Douglas Lain of Zero Books interviews Chris Cutrone on Trump, the 2020 election and the COVID pandemic.
Critical Theory of Art as Technology (audio and video recordings)
Chris Cutrone
Chris Cutrone teaches in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an Instructor at the Institute for Clinical Social Work and was a longtime lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the PhD degree in the Committee on the History of Culture and the MA in Art History. His doctoral dissertation was on Adorno’s Marxism. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. He is also a writer and media artist committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an international Marxist educational project.
Background reading list:
The Relevance of Critical Theory to Art Today by Chris Cutrone for the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum
http://platypus1917.org/2011/01/01/the-relevance-of-critical-theory-to-art-today/#cutrone
Critique of Revolutionary Art: Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno, and Greenberg by Chris Cutrone for Caesura
https://caesuramag.org/essays/critique-of-revolutionary-art-trotsky-benjamin-adorno-and-greenberg
Art and Politics in Our Epoch by Leon Trotsky https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm
The Author as Producer by Walter Benjamin
https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/benjamin_authorproducer.pdf
Chris Cutrone on the Death and Life of the Left, the Hidden Potential of Liberalism and Potential Futures (audio and video recordings)
Full video:
Video part 1:
Video part 2:
Full unedited audio:
Chris Cutrone
Chris Cutrone interviewed by Laurie Johnson (Political Science, Kansas State University) on the origins of Platypus, the death and life of the Left, socialism and the hidden potential of liberalism and potential futures.
James Vaughn interviews Chris Cutrone on post-neoliberalism (George Washington Forum Radio podcast audio)
Chris Cutrone
September 12, 2020 | George Washington Forum Radio podcast Episode #2
Chris Cutrone (School of the Art Institute of Chicago) joins George Washington Forum Radio to discuss Trump and U.S. politics, the present crisis of neoliberalism, and the global shift toward post-neoliberalism.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
All episodes at: https://gwfohio.org/gwf-radio/
Kautsky in the 21st Century (audio and video recordings)
The legacy of Karl Kautsky
Chris Cutrone
Presented on a Platypus Affiliated Society on-line public forum panel discussion with Adam Sacks (Jacobin magazine contributor), Ben Lewis (Communist Party of Great Britain) and Jason Wright (Bolshevik Tendency) on Saturday September 5, 2020. Transcribed and published in The Platypus Review 136 (May 2021).
For me, the question of the legacy of Karl Kautsky’s Marxism is not as a Marxist, but rather as the Marxist. He was the theorist, not of capitalism or socialism, but of the working class’s struggle for socialism, the social and political movement and most of all the political party that issued from this movement and struggle. Kautsky articulated the historical and strategic perspective and the self-understanding of the proletarian socialist party. He helped formulate the political program of Marxism — the Erfurt Programme in which the German Social-Democratic Party became officially Marxist — and explained it with particular genius. He was not a theorist of German socialism but rather of the world-historic social and political task of socialism, for the entire Socialist International.
He was rightly if ironically called the “Pope of Marxism,” and this meant as a world political movement, indeed of the world party for socialism, in every country. For instance his writings converted the American socialist Eugene Debs to Marxism. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and countless others learned Marxism from Kautsky. Kautsky provided the theoretical self-understanding and strategic vision for all Marxists and for the broader socialist movement led by Marxism throughout the world, precisely when Marxism was a mass form of social struggle and politics, and precisely when this was so in the core metropolitan advanced capitalist countries.
In this respect Kautsky was one of the greatest political leaders of all time, in all of world history. However, he was the leader of a movement that failed, for Marxism failed.
This makes Kautsky a peculiar historical figure, and makes his thought — as we inherit from his writings — a specific kind of object and legacy. Kautsky explains something to us that no longer exists, namely the mass socialist political party and the class struggle for socialism of the working class, aiming for the world dictatorship of the proletariat taking over and transforming global capitalism.
Kautsky’s Marxism summarized and appropriated the entire history and experience of the socialist workers’ movement up to that point, namely, the radical tradition of the bourgeois revolution, the industrial social visions of the Utopian Socialists, the unfinished tasks of the failed revolutions of 1848, the civil collective and social cooperative movements of labor organizers and anarchists, and the party as what Ferdinand Lassalle called the “permanent political campaign of the working class” aiming to win the “battle of democracy.”
But the history of socialism had exhibited antagonisms and conflicts between its various aspects and protagonists. The disputes within socialism were considered by Marxism such as Kautsky’s as not mere differences and disagreements, but rather expressed the self-contradictory character of the struggle for socialism and its tasks. The question was how the working class must work through such self-contradiction.
One catch-phrase from 19th century history preceding Kautsky was “social and political action.” Kautsky understood the proletarianized working class’s struggle for socialism to require both kinds of activity, and moreover sought to combine them in the political party for socialism and its associated civil-social movement organizations. This is what Kautsky and the greater Second International Marxism meant by “social democracy,” a legacy of the unfulfilled tasks of 1848, to achieve the “social republic.” Marxists understood this to require the independent political and social action of the working class leading the broader discontented, exploited and oppressed masses under capitalism.
Otherwise, the task of socialism in capitalism was liable to fall out into an antinomy of having to choose between social movement activism and political activity. It was Kautsky’s Marxism’s ability to comprehend and transcend this antinomy and achieve the combined tasks of both.
This is what the subsequent socialist movement since Kautsky’s time — since the failure of Second International Marxism — has foundered upon, starting at least as early as the 1930s Old Left of Stalinism and reformist Social Democracy, and especially since the 1960s New Left and its eschewing of the tasks of building the political party for socialism.
The historical wound of this history we face is that the Kautskyan political party both made the revolution and prosecuted the counterrevolution. Both Social Democracy and “Marxist-Leninism” — Stalinism — are descended from Kauskyan socialism — from this history of Marxism.
But rather than engaging and trying to work through the problematic legacy of Kautsky’s Marxism, socialists and the greater Left — and indeed democracy — has drawn back and retreated from it — avoided it.
The reason the question of Kautsky’s legacy specifically as well as that of Marxism more generally returns periodically is that it represents the unfinished work and task of history that must still be worked through.
In one way or another, we must engage the tasks — and contradiction — of social and political action in capitalism that points beyond it to socialism. So long as this task remains we will be haunted by Kautsky’s Marxism. | P
The fate of the American Revolution (audio and video recordings)
Chris Cutrone, Reid Kotlas, Spencer Leonard, Pamela Nogales, James Vaughn
2020 summer lecture series by the Platypus Affiliated Society
Panel Discussion by the lecturers James Vaughn, Chris Cutrone, Reid Kotlas, Spencer Leonard and Pamela Nogales
The red thread running through the lecture series, and the question discussed in this final panel among the lecturers, is the persistence and legacy of the revolution. How does Marxism appear today in light of the American Revolution, and vice versa?
Background reading:
Chris Cutrone, “The American Revolution and the Left” (2020)
https://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/
The philosophy trap (Is theory good for anything?) Zero Books interview (audio and video recordings)
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He returns to the Zero Books channel to discuss his 2014 essay “Defending Marxist Hegelianism against a Marxist critique” and to discuss the role that critical theory should play in the struggle for socialism.
Suggested reading:
Mike Macnair, “Lukács: The philosophy trap,” Weekly Worker 11/21/13 https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/987…
Chris Cutrone, “Defending Marxist Hegelianism against a Marxist critique,” Weekly Worker 8/11/11
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/878…
Georg Lukács, Original Preface (1922) to History and Class Consciousness (1923)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/luka…
Chris Cutrone, “Why still read Lukács? The place of ‘philosophical’ questions in Marxism” (2014)
https://platypus1917.org/2014/02/01/w…
Suggested viewing:
Chris Cutrone, “CPGB contra Lukács” teach-in at SAIC, 1/11/14 https://youtu.be/kKt3zePUtMI
The legacy of the American Revolution: The Gilded Age (audio and video recordings)
Chris Cutrone
Audio recording available at: https://archive.org/details/gilded-age-7-17-20
The Legacy of the American Revolution 2020 summer lecture series by the Platypus Affiliated Society
6.) Chris Cutrone on the Gilded Age and Second Industrial Revolution
The retrospective view from the present allows for regarding the 20th century as the outcome of the Gilded Age — of the Second Industrial Revolution. We still live in the after-effects of the crisis that conditioned the 20th century. The inability to overcome the discontents of capital from a century ago still swamps us today. In the late 19th century U.S., the Second Industrial Revolution was governed by the Republican Party, which was the combined party of progressive liberalism and big capital. Progressivism emerged as a reform effort from within the Republican Party against manifest problems of Gilded Age capitalism in the 1890s–1900s — most dramatically under President Theodore Roosevelt and his run for reelection as a Progressive in 1912. In America and Europe, discontents with the Gilded Age capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution manifested in the Socialist Parties of the Second International. Liberal capitalism was opposed by a mass industrial workers politics — for instance the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs.
Lecture based on Cutrone’s essay “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” available online at:
<https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>
The Jeffersonian American Revolution (audio and video recordings)
Chris Cutrone
The recent protests against police brutality have raised questions about the revolutionary character of the United States. Platypus argues that any revolution in America for human emancipation would have to build on the legacy of 1776 and not 1619. We see the erasure of 1776 as a fundamental acquiescence to defeat. This is why today we are making the case for 1776 and the promise of liberty yet to be fulfilled.
The red thread running through the lecture series is the persistence & legacy of the revolution. We ask: How does America remain a revolutionary society? How did each chapter of American history give a new impetus to the revolution that began in 1776? Our approach to the American Revolution and the subsequent history of the polity it founded is from the perspective of the bourgeois revolution and its crisis in the Marxist philosophy of history.
Chris Cutrone’s presentation from the Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion on the American Revolution and the Left, February 22, 2020, at Columbia University, New York:
<https://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/>
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), some quotations
“He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.”
— Thomas Jefferson, original draft of the Declaration of Independence (1776)
“I go right back to the equality clause. It is ‘all men are created equal.’ I think that’s the key one. And that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of happiness — it’s difficult to know. It’s not quite — he isn’t a pleasure-seeker. And yet he knows that freedom is happiness too. That liberty will enable you to pursue happiness. And how grand it is that in a capitalistic country like this, that he did not follow Locke and have life, liberty and property. And that mystery of the pursuit of happiness suits me just fine. If the equality clause will trouble us a thousand years, as [Robert] Frost said [in North of Boston, ‘The Black Cottage’ (1915)], if it’ll trouble us, then the pursuit of happiness will mystify us forever. And I like the trouble and I like the mystery. And that suits me just fine about Jefferson.”
— James Cox in Ken Burns’s PBS documentary Thomas Jefferson (1997)
“Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasn’t just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases — so removed
From the world’s view to-day of all those things.
That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.”
— Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage” (1915)
“The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
— Jefferson, Paris, November 13, 1787
“The tone of your letters had for some time given me pain, on account of the extreme warmth with which they censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France. . . . In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as any body, and shall deplore some of them to the day of my death. But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands, the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying that very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”
— Jefferson, Secretary of State, letter to William Short, U.S. Ambassador to France, January 3, 1793
“I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter [the abolition of slavery], and which has been thro’ life that of my greatest anxieties. the march of events has not been such as to render it’s completion practicable within the limits of time alloted to me; and I leave it’s accomplishment as the work of another generation. and I am cheared when I see that on which it is devolved, taking it up with so much good will, and such mind engaged in it’s encoragement. the abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object. that which you propose is well worthy of tryal. it has succeeded with certain portions of our white brethren, under the care of a [Christian communist George] Rapp and an [Utopian Socialist Robert] Owen; and why may it not succeed with the man of colour?”
— Jefferson to Frances Wright, August 7, 1825
Socialism in the 21st century: Living Art WKPFT Houston 90.1 FM radio interview with Chris Cutrone (audio recording)
Michael Woodson interviews Chris Cutrone on capitalism, post-neoliberalism and prospects for socialism in the 21st century, for the radio program Living Art on WKPFT 90.1 FM, Houston, Texas, broadcast in two parts, May 28 and June 4, 2020. Part 1 addresses the difference between Ancient and Modern or traditional civilization and bourgeois society; Part 2 addresses the new contradiction of capitalism with the Industrial Revolution and the task of socialism.
“Socialism in the 21st century” article referenced in the interview available at:
https://platypus1917.org/2020/05/01/socialism-in-the-21st-century/