Platypus Review 8 (November 2008), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2008/11/01/friedrich-hayek-and-the-legacy-of-milton-friedman-neo-liberalism-and-the-question-of-freedom/>; and my “Obama and Clinton: ‘Third Way’ politics and the ‘Left’,” Platypus Review 9 (December 2008), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2008/12/01/obama-and-clinton-third-way-politics-and-the-left/>.

* As James Miller, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault (2000), put it in his 1992 introduction to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992),

The principle of freedom and its corollary, “perfectibility”… suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless…. Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau’s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared…. As Hegel put it, “The principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.” (xv)