“Chris Cutrone is a member of the Platypus Affiliated Society, a professor at The School of Art Institute of Chicago, and a returning guest to the Zero Books podcast. He is the author of a controversial essay entitled âWhy Not Trump.â The piece was a half-hearted endorsement of Trump as the better adversary for the left, an opinion that is not at all self-evident today under Trump. However, this week we discuss the late Moishe Postone as well as Adolph Reed in the context of the death of politics.”
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )
MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as âbourgeois ideology.â This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. Thereâs little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine âideology.â It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)
So what is meant by philosophy as âideologyâ?
This goes to the issue of Marxist âideology-critique.â What did Marxism mean by ideology as âfalse consciousnessâ? âFalseâ in what way? For if bourgeois ideology were considered the ideology of the sociological group of the bourgeoisie â capitalists â then there would be nothing âfalseâ about it: it would be the consciousness adequate to the social being of the ruling class; it would be the true consciousness of the bourgeoisie. So it must be false not for the bourgeoisie but rather for others â for the âproletariat.â This kind of âclass analysisâ of ideology would be concerned that the workers not fall for the ideology of the ruling class. It would be a warning against the workers adopting the idealism of the bourgeoisie that would blind them to their real social condition in capitalism. The idea here is that somehow the workers would remain ignorant of their exploitation by the capitalists if they remained mired in bourgeois ideology.
Of course Marxism was originally no such âmaterial analysisâ â debunking â of wrong thinking. No.
Rather, the original Marxist ideology-critique â Marx and Engelsâs ideology-critique of bourgeois society â was the immanent dialectical critique of the way society in capitalism necessarily appears to its members, bourgeois and proletarian â capitalists and workers â alike. It was the critique of the true consciousness of the workers as well as of the capitalists.
Now, that formulation just lost me 99% of ostensible âMarxistsâ as well as all of the rest of the âLeft,â whether socialist or liberal, who do indeed think that the poor benighted workers and other subaltern need us intellectuals to tell them what their true social interests are.
This is not what Marxism â Marx and Engels â originally thought, however.
Marxism began with the critique of socialism, specifically with the critique of the most prominent socialist thinker of Marx and Engelsâs formative moment in the 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon â who coined the term âanarchismâ â claimed that he respected only three authorities, intellectually, Adam Smith, Hegel and the Bible!
Marxism is usually thought of as the synthesis of German Idealist philosophy, British political-economy, and French socialist politics. But what Marxism actually was was the immanent dialectical critique of these three phenomena, which Marx and Engels considered three different forms of appearance of the same thing: the most advanced bourgeois ideology of their time, of the earlyâmid 19th century. They were all true expressions of their historical moment, of the Industrial Revolution. But as such, they were also all false.
Proudhon wrote of the âphilosophy of misery,â attacking the heirs of Adam Smith in Utilitarianism â James Mill and Jeremy Bentham â and other contemporary British political economists such as Malthus and David Ricardo and their French counterparts. Marx wrote his first major work on political economy and the class struggle in industrial capitalism as a critique of Proudhon, cleverly inverting its title, The Poverty [Misery] of Philosophy.
I was deeply impressed by this work â and especially by its title â when I first read it as an aspiring young âMarxistâ in college. It signified to me a basic truth, which is that the problem of capitalism and its potential overcoming in socialism was not a matter of âphilosophy,â not a problem of thinking. Reading further, in Marxâs 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, I read and deeply internalized Marxâs injunction that âcommunism is a dogmatic abstractionâ which was âone-sided,â expressing the same thing as its opposite, private property, and, like bourgeois society itself, was internally divided, for instance, between collectivism and individualism, and so could not be considered a vision of an emancipated future society, but only a negation of the present. I had read in Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto their critique of âreactionary socialism,â and their observation that everything of which communism stood accused was actually the âspecterâ of what capitalism itself was already doing â âabolishing private property,â among other things.
This all told me that, for Marx and Engels at least, the problem of bourgeois ideology was not a matter that could be addressed let alone rectified by proper methodology â by a kind of right-thinking opposed to it.
In short, I recognized early on that Marxism was not some better philosophy.
Marxism was not a philosophical critique of philosophy, but rather something else entirely. For instance, Marx and Engelsâs critique of the Young Hegelians was not as philosophers, but in their philosophical claims for politics. This was also true of Leninâs critique of the Machians among the Bolsheviks (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908). The critique was of the relation between philosophy and politics. It was thus also not a political critique of philosophy.
Ends
I have titled my talk here, âEnds of philosophy,â after the title for the week in our Platypus primary Marxist reading group syllabus when we read Karl Korschâs 1923 essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the recommended background reading for todayâs discussion. In the syllabus week title as well as here, I intend to play on the multiple meanings of the word âends.â What are the ends of philosophy, according to Marxism, in terms of its telos, its goals, its purposes, and its satisfaction; what would it take to attain and thus overcome the aspirations of philosophy?
Specifically, what would it take to satisfy bourgeois â that is to say, modern â philosophy? What would make philosophy superfluous?
This is posed in the same way that Marxism sought to make labor as social value superfluous. How does labor seek to abolish itself in capitalism? The same could be said of philosophy.
What would it take to bring philosophy to an end â to its own end? Not by denying the need for philosophy, but by satisfying it.
But there have been other moments, before (and after) Marxism, which sought to overcome philosophy through its satisfaction, through satisfying the need for philosophy.
The need for â the necessity of â philosophy in the modern world is different from its need previously â fundamentally different. The need to account for freedom in bourgeois emancipation was new and different; this did not motivate and inform traditional philosophy. But it fundamentally tasked modern philosophy â at least the philosophy that mattered most to Marxism, the Enlightenment and German Idealism at its culmination. But the need for philosophy in capitalism is also different from its need in the bourgeois revolution.
Please allow me to address several different historical moments of the end of philosophy. I use this concept of moments of the âend of philosophyâ instead of alternative approaches, such as varieties of âanti-philosophy,â because I think that trying to address Marxism as an anti-philosophy is misleading. It is also misleading in addressing other such supposed âanti-philosophies,â such as those of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Existentialism, Heidegger, etc., as well as other traditions entirely, such as the Enlightenment philosophes contra âphilosophy,â or Empiricism and Analytic Philosophy contra âmetaphysics.â (For instance, Heidegger sought the potential end to âthousands of years of Western metaphysics,â going all the way back to Plato.) Yet all these various phenomena express to my mind a common issue, namely the problem of âphilosophyâ per se in the modern era, both in the era of bourgeois emancipation and subsequently in capitalism.
What is âphilosophy,â such that it can experience an end? It is not merely its etymological meaning, the love of knowledge, or wisdom, or the love of thinking. Philosophers are not merely smart or sage â not merely sophists, clever thinkers: philosophy cannot be considered merely the mastery of logic or of semantics. If that were true, then most lawyers would be better philosophers than most avowed âphilosophers.â
The end of philosophy cannot be considered an end to sophistry, finally putting the clever fellows down. It cannot be considered an analogue to Shakespeareâs âFirst, we kill all the lawyers.â It is not meant to be the triumph of Philistinism. Although you might think so from a lot of âMarxistâ deprecation of philosophy, especially as âbourgeois ideology.â Such âMarxistsâ want to put a stop to all mystification by putting a stop to the mystifiers of bourgeois society, the lackeys â the paid liars â of the capitalist bourgeoisie. They want to stop the âphilosophersâ from pulling the wool down over the eyes of the exploited and oppressed. This is not my meaning. â This was not even Socratesâs (Platoâs) meaning in taking down the Sophists.
Authoritarianism
Philosophy cannot be considered, either negatively or positively, as the arrogation of all thinking: it is not some Queen of the Sciences that is to make proper sense of and superintend any and all human thought in every domain. It is not the King of Reason; not the thought-police. Marxism did not seek to replace philosophy in such a role. No. Yet this seems to be precisely what everyone wants from philosophy â or from anti-philosophy. They want their thinking dictated to them.
Korsch addresses this as âBonapartism in philosophy:â we seem to want to be told how and what to think by philosophers â or by anti-philosophers. It is an authoritarian impulse. But one that is an authentic expression of our time: capitalism brings forth its own Philosopher Kings.
This is not at all what the immediate predecessors for Marxist thought in philosophy, Kant and Hegel, considered as their task: Kant, in âbeginningâ philosophy (anew), and Hegel in âcompletingâ this, did not seek to replace the thinking of others. No. Precisely the opposite: they sought to free philosophy, to make it âworldly.â They thought that they could do so precisely because they found that the world had already become âphilosophical.â
After them, they thought there would no longer be a need to further develop Philosophy as such, but only the need for philosophical reflection in the various different diverse domains of human activity. Our modern academic institutions reflect this: one receives the PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, in Chemistry, meaning one is qualified to âdoctor,â to minister and correct, to treat the methods and attendant thinking â the âphilosophyâ â of the science of chemistry, without however necessarily becoming an expert specialist âphilosopher of science,â or studying the specialized discipline Philosophy of Science per se. According to LukĂĄcs, such specialized knowledge as found in academia as well as in the various technical vocations â such as law, journalism, art, etc. â exhibited âreificationâ in capitalism, a disintegrated particularization of atomized consciousness, in which losing the forest for the trees was the very predicate of experience and knowledge. But this was the opposite of what Kant and Hegel had expected. They expected not disintegration but the organic, living and changing relations of diverse multiplicity.
Marx found a very different world from Kant and Hegelâs, after the Industrial Revolution. It was not a philosophical world in capitalism â not an âenlightenedâ realm of âsober senses,â to which bourgeois philosophy had aspired, but something much darker. It was a âphantasmagoriaâ of âcommodity fetishism,â full of beguiling âmetaphysical subtleties,â for which one needed to refer to the âmist-enveloped regions of religionâ for proper models. In capitalism, bourgeois society was sunk in a kind of animism: a world of objects exhibiting âtheological niceties.â
There was a need for a new Enlightenment, a Second Enlightenment specific to the needs of the 19th century, that is, specific to the new needs of industrial capitalism, for which the prior thinking of bourgeois emancipation, even at its best, for instance by Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel, was not equipped to adequately address. It needed a new recognition of the relation between social being and consciousness.
But for Marx and Engels, this new task of enlightenment was something that could not be accomplished philosophically â could not be brought to fruition in thinking â but only in actual political struggle and the transformation of society.
History
This was because, unlike the emancipation of bourgeois society, which took several centuries and came to consciousness of itself as such only late, no longer cloaking itself in the religious garb of Christianity â the Protestant Reformation as some return to true Christianity of the original Apostles, freed from the corruptions of the Church â and arrived at self-consciousness only at the end of its process of transformation, in the 18th century. As Hegel put it, âThe Owl of Minerva [that is, knowledge] flies at dusk:â proper consciousness comes only âpost-festum,â after the fact of change.
But Marx and Engels found the task of socialism in capitalism to be motivated by a new need. The proletarianization of the bourgeois social relations of labor â the society of cooperative production in crisis with the Industrial Revolution â required a new consciousness of contradiction, a âdialecticalâ and âhistoricalâ âmaterialism,â to properly recognize its tasks. As Marx put it, the social revolution of the 19th century â in contradistinction to the bourgeois revolution â could not take its poetry from the past, but needed to take its poetry from the future. This was quite a paradoxical formulation, especially since Marx and Engels explicitly abjured âutopian socialism,â finding it a realm of images of capitalism, and not of a world beyond it.
This was because they found the workersâ struggles against the capitalists to be motivated by bourgeois consciousness, the consciousness of the bourgeois revolution. Socialism was born in the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, for instance, in the former Jacobin Babeufâs Conspiracy of Equals, still motivated by the aspirations of âliberty, equality and fraternity.â Proudhon, for example, was motivated in his anarchist socialism, avowedly, by Adam Smith and Hegel (and the Bible) â animated, unabashedly, by bourgeois political economy and philosophy.
Marx and Engels didnât think that this was wrong, but only inadequate. They didnât offer an alternative to Proudhon â to Smith and Hegel (or the Bible!) â but only a critique of how bourgeois thought mystified the crisis and task of capitalism. The world necessarily appeared in bourgeois terms â there were no other terms. There was no other form of consciousness. There was no other philosophy. Nor was there a need for a new philosophy.
Bourgeois philosophy, for Marx and Engels, had successfully summed up and appropriated all prior philosophical enlightenment. They agreed with Kant and Hegel. Bourgeois social thought had successfully summed up and completed all prior thinking about society. Marx and Engels neither disputed nor sought to replace it. They were concerned only with its self-contradiction in capitalism. Not its hypocrisy, but its authentic antinomies, which both drove it on and left it stuck. The bourgeois âend of historyâ turned out to be the opposite of what it intended: not a final stage of freedom, but rather a final stage of unfreedom; the crossroads of âsocialism or barbarism.â
Impossibility
This affected the status of philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy no longer described freedom but rather unfreedom. Or, more dialectically, it described both: the reproduction of unfreedom in the struggle for freedom. As a result, the task of freedom was no longer expressed by the need for all human activity to achieve an adequate â Hegelian â philosophically reflective self-consciousness, but rather to realize in practice and thus recognize in consciousness the limits of such self-consciousness, of such philosophical reflection. There was a crisis in radical bourgeois philosophy. The crisis and decay of Hegelianism was an authentic historical phenomenon, not a mistake.
Like liberal democracy, philosophy in capitalism was no longer itself, and was no longer tasked with becoming itself, attaining its aspirations, but rather was tasked with overcoming itself, superseding its achievements. The achievements of bourgeois emancipation seemed ruined in the 19th century.
Indeed, capitalism already accomplished such self-overcoming of bourgeois society, but perversely, negating itself without satisfying itself. In so doing, it constantly re-posed the task of achieving itself, as an impossible necessity. Bourgeois philosophy became the opposite of what it was, utopian. Not worldly philosophy, but an ideal, a mere notion, mocked by the real, ugly and anything-but-philosophical world.
Because of this â precisely because of this â bourgeois philosophy did not end but constantly reinvented itself, however on an increasingly impoverished basis. It radically revolutionized itself, but also, in so doing, radically undermined itself.
Philosophy remained necessary but proved impossible. It disintegrated, into epistemology, ontology and ethics. They went their separate ways. But they also drove themselves into blind alleys â dead-ends. This actually indicates the task of philosophy to overcome itself, however in perverted form.
Metaphysics
So, what is philosophy? One straightforward way of answering this is, simply, metaphysics. Kant, following Rousseau, had overcome the division and opposition between Rationalism and Empiricism by finding a new foundation for metaphysics. This was the Kantian âCopernican Turnâ and ârevolutionâ in philosophy. But it was not simply a new metaphysics, but rather a new account of metaphysics â of philosophy â itself. Moreover, it was revolutionary in an additional sense: it was not only a revolution, but also accounted for itself as revolutionary. This is because it was a metaphysics of change, and not merely change but radical qualitative transformation: it was a revolutionary account of the fundamental transformability of the substance of philosophy itself. In short, it was a philosophy of freedom. It was the self-reflection of practical freedom in society â that society made human lifeâs transcendence of nature possible, at all, but in so doing created new problems to be worked through and overcome.
It is precisely this metaphysics of freedom, however, that has gone into crisis and disintegrated in capitalism. This has been the expression of the crisis and disintegration â the decay â of bourgeois society.
The goal of philosophy in overcoming itself is to free thinking from an overarching and underlying metaphysics at all. Kant and Hegel thought that they had done so already, but capitalism â in its crisis of the metaphysics of bourgeois society â revealed that there was indeed an underlying and overarching metaphysics still to be overcome, that of social practice â society â itself. The self-production and self-overcoming of the subject in its socially and practically objective activity â labor â needed to be overcome.
The end of philosophy â the end of a singular metaphysics, or of metaphysics per se â aims at the freeing of both action and thinking from any unitary framework. It is the freeing of an ever-expanding and limitless â without end â diverse multiplicity of new and different forms of acting, being and knowing.
Postmodernism was, as Moishe Postone put it, âpremature post-capitalism.â It aimed at the freeing of the âsmall-s subjects from the big-S Subject.â It also aimed at freedom from capital-H History. It meant overcoming Hegelâs philosophy of history.
We already live in such freedom in bourgeois society, however perverted by capitalism. Diverse activities already inhabit different realms of being and call forth different kinds of ethical judgments. Doctors and lawyers practice activities that define being â define the ârights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happinessâ â in different ways, and are hence ethically bound in different ways. Doctors discipline themselves ethically differently from scientists. Among scientists, Biology has a different epistemology from Physics: there are different methods because there are different objects. There is no âphilosophyâ in the sense of a metaphysical logic that encompasses them all. Lawyers, for example, practice differential ethics: prosecutors and defense attorneys in criminal law are bound by different rules of behavior; the practice of civil law is ethically distinct from criminal law; the rules of evidence are different. We do not seek to bind society to one form of knowledge, one code of conduct, or one way of life. There is no âphilosophyâ that could or should encompass them all. It would be arrogant to claim that there is one singular logic that can be mastered by anyone for governing everything.
Bourgeois society has already established well the reasonable limits to philosophy and its competence.
In Ancient civilization there were differentiated realms of being, knowing and acting. There was a caste system, in which there were different laws for peasants; for merchants; for artisans (and for different kinds of artisans, for different arts and different sciences); and for the nobility; and for the clergy. But they were unified in a Divine Order of the Great Chain of Being. There was heterogeneity, but all with a single origin in God: all of Godâs creatures in all of Godâs Creation. That mystery was to remain unknown to Man â known only to God. There was a reason for everything, but only God could know it. There was not philosophy but theology, and theology was not to arrogate to itself the place of the Mind of God, but only ponder Manâs place in and relationship to it. Theology established the limits to manâs knowledge of God: we knew only what God had revealed to us, through his Covenant. We all heard the Word of God; but God told His different creatures different things. In overcoming theology, philosophy did not seek to replace it. It sought to explore the mind of man, not to relate to and limit itself with respect to the Mind of God. It was not concerned with Divine or Natural limits, but with freedom.
There is no possible one single or once-and-for-all account of freedom, for then freedom would not be free. There is no possible account of âbeingâ free, but only of becoming free. And there is only one such account, that of bourgeois emancipation from traditional civilization. It was to set free all the diverse and multiple activities of mankind, in relation to other humans, to Nature, and to ourselves.
Overcoming
Marx was both a Hegelian and departed from Hegel, with a historical and not a philosophical difference. As Marx put it, for Hegel himself the Hegelian system was not ready-made and finished as it was for those who came after. As Marx observed, Hegelianism went into crisis for real historical reasons, not due to misunderstanding by his followers; but rather the crisis came from Hegelian philosophyâs actual contact with the world, and that world had become as internally contradictory in capitalism as Hegelianism became in contact with it. The Hegelian dialectic is both appropriate and inappropriate to the problem of capitalism. The crisis and disintegration of Hegelianism was a crisis of metaphysics â of philosophy â at a higher and deeper and not a lower or more superficial level from Hegelianism. Hegelianism was falsified not in itself but by history. But Hegelianism was also borne out by history as the last word in philosophy â in metaphysics. Marxism cannot be purged of its Hegelianism without becoming incoherent; Marxism remains Hegelian, albeit with what LukĂĄcs called an âadditional twistâ in the âpure historicization of the dialectic.â
If society in capitalism remains bourgeois in its ideals, with the goal of providing opportunities for social labor, materially, it has become its opposite: as capitalist, it prioritizes not labor but capital, and at the expense of labor. This means society is tasked with the material challenge of overcoming its ideals. But, as Marx recognized, this can only be done on the basis of this societyâs own ideals, in and through their self-contradiction. In philosophy, this means the task expressed by the self-contradiction of Hegelianism.
Capitalism is the model of the Marxist-Hegelian procedure of immanent dialectical critique: this is how capitalism itself moves, how it reproduces itself through self-contradiction. Capitalism is its own practical critique, reproducing itself by constantly overcoming itself. As Marx put it, the only limit to capital is capital itself; but capital is the transgression of any and all limits. It is the way capitalism overcomes itself, its dynamic process of change, which is its unfreedom, its self-limitation. The Marxian horizon of freedom beyond capitalism is freedom beyond the Hegelian dialectic, beyond the bourgeois dialectic of transformation â beyond labor as a process of self-overcoming through production.
There thus remains a unitary metaphysics binding all social practices, dominating, constraining and distorting their further development in freedom under capitalism: the bourgeois right of labor. The form of total freedom in bourgeois emancipation â self-production in society â has become in capitalism the form of total unfreedom. The social condition for labor has become that of the self-destruction of labor in capital. The goal of labor in capital is to abolish itself; but it can do so only by realizing itself â as self-contradiction. Hegelâs ânegative labor of the conceptâ must be completed; short of that, it dominates us.
Overcoming this will mean overcoming metaphysics â overcoming philosophy. At least overcoming philosophy in any way known â or knowable â hitherto. | P
Earlier this summer, I visited Athens and made a pilgrimage to Aristotleâs Lyceum. I was struck by the idea that perhaps what I am doing in Platypus is essentially the same as what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were doing back in Ancient Greece. Spencer and I were recently discussing the recurrent trope of Aristotle and Marx, apropos of todayâs discussion of Marxism and philosophy, and he recalled his feeling nauseous when reading Castoriadisâs famous essay on Aristotle and Marx, published in the same issue of the journal Social Research alongside Moishe Postoneâs seminal essay, âNecessity, Labor and Time.â Spencer said he had felt sick at the thought that nothing had changed since Aristotleâs time.
I recalled how Frantz Fanon wrote, in Black Skin, White Masks, that he would be happy to learn that an African philosopher had corresponded with Plato, but this wouldnât make a difference for 8 year-olds in Haiti and the Dominican Republic forced to cut sugar cane for a living. This compares well to the former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who, writing from her exile in Cuba on Black Lives Matter, referred to black Americans as âAfricans lost in America.â But are blacks any less lost in Africa today? Am I an Italian or Irish lost in America, too? I often feel that way, that my peasant ancestors were dragged into bourgeois society to ill effect, to my present misery. What would it mean not to be lost? Was I returning home, in a sense, when, as an intellectual, I returned to Aristotleâs school in Athens? Was I any less lost in Athens?
Adorno wrote, in his inaugural lecture on âThe idea of natural history,â that âI submit myself, so to speak, to the materialist dialectic.â What he meant of course was that he could only speak misleadingly of submitting himself to the materialist dialectic, as if he would not already be dominated by it, whether he was conscious of his submission or not. This reminds us of Trotskyâs statement to his recalcitrant followers who rejected Hegelianism that, âYou may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.â
Why should we be interested in âphilosophy,â then? Adorno did not mean that he was submitting himself to Marxism as the âmaterialist dialecticâ in the sense of submitting to Marxâs thought. No. He meant, as we must mean in Platypus, that he accepted the challenge of Marxâs thought as thinking which registered a greater reality, as a challenge and call to task for Adornoâs own thinking.
Foucault wrote about his chagrin that just when one thinks one has overcome Hegel, Hegel is still there smiling back at you. This rather paranoid claim by Foucault as a mental phenomenon has a real meaning, however, which is that Hegel still speaks in some unavoidable way to our real condition. What is meant by âHegelâ here, of course, is the entirety of the alleged âMaster Narrativeâ of the Western philosophical tradition culminating in bourgeois modernity.
Engaging philosophy then, is not being told how to think, but allowing oneâs thinking to be challenged and tasked in a specific way. It is a microcosm of how society challenges and tasks our thinking, whether we are inclined to it or not.
Historical philosophers are not some âdead white malesâ the authority of whose thinking threatens to dominate our own; we do not, or at least ought not, to read philosophy in order to be told how to think. No. The philosophy that comes down to us from history is not the dead weight of the past, but it is part of that past. And the past is not dead or even really past, since past actions still act upon us in the present, whether we like it or not. Marx reminds us that, âMan makes history, but not according to conditions of his own choosing.â
We cannot avoid the past, but we are concerned with the symptomatic attempts to free ourselves from the past by trying to avoid it. Especially on the âLeft,â and especially by ostensible âMarxists.â
As Korsch reminds us, among other ways, this can take the form of trying to avoid the âphilosophicalâ aspects of Marxism.
We might recall that Korschâs essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the background reading for today, was the very first text we read in the Platypus reading group. This was before it was called Platypus, of course, but it was still our first collective discussion of a reading as a group. Our reading was predicated on opening up, not philosophy, but rather the political foundations for Adornoâs thinking. It was meant to help lead my academic students of Adorno, not from Marxism to philosophy, but rather from philosophy to Marxism.
This is the intention of todayâs event as well: we come full circle. Perhaps indeed nothing has changed. | P
Presented at the Left Forum 2018 on the panel âHas âthe Leftâ Accommodated Trump (and Putin)? A Debate,â with Ravi Bali, Brendan Cooney, Anne Jaclard, Daphne Lawless and Bill Weinberg, organized by the Marxist-Humanist Initiative at John Jay College in NYC on June 2, 2018. A video recording of the event is available online at: <https://youtu.be/tUvBeXO02JY>.
AS A MARXIST academic professional and a gay man living in a Northern city, married to a nonwhite Muslim immigrant, it would have been beneficial to me for Hillary Clinton to have been elected President of the U.S. That would have served my personal interests. No doubt about it.
I am opposed to all of Trumpâs policies.
I am especially opposed to Trump on his signature issue, immigration. But I was opposed to Obama on this as well, and would have been opposed to Hillary too. I am opposed to DACA and its hierarchy of supposedly âdeservingâ recipients. âFull citizenship rights for all workers!â
One response to Trump was a Mexican nationalist slogan, in response to Trumpâs âMake America Great Again!,â âMake America Mexico again!â But, as a Marxist, I go one step further: I am for the union of Mexico and the U.S. under one government — the dictatorship of the proletariat. But Trump made Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions wear hats saying âMake Mexico Great Again Also.â This was wholly sincere, at least on Trumpâs part but probably also for Sessions and Giuliani. Why not? If I am opposed to making America great again, then I suppose I am also opposed to making Mexico great, too.
For the purposes of the struggle for socialism I seek to pursue, I wish Hillary had won the election. All the anti-Trump protest going on is a distraction from the necessary work, and, worse, Trump feeds discontent into the Democrats as the party of âopposition.â With Hillary in office, this would have been less the case — however, we must remember that, had she won, Hillary still would have faced a Republican Congressional majority, and so we would have still heard about how important it would be to elect Democrats this year!
I am opposed to Trumpâs law-and-order conservatism. Not that I am against law and order per se, mind you, and perhaps I am not even so opposed to the order and law of society as it is now. I play by the rules and follow the law. Why wouldnât I? — And, anyway, honestly, who here doesnât: ârebels,â all?
But I am aware that laws are selectively enforced and that the social order is run by those who donât always play by the rules — donât always play by their own rules! I am aware that the social order and the law are used as excuses for things that are not so lawful and orderly, for things that are not so social. I am aware of Trumpâs demagogy.
But it is funny watching the established social and political order go into fits over Trumpâs insistence on law and order!
Trumpâs election gave the âLeftâ something to do — they should be grateful! They would have been bored under Hillary. Especially after 8 years of Obama. âFascismâ is much more exciting, isnât it?
I would have been grateful if Hillary had been elected instead — Saturday Night Liveâs jokes about Hillary are much funnier than about Trump.
My family voted for Trump — mostly. My mother and my brother and his wife voted for Trump. But my father voted for Hillary. When Hillary collapsed due to fatigue from pneumonia, my father dutifully went to get his pneumonia shot. But my mother previously had voted twice for Obama; Iâm not sure if my father did, too — he might have voted for McCain and Romney.
In the primaries, I intended to vote for Bernie, but it turned out the Democrats sent the wrong ballots to my precinct (which was more likely to vote for Bernie than other precincts: I thus personally witnessed in action the Democratsâ suppression of votes for Bernie in the primaries), so I went to the (empty) Republican line and voted for Trump. — In November, too: I knew that Hillary would win Illinois, but I wanted her to win by one vote less: no sense rewarding the Democrats for being greedy.
I expected Trump to win.
From the very moment that Trump descended the golden escalator and announced his candidacy, I thought he could win. As time went on, I increasingly thought that he would win.
I had mixed feelings about this.
On the one hand, I dreaded the shit-show that ensued in Trumpâs campaign and that I knew would only get worse if he was elected.
But on the other hand, I felt an obligation as a teacher to prepare my students for Trumpâs victory. — If he had not won, nothing would have been lost: my students didnât require any special preparation for a Clinton Presidency. But if Trump won, I knew that there would be a great deal of confusion — and scare-mongering by the Democrats. I couldnât stand by and watch my students be lied to.
I had lived through the Reagan Revolution and watched The Day After on television along with everyone else. I heard Reagan denounced as a âfascistâ by the âLeftâ and experienced the multiple anti-climaxes of Mondale and Dukakis. The world hadnât ended. As an adult, I lived through the George W. Bush Presidency, 9/11 and the War on Terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the financial crash, and the âchange we can believe in,â the election of the First Black President. In all that time, not much changed. At least not much attributable to the Presidency.
So I didnât expect much to change with Trump either.
But I did expect a lot of hysterics in response. I knew that my students would be scared. I wanted to protect them from that.
So I sought to get out ahead of it.
My students asked me to write a statement on the election in the beginning of the new academic year before the election, something short that could be handed out as a flyer.
So I wrote, âWhy not Trump?â — which is why I was invited here to speak to you now: to answer for my alleged crime. It was not an endorsement, nor an equivocation, but an honest question: Why not Trump? Perhaps it was too philosophical.
As I wrote in that article, I thought that the mendacity of the status quo defending itself against Trump was a greater threat than Trump himself. I was prompted to re-read Hannah Arendtâs article on the Pentagon Papers, âLying in Politics:â she said that the ability to lie was inextricably connected to the ability to create new things and change the world.
I donât know.
I did find however a difference in quality and character between Trumpâs lies and the Democratsâ.
The only argument I found for Hillary was that we lived in the âbest of all possible worldsâ — as Voltaireâs Professor Pangloss described it in Candide. I didnât want to be Professor Pangloss. I wanted to spare my students that.
But perhaps we did live in the best of all possible worlds under Obama, and would have continued to do so under Hillary. Perhaps Trump really has ruined everything for everyone. Perhaps the world has come to an end.
I donât know.
I wish Hillary had won — so I could have found out. | P
– Lorraine Cohen, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York, USA âRosa Luxemburgâs theory of leadership: An Alternative ApproachâÂ
– Edward Remus, Ronald Williams Library, Northern Illinois University, Chicago “American Bernstein, American Luxemburg: Views of the SPD’s revisionist dispute and great schism from the Socialist Party of America, 1900-1918âÂ
– Henry Holland, Hamburg, Germany âBeyond Nationalisms: Spontaneity and Working-Class Organization in Scotland, 2012-2017 through the lens of Luxemburgâs dialecticâÂ
Presented as the Presidentâs report at the closing plenary of the 10th annual international convention of the Platypus Affiliated Society in Chicago on April 7, 2018. Full audio recording of discussion available online at: https://archive.org/details/CenturyCounterrevolution
RECENTLY, I CAME ACROSS a 1938 article by the âLeft communistâ Paul Mattick, Sr., titled âKarl Kautsky: From Marx to Hitler.â In it, Mattick asserted that the reformist social democracy that Kautsky ended up embracing was the harbinger of fascism â of Nazism.[1] There is a certain affinity to Friedrich Hayekâs book on The Road to Serfdom (1944), in which a similar argument is made about the affinity of socialism and fascism. If Marxism (e.g. Kautsky) led to Hitler, as Hayek and Mattick aver, then this is because the counterrevolution was in the revolutionary tradition. The question we face today is whether and how the revolutionary tradition is still within the counterrevolution. For that is what we live under: it is the condition of any potential future for the revolutionary tradition whose memory we seek to preserve.
2018 marks two anniversaries: the 100th anniversary of the failed German Revolution of 1918; and the 50th anniversary of the climax of the New Left in 1968.
Moishe Postone died this year, and his death marks the 50th anniversary of 1968 in a certain way.
A strange fact of history is that both Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Founding Father but bitter political opponent, whose Presidency Jefferson unseated in his Democratic-Republican Revolution of 1800, John Adams, died on the precise 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence to the day, on July 4, 1826. John Adamsâs dying words were âJefferson still lives.â He was mistaken: Jefferson had died several hours earlier. But he was correct in another, more important sense: Jefferson had lived just long enough to see the survival of the American Revolution for its first half-century.
Perhaps Moishe Postone lived just long enough to see the survival of the New Left 50 years later. If that is true, however, then he lived just long enough to see the survival of not the revolution but the counterrevolution.
As I presented all the way back at our very first annual Platypus convention in 2009, in my contribution to The Platypus Synthesis, on âHistory, theory,â the Spartacists and Postone differ on the character of historical regression: Postone taking it to be the downward trend since the missed opportunity of the New Left in the 1960s; while the Spartacists account for regression since the high-point of the revolutionary crisis after WWI in which the October Revolution took place in 1917. But perhaps we can take the occasion this year to date more precisely the regression affecting both the Spartacists and Postone, the failure of the German Revolution of 1918, whose centennial we mark this year.
The question of historical regression raises its potential opposite, that is, history as Hegel took it to be, the progress in (the consciousness of) freedom. What we face in 2018 is that the last 50 years and the last 100 years have not seen a progress in freedom, but perhaps a regression in our consciousness of its tasks, specifically regarding the problem of capitalism. Where the Spartacists and Postone have stood still, waiting for history to resume, either from 1918 or from 1968, we must reckon with not history at a standstill but rather as it has regressed.
In this we are helped less by Hegel or Marx than by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose essay on âThe Use and Abuse of History for Lifeâ (1874/76) I cited prominently in my Platypus Synthesis contribution. There, I quoted Nietzsche that,
âA person must have the power and from time to time use it to break a past and to dissolve it, in order to be able to live. . . . People or ages serving life in this way, by judging and destroying a past, are always dangerous and in danger. . . . It is an attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past after the fact, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. . . .
âHere it is not righteousness which sits in the judgment seat or, even less, mercy which announces judgment, but life alone, that dark, driving, insatiable self-desiring force. . . .
â[But there is a danger in the] attempt to give oneself, as it were, a past after the fact, out of which we may be descended in opposition to the one from which we are descended. It is always a dangerous attempt, because it is so difficult to find a borderline to the denial of the past and because the second nature usually is weaker than the first.â[2]
So the question we have always faced in Platypus is the borderline between freeing ourselves from the past or rather participating in its liquidation. Are we gaining or losing history as a resource? In losing its liability we might sacrifice history as an asset. We must refashion history for use in our present need, but we might end up â like everyone else â abusing it: it might end up oppressing rather than freeing us.
Indiana Jones, who as we know was a Professor of Archaeology, in the 1989 film The Last Crusade, said that âArchaeology is about the search for fact, not the search for truth â for the search for truth, see Philosophy!â If Steven Spielberg and George Lucas can get it, then certainly we should!
In our approach to history, then, we are engaged not with its âfactsâ but with the truth of history. We are not archeologists: we are not antiquarians or historians â at least not affirmatively: we are not historicists. The events and figures of the past are not dead facts awaiting discovery but are living actions â past actions that continue to act upon the present, which we must relate to. We must take up the past actions that continue to affect us, and participate in the on-going transformation of that action. How we do so is extremely consequential: it affects not merely us, today, but will affect the future. History lives or dies â is vital or deadly â depending on our actions.
We are here to consider how the actions of not only 50 years ago in 1968 but 100 years ago in 1918 affect us today. But to understand this, we must consider the past actions that people 100 years ago in turn were affected by. We must consider the deeper history that they inherited and sought to act upon.
Last year we marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the closing plenary panel discussion at our international convention in which I participated, alongside Bryan Palmer and Leo Panitch, I raised the possibility that, after a century, we had the opportunity of approaching this history differently. There, I said that,
âThe paradox of 1917 is that failure and success are mixed together in its legacy. Therefore, the fact that 1917 is becoming more obscure is an opportunity as well as a liability. We are tasked not only with understanding the opportunity, but also with trying to make the liability into an asset. The various ways in which 1917 is falsely claimed, in a positive sense â we can call that Stalinism, we can call it all sorts of things â has dissipated. We have to try to make use of that. What has faded is not the revolution, perhaps, but the counter-revolution. In other words, while not entirely gone, the stigmatization of 1917 throughout the 20th century and the horror at the outcome of revolution [i.e., Stalinist repression] â these are fading. In that way we might be able to disentangle the success and the failure differently than it has been attempted in the past.â[3]
This year we must reckon with the changing fortunes over the last century, not of the revolution, but rather of the counterrevolution. If not the revolution but the counterrevolution has disappeared, perhaps this is because it has become invisible â naturalized. It is so much the fundamental condition of our time that we donât even notice it. But that does not mean that it doesnât continue to act upon us. It might be so powerful as to not even provoke resistance, like atmospheric pressure or gravity. The effort it takes to read history against the grain â Benjamin said it must be done with the leverage of a âbarge-poleâ[4] â is in denaturalizing this history of the counterrevolution, to make it visible or noticeable at all. Can we feel it? This has changed over the course of the past century. In the first half-century, from 1918 to 1968, the naturalization of the counterrevolution took certain forms; in the last half-century, since 1968, it has taken other forms. We can say indeed that the action of the counterrevolution provoked more resistance in its first 50 years, from 1918â68, than it has in its second 50 years, from 1968 to the present. That would mean that 1968 marked the decisive victory of the counterrevolution â to the degree that this was not entirely settled already in 1918.
As Richard [Rubin] pointed out at my presentation at this yearâs 4th Platypus European Conference in London, on âThe Death of the Millennial Left,â there has been nothing new produced, really, in the last 50 years. I agreed, and said that whatever had been new and different in the preceding 50 years, from 1918 to 1968 â Heideggerâs philosophy, for example â was produced by the counterrevolutionâs active burial of Marxism. Max Weber had remarked to Georg LukĂĄcs in 1918 that what the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in the October Revolution and its aftermath would mitigate against socialism for at least 100 years. He seems to have been proven right. But since 1968, such active efforts against the memory of Marxism have been less necessary. So we have had, not so much anti-Marxism, as the naturalization of it. Ever since 1968, everyone is already a âMarxistâ â as Foucault himself said â precisely because everyone is already an anti-Marxist. This is how things appear especially this year, in 2018. And necessarily so.
The failure of the 1918 German Revolution was not only that, but was the failure of Marxism as a world-historical movement. As Rosa Luxemburg posed the matter, the failure of revolution in Germany was the failure of revolution in Russia. 1918 and 1917 are inextricably linked. But the failure of 1918 has been hidden behind the apparent success of 1917. The failure of 1917 wears the deceptive mask of success because of the forgetting of the failure of 1918.
Marxism failed. This is why it continues to fail today. Marxism has forgotten its own failure. Because Marxism sought to take up the prior â bourgeois â revolutionary tradition, its failure affected the revolutionary tradition as a whole. The victory of the counterrevolution in 1918 was the victory of counterrevolution for all time.
What do we mean by the âcounterrevolutionâ?
Stalin declared the policy â the strategy â of âsocialism in one countryâ in 1924. What did it mean? What was it predicated upon? The events in Germany in 1923 seemed to have brought a definitive end to the post-WWI revolutionary crisis there. Stalin concluded therefore that Russia would not be saved by revolution in Germany â and even less likely by revolution elsewhere â but needed in the meantime to pursue socialism independently of prospects for world revolution. Stalin cited precedent from Lenin for this approach, and he attracted a great deal of support from the Communist Party for this policy.
Robert Borba, a supporter of the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA, speaking at our 4th European Conference in London earlier this year, addressed the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism in response to Hillel Ticktin on the panel discussion of â50 Years of 1968,â as follows:
âHillel [Ticktin] defined Stalinism as socialism in one country, which supposedly cannot exist. It is not viable. We should think seriously about what that means. Imagine you are Lenin in 1918. You have led a revolution. You are counting on the German revolutionaries to come to your aid, as you envision this whole process of revolution throughout Europe. But it does not happen. Now what do you do? Say, âThis cannot exist, it is not viable,â and give up? Lenin and the Bolshevik Party did not give up. The proletariat had taken power in one country. The imperialists were invading. They did the best they could for the world revolution. They retained a base from which to spread revolution. To give that up would harm the interests of oppressed humanity.â[5]
This blackmail of the necessity to âdefend the gains of the revolutionâ is crucial to understanding how the counterrevolution triumphed within the revolution â how Bolshevism led to Stalinism.
Even supposed âTrotskyistsâ however ended up succumbing to the exigencies of supposedly âdefending the gainsâ â Trotsky himself said that an inability to defend the gains of the revolution would mean an inability to advance it: Trotsky was still addressing Stalinism as a retreat. His followers today are even more willing than Trotsky himself to defend any and all purported âgainsâ â but at the expense of possibilities for any advance. What was perhaps a temporary necessity for Trotsky has become permanent for the supposed âLeft.â
So-called âMarxismâ today is in fact an agency of the counterrevolution â has become part of the counterrevolutionâs on-going action â which is why it is not surprising that the âLeftâ today even champions the counterrevolution â by denouncing the revolutionary tradition. But this didnât happen just recently, but has been going on increasingly over the course of the past century. First, in small ways; but then finally comprehensively. Equivocations became judgments against the revolutionary tradition. It began in marked ways at least as early as the late 1960s. For instance, in 1967 Susan Sontag wrote, in the formerly Communist- and then Trotskyist-affiliated journal Partisan Review, that,
âIf America is the culmination of Western white civilization, as everyone from the Left to the Right declares, then there must be something terribly wrong with Western white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. . . . The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al, don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone â its ideologies and inventions â which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.â[6]
Sound familiar? It is a voice very much for our time! Here, Sontag explicitly rejects the revolution â âparliamentary government,â the âemancipation of women,â and âMarxâ included â because of its âeradication of autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads,â and as âwhat this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.â Letâs accept this characterization of âWestern white civilizationâ by Sontag, but try to grasp it through the revolution. For this is what revolution does: eradicate the prior form of civilization. What is America the âculminationâ of, exactly? Letâs look to its Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, and think about the American Revolutionary leader alongside the protagonist of the 1918 German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg.
I will start with the concluding scene of the 1995 film Jefferson in Paris. Here, Jefferson negotiates a contractual agreement with his slave James Hemings for the freedom of himself and Sally Hemings and her children â Jeffersonâs own offspring. It is observed by his white daughter. This scene encapsulates the revolution: the transition from slavery to social contract.
In the 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg, Sonja Liebknecht says to Luxemburg in prison that, âSometimes I think that the war will go on foreverâ â as it has indeed gone on forever, since we are still fighting over the political geography and territorial results of WWI, for instance in the Middle East â and, responding to Luxemburgâs optimism, about the mole burrowing through a seemingly solid reality that will soon be past and forgotten, âBut it could be us who will soon disappear without a trace.â In the penultimate scene of the film, Karl Liebknecht reads the last lines of his final article, âDespite Everything,â and Luxemburg reads her last written words, âI was, I am, I shall be!â â referring however to âthe revolution,â not Marxism![7]
Luxemburgâs âI was, I am, I shall be!â and Liebknechtâs âDespite everything!â â are they still true? Is the revolution still on-going, despite everything? If not Luxemburgâs, then at least Jeffersonâs revolution?
But arenât Thomas Jefferson and Rosa Luxemburg on âopposing sidesâ of the âclass divideâ â wasnât Luxemburgâs Spartakusbund [âSpartacus Leagueâ] on the side of the slaves (named after a Roman slave who revolted); whereas, by contrast, Jefferson was on the side of the slave-owners? No!
To quote Robert Frost, from his 1915 poem âThe Black Cottage,â
â[T]he principle
That all men are created free and equal. . . .
Thatâs a hard mystery of Jeffersonâs.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isnât true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman [Jefferson] got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.â[8]
How will we reconsider it for our age? Apparently, we wonât: Jeffersonâs statues will be torn down instead. We will take the âeasy wayâ and âdecideâ that Jeffersonâs revolutionary character âsimply isnât true.â This has long since been decided against Luxemburgâs Marxism, too â indeed, as a precondition for the judgment against Jefferson. As Max Horkheimer said, âAs long as it is not victorious, the revolution is no good.â[9] The failure of revolution in 1918 was its failure for all time. We are told nowadays that the American Revolution never happened: it was at most a âslaveholderâs revolt.â But it certainly did not mark a change in âWestern white civilization.â Neither, of course, did Marxism. Susan Sontag tells us so!
Platypus began in 2006 and was founded as an organization in 2007, but we began our conventions in 2009. In 2018, our 10th convention requires a look back and a look ahead; last year marked the centenary of 1917; this year marks 1918, hence, this specific occasion for reflecting on history from Platypusâs point of view. What did we already know in 2006â08 that finds purchase especially now, in 2018? The persistence of the counterrevolution. Hence, our special emphasis on the failure of the 1918 German Revolution as opposed to the âsuccessâ of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which has been the case throughout the history of our primary Marxist reading group pedagogy. But we should reflect upon it again today.
I would like to refer to some of my convention speeches for Platypus:
In my 2012 convention Presidentâs report, â1873â1973: The century of Marxism,â I asserted that the first 50 years saw growth and development of Marxism, as opposed to the second 50 years, which saw the steady destruction of the memory of Marxism.[10]
So today, in regarding 1918â2018 as the century of counterrevolution, I ask that its first 50 years, prior to 1968, be considered as the active counterrevolution of anti-Marxism, as opposed to the second 50 years, after 1968, as the naturalization of the counterrevolution, such that active anti-Marxism is no longer necessary.
But I would like to also recall my contribution to a prior convention plenary panel discussion in 2014, on âRevolutionary politics and thought,â[11] where I asserted that capitalism is both the revolution and the counterrevolution. To illustrate this, I quoted a JFK speech from 1960:
âWe should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.â
Kennedy was speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York:
âI am delighted to come and visit. Behind the fact of [Fidel] Castro coming to this hotel, [Nikita] Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad they came to the United States. We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.â[12]
With Kennedy, the counterrevolution, in order to be successful, still needed to claim to be the revolution: the counterrevolution still struggled with the revolution. By the end of the 1960s â at the other end of the New Left â however, this was no longer the case.
We can observe today that what was lacking both in 1918 and in 1968 was a political force adequate to the task of the struggle for socialism. The problem of political party links both dates. 1968 failed to overcome the mid-20th century liquidation of Marxism in Stalinism and related phenomena, in the same way that 1918 had failed to overcome the capitulation of the SPD and greater Second International in WWI, and thus failed to overcome the crisis of Marxism.
For this reason, we can say, today, 50 years after 1968, that the past 100 years, since 1918, have been the century of counterrevolution. | P
[1] Available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1939/kautsky.htm>.
[2] âHistory, theory,â available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2009/06/14/the-platypus-synthesis-history-theory/>.
[3]Platypus Review 99 (September 2017), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2017/08/29/1917-2017/>.
[4] Walter Benjamin, âParalipomena to âOn the Concept of Historyââ (1940), Selected Writings vol. 4 1938â40, Howard Eiland and Michael William Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 407.
[5] â50 years of 1968,â Platypus Review 105 (April 2018), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2018/04/01/50-years-of-1968/>.
[7] Karl Liebknecht, âDespite everythingâ (1919), in John Riddel, ed., The Communist International in Leninâs Time: The German Revolution and the Debate on Soviet Power: Documents 1918â19: Preparing for the Founding Conference (New York: Pathfinder, 1986), 269â271; Rosa Luxemburg, âOrder prevails in Berlinâ (1919), available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1919/01/14.htm>.
[8] In North of Boston, available on-line at: <http://www.bartleby.com/118/7.html>.
[9] Horkheimer, âA discussion about revolution,â in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926â31 and 1950â69 (New York: Seabury, 1978), 39. Available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/readings/horkheimer_dawnex.pdf>.
[10]Platypus Review 47 (June 2012), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2012/06/07/1873-1973-the-century-of-marxism/>.
[11]Platypus Review 69 (September 2014), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2014/09/05/revolutionary-politics-thought-2/>.
[12] Available online at: <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25785>.
A book talk on the newly published collection of essaysMarxism in the Age of Trump(Platypus Publishing, 2018) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on March 9, 2018.
An abridged version of this article was presented at the 4th Platypus European Conference closing plenary panel discussion, “What is the Future of Socialism?,” with Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute of Globalization and Social Movements), Alex Demirovic (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation), Mark Osborne (Alliance for Workersâ Liberty; Momentum) and Hillel Ticktin (Critique journal), at Goldsmiths University in London on February 17, 2018.
The liquidation of [Marxist] theory by dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice. . . . The interrelation of both moments [of theory and practice] is not settled once and for all but fluctuates historically. . . . Those who chide theory [for being] anachronistic obey the topos of dismissing, as obsolete, what remains painful [because it was] thwarted. . . . The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth-content only by those who agree with [Friedrich] Schiller that âworld history is the world tribunal.â What has been cast aside but not absorbed theoretically will often yield its truth-content only later. It festers as a sore on the prevailing health; this will lead back to it in changed situations.
âAdorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)[1]
THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM is the future of capitalismâthe future of capitalism is the future of socialism.
Socialism is an illness of capitalism. Socialism is the prognosis of capitalism. In this respect, it is a certain diagnosis of capitalism. It is a symptom of capitalism. It is capitalismâs pathology. It recurs, returning and repeating. So long as there is capitalism there will be demands for socialism. But capitalism has changed throughout its history, and thus become conditioned by the demands for socialism. Their histories are inextricably connected and intertwined. This is still true today.
Society under capitalism in its concrete form will be conditioned by the need to realize capital. This means that society will be conditioned by the contradiction of capital. The future of socialism will be conditioned by that contradiction. This is an illness of self-contradiction of society in capitalism.
Illness
What kind of illness is capitalism?
Friedrich Nietzsche described the modern affliction of nihilism in capitalismâhe didnât use the term âcapitalismâ but described itâas an âillness, but the way pregnancy is an illness.â
Socialism is the pathology of capitalismâin terms of Marx and Engelsâs Manifesto, âcommunismâ is the âspecterâ âand capitalism is the pathology of socialism, always threatening its return. The question is the prognosis of socialismâthe prognosis of capitalism.
Capitalism is an illnessâa pathologyâof potential. We suffer from the unrealized potential of capital.
Capitalism is an imbalance of production and appropriation. It is a problem of how society produces, and how society appropriates its own production. As such it is a problem of metabolism. This is often referred to, for instance by Keynesians, as a problem of overproductionâa problem of underconsumption. But it is more self-contradictory than that. It is more than a temporary market imbalance awaiting correction, either by the state or by the market itself. Turning over the issues of production and consumption, we find that capitalism is also a problem of an overconsumption of resourcesâMarx called it the wearing-out of both the worker and natureâand an underconsumption of value, for instance in an overabundance of money without outlet as capital investment. It is also, however, an underproduction of resourcesâa wastage of nature and laborâand an overproduction of value. It is, as Marx called it, a problem of surplus-valueâof its production and consumption.
The pathology of capitalism is a metabolic disorder. As capitalism is usually addressed by contemporary commentators, it is not however a disorder of scarcity or of (over-)abundance, nor of hierarchy or of equalityâfor instance, a problem of leveling-down. But, rather, as a problem of what Marx called the âsocial metabolism,â it exhibits all of these symptoms, alternately and, indeed, simultaneously.
In the way that Nietzsche regarded capitalist modernity as an illness, but an illness the way pregnancy is an illness, it is not to be cured in the sense of something to be eliminated, but successfully gone through, to bring forth new life.
Is it a chronic or an acute condition? Capitalism is not well analogized to cancer because that would imply that it is a terminal condition. No. Rather than socialism waiting for capitalism to die, however, the question is whether socialism is merely a fever-dream of capitalism: one which chronically recurs, occasionally, but ultimately passes in time. Capitalism is not a terminal condition but rather is itself a form of life. A pathological form of life, to be sure, but, as Nietzscheâand Christianity itselfâobserved, life itself is a form of suffering. But what if capitalism is not merely a form of lifeâhence a form of sufferingâbut also a potential form of new life beyond itself? What if the recurrent symptom of socialismâthe crisis of capitalismâis a pregnancy that we have failed to bring to term and has instead miscarried or been aborted? The goal, then, would be, not to eliminate the pregnancy of socialism in capitalism, not to try to cure the periodic crises of capitalism, but for capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism.
This would mean encouraging the health of capitalism in a certain sense. Perhaps humanity has proven too ill when undergoing capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism; but the pregnancy has been mistaken for an illness to be cured, rather than what it actually was, a symptom of potential new life in the process of emerging.
Past Marxists used the metaphor of ârevolution as the midwife of history,â and they used this very precisely. Socialist revolution would make socialism possible, but would not bring forth socialism ready-made. An infantâmoreover one that is not yet bornâis not a mature form of life.
These are the stakes of properly recognizing capitalism for what it isâthe potential for socialism. If we mistake capitalism for an illness to be eliminated, then we undergo its pathology periodically, but fail to bring forth the new life that capitalism is constantly generating from within itself. The point then would be, not to avoid capitalism, not to avoid the pregnancy of socialism, but to allow capitalism to give birth to socialism. Bourgeois ideology denies that there is a new form of life beyond itselfâthat there is socialism beyond capitalismâand so seeks to terminate the pregnancy, to cure the ailment of capitalism, to eliminate the potential that is mistaken for a disease, whether thatâs understood as infection by a foreign body, or a metabolic imbalance to be restored. But capitalism is not a malignant tumor but an embryo. The recurrent miscarriage of socialism, however, makes capitalism appear as a tumor, more or less benign, so long as it passesâor is extracted or otherwise extirpated.
As a cancer, capitalism appears as various kinds of cancer cells running rampant at the expense of the social body: whether of underclass criminals, voracious middle classes, plutocratic capitalists, or wild âpopulistâ (or even âfascistâ) masses, all of whom must be tamped down if not eliminated entirely in order to restore the balanced health of the system. But capitalism does not want to be healthy in the sense of return to homeostasis, but wants to overcome itselfâwants to give birth to socialism. Will we allow it?
For this would mean supporting the pregnancyâseeing the symptoms through to their completion, and not trying to stop or cut them short.
Diagnosis
What is the prognosis of socialism?
Socialism is continuous with the ârights of human beings and citizens,â according to the principles of âliberty, equality and fraternity,â that âall men are created equal,â with âinalienable rightsâ of âlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.â Socialism seeks to realize the bourgeois principle of the âfree association of producers,â in which each is provided âaccording to his needâ while contributing âaccording to his ability.â The question is how capitalism makes this both possible and impossible, and what it would take to overcome its impossibility while realizing its possibility.
Moishe Postone, in his 2006 essay on âTheorizing the Contemporary World: Brenner, Arrighi, Harveyââa companion-piece to his other well-known essay from 2006, âHistory and Helplessnessââgrasped this contradiction of our time as that between islands of incipient post-proletarian life surrounded by seas of superfluous humanityâpostmodernist post-humanism and religious fundamentalist defense of human dignity, in a world simultaneously of both post-proletarian cities of abundance and sub-proletarian slums of scarcity.
Peter Frase, in an early foundational article for the Democratic Socialists of Americaâs Jacobin magazine in 2011, wrote of the âFour Possible Futuresââthis was later expanded into the 2016 book subtitled âLife after Capitalismââon the supposed âinevitable endâ of capitalism in four potential outcomes: either in the âcommunism of abundance and egalitarianism;â the ârentism of hierarchy and abundance;â the âsocialism of egalitarianism and scarcity;â or the âexterminism of hierarchy and scarcity.â The future was supposed to lie between two axes of contradiction: egalitarianism vs. hierarchy; and scarcity vs. abundance.
Unlike Postoneâwho, like Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek around the same moment, grasped the simultaneous existence of postmodernism and fundamentalism as two sides of the same coin of late capitalismâFrase neglects the dialectical proposition that all four of his âpossible futuresâ will come trueâindeed, that all four are already the case in capitalism. They are not merely in the process of coming true, but have been the actual condition of capitalism throughout its history, ever since its inception in the Industrial Revolution. There has been the coexistence of hierarchy and egalitarianism and of scarcity and abundance, and each has been the precondition for itsâdialecticalâopposite.
One could say that this has been the case since the early emergence of bourgeois society itselfâthat capitalist contradiction was always the caseâor, indeed, since the beginning of civilization itself. One could say that this has been the condition of âclass society as a whole,â the condition of the existence of a âsocial surplusâ throughout history.
This is the perspective of Alain Badiouâs âcommunist hypothesis,â for example. Badiou has mobilized a rather literal reading of Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto, and a straightforward, if rather naĂŻve, interpretation of communism or socialism from Babeufâs âconspiracy of equalsâ onwardsâindeed perhaps all the way back from Jesus and His Apostles onwards. âCommunismââin Peter Fraseâs terms, âegalitarian abundanceââis the âland of milk and honey,â where the âlast shall be first, and the first shall be last.â
Capitalism, understood undialectically, then, is, by contrast, the exterminism of rentism, the inhumanity of exploitation, in which scarcity and hierarchy rule through elite appropriation of the surplus. But this has been true since the dawn of civilization, since the beginningâin terms of Engelsâs clever footnote to the Manifestoâs assertion that âhistory is the history of class struggleââof ârecorded history.â
So what is different with capitalism? What has changed is the form of the social surplus: âcapital.â To say, as Marxists did, that, as the possibility for socialism, capitalism is the potential âend of prehistoryâ is to say that all of history is the history of capital: the history of civilization has been the development of the social surplus, until it has finally taken the form of capital.
Ancient civilizations were based on a specific kind of social surplus, however. The surplus of grain beyond subsistence produced by peasant agriculture allowed for activity other than farming. Peasants could tighten their belts to feed the priests rather than lose the Word of God, and so that some knights could protect them from the heathen. But for us to return to the religious basis of civilization would also mean embracing values quite foreign to the bourgeois ethos of work, such as that âthe sick are blessed,â with the divine truth of the vanity of life, whereas we rightly consider sickness to be a curseâat the very least the curse of unemployability in society.
So what is the social surplus of capital? According to Marx, capital is the surplus of labor. It is also, however, the source of possibilities for employment in production: the source of social investment. Does this make it the source of hierarchy or of equality, of scarcity or of abundance, of post-humanism or of ontologicalâfundamentalâhumanity? It is the source of all these different apparently opposed values. It is their common condition. It is society itself, albeit in âalienatedâ form. As such, it is also the source of societyâs possible change.
Socialism aims at the realization of the potential of society. But it will be achievedâor notâon the basis of capitalism, under conditions of capital. The social surplus of capital is the source of potential societal change, of new forms of productionâmanifold new forms of human activity, in relation to others, to Nature, and to ourselves. Changes in capital are changes in our social relations. Capital is a social relation.
Capital is the source of endless new forms of social scarcity and new forms of social abundanceâof new forms of social expropriation and of social productionâas well as of new forms of social hierarchy and of new forms of social equality. Capital is the source of all such changes in society over the course of the last two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution.
Hillary Clinton, in an interview during her failed campaign for President of the U.S., said that what keeps her âawake at nightâ is the problem of figuring out policy that will encourage the investment of capital to produce jobs. Indeed, this is precisely what motivated Trumpâsâsuccessfulâcampaign for President as well. Interestingly, it is unclear whether this is what properly motivated Bernie Sanders as an alternative to Clinton, or if this now motivates Jeremy Corbyn as the head of the U.K. Labour Party. In the case of Corbyn and Sanders, it seems that they have been motivated less by the problem of capital and labor than by a more nebulous concern for âsocial justiceââregardless of the latterâs real possibilities in capitalism. In the U.K., for example, Theresa Mayâs âRed Toryismââby prioritizing the circumstance of the âBritish worker,â like Trumpâs stated priority for the âAmerican workerââis actually more realistic, even if it presently has a rather limited organized political base. Corbyn, as a veteran New Leftist âsocial justice warrior,â is actually closer to the criteria of neoliberal politics than May, whose shifting Conservative Party is not (yet) able to support her agenda. By contrast, it is a solidly neoliberal Blairite Labour Party that Corbyn leads. But Brexit, and the crisis of the EU that it expressed, is changing the landscape. May is still, however, leading the way. As is, of course, Trump.
In this sense, the issue of socialism was closer to the actual concerns of Clinton and Trump than to Sanders. Sanders offered to his followers the Obama Presidency that never was, of a ânew New Dealâ that is never going to be. By contrast, both Clinton and Trump were prepared to move on from the 2008 economic crisis: How to make good of the crisis of neoliberalism, now a decade old? For every crisis is an opportunity for capitalism. This is what must be the concern of politics.
This is the ageless question of capitalism: How is society going to make use of its crisis of overproduction, its surplus in capitalâits surplus of labor? How are the social possibilities of capital going to be realized? What is the actual potential for society in capitalism?
Of course, the narrow horizons of the perspectives of both Clinton and Trump and of May for realizing the potentials of capitalism are less appealing than the apparent idealism of Corbyn and Sanders. But, realistically, it must be admitted that the best possible outcomeâwith the least disruption and dangerâfor U.S. and thus global capitalism at present would have been realized by a Clinton Presidency. If Trumpâs election appears to be a scary nightmare, a cruise into the unknown with a more or less lunatic at the helm, then, by contrast, a Sanders Presidency was merely a pipe-dream, a safe armchair exercise in idealism. Today, the stock market gambles that, whatever Trumpâs gaffes, the Republican Party remains in charge. The captain, however wild-eyed, cannot actually make the ship perform other than its abilities. The question is whether one trusts a CEO trying to build the company by changing it, or one trusts the shareholders who donât want to risk its profitability. Trump is not a safe bet. But he does express the irrepressible impulse to change. The only question is how.
Prognosis
So the question of the future of socialism is one of potential changes in capitalism. The question is how capitalism has already been changingâand will continue to change.
What seems clear is that capitalism, at least as it has been going on for the past generation of neoliberalism, will not continue exactly the same as it has thus far. There has been a crisis and there will be a change. Brexit and the fall of David Cameron as well as Trumpâs victory and Hillaryâs defeatâthe successful challenge by Sanders and the rise of Corbyn alongside Mayâs Premiershipâcannot all be chalked up to the mere accidental mistakes of history.
In the face of historical change, continuity must be reckoned withâprecisely as the basis for this change. How is neoliberal capitalism changing out of its crisis?
Neoliberalism is old and so is at least in need of renewal. The blush has gone off the rose. Its heroic days are long behind us. Obama rallied it to a certain extent, but Hillary was unable to do so again. The Republicans might be stuck in vintage 1980s Reaganism, but Trump is dragging them out of it. In the face of Trump, the question has been posed: But arenât we all good neoliberals? Not only Nancy Pelosi has said that, all respect to Bernie, we need not try to become socialists but remain capitalists. The mainstream Republican contender Marco Rubio said the same about Trump, while Ted Cruz retired to fight another day, against what he indicatively called Trumpâs âsocialism.â But the Tea Party is over. Now, the specter of âfascismâ in the crisis of neoliberalismâwhich, we must remember, regards any and all possible alternatives to itself as more or less fascistâis actually the specter of socialism.
But what does the actual hope for socialism look like today? Does it inevitably appear as nationalism, only with a difference of style? Must the cosmopolitanism of capitalism take either the form of unmediated globalization (which has never in fact existed) or rather inter-nationalism, relations between nations? These apparent alternatives in themselves show the waning of neoliberal optimismâthe decline of Clintonâs âglobal village.â We are now livingâby contrast with the first Clinton era of the 1990sâin the era of neoliberal pessimism, in which all optimism seems reckless and frightening by comparison: Hillaryâs retort that âAmerica is great already!â raised against Trumpâs âMake America Great Again!â Trump was critical of, and quite pessimistic about, existing conditions, but optimistic against Hillaryâs political pessimismâto which Hillary and Obama could only say that things arenât so bad as to justify (either Sanders or) Trump.
Were the Millennials by contrast too optimistic to accept Hillaryâs sober pragmatismâor were they so pessimistic as to eschew all caution of Realpolitik and embrace Sanders and Corbyn? Have they clung, after the election of Trump, now, to the shreds of lip-service to their concerns, as the best that they could hope for? Does Sandersâlike Corbyn in the U.K.âmerely say, better than Hillary or Obama, what they want to hear? By comparison, Hillary and Trump have been a salutary dose of realityâwhich is bitterly resented. Obama was the âchange we can believe inââmeaning: very little if any. Clinton as the continuation of Obama was the sobriety of low-growth ârealism.â Now Trump is the reality of changeâwhether we like it or not. But it is in the name of the optimism for growth: âJobs, jobs, jobs.â
The problem of capitalismâthe problem that motivates the demand for socialismâis that of managing and realizing the possibilities of a global workforce. This is in fact the reality of all politics, everywhere. All countries depend on international and, indeed, global trade, including the circulation of workers and their wages. Even the âHermit Kingdomâ of North Korea depends not only on goods in trade but on remittances from its workers abroad. This issue of the global workforce is the source of the problem of migrationâthe migration of workers. For instance, wars are waged with the problem of refugees foremost in mind. Political crisis seeks alleviation in either benign ways such as the âbrain drainâ of the emigrating middle-class, or malignantly in ethnic cleansingâin either case the exodus of restive surplus populations that cannot be integrated. International aid as well as military intervention is calculated in effects on migration: how to prevent a refugee crisis? The U.S. has paid countries such as Egypt and Pakistan to subsidize their unemployed through bloated militaries. What is to be done with all those seeking work? Where will they find a job? It is a global problem.
Capital is the social form of this surplus of laborâthe social surplus of production. Capital is the way society tries to manage and realize the potential of that surplus. But the source of that surplus is no longer so much human activityâlaborâas it is science and technology. The problem is that, politically, we have no way of marshaling this surplus other than through possibilities for laborâfor instance, through managing nation-states as labor markets. The question is realizing the potential possibilities of the social surplus beyond the reproduction of an increasingly redundant laboring workforce. Will they be starved or exterminated? Or will they be freed?
The only alternatives capitalism offers is in freedom to workânot the worst form of freedom the world has ever known, but its possibilities in capitalism are increasingly narrow. The question is the freedom from work. How will this be realized? There has been mounting evidence of this problem ever since the Industrial Revolution: unemployment. Social Darwinism was not a program but a rationalization for the crisis of capitalism. It remains so today. Will humanity free itself from the confines of capitalâthe limits of labor?
Future
Were Jacobinâs Peter Fraseâs four possible alternative futures merely alternatives in rhetoric? Nearly no one claims to favor exterminism, scarcity, or inequality. The real future of capitalism does not actually belong to such expressions of pessimism. Fortunately, it will be appreciably better than our worst fearsâeven if, unfortunately, it will be much worse than our best desires. Capitalism for better or worse does indeed have a future, even if it will be different from what we are now used to. It will also be different from our dreams and nightmares.
Jacobinâs Frase seems to assume that not what he calls âcommunismâ but âsocialismââthe combination of egalitarianism and scarcityâis both more possible and more desirable: for Frase, abundance carries the danger, rather, of continued capitalist ârentismâ and hierarchy. For Frase, among others, the future of social conflict seems to be posed over the terms of scarcity: equality vs. âextermination;â for instance, egalitarianism vs. racism.
Both Moishe Postoneâs and Peter Fraseâs antinomiesâof postmodernism and fundamentalism, and of scarcity and egalitarianism (the latter combination as Fraseâs formula for âsocialismâ)âare expressions of pessimism. They form the contemporary face of diminished hopes. But capitalism will not tarry over them. It will move on: it is already moving on.
What is the future of abundance, however with hierarchyâthat of continued capitalism, that is, of âcapital rentsââin society, and how does this potential task any future for socialism? Where will the demand for socialism be raised? And how is it to be realized?
We should not assume that capitalist production, however contradictory, is at an end. No. We are not at an end to forms of scarcity under conditions of abundance, or at an end to hierarchies conditioned by social equality.
Citizen Trump shows us this basic fact of life under continued capitalism.
As Walter Benjamin observed in conversation with Bertolt Brecht during the blackest hour of fascism at the midnight of the last century, we must begin not with the âgood old daysââwhich were in fact never so goodâbut with the âbad new ones.â We must take the bad with the good; we must take the good with the bad.
We must try to make good on the reality of capitalism. As Benjamin put it, we must try to redeem its otherwise horrific sacrifices, which indeed are continuous with those of all of civilization. Historyâthe demand for socialismâtasks us with its redemption.
The future of capitalism is the future of socialismâthe future of socialism is the future of capitalism.
Addendum
Perhaps capitalism is the illness of bourgeois society, and socialism is the potential new form of life beyond the pregnancy of capitalism. Bourgeois society does not always appear as capitalism, but does so only in crisis. We oscillate in our politics not between capitalism and socialism but between bourgeois ideology and anti-capitalismânowadays usually of the cultural ethno-religious fundamentalist communitarian and identitarian type: forms of anti-bourgeois ideology. But socialism was never, for Marxism at least, simply anti-capitalism: it was never anti-bourgeois. It was the promise for freedom beyond that of bourgeois society. The crisis of capitalism was regarded by Marxism as the tasking of bourgeois society beyond itself by socialism. It was why Lenin called himself a Jacobin; and why Eugene Debs called the 4th of July a socialist holiday. Socialism was to be the realization of the potential of bourgeois society, which is otherwise constrained and distorted in capitalism. So long as we live in bourgeois society there will be the promiseâand taskâof socialism. |P
[1] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Seabury Press, 1973), 143â144.
This episode is on current affairs and happenings related to politics. I discuss the Chris Cutrone essay “The Millennial Left is dead,” which you can read here: https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/ I also offer my thoughts on this alt-right sh*t-show with Richard Spencer, Sargon of Akkad, and Styx. I don’t recommend watching all 4 hours: https://youtu.be/UiUH-tWHbr8
Chris Cutrone, founder and President of the Platypus Affiliated Society, interviewed by Douglas Lain of Zero Books, on the results of the first year of the Presidency of Donald Trump.
Cutrone’s writings referenced in the interview can be found at:
