Chris Cutrone discusses the meaning of Marxism today with Paul of Dark Centrism.
Trump’s “not regime change” in Iran: Name vs. substance
The Crisis of the Islamic Revolution 1979–2009–2026
Chris Cutrone
Presented on a panel at the 18th Platypus Affiliated Society annual international convention with Grayson Walker (American Communist Party), Mateo Farzaneh (Northeastern Illinois University), Tirdad Kiamanesh (Northwestern University) at Northwestern University, Evanston, April 9, 2026.
Donald Trump has simultaneously claimed to have achieved a “regime change” in Iran as well as disavowed any intention to do so. It has come out that in the lead-up to the current war in Iran, Trump agreed only to pursue prospects for removing the top leadership and the degradation of the Islamic Republic’s capacity to wage war. Trump wants not a change of regime but of behavior of the existing regime. This is modeled on the replacement of Nicolás Maduro by his Vice President, Delcy Rodriguez, which left the power structure of the Venezuelan state in place. Trump seeks a similar outcome in Cuba. Trump has proudly declared that he can “get along with communists” — pointing to Zohran Mamdani, the “socialist” Mayor of New York. He wants not a change of politics but only of policy from adversaries.
The accidental “regime change” in Iran came not from American but Israeli action: it was Israel not the U.S. that killed the prior political leadership, including those Trump sought to negotiate with — as he complained about at the time. And Israel has continued to do so. At the same time, the Islamic Republic and its power structures remain in place. Trump seeks their “unconditional surrender” to his terms rather than their destruction. But to achieve this, there must be a credible threat that they could lose it all. For Trump, this was the significance of the January protests in Iran: they represented not a potential revolution but leverage against the existing state. Back then, Trump implored the regime to “take the deal” while also promising to “protect the protesters,” and warning the Islamic state against their repression — which followed on, regardless.
If the protests set the conditions, this was still not the trigger for the eventual military action Trump took. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner judged that the Iranians were not serious about their negotiations, but only stalling for time — as usual. The Iranians said they would not surrender in negotiations what could not be achieved militarily. Trump has obliged them. Israel presented the opportunity to “decapitate” the regime, as Israel had done with Hamas and Hezbollah leadership, and Trump assented to it, joining a war that was going to result from the decapitation anyway. Trump chose surprise and radical action to reset conditions, and to immediately offer to negotiate mere days into the campaign. When the Iranians refused to do so, Trump decided to continue the planned 4-6 week schedule of attacks to degrade Iran’s military capacities. Trump was recently threatening a second phase, broadening the war to include attacks on Iranian essential infrastructure as a further pressure on the regime to capitulate and negotiate. Whether Trump can achieve his goals this way — what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth calls “negotiating with bombs” — is unclear. But he will try. The current provisional ceasefire has behind it a threat to continue the war.
A note on the war itself, especially as regards Israel’s controversial role: Trump’s U.S. “Epic Fury” war in Iran is not the same as the “Roaring Lion” of Netanyahu’s Israel. Trump is most comfortable when he can serve as the negotiator, positioning himself between Israel and Iran as belligerents. Trump ultimately aims at a stable balance of power in the Middle East, in which neither Iran nor Israel will play the role of a unilateral rogue actor moving forward. Trump was sincere about expanding the Abraham Accords to include not only Saudi Arabia but Iran itself. The goal remains the same as American policy historically, in general: normalized relations between states. The only question is whether a revolution is necessary in Iran to achieve this — and, if so, what kind of revolution?
I wish to clarify my previous writings on the 2011 Arab Spring and the 2009 Green Movement crisis of the Islamic Republic as well as on the original 1979 Iranian Revolution, on the question of the form and content, the terminology and substance of “democratic revolution.” What makes the 1979 Revolution in Iran so painful is that it was a rare occasion in which there was more than a mere regime change, but a thorough-going popular smashing and reconstitution of the state. While of course some Shah elements of the Iranian state continued, mostly it was purged, and the composition of the state in the Marxist sense — the “special bodies of armed men” — was changed. As with all revolutions after 1848, however, the question is the democratic outcome or absence of this as a result.
The “Left” in Iran rightly considered the Revolution to have been hijacked by Khomeini’s Islamists, that they had been tricked by Khomeini, whom they had wanted to use as a mere symbolic figurehead for the revolution, but who took control as Supreme Leader in more than just name. This did not happen all at once, but over a process, first in the early moments of the Revolution, then as a function of the war with Iraq, in which the new power-structures of the Islamic Republic were consolidated. The initial liberal political leader, Bazargan, was sidelined and driven out of power early on. But even the subsequent Bani Sadr government chosen by Khomeini fell quickly as an obstacle to Khomeini’s ultimate aims. So it was not a matter of a change in political leadership masking the continuity of the state and its bases of power. There was even a significant social content to the revolution, as much of the prior Iranian ruling class under the Shah fled with him and his officials into exile.
The new Islamic Republic state established in the Iranian Revolution and consolidated and strengthened through the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, however, soon exhibited reform impulses in the 1990s, following Khomeini’s death in 1989. By the time of the 2009 Green Movement election crisis 20 years later, it was clear that the state itself was in crisis and that mere reform was not only inadequate but impossible to achieve the necessary changes. The Iranian state has subsisted on an increasingly narrow basis since then, with periodic protests — and their repression — growing in scale and intensity, up to those of earlier this year. There has been a steady stream of middle-class emigration from Iran. Even many members of ruling class families have ended up living abroad. As with other countries, Iran exports its discontents. This hollowing-out of the state portends ominous results.
Still, Trump is cautious and conservative about seeking substantial political change in Iran, which he thinks is unnecessary to achieve his goals — the same goals as those of successive American Administrations, namely, to normalize Iranian behavior and relations, ceasing to be a “rogue state.” As usual, Trump paints a rosy picture of possibilities for Iran, if only its political leaders would choose a different course of action — a different policy. In many respects, this is realistic, as Trump seeks a regional power-balance that can contain conflicts, preventing instability and war from breaking out. There is no reason, in Trump’s mind, why Iran, the Arab states, Turkey and even Israel cannot coexist peacefully in a regional settlement of the Middle Eastern countries, putting an end to decades of dysfunction and failure. Is he wrong?
The “Left” gives specious explanations for why things have been as they are. In so doing, it is worse than the capitalist politicians, who seek action to ameliorate problems and improve conditions in ways barred to the “Left.” The “Left” is sunk in delusions where the capitalist policymakers are acting in reality.
So, what are the possibilities for more substantial change, if any? This is unclear. The long history of the past 40 years has seen the complete destruction of even the ostensible “Left” in the Middle East — with perhaps the partial exception of certain Kurdish political organizations and marginal hangers-on among Palestinians. The most powerful agents of change have come from the avowed Right, for many decades, now. The Islamic Republic political leadership is one of them — but even it is quite old and degenerate at this point.
Since 2009, the Islamic Republic has degenerated such that it has come to resemble its neighbors and other similar countries of the developing world, and increasingly lost whatever specificity it had as a result of the 1979 Revolution. It has become a corrupt kleptocracy in which its ideological legitimation has been undermined, more like Saddam Hussein’s Baathists in Iraq, and the governments of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Egypt’s Nasserite nationalist Mubarak, Syria’s Assad, etc. Degenerate nationalism was replaced by Islamism, which has itself now degenerated in its turn. Its heroic days are long past. Additionally, the youthful population of Iran today mostly was brought up after the Revolution and therefore have no particular allegiance to the status quo that would flow from having participated in bringing it about. They don’t have any particular investments in the political status quo.
The idea that the Islamic Republic will reinvent itself now as an Iranian nationalist state, after the assassination of Ali Khamenei and his inner circle, without a crisis in its power structure depends on the long history of frustrated democratic revolution throughout the world. No doubt, any democratic revolution will depend on existing state elements, even more so than in the case of the overthrow of the Shah. It seems that the transition is impossible without overcoming Islamism as an obstacle.
But there can still be a significant crisis — and change of policy, for instance in diplomatic orientation. The Iranian state has long tried to navigate world politics by avoiding succumbing to subordination to any other states. This has seemed tenuous at times, and there have been crises and humiliating episodes, but Iranian political independence has been preserved successfully for over a hundred years. Today, however, it is part of the Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, and dependent on them for survival. Trump wants them to be replaced by the U.S. instead, to become an American client, like Israel, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf and other Arab States.
The problem is that it is precisely the radical character of the Islamic Revolution — its actual democratic (meaning, popular) character — which now threatens a deeper crisis for the Iranian state: a brittleness that goes beyond even that of the Shah’s state in 1979. It could be that the hitherto strength of the state will become a liability due to lack of flexibility.
And the global dynamics Iran faces are even greater today than in the past. The Islamic Republic might hope to balance the Russians or Chinese against the Americans, and to exploit differences among Middle Eastern states, but it is also the case that Iran, like many other countries, is actually weaker and more fragile today than in the past. The developing world was hard-hit by both the post-2008 Great Recession and the COVID crisis, which, as elsewhere, exposed deep societal deficits. That there is no movement and thus credible alternative to the existing state will not guarantee the survival of the latter but only the violence of its fall.
Trump is offering not to deliver the coup de grace but rather to rescue the Iranian state from its crisis, saving it from the fate of a further downward spiral into paranoid isolation that was perhaps always the true character and intention of the Islamic Revolution from the beginning. There are two aspects of Iran: the capitalist state; and its Islamist ideology. — Trump doesn’t think that either needs a radical change, but only a change of orientation and behavior. This is not impossible. The only question is how to achieve it.
The religious-messianic utopian fantasy of a Shia Islamic state transcending the strife of world politics in capitalism was never a viable proposition long-term. At best it served as an ideological framework that facilitated the reconstitution of the Iranian state after the demise of the Shah, for instance by integrating a rapidly urbanizing society under modern conditions better than the Shah’s state was able to do. It achieved a further basis in defending Iran against Iraqi attack. But it has long outlived this function and purpose. The only question is how radical a political change will be required to transition from the crisis of this ideology.
There is no reason why Iran cannot replicate the experience and become like Egypt, or Pakistan (itself officially an “Islamic republic”) or Turkey (with its Islamist government and ruling party), none of which is lacking independence or without differences or is otherwise in lockstep with American policy — but even those states have not been without dramatic political controversies and events of crisis in recent decades. But none of them became international pariah states with economic and political sanctions against them like Iran, as a result of their crises.
Iran today faces another. The war with the U.S. is not the cause but the effect. It is a symptom of the Islamic Republic’s terminal illness if not death agony. Iran has been uniquely isolated ever since 1979. Trump’s attempt to mediate and actively manage a transition for Iran might be ill-advised. But the crisis in Iran was and is real, with or without the war. It must be resolved based on changes within Iran. If they are inadequate, it will only be deferred — not avoided. Trump grabbing the opportunity to settle it on his watch — and how he did so — can be disputed, but what cannot be denied is that there was a real crossroads that had been reached.
Perhaps the Islamic Republic will save itself and remain alone, entrenched behind nuclear and conventional weapons like North Korea. But this won’t justify the regime but only condemn it, especially in the eyes of its own people. Perhaps the Islamic Republic’s efforts will lead to a settlement of regional and domestic conflicts in its favor, forced by resisting American intervention. Either way, it will be the end of the Islamic Revolution in substance if not in name. | P
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on the Iran war and the Democrats
Chris Cutrone discusses the Iran war and Trump’s goals. In the second half, they discuss the “Left” and the Democratic Party in the U.S.
Chris Cutrone with Michael Downs on Curtis Yarvin, democracy and Marxism
Chris Cutrone discusses with Michael Downs and Nance of the Dangerous Maybe Curtis Yarvin, democracy and Marxism.
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on the Iran war
Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain the Iran war. In the second half, they discuss pedagogy vs. punditry, writing vs. podcasting and other issues of public intellectual life.
Why Marxists loved America (Chase Center at OSU)
Chris Cutrone
Presented at the Salmon P. Chase Center of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, February 11, 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. | §
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on Iran protests and anti-ICE protests
Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain recent events in anti-regime protests in Iran and the anti-ICE protests in the U.S. including the killing of Renee Good in Minnesota.
Chris Cutrone with Cadell Last on Marxist politics for undead Millennials
Chris Cutrone and Cadell Last discuss Cutrone’s upcoming year-long 2026 Philosophy Portal course based on his books The Death of the Millennial Left and Marxism and Politics, reviewing the various topics and themes from the essays collected in these books.
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on Trump’s new Pax Americana
Chris Cutrone discusses his essay “Trump’s bid for a new Pax Americana,” published in Compact Magazine, with Doug Lain.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/trumps-bid-for-a-new-pax-americana
Trump’s bid for a new Pax Americana
Weakest links in the “Axis of Evil”
Chris Cutrone
Donald Trump began his second term with a push for negotiated settlement with Iran, picking up from efforts at the end of his first term, which had been interrupted by Covid and his unseating in 2020. In the meantime, the October 7 attack had happened, prompting Israel to dismantle Iranian allies throughout the Middle East. This effort culminated in direct war between Iran and Israel in 2025, in the midst of US-Iran talks. Benjamin Netanyahu might have hoped to spike these negotiations, but Trump joined Israel’s bombing of Iran in order to end Israel’s war, turning it into a further lever against Iran for making a deal, and resisting Israeli calls for a “regime-change” crusade. Trump went so far as to offer the prospect of Iran joining the Abraham Accords, which had appeared originally designed to isolate and present a united Arab-Israeli front against Tehran. Trump proudly lists the Israel-Iran conflict as one of the “wars” he’s settled during his first year in office.
Now, protests have broken out in Iran. There have been several waves of such protests going back to 2009 and the Green Movement around controversial election results, disputed between reformers and conservative hardliners. Since then, the specter of regime collapse of some kind or another has loomed. Would the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council be swept aside by the IRGC and Basiji militias in a military coup? Would the veneer of “democracy” be stripped away? Or would there be a democratic revolution and a more radical political change, ending the Islamic Republic? Will a civil war erupt? Will Iran become another “failed state”?
Trump seems to be preparing for any eventuality. In a recent Truth Social post, he promised to “rescue” Iranians from violent repression by the regime. At the same time, as recently as Netanyahu’s visit to Mar-a-Lago ahead of the New Year — the day after Volodymyr Zelensky came to discuss war and peace with Russia — Trump called for Iranian leaders to “take the deal” he’s been offering them. One of his first actions in his transition after election in November 2024 was to make contact with Iranian representatives about restarting talks. Was he sincere, or was it a ruse to trick them into lowering their guard? It is best to take Trump straightforwardly. He has said that Iranian leaders have two choices: deal or conflict. He threw out the JCPOA negotiated by Obama because he thought it was a bad deal, not because he wanted war. He wanted to avoid it. He seems justified in saying that Obama and Biden efforts had led to October 7, because it provided billions to Iran with which they could and did instigate trouble. Meanwhile, Trump’s tete-a-tete and desired détente with Russia’s Putin continues — as China’s Xi has accepted an invitation to visit Washington and Trump agreed to travel to Beijing later this year.
Venezuela and Iran are sideshows in this greater global drama. Geopolitically, the Russia-China alliance — in the wake of Putin’s disastrously miscalculated invasion of Ukraine — is bolstered by Iran and Venezuela, both of which are important sources of oil for China. Is it mere coincidence that Trump began to apply military pressure to Nicolás Maduro, and specifically the Venezuelan oil trade, at the same time as the protests in Iran? One might imagine that from a US policy perspective, protests broke out in the wrong country. But, really, it’s all the same. Trump can play Venezuela and Iran off each other. At the podium with Netanyahu, Trump disavowed seeking regime change in Iran. This is because the threat of destabilization of Iran is another reason for them to reach a deal, to save themselves.
By contrast, Maduro has now been removed from office by a US military operation, although his allies remain in control of the country. Maduro was indicted on drug trafficking charges at the end of the first Trump term in 2020, so, as far as the Administration is concerned, this is unfinished business. His capture recalls the US invasion to arrest Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989, also on drug charges. This is importantly law-enforcement action and not war. The truth is that the US is, as is said derisively, the “global cop,” and is in fact the only serious agency for law internationally. Maduro’s rights as a defendant at trial will be respected. The principles of the American Revolution whose 250th birthday we celebrate this year, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are not restricted by nationality, but are meant for everyone. Their practical reach is not a formality.
Trump’s presidency represents the coincidence of several historical crises and potential transitions out of them — a “polycrisis” that Trump is attempting to ride to a brighter American and global future. The Iranian Islamist regime coincides with the neoliberal era. Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980 amid the US embassy hostage crisis during the Islamic Revolution; the hostages were released the same day as Reagan’s Inauguration in January 1981. Later, Reagan courted a serious impeachment threat in the Iran-Contra Affair; and his worst military calamity was suffered when Iran-supported Hezbollah militants in Lebanon attacked US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing hundreds and prompting their withdrawal.
Historically, the Shah was brought down by the 1970s economic crisis that disproportionately impacted the developing world, bringing the Sandinistas to power against a US-backed dictatorship in Nicaragua in the same year. That same year, Washington successfully lured the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan to suppress an American-supported Islamist insurgency there. The ultimate collapse of the USSR and its Eastern European allied regimes could be traced to their debacle in Afghanistan, from which had risen new leadership with Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, both dissidents from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Now, the crisis of neoliberalism that ended the Cold War and was shadowed by fundamentalist revolts against developmental states seems to be bringing history full-circle. There is even some prospect for a return of the Shah — his son — to Iran: The dual Persian and Shia Muslim identity can resolve either way, or a new combination of both. Persian nationalism after exhaustion of Islamism might be a welcomed change.
Iran, like many other countries, has struggled to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis, subsequent Great Recession, and Covid pandemic, the latter of which hit Iran particularly hard. The world economy is still hanging on American growth. After many years, it’s clear that no alternative is going to emerge, especially as Europe and China have precipitously slowed. This is the opportunity Trump is leveraging in political negotiations.
The Latin American Pink Tide has long run its course and ebbed. Chavismo has faded. Both Iran and Venezuela have bled their middle classes to massive emigration, from which they might not return but still maintain economic and political ties back home. The “Shahs of Sunset Boulevard” are waiting in Los Angeles for expanded business opportunities in Tehran. The mullahs are ready to change robes for suits. Trump is offering them the chance. He’s in no rush, but time might be running out for them.
The choice is not peace or war, but what new status quo will emerge after the conflict. What will be the outcome of the crisis? This is the end of an era. The game is over. Time to take the winnings and go home — to retire. During the Biden presidency, other actors moved to change facts on the ground in their long-term interests and as legacies. Their efforts have run aground and come to grief. Trump is providing an exit strategy to not only Russia, Iran, and Venezuela, but to Ukraine and Israel.
The world aflame is the condition for a renewed Pax Americana. That everyone is suspicious is no deterrent to Trump, but more leverage. Hamas was the first to recognize that their only hope was Trump. No mafia boss, whether Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Ukrainian, Palestinian, Israeli, or Iranian, can deal with Washington as an inherently duplicitous neoliberal technocratic policy blob. But they can deal with Trump. Can he talk them down from the ledge, or will they jump? | §
Originally published in Compact (January 5, 2026)