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 and “Horkheimer in 1943 on party on class,” the latter on Horkheimer’s previously unpublished essay “On the sociology of class relations.”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

Morbid Symptoms: Chris Cutrone vs. Alexander Mckay and Tara Van Dijk on Trotskyism and Stalinism

Chris Cutrone debates Marxism, Trotskyism and Stalinism (including Maoism) with Alexander Mckay of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute (U.K.) and Tara Van Dijk of Morbid Symptoms podcast.

Post-debate debrief with Doug Lain for Sublation Media.

(Chris Cutrone prepared opening remarks:)

A long time ago, when I was in college and a member of the orthodox Trotskyist Spartacus Youth Club associated with the Spartacist League, I watched a rerun of the Star Trek Original Series episode, “The Omega Glory,” from 1968, in which a post-apocalyptic civilization was beset by war between the Yangs and the Kohms — I thought that this is what the end of history would look like: Maoists vs. Trotskyists!

I consider Stalinism to be, simply, Right-wing Marxism. — A Right-wing liquidation of Marxism. It’s easy to understand why Communists in the Soviet Union and China have had to pretend to be “Marxist,” since they seemed to represent the Russian Revolution’s outcome. But there is no excuse for anyone who is not an apparatchik with vested interests in this pretense to accept this.

I am not sure why you are Stalinists: are you ignorant; opportunists; or do you want to be the hangmen of the revolution? Would you be Marxist at all if there were no “actually existing socialist states” to admire from afar?

Similarly, I am not sure what I am here to defend about myself: my ideas; my practical strategy; or my soul.

Actual Stalinists and Maoists have rejected Dengism as Revisionism and post-Mao China as a fascist-led state-capitalist country.

Mao himself said, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, that the supposed “Left-wing followers of Marx often become fascists.”

Stalin and Mao themselves would regard you are Revisionists — or as “useful idiots.”

In my time, back in the day, anti-Revisionist Maoism was represented by the Maoist International Movement, or MIM Notes, and J Sakai’s book Settlers represented this tendency. But they would have — rightly — rejected your perspective as non- and even anti-Marxist.

But divisions among Stalinists are longstanding: there was the Sino-Soviet split between Mao and Khruschev; the Sino-Vietnamese war; and the various African, Asian and Middle Eastern civil wars in which Communist China and the Soviet Union fought on opposite sides and chewed up countries as cannon-fodder in wars that had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever. Each side called the other “imperialist,” and had spurious pseudo-“Marxist” explanations for why this was so.

There was also the U.S.-China alliance under Mao against the Soviet Union, which involved these armed conflicts.

Mao claimed to uphold Stalin against Khruschev’s denunciations, but even Mao said that Stalin’s Purge Trials were wrong — too bureaucratic and authoritarian. His solution was the Cultural Revolution; his slogan was “bombard the [Communist Party] headquarters.” But now you defend the Chinese Communist Party — Mao was calling to bombard the people in China you have placed your hopes in; he was calling to bombard you.

On Israel-Palestine and the Gaza war, if I can speak personally: I was horrified by the Oct. 7 attacks, but not because of the atrocities against civilians, but because of what I expected the Israeli response would be. I identify spontaneously with the Palestinians, not the Israelis — and this is precisely why I oppose Hamas. Leaving aside the question of the struggle for socialism entirely, I am opposed to terrorism, which I consider liberalism with bombs and reformism with guns — as Lenin called it. And he meant targeted attacks on the state, not communitarian violence against civilians. To defend it is to defend the slaughter of Palestinians that was its intended result: Hamas wanted this “genocide” to happen (they call it “martyrdom”), and that’s why they are wrong — from a proletarian socialist perspective.

Yes, Lenin said about Marxists who had qualms about the 1916 Easter Uprising, which had significant participation by Irish socialists, that if you can’t stomach petit bourgeois outrages, you will not be able to support the revolution. But he meant the proletarian socialist revolution. Whereas today we have nothing but petit bourgeois outrages — and petit bourgeois “radical” cheerleaders or spectators.

We have had a century of so-called Third World revolution: it has not brought the world closer to socialism. But it has distorted the minds of Western “Leftists” such as yourselves.

Which brings me to practical strategy. I have two distinct tracks: Platypus and my Campaign for a Socialist Party. I notice that the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute’s mission is “education and analysis.” This makes you no different from any other “Left” tendency, which I consider to be inherently limited to propaganda — mis-education. There is no political practice whatsoever. There is “analysis,” supposedly, which since it is divorced from any viable political strategy, is just tendentious ideology. Platypus addresses the dead “Left” reduced to mere trafficking in misunderstood ideas, which serve only to justify, in a crackpot way, what are capitalist politics and policies, to a very limited audience of virtual fanboys (and girls).  In Platypus we are trying, at the level of ideas, to “clear ideological obstacles” to a real proletarian socialist movement. It is an inherently limited project. We are addressing the “Left,” which is of course a petit bourgeois milieu.

By contrast, my Campaign is taking on the practical tasks of laying some kind of foundation for a proletarian socialist movement and politics. As I have said repeatedly, this will necessarily look like anarchism — or like grassroots “long-march” Maoism. So be it. But unlike the anarchists, we won’t fetishize social action and oppose political action — the eventual struggle for state power, and building a party to achieve it — on principle; unlike the Maoists, we won’t tail after supposedly “progressive” or “working-class” capitalist politics, which, again, has clearly led nowhere — nowhere but capitalist politics — since the 1970s. Similarly, however, we are addressing “Leftists” — petit-bourgeois radicals — who might want to serve as potential cadres of what, to actually be socialist, must become a working-class movement. We’re not there yet.

The 20th century leaves a lot of treacherous debris — and unexploded ordnance — from the disintegration of Marxism and proletarian socialism. I recognize that we are beginning today from scratch. But we have to avoid the traps awaiting the ignorant or unwary.

Chris Cutrone with Platypus pedagogues on Hegel, Marx, Bonapartism and socialism

A discussion among Platypus pedagogues on readings from the Platypus Affiliated Society’s academic year syllabus of primary Marxist readings.

Readings addressed:
Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History
Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008), “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010), “Class consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) today” (2012) and “Badiou’s ‘communism’: a gerontic disorder” (2011)
Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left”
Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (trans. Dawn and Decline) 1926-31
Theodor Adorno, “Imaginative excesses” (orphaned from Minimal Moralia, published in “Messages in a bottle”)
Karl Marx, “To make the world philosophical” (excerpt from dissertation); Letter to Arnold Ruge September 1843; selections from 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
Marx, “The coming upheaval” from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847)
Marx, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850); selections from The Class Struggles in France (1851) and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); and Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer March 5, 1852

Platypus academic year primary Marxist readings syllabus:

https://platypus1917.org/2025/07/09/platypus-primary-marxist-reading-group-summer-and-fall-2025-winter-2026/