Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review 180 | October 2025
[T]he ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.
— Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1858)
UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.
In the midst of the manifest on-going social and political crisis of capitalism, people want something solid to believe in and ground to stand on: religion, nation, “race” — “politics.” Also: “philosophy.” (As well as, perhaps, “science”?)
But as Marx pointed out, in capitalism “all that is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is a moving proposition that we must engage from within and as part of its motion. There is no stable standpoint from which to view — theorize — it. But that doesn’t mean that it somehow isn’t real. Its shifting illusion is its reality. There is nothing else.
We are shaken but evidently not stirred — not stirred to action — but paralyzed. The incessant images flood over us. We reach out for the Truth. But it constantly escapes our grasp. We shrink back and collapse into ourselves.
Benjamin Studebaker has written a critique of “ideology critique” that offers an alternative “Platonist” reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and situates non-identity not as a matter of self-contradictory social relations and unfreedom but of thinking about the good.1
Studebaker proposes that where I say freedom he says good, and that freedom is best understood in terms of the good and the good should be understood in terms of freedom. He writes that the good must be the essential starting-point for “laddering up” to political goals.
But the pursuit of the emancipation and transformation of social relations is very different from that of the good.2 For the issue is not the good that resides in every body, but rather the social relations that develop the subjectivity of everyone.
Social relations are more than the sum of their parts: they express the “general will” that transcends the individual wills of interested parties. Social relations are the result of interaction that produces something beyond the individual actions. Society is a third party with an interest of its own. Social freedom means the freedom of society itself to develop.
Studebaker raises Louis Althusser’s approach to ideology in order to attack the limitations of Althusser’s “interpellation” as a theory of subjectivity that loses sight of the good. It seems that Studebaker understands — and disagrees with — “social relations” in such Althusserian structuralist terms, saying that it amounts to an “ontology” that he disputes.
Studebaker among many other Millennials prefers a political to a social or societal ontology. But he prefers not just any ontologization of politics, but one in particular, Plato’s. For Plato, politics is the bringing back together what has been divided and separated: the One. This is why Studebaker says that it is because we are in separate bodies that politics is necessary. No: that bodily differentiation does not even make society or social relations necessary. Plato’s ontology only allows for cycles of separation and return, appropriate to his world of agricultural production. It is no longer appropriate to the modern world of capitalist production.
What if it is only society — what Studebaker means by “politics,” as in the zoon politikon (“political animal”) — that allows for the differentiation of humanity, to become other than what it is or originally was, to transform its being? And this transformation is necessary.
This was what Marx thought — following from Rousseau, among others: social relations are not merely the relations between people or to others, but also to and with Nature and to and with oneself. Social relations are what allow and motivate the elaboration of diverse multiplicity and complexification of our being.
It is such a process of not only the realization of existing but generation of new potential that Marx found capitalism to constrain and distort — dominate. It is not about people but social relations. Capitalism was the domination limiting social freedom: the freedom to elaborate and transform social relations — society.
Social relations are not causal or determinative but conditioning and elaborative. Social relations are not structural but cosmological. The universe is still expanding. So are our social relations. So is our freedom.
“Ideology” in the original historical Marxist sense of “ideology-critique” meant the exploration of conditions of possibility for transforming our social relations from within them. As a Hegelian, Marx thought that manifest contradiction indicated the possibility and necessity for change. Capitalism was a new social — societal — self-contradiction — a self-contradiction of society, of social relations — that brought about a new task: socialism. Socialism was for Marx the highest form of “bourgeois ideology.” Marx critiqued socialist ideology according to its self-contradictory character: statist vs. anarchist; individualist vs. collectivist, reactionary vs. progressive, etc.
But the appearance of contradiction was not only a potential recognition but also and most importantly a misrecognition: misrecognitions are necessarily forms of recognition; forms of recognition are also necessarily forms of misrecognition. We must struggle in and through forms of misrecognition that are our only possible forms of recognition — we must struggle from within and on the basis of and find our way out of ideology. There is no breaking the spell or stepping outside of ideology. There is no leaving Plato’s Cave.
There will be no returning to the One. The yearning for totality is understandable given the manifest exhaustion of postmodernism and neoliberalism and the self-contradiction, fragmentation, and crisis of society in capitalism. But this does not actually return us to Plato’s Republic, a utopia that was never meant to be realized but only to get us thinking about politics. A very long time ago. What Plato and Aristotle meant by “politics” is not our social and political world. Their misrecognitions were different from ours. Their “ideology” was different from ours. Actually, they didn’t have ideology; only we have ideology — and hence only we have ideology-critique. Only we have Marxism. We need something more and other to think about the problem of capitalism and the political task of socialism. Only we need Marxism — only we need Marxist ideology-critique. It was not the critique of inadequate or contradictions between different definitions of the good, but of a self-contradictory freedom of our social relations, to which we are all subject, and of which we are all subjects.
We are not only bodies separated from the original One, but members of society — participants in social relations. There is a higher good and necessity we must serve than the good of our bodies: the freedom of society. The misery of capitalism might break our bodies, but its wrong is against society and its potential, which goes far beyond our physical selves. As Ortega y Gassett put it, what nature is for animals, history is for humans. We are more than the product of a natural or divine act, but at least in part produce our own being — our spiritual not physical being. It is not our existence as homo sapiens that is free but our humanity.
The zoon politikon is not an origin but a result. The point is that it changes. We are not political but become political in society. Society humanizes us: our social relations make us human — they also make us political. Society changes our humanity — constantly. It is the self-contradiction of our social relations in capitalism that jeopardizes our humanity — even to the point of placing the (supposed) physical needs of our bodies above it. Whereas all human cultures and communities, ever, have valued spirit above body. — Do we still?
At issue in politics is not our bodies but our social relations. It is a peculiar form of politics that is demanded and required by the problem of capitalism. If Durkheim recognized that society is an object sui generis, then the crisis of society in capitalism is a problem sui generis — a unique problem of politics unprecedented in history. Marxism is the “sui generis form of cognition” (Gillian Rose) prompted by the political problem of capitalism.
Ideology expresses the social origin of our manifest phenomena: the misrecognitions through which we must act politically to change society. It is the source of our cognition and the means through which we must cognize our reality. It is not a problem of consciousness but produces our consciousness. It is a cosmos in crisis, a cosmology of crisis — a total crisis and hence the totality one is looking for. But it is a negative totality of contradiction, and one which reproduces itself in and through that crisis. As Adorno wrote to his friend Benjamin: “The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.”3 The explosion is not the calamity but the potential and possibility of freedom, however only perceptible through its phantasmagoria. Its appearances don’t deceive but indicate: “The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal, his aphorism: ‘Know thyself.’ It is a difficult saying; for that god ‘hides nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way,’ as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to you?”4
Can we yet know ourselves as members of society, and read the writings on the wall of capitalism, directing us to the task of socialism? Can this be our politics — of freedom? | P
1 Benjamin Studebaker, “Beyond ideology critique,” Platypus Review 179 (September 2025), <https://platypus1917.org/2025/09/01/beyond-ideology-critique/>.
2 Please see my conversation with Studebaker and Doug Lain (March 28, 2025), <https://youtu.be/PYuQTwCs-tM>.
3 Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin (August 2, 1935), in Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Rodney Livingstone, et al., trans. Anya Bostock, et al. (London: Verso, 2007), 111, 113.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), trans. Ian C. Johnston for The Nietzsche Channel.