Marx and Engels and Adorno and Horkheimer were (not) alone

Rejoinder on Marxism and individuals

Chris Cutrone

I concluded my dismantling of Gabriel Rockhill’s slander against the Frankfurt School with the deliberately provocative lines:

Everyone has to think for themselves. There’s no “we” in socialism, comrades.

I don’t celebrate political isolation but recognize it — and am trying to overcome it! To paraphrase Nietzsche, I take my revenge on a bad feeling by making it public (in “Use and abuse of history for life,” Unfashionable Observations, 1876).

I have previously written about Adorno and Horkheimer’s Towards a New Manifesto and related writings, among other places, in two particular articles published at Nonsite.org, “Do we need Adorno?” and “Horkheimer in 1943 on party on class,” the latter on Horkheimer’s previously unpublished essay “On the sociology of class relations.” I refer to them so that my prior arguments about the Frankfurt School’s politics do not need to be repeated.

But there is much more than the Frankfurt School to the question of Marxism as an isolating intellectual phenomenon. It goes back to Marx and Engels themselves. Indeed, Lenin found himself a man alone at key moments, including both in 1917, when he had to criticize his comrades in the Revolution, and at the very end, in his resistance to Stalinization (see Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle, 1968). While there should not be a reinforcement let alone ratification of the casting aside of Marxist critical theory by politics, it is also important to recognize that the actual problem is rather the opposite: turning Marxist critics into mere comrades. “Comrade Marx” won’t do. Neither will Comrade Adorno — nor Comrade Cutrone.

In response to the Critique of the Gotha Program, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany founder and longtime Chairman August Bebel wrote, “One can see that it was no easy thing to reach agreement with the two old men [Marx and Engels] in London.” (Bebel, My Life, 1912). But was it merely lack of agreement? Or was there an indispensable role for (Marx’s) critique in the proletarian struggle for socialism? The repressive character of having to justify critique by its practical applicability was not original to Adorno and Horkheimer, but already observed by Marx and Engels early in their political career.

Marx and Engels relished their isolation in the wake of 1848, which they found liberating. As they wrote to each other in 1851:

Marx to Engels (Feb. 11, 1851):

I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_11.htm

Engels to Marx (Feb. 13, 1851):

From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. . . . Besides we have no real grounds for complaint if we are shunned by the petits grands hommes; haven’t we been acting for years as though [Tom, Dick and Harry] were our party when, in fact, we had no party, and when the people whom we considered as belonging to our party, at least officially, sous réserve de les appeler des bêtes incorrigibles entre nous [with the reservation that between ourselves we called them incorrigible fools], didn’t even understand the rudiments of our stuff? How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years [since 1848].  

We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.

The main thing at the moment is to find some way of getting our things published; either in a quarterly in which we make a frontal attack and consolidate our position so far as [definite] persons are concerned, or in fat books where we do the same without being under the necessity of mentioning any one of these vipers. . . . What price all the gossip the entire émigré crowd can muster against you, when you answer it with your [forthcoming] political economy?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_13.htm

This wasn’t sour grapes. Their marginalization would be vindicated by history.

Adorno and Horkheimer made the relation of their theory to the non-existent political practice of a socialist party clear in Towards a New Manifesto (1956):

[25 March:]

ADORNO: Shouldn’t we really have to think everything out from the beginning? Write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation. In Marx’s day it could not yet be seen that the immanence of society had become total. That means, on the one hand, that one might almost need to do no more than strip off the outer shell; on the other hand, that no one really wants things to be otherwise.

HORKHEIMER: We still have something of a breathing space. We must not lose sight of that in our discussion of theory. We cannot be active politically and yet every word we write is political. We have to say clearly that the Communist Party is not a whit superior to the liberal politicians in the Federal Republic. The claim that new constellations are possible has echoes of Trotsky.

ADORNO: The fact that art exists is not rendered immaterial by the statement that what really counts is revolution.

HORKHEIMER: Art is actually not different from what we have in mind, but we have to articulate it.

ADORNO: We should not blind ourselves to this.

HORKHEIMER: We need to make explicit matters that Picasso can remain silent about. It must become quite clear from our general position why one can be a communist and yet despise the Russians.

ADORNO: We must be against [West German Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer.

HORKHEIMER: But that is only true as long as we list the reasons that make it possible to keep on living in the West. An appeal for the re-establishment of a socialist party.

ADORNO: With a strictly Leninist manifesto.

HORKHEIMER: Then we would be told that such a manifesto could not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless. At best, it might have some success in France and Italy. We are not calling on anyone to take action.

ADORNO: Practice is a rationally led activity; that leads ultimately back to theory. Practice is driven on to theory by its own laws.

HORKHEIMER: Theory is, as it were, one of humanity’s tools.

ADORNO: That means that theory and practice cannot be separated.

HORKHEIMER: That is conformism.

ADORNO: For a form of behaviour to be practical I must reflect on something or other. If I have the concept of reflection, the concept of practice implicitly postulates that of theory. The two elements are truly separated from each other and inseparable at the same time.

HORKHEIMER: Theory is required to reflect; it must know why.

ADORNO: What makes theory more than a mere instrument of practice is the fact that it reflects on itself, and in so doing it rescinds itself as mere theory.

HORKHEIMER: It can achieve that only by targeting true practice.

ADORNO: Contemplation had a point while it was still directed at an object in a theological sense. You always criticize theory on the grounds that a communist theory is really an absurdity, the pure observation of something that no longer exists. The concept of theory has undermined itself through the overall concept of enlightenment. There is something archaic about the concept of theory.

HORKHEIMER: Marx would say that what we perceive are not ideas but products of human practice, in a twofold sense. Firstly, in the sense that our attention is still taken up by our needs, and secondly, because we regard as nominalistically insoluble something that we are as yet unable to produce with the methods of science.

[30 March:]

HORKHEIMER: We have asked about the relationship between theory and practice if there is no longer a party. Now there is no party and this means that two sources of uncertainty are involved, if we continue to operate in the realm of theory. Firstly, because what is produced in the way of theory no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat. Secondly, it seems then as if we are working on a theory for keeping in stock.

ADORNO: In the best case, it is theory as a message in a bottle.

HORKHEIMER: In stock. Perhaps the time will come again when theory can be of use. A theory that has ceased to have any connection with practice is art. What we need to respond to is the question of whether we are doing philosophy as pure construct.

ADORNO: If I had the choice between a construct and the stockroom, I would always choose the construct. To think thoughts because it is fun seems more dignified.

HORKHEIMER: First thesis: the choice between ideas as constructs and ideas in stock.

ADORNO: We have to express this as bluntly as possible without leaving anything obscure.

HORKHEIMER: Even if our theory doesn’t directly feed into practice, and even if the link with practice is utterly opaque, it will nevertheless benefit practice somehow or other. Thinking has lost direction in a very crucial way. Philosophy differs from art in this respect. If we speak of the injustice and mendacity of the world in a philosophical text and the world replies that it is not unjust and mendacious, since there is no alternative at present, it is just doing the best it can, this means that there is something wrong with theory. We rightly expect theory to have a definite meaning. In contrast, we just listen to music. Theory cannot be oblivious of itself. Theory as resistance. Basically your thinking too has a highly practical orientation.

ADORNO: I know that everything is false as long as the world is as it is.

HORKHEIMER: You would say that merely to say this is to achieve much. I say that a lot more has to happen. We have to point to the direction we must travel in to make sure that the horrors are no longer necessary. In your view theory has done its job once we can say that. I believe we must retain the aspect of Marxism which insists that it is not enough to say something is bad. In actuality we still have to do battle with the standpoint of the French counter-revolution, which maintains that the work done by the executioner is still needed since otherwise things would be even worse. . . .

HORKHEIMER: I do not myself think that pure cultural criticism is so important. An American might well say to us, what do you really want, we are the better human beings, we want to organize things so as to put an end to barbarism. This is what we have to sort out. Do you know what it is about practice that you reject? The recipe. Theory should not be a recipe, but if it remains quite unconnected with any such thing —

ADORNO: — It negates itself. When ideas become too concrete, I protest; when they become too abstract, you protest. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto there was no party either. It is not always necessary to join up with something already in existence.

HORKHEIMER: If you produce revolutionary writings in a non-revolutionary situation without engaging with the positive aspects of a culture, it always seems somehow hopeless.

ADORNO: But Marx did not have the aura of someone who was godforsaken.

HORKHEIMER: There was nothing sectarian about him. We must not write a single word that might fail to acknowledge that we live in this particular society and are a part of it.

ADORNO: We live on the culture we criticize.

HORKHEIMER: I meant the society.

ADORNO: You said that the barbarism of this culture can be countered only with barbaric methods. So are the means neutral towards the ends? In other words, can I really be opposed to barbarism if I myself write like writers in the Marxist tradition? . . .

ADORNO: We have to express ourselves in such a way that our readers can see quite clearly how things have to be changed, but one must allow the reader to see enough to enable him to glimpse the idea that change is possible.

HORKHEIMER: Second thesis: What we say today is something implicit in morality or Christianity. If there is so much affluence as there is in the Western world, we must give to those who have nothing.

ADORNO: The fault lies exclusively with ideology. Basically, we have to change consciousness, to dissolve the context of delusion in the minds of others. Then all would be well.

HORKHEIMER: It is not just the state of consciousness. If those who have plenty were to hand some over to the needy, they would ultimately find themselves overwhelmed by them. Human beings live on horror. It’s connected with eating meat. Your ‘beggar hurries to the gate’ [from a song in Adorno’s unfinished 1933 opera Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)] — that is the culture we live in.

ADORNO: Theory is already practice. And practice presupposes theory. Today, everything is supposed to be practice and at the same time, there is no concept of practice. We do not live in a revolutionary situation, and actually things are worse than ever. The horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one.

HORKHEIMER: The party no longer exists.

ADORNO: Any appeal to form a Left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda. Such a party would either be dragged along in the wake of the Communist Party, or it would suffer the fate of the SPD or [U.K.] Labour Party. It is not a political issue that there is no party.

HORKHEIMER: The moment politics is less able to do the right thing than at any time in history is also the moment politics is no longer of relevance.

ADORNO: The problem of he who speaks.

HORKHEIMER: Can it be said that today the political situation is worse than at any other time? It is not just worse. What links the two of us and separates us from other people is a kind of reluctance to say that twenty million are being murdered in China but soon there will be no more famines. What we reject is not practice but telling others what to do. Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something. | P

Chris Cutrone

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

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The Frankfurt School wanted socialism: Contra Rockhill

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 187 | June 2026

Where political influence is possible without betraying the truth, it should be practiced to the best of our abilities. Given the circumstance that there is no truth, this influence will remain almost purely theoretical. This means, in other words, that in the present historical situation, salvation lies in thinking and politics lies in thinking; that we are therefore consciously thrown back into a Stoic standpoint — not because we would tell the existentialists they are the Stoics, but because we would cry out: we are the Stoics because there is no party.
— Max Horkheimer with Theodor W. Adorno, “Rescue of the Enlightenment” (1946)

WHAT IS STALINISM? It is the liquidation of Marxism. More precisely, it is the liquidation of the Marxist self-consciousness and theory of the proletarian socialist party — it is also the practical liquidation of that party. What is most troubling about the history of “Marxism-Leninism” AKA Stalinism is, like with the Jacobins, not their ruthlessness towards avowed counterrevolutionaries, but rather the Revolution eating its own — the unjust and murderous turn against the loyal revolutionaries themselves. The problem with Stalinism is the lies it entails — the lies against the revolutionaries, and against the Revolution itself. And the lies never end.

These lies are not only about socialism but more directly the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” in the Marxist sense of the rule of the working class directed to overcoming capitalism. The goal of the revolution, according to Marxism, is establishing this dictatorship of the proletariat, which is not itself the achievement of socialism but its mere precondition. The question is whether Communist Party rule in China, Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea today means the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. There are real reasons to doubt it.

Such skepticism about the “Marxist” bona fides of the ruling Communist Parties didn’t begin yesterday, but long ago. It is the question that has haunted Marxism since the Russian Revolution, which has only been compounded by its ramified results beyond the Soviet Union, and continues to persist after the latter’s demise.

The Marxist Critical Theorists of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt are among those who maintained these questions and problems of the Revolution and its results. Their notorious “negativity” contrasts starkly with the apparent positive results of “actually existing socialism” — at least according to the ideological claims of the Communist Parties. What right did the Frankfurters have to doubt the positive claims of the real revolutions of their time? In this they followed Marx in his early — and never abandoned — demand for the “ruthless criticism of everything that exists.” First and foremost for Marxist criticism was the socialist or communist movement itself, which Marx considered the highest — that is, the most acute and self-contradictory — phenomenon of “bourgeois ideology.” As he wrote in his September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge,

I am not in favor of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism.

Furthermore, Marx wrote that,

This communism is itself only a particular manifestation of the humanistic principle and is infected by its opposite, private property. The abolition of private property is therefore by no means identical with communism and communism has seen other socialist theories, such as those of Fourier and Proudhon, rising up in opposition to it, not fortuitously but necessarily, because it is only a particular, one-sided realization of the principle of socialism.

The critical task of Marxism did not end with the 1917 Russian Revolution, by any means, let alone in 1949 or 1959. If anything, Marxist critique — including of the critique of Marxism itself, the critique that was practiced by Lenin and other Marxists before and after 1917 — became more urgent, let alone when “Marxism” became an official state ideology.

What was practiced after Lenin’s death — namely, Stalinism — was a malicious, bureaucratic mockery of Marxist critique. So there were relatively very few Marxists who took up the true duty of critique since then. There still are hardly any at all. (Perhaps there is only one?) The primacy of such critique might seem obscure today, which is all the more reason its light should not be extinguished. Socialism will not be possible without it. The criticism of attempts at socialism should not be left to the avowed Right, since they disbelieve it anyway and so do so in bad faith.

Instead, Marxist Critical Theory is vilified on the “Left,” often abusing a parodical version of “Marxism” to do so.

Gabriel Rockhill’s treatment of the Frankfurt School in his book Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? (Monthly Review Press, 2025) is beyond inaccurate: it is dishonest. Let me demonstrate my point with some analysis of Rockhill’s quotations of the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists in his book.

It seems that from the professional safety of academic tenure, Rockhill has unleashed uninhibited vitriol against what has been his own area of expertise and the basis of his success, specifically “French” theory, expressing bitterness at its obvious and complacent dead end. It is not accidental that this apostasy from prior academic fashion is coinciding with the end of neoliberalism — the exhaustion of “postmodern” capitalism. But what replaces it is unabashed philistinism. Rockhill is its perfect exemplar. But this theoretical suicide is not noble, let alone heroic, but unseemly. The French Fries begging to differ from Stalinist orthodoxy of their time is subject to a posthumous show-trial frame-job. I am as annoyed by Deleuze and Foucault as anyone, but even the guilty should be given a fair shake.

As with Domenico Losurdo, Rockhill uses innuendo and guilt-by-association rather than actual clear statements by his subjects. When there is any direct quotation, it is tendentiously selected and deliberately taken out of context in order to cast it in the most possibly unfavorable light.

It’s just lying. It’s deliberately dishonest. If you have to lie, then you’re not only incorrect but not in the right. Some basic intellectual ethics are required, especially when there is disagreement, otherwise the issues are muddled. But this is not merely a matter of disagreement or debate but slander — character-assassination. It’s trying to take advantage of and reinforce the ignorance of readers — students. It is basic miseducation. Rockhill is telling students not to bother considering the Frankfurt School at all.

This is the opposite of enlightening. It’s the usual Big Lie campaign of shameless propaganda that one expects from capitalist politics, but won’t do for the proletarian struggle for socialism, which, if it is ever to succeed, cannot be based on lies.

I will not lie to you.

Here’s Rockhill (188):

Adorno’s overall position, like Herbert Marcuse’s, was summarized by Marie-Josée Levallée in the following terms: “The Bolshevik party, which Lenin made the vanguard of the October Revolution, was a centralizing and repressive institution which would shape the Soviet State in its image and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into its own dictatorship.”30 In an interesting — though debatable — formulation, Leo Löwenthal described the Institute’s form of critical theory as one that rejected both “the Social Democratic and the Bolshevik versions of Marxism” in favor of continuing “the radical Enlightenment tradition.”31

  1. Marie-Josée Levallée, “October and the Prospects for Revolution: The Views of Arendt, Adorno, and Marcuse,” The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice: Failures, Legacies, and the Future of Revolution, ed. Thomas Telios, et al. (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 173.
  2. Löwenthal, An Unmastered Past, 65. In the 1930s, Löwenthal explained, the few defenders of the USSR in their circles — Karl Wittfogel, Henryk Grossman, and Ernst Bloch — referred to Horkheimer’s group as the “swine on 117th Street” (the location of their Columbia University house) (ibid., 66). Horkheimer had even claimed that “it would not surprise him if an alliance developed between Hitler and Stalin, if Hitler made only the least overture” (ibid.).

But there was indeed such an alliance, albeit betrayed by Hitler! — Why does Rockhill summarize someone else’s paraphrasing(!), instead of quoting original sources? Rockhill doesn’t quote the passages from Towards a New Manifesto (1956) where Horkheimer and Adorno state clearly that they sought to follow Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

My own academic work, both in my PhD doctoral dissertation, and presented and discussed at several international Marcuse and Adorno conferences, and published in several journals, helped bring this matter to light, and indeed helped prompt the translation and publication of Horkheimer and Adorno’s Towards a New Manifesto to begin with. And there are many other examples of Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer’s writings stating their adherence to Lenin’s views, as well as their explicit sympathy for the victims of — and blaming “imperialism” for — the oppressive conditions suffered in Russia and elsewhere.

What was going on in 1956 to inspire their contemplation of writing a new Communist Manifesto for the 20th century? Soviet Communist leader Nikita Khrushchev had criticized Stalin and the official “Marxism-Leninism” ideology he had instituted, as itself committing “crimes against Leninism.” In Eastern Europe there were popular uprisings against Communist Party rule — about which Bertolt Brecht, who died in 1956, had written, in “The Solution” in 1953:

Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

For his part, Adorno said: “I have always wanted to . . . develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin.” Horkheimer responded laconically, “Who would not subscribe to that?” — Here is the full quotation:

[30 March:]

ADORNO: What irritates me so much about the entire relationship between theory and practice is something quite obvious, namely the experience that everything the Russians write slips into ideology, into crude, stupid twaddle, that culture is rubbish and that somewhere, at the very same spot as in Marx and Engels, there is an element of re-barbarization. Thinking in their [the Russians’] writings is more reified than in the most advanced bourgeois thought. I have always wanted to rectify that and develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin, while keeping up with culture at its most advanced.

HORKHEIMER: Who would not subscribe to that? You wish to retain culture, but being ruthless and barbaric is necessarily part of this culture. Your attitude has something of Don Quixote about it. You would like to omit whatever doesn’t suit you, as if this culture could survive in present conditions without the injustice we both hate.

ADORNO: The ruthless critique of this culture is one element of our own activity.

— Instead, Rockhill quotes Horkheimer with an almost self-parodying strung-together set of ellipses: “In the East . . . they have chosen slavery. . . . We have to reject . . . Marxism” (220). — What Horkheimer actually said:

[12 March:]

HORKHEIMER: Your view is that we should live our lives in such a way that things will get better in a hundred years. That’s more or less what the parson says too.

ADORNO: Our disagreement is about whether history can succeed or not. How are we to interpret the ‘can’? On the one hand, the world contains opportunities enough for success. On the other hand, everything is bewitched, as if under a spell. If the spell could be broken, success would be a possibility. If people want to persuade us that the conditional nature of man sets limits to utopia, that is simply untrue. The possibility of a completely unshackled reality remains valid. In a world in which senseless suffering has ceased to exist, Schopenhauer is wrong.

HORKHEIMER: In the long run things cannot change. The possibility of regression is always there. That means we have to reject both Marxism and ontology. Neither the good nor the bad remains, but the bad is more likely to survive. The critical mind must free itself from a Marxism which says that all will be well if only you become a socialist. We can expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-out version of the American system. The difference between us is that Teddie still retains a certain penchant for theology. My own thoughts tend to move in the direction of saying that good people are dying out. In the circumstances, planning would offer the best prospect.

ADORNO: If the result of planning was that beggars would cease to exist, then planning itself would shed its rigidity, and decisive change would be the result.

HORKHEIMER: Perhaps, but a relapse into barbarism is no less conceivable.

ADORNO: Relapse into barbarism is always an option. If the world were so planned that everything one did served the whole of society in a transparent manner, and senseless activities were abandoned, I would be happy to spend two hours a day working as a lift attendant.

HORKHEIMER: An assertion of that kind leads us directly to reformism.

ADORNO: Reform of the administration cannot be brought about by peaceful means.

Rockhill (219):

Moreover, it is in this context that Horkheimer doubled down on their social chauvinism by averring, in a world-historical conclusion that provoked no rebuttal on the part of his “Leninist” collaborator: “I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains.”

— What was actually said by Adorno and Horkheimer: 

ADORNO: I have the feeling that, under the banner of Marxism, the East might overtake Western civilization. This would mean a shift in the entire dynamics of history. Marxism is being adopted in Asia in much the same way as Christianity was taken up in Mexico at one time. Europe too will probably be swallowed up at some point in the future.

HORKHEIMER: I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains. That can be achieved only if we remain ruthlessly critical of this civilization.

ADORNO: We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.

HORKHEIMER: We cannot do so because that would destroy it. If we were to defend the Russians, that’s like regarding the invading Teutonic hordes as morally superior to the [Roman] slave economy. We have nothing in common with Russian bureaucrats. But they stand for a greater right as opposed to Western culture. It is the fault of the West that the Russian Revolution went the way it did. I am always terribly afraid that if we start talking about politics, it will produce the kind of discussion that used to be customary in the Institute.

To quote Marx from the sign-off at the end of his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), which both criticized the consciousness of the first ostensibly “Marxist” political party established by his followers, and laid out in explicit terms his vision of the task of proletarian socialism: “Dixi et salvavi animam meam” (“I have spoken and saved my soul”). So have I. Everyone has to think for themselves. There’s no “we” in socialism, comrades. | P

Chris Cutrone with Michael Downs and Nance on Trump’s economic and geopolitical agenda

Chris Cutrone discusses with Michael Downs and Nance the Trump economic and geopolitical agenda, addressing the AI buildout and Bernie Sanders and AOC’s resistance to it, Accelerationism and its ideological character, and UFOs and demonology, with reference to Cutrone’s essays “Fear itself” and “Robots and sweatshops.”

https://www.sublationmag.com/post/fear-itself

https://platypus1917.org/2020/02/01/robots-and-sweatshops/

Why Marxists loved America

The Crisis of the American Revolution

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel at the 18th Platypus Affiliated Society annual international convention with Edith Fisher (Revolutionary Communist Organization) and Ingar Solty (Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung) at Northwestern University, Evanston, April 10, 2026.

Hegel made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as a “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime of constitutional monarchy on the basis of the English Revolution was improved in the American Constitutional Republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the Presidency as counterbalance to democracy, to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early 20th century that in America “freedom was most complete.”

For their part, Marxist-informed socialists in the United States such as the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs claimed both the American Revolution and the Civil War and their political leaders as historical figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, to their cause and as their rightful legacy, as against the capitalist political parties, the Republicans and Democrats, falsely wearing their mantles. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin greatly esteemed Debs, especially for his denunciation of U.S. imperialism and its involvement in World War I which had landed Debs in jail, and Debs returned the praise, calling himself, during the counterrevolutionary reactionary panic after the Russian Revolution and Woodrow Wilson’s Palmer Raids repression of the Socialist Party, “from head to foot a Bolshevik and proud of it.”

Later, Frankfurt School Critical Theorist Theodor Adorno, who fled the Nazis to the United States, along with his colleagues Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, wrote endearingly about his experience of American society, and upheld the American Republic’s Constitutional separation of powers and checks and balances as the model for “critique,” the free interplay of theory and practice and subject and object, in maintaining and promoting the freedom of society.

So powerful was the influence of the American Revolution that the Communist Party in the United States named its party night school for workers after Thomas Jefferson. Its leader in the 1930s, Earl Browder, famously stated that “communism is as American as apple pie.”

What was the substance of this evaluation by such prominent Marxists of the United States and the American Revolution and its legacy? Marxism understood capitalism as a phenomenon based on bourgeois society, and regarded the American Revolution as a “bourgeois” revolution. What did this mean?

First, we must step back and examine the Marxist understanding of history and how it had led to capitalism. The basic idea is that the rise of modern “bourgeois” society or “civil society” was a societal transformation on the same order of magnitude as the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which in Marxist terms had ushered in “class society” from the original “primitive communism” of Paleolithic hunter-gatherer communities. This was understood as the beginnings of capitalism. The Industrial Revolution was regarded as the crisis of bourgeois society and capitalism, indicated by the class division into capitalists and workers, specifically by the proletarianization of labor, in which workers no longer owned the means of production — the machines and other capital goods owned by the capitalist class. The Industrial Revolution, according to Marxism, led to the possibility and necessity of socialism — modern communism. The Industrial Revolution historically brought about the modern class struggle of the workers against the capitalists that led to socialism.

Capitalism was defined by its contradiction and crisis: the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production; and the crisis of “socialism or barbarism” — capitalism was understood as the barbarization and decadence of bourgeois society, in which bourgeois principles were observed only in form and not in substance.

It is important to note that for Marxism bourgeois social relations were the social relations of labor, and bourgeois society itself was understood as the emancipation of labor from the traditional social relations of prior civilization, with its caste system, subsistence agriculture and guild-craft control of artisan production.

The bourgeois revolution was the emancipation of the rights of labor against its traditional restrictions in the previous state — the ancien régime and its official religious sanctification. In this respect, it was the rights of private production and appropriation in civil society, which was the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen labor, offering its products on the free market. But this was a social form of labor: the social relations of free exchange, trade and commerce as the form of social cooperation and community; the freely associated laborers. Trade in traditional civilization was restricted politically by the caste order, and was primarily in luxury or specialized goods for the ruling castes, and not the subsistence needs for the vast majority of people. The rise of bourgeois society was the transformation of immediate local subsistence production into production for trade and commerce. One produces not for one’s own subsistence or those of one’s immediate local community, but for trade to acquire subsistence goods for one’s own consumption from more distant others: the dependence of the majority on the commerce in subsistence goods. The exchange of traditional civilization governed by custom was replaced by trade according to worth freely negotiated according to the value of labor in the market.

This is why the modern society of production for trade and commerce is called “bourgeois,” meaning “urban” in French, by contrast with traditional civilization of the countryside where production was for subsistence in local agriculture — 95% of the population were peasants; today, by contrast the vast majority of society’s members are workers: wage-laborers. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt put it, today even a king is someone employed in a job, not by Divine status but performance evaluation of function: the 17th century English Revolution reduced the Sovereign to the highest paid employee serving ceremonially to perform the dignity of the state.

Capitalism, arising as such in the 19th century, was the contradiction and crisis of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, in which a dynamic of replacing labor by automation introduced the business cycle of boom and bust, which was not merely a commercial crisis of supply and demand in market adjustments, but a crisis of value of wage-labor in the social system of production, indicating its potential obsolescence.

The First Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from ~1750 to ~1850 and was centered first in Britain and then, after the French Revolution, in France and the Benelux countries — Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg — and those parts of Europe, such as the western part of Germany in the Rhineland, most affected by the French Revolution. (Marx and Engels hailed from this region, Engels from a factory-owning family.) This was where machine automation first took hold and the proletarianization of labor first took place.

The French Revolution was closely associated with the American Revolution, which itself was a further development of the English Revolution of the preceding century. The French Enlightenment and the revolutionaries it inspired were noted Anglophiles, and it was not mere coincidence that the storming of the Bastille took place in the centenary year of the seating of the constitutional monarch in the English Glorious Revolution, 1689, as politically theorized by John Locke. Marx said that of the two traditions of materialism, those of Descartes and Locke, it was Locke’s that led to socialism. Thomas Jefferson participated in both the American and French Revolutions, co-writing the American Declaration of Independence as well as the French Declaration of the Rights of Human Being and Citizen, co-written by Lafayette who himself had led the French forces in the American Revolutionary War. The later leading French Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War under Lafayette, and wrote of the indelible experience of freedom he had in America. The American Revolution is best understood as the continuation and radicalization of the English Revolution, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson’s revising of Locke’s inalienable rights of “life, liberty and property” to the “pursuit of happiness,” of which property was the mere means and not a right as an end in itself. This prepared the United States for the social freedom that made it Hegel’s “land of the future,” to be realized in the 19th century, contemporaneous with the rise of Marxism.

British Utopian Socialist Robert Owen presented his model community ideas to the U.S. Congress, meeting with Founding Fathers and former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and also James Madison, as a keenly interested audience. One of the final expressions of Jefferson’s political sentiments was to endorse, in an 1825 letter to Frances Wright, the Utopian Socialist experiments underway as a means for facilitating Emancipation and Abolition as part of the greater cause of labor.

The Second Industrial Revolution is conventionally dated from 1871 to 1914 — from the Franco-Prussian War to WWI. German victory over France led to unification under the Prussian Empire, which allowed for its rapid industrialization. Contemporaneously, the Meiji Restoration in Japan and political centralization under the Emperor, triumphant over the Samurai, and the victory of the Union in the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, as well as the emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire, meant that these countries saw rapid industrialization in this period. The rise of these new industrial powers produced new international conflicts in global capitalism and eventually the World Wars of the 20th century.

Whereas Marx and Engels were individuals in a “party of two” whose ideas about capitalism and socialism were relatively limited in their influence, in the era of the Second Industrial Revolution there was the emergence of Marxism as a predominant ideology in the modern proletarian socialist movement of the working class. The new socialist parties most influenced by Marxism in the era prior to WWI were those in Germany, the United States, Russia, Italy and Japan: the countries of the Second as opposed to the First Industrial Revolution. Unlike the others, the United States was a liberal democratic constitutional republic. It was also quickly emerging as by far the largest and most dynamic and technically innovative capitalist economy in the world. The Marxists of the Second International such as Lenin and Eugene Debs understood that the future of socialism at a world scale would be ultimately decided in America.

Furthermore, in this period, the working class was greatly internationalized, with many workers migrating for work around the world, often not permanently settling but returning to their home countries after earning their fortunes. It was a smaller world at that time of original historical Marxism than we tend to appreciate. Many workers from around the world had experience living and working in the United States in this period, and they were influenced profoundly by its social freedom — much as Marx and Engels had been influenced by the freedom they experienced as exiles in France and England. Interestingly, Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America, to which many radical political refugees from Europe had emigrated in the 19th century, such as the “Red ’48-ers” who had fled from the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and Central Europe — “Bohemians.” These German émigrés, with whom Marx was associated, participated in the Abolitionist Movement and the new Republican Party in the United States, whose leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Marx regularly wrote for in the 1850s, and the Red ’48-ers served as officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and figured as Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Later, in the period before the Russian Revolution, many leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks lived and worked and organized as socialists in the United States. They took that American experience back with them in leading the Revolution in Russia. Many American socialists inspired by the Russian Revolution had first met the Bolsheviks in America.

As elsewhere, the contradiction between bourgeois society and its values of the rights and freedom of labor with new industrial capitalism was clearly manifest. This introduced a complex dynamic in which the struggle for socialism of the industrial proletariat was connected with upholding the older revolutionary tradition of the American and French Revolutions and the bourgeois rights enshrined therein. Just as French socialism emerged from the revolutionary tradition there, so did socialism in the United States, through both the American Revolution and the Civil War.

In Germany, the preeminent country of the Marxist-led socialist movement at the turn of the 20th century, the working class claimed the legacy of German Idealist philosophy of Kant and Hegel, which was itself inspired by the English, American and French Revolutions, as against the capitalists: the working class claimed the intellectual and cultural heritage of the bourgeois revolution that had decayed — become “decadent” — under capitalism. This was also true in England, France and America. In this way, the struggle for proletarian socialism took up the mantle of the earlier bourgeois revolution and emancipation that had been betrayed in capitalism.

So, it is not a simple matter of proletarian socialism succeeding the bourgeois revolution in terms of leaving it behind, but of actively recovering it, struggling within the revolutionary tradition from its contradiction in capitalism. Propagandistically, this was posed as the succession of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat as the historically revolutionary — and “universal” — class. What did this express?

The universality of the bourgeois revolution suffered some severe setbacks outside the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as at home with the reinvigoration of slavery as a function of the Industrial Revolution, preventing it from dying out naturally as the Founding Fathers expected. Whereas there has been one continuous American Republic from the Revolution to today — however modified substantially by the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments — France, for example, is today in its Fifth Republic, interrupted by two monarchies, two empires and a fascist regime; and the U.K. remains a monarchy, albeit constitutional (even though it was a republic during its revolutionary Civil War in the 17th century); and Germany and Japan have been liberal democracies only since WWII. And the U.S. remains the preeminent capitalist country in the world that it became during the Second Industrial Revolution.

The modern bourgeois republic differs from the ancient republic in its respect for civil liberties and rights — the rights of civil society against the state, not observed by Ancient democracy.

The Marxist understanding of the dialectical relation between capitalism and the possibility and task of socialism means that the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production poses itself most purely in the United States of America, and has done so from early on. It has not been clouded by the question raised by Arno Mayer and others about just how “bourgeois” society and politics were in Europe before recent times, the supposed issue of “feudal holdovers” in Europe, even in France as well as in the U.K. up through the Second World War — before the victorious U.S. imposed the essential criteria of the American republican system of liberal democracy onto Europe and Japan. This was not merely a function of capitalism, since capitalism has been compatible with illiberal and undemocratic political systems. The tension between capitalism and the freedom of American bourgeois society was made global in character in the “American Century” and leadership of the “Free World.” This was the intention of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations and realized in the United Nations system of the victorious Allies under American leadership — the Cold War erupting soon between them notwithstanding.

Just as in Marx’s and Lenin’s times, the specter of socialism or communism apparently still haunts the world, as seen in the last Millennial generation’s attempted resuscitation of its tradition. Today, it appears as the ghost of Marxism. The greatest phenomenon of a new socialist movement in recent times has taken place in the United States with the Millennial Left. In it, questions of original historical Marxism — the recovery of Marx and figures such as Lenin — have figured prominently. This was also true in the last major historical upsurge of interest in Marxism, in the 1960s New Left, which back then — as now — was influential and inspirational throughout the world. It was long understood that if Marxism is not relevant in the United States, then it is irrelevant everywhere else.

Late doubts about this speculative proposition of identical fates of the bourgeois revolution — and America as its last standing avatar — with the struggle for socialism to overcome capitalism reflect not enlightenment but its forgetting. Socialist counter-identification with America as the predominant capitalist country expresses doubts about socialism. Marx’s and historical Marxism’s clear perspectives on the foundational character of the American Revolution and central character of the United States historically in the struggle for socialism have become obscured in the present. A reactionary anti-capitalism, both on the ostensible “Left” and avowed Right, has made a casualty of America and its revolutionary history. In its 250th year this is particularly poignant. In the recent era of neoliberalism — the Reagan and Thatcher revolution of neoliberal capitalism — the American “Left” has reached to post-WWII European social democracy as a contrasting counter-model, and capitalism has been hastily identified with Anglo-Americanism. In this, both the counterrevolutionary character of social democracy and the revolutionary character of capitalism itself have been obscured. What was forgotten is that original historical Marxism opposed the welfare state of capitalism, which was seen rightly as — intentionally — undercutting the workers’ own social capacities and struggles by making them dependent wards of capitalist politics. Instead, this counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted falsely as good coin. The Millennial “Left,” for instance the Democratic Socialists of America, has been content to accept what the Right denounces demagogically as “socialism” in the welfare state, and inverting its value positively as their own program. The original meaning of not only Marxism but socialism itself as the promised self-overcoming and transcendence of capitalism has been deranged beyond recognition. — Worse still, “freedom” has become a strangely tabooed concept, both on the “Left” and beyond. Pessimism about America expresses pessimism about socialism. It is pessimism about freedom. Choosing the pessimistic version of capitalism in “progressive” welfarism has meant doubting the possibility of socialism that Marxism originally recognized in capitalism as a self-contradictory form of freedom.

The crossroads of “socialism or barbarism” has cut through the heart of America as the preeminent capitalist country for the last two centuries. It still does. Hence, so does Marxism, indelibly. As we remember the American Revolution and its historical legacy, we are haunted by the remaining task of socialism — to realize the historic promise of freedom as the dialectical truth of capitalism. The truly emancipatory character of the American Revolution lives, however contradictorily, in capitalism, and its fate will be determined in the struggle for socialism. | P

Category error: The Good and freedom under capitalism: Reply to Tom Canel’s caveats on Marxism

Chris Cutrone

Platypus Review 185 | April 2026

For the little man . . . not only his own lack of freedom but that of others as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom.
— Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dämmerung (1926–31)[1]

Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.
— Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street (1928)[2]

TOM CANEL’S ESSAY on my debate with Benjamin Studebaker, between pursuit of freedom and the Good, tries to address my writing as a logical problem.[3] But it begins with a misapprehension: not I but Studebaker introduced the category of the “body” into our dispute about Platonism and Marxism. Not my argument but his hinges on the natural body as a phenomenon. For me it is a historical form of appearance in society; for him it is an emanation of the Good — falling away from it.

This raises the issue of how a natural biological species, which seemingly hasn’t changed fundamentally physically in many thousands of years, could nonetheless have its social relations change, profoundly. What are social relations? They are not merely relations between persons, but also relations to and with Nature (physical and historical) and to and with oneself. They thus form a cosmos — a cosmology.

Kant introduced a critique of the hitherto mechanical view of the universe, on the basis of Rousseau’s observation that the interaction of things changes the things. He sought to go beyond Newtonian physics to a more organic perspective that could grasp qualitative transformations in a process of change. This dialectical view of subject and object, as well as of practice and theory, was motivated by recognition of radical historical change expressed by political, economic, technical and scientific, as well as philosophical revolutions in the modern, bourgeois epoch, overthrowing entirely a prior form of society. Kant’s revolutionary philosophy has been profoundly influential, affecting critical reflection and self-consciousness in diverse ways in all domains. Kant overcame the antinomies of idealism vs. realism (AKA materialism), empiricism vs. rationalism, etc., but this has not prevented the recrudescence of such Ancient philosophical concerns in the subsequent capitalist era. I regard the return to pre-Kantian philosophy to be a symptom of the abandonment of this revolutionary perspective.

Marxism historically critiqued such regression in philosophy as expressing the decadence of bourgeois society. Theodor Adorno, for example, addressed the wide disparity between so-called “Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy” as posing the question of philosophy itself; also noting that philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche seemed to be offering not alternative but anti-philosophies, as did Marxism; and the sciences had taken leave of philosophy altogether in the 20th century, by contrast with the bourgeois Enlightenment, and in ways not yet true in the 19th century, when science and philosophy could still yet cross-fertilize productively.

Tom Canel asks:

Would an established emancipatory communism leave any moral / historical tasks unfulfilled? If not, there might not be a need for any communist virtues. Arguably, once human species being is no longer alienated from itself, the world historical task that the conjuncture would task us with would be to continue to perfect our species being by constantly extending human potential.[4]

But this is the wrong question. No doubt there will be tasks and possibilities beyond that of overcoming capitalism, which is how Marxism originally defined socialism/communism. New problems will arise. Capitalism was regarded as the self-contradiction, crisis, and destruction of historically achieved virtues of bourgeois society, pointing paradoxically to their fulfillment and transcendence beyond capitalism. Leon Trotsky, whose work Canel invokes, warned about illusions of negating bourgeois society and its values, for instance in the realm of culture and art (see Literature and Revolution and other writings, in which he rejected the very possibility of “proletarian” culture and art); but Vladimir Lenin, following Marx and Engels, also warned against prematurely disregarding bourgeois forms of politics and economics, including those developed self-contradictorily under capitalism, the horizon of “bourgeois right” which any attempted rule by the working class — the dictatorship of the proletariat — would still need to observe and respect, in practice as well as theory, at least in the transition from capitalism to socialism that working-class political revolution could only initiate and not complete instantly.

Would “human species-being” ever achieve an unalienated state? Will disalienation ever be complete? We cannot know this for certain. All we can know, according to Marxism, is the possibility and necessity of overcoming the present form of alienation, namely capitalism, and accept and pursue that task of socialism. Marx’s observation about human species-being was that it seemed radically historically transformable in ways not seen in other natural species. Our capacity for self-alienation was responsible for this potential — for freedom. Marx followed Rousseau in acknowledging alienation as our inevitable condition. To overcome one form of alienation is to produce another.

Humanity has developed capacities that transcend our physical biological nature, producing technical possibilities incommensurate with our sense-data perceptions and physical experience. Technology offers possibilities beyond the human body. The problem is that capitalism, based on the bourgeois social relations of human labor, keeps technology shackled to measures of commensurability with biological human life. This problem yields opposed desires and fears: anarcho-primitivism vs. techno-utopianism. Socialism beyond capitalism will realize both and neither of these projections. Both human nature and technology will be free to realize potentials not tied down to the other. As Walter Benjamin recognized, the body is itself a technology; and technology is an extension and prosthesis of the body. To master them is to allow them to more freely relate to each other than is possible under capitalism. What we want is that “the tool not dominate the man,” not to choose either the tool or the man. We want a “relation between men” to no longer appear as a “relation between things” (Marx), but this doesn’t mean rejecting the things.

Marx recognized alienation in all domains of social relations: alienation between people; alienation from Nature; and alienation from ourselves. But he also recognized further alienation: the alienation of the social relations from themselves; the alienation of labor as a social relation from its product; and technology itself as an alienated social relation. Capital as alienated labor transcends and not only negates labor. Disalienation doesn’t mean trying to achieve an unalienated state: alienation is our species-being. What changes is the form of the self-alienation of humanity. Today it is capital — capitalism. Reappropriating it will mean overcoming one form of alienation, not alienation per se.

But our task is to overcome this form of alienation, since it is manifestly self-contradictory and self-destructive: capital contradicts not merely humanity but itself; capital destroys not only humanity but itself. If capital merely destroyed humanity, it would not distinguish itself from all forms of culture and society, which have all demanded human sacrifice: the sacrifice of the human body and its good. All culture and society has been “inhuman”; that has never been enough to demand its change: only internal contradiction drives change. Naïve humanism is an insufficient basis for transformation: capital must be realized in order to be abolished. Anti-capitalism is mere sentimentality to which everyone can agree.

From the standpoint of bourgeois society in the present, as well as from any historical standpoint, the potential for freedom expressed by capitalism must challenge fundamentally any notions we can have of morality and ethics. It is truly “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche); and the freedom expressed by our reason, as developed by society, works for both good and ill, to our benefit and detriment (Rousseau): “man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” These are chains of our own making: so is any good that can be made on the basis of our natural potential — and of our historical enthrallment. More confusing still, the unfulfilled potential for freedom in capitalism is inseparable from its manifest harmful effects. Hence, Marxism regarded capitalism and its history as the basis for not merely unfreedom but freedom. To overcome our unfreedom we must master the freedom that it makes both necessary and possible.

The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.[5]

However capitalism, especially at this late stage, might make us doubt the potential for such mastery, we should not pessimistically accept the apparent limitations of our bodies, as they appear under capitalism, as a conditional qualification for deference in our pursuit of socialism. To accept Nature in the forms of appearance — the Good — as presented under capitalism means accepting capitalism. | P

[1] Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 52.

[2] Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004), 487.

[3] Tom Canel, “Species being, the good, and Leon Trotsky: A response to the Chris Cutrone / Benjamin Studebaker exchange regarding ideology critique,” Platypus Review 183 (February 2026), <https://platypus1917.org/2026/02/01/species-being-the-good-and-leon-trotsky/>.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” 487.

April 1, 2026 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed