Chris Cutrone
A book talk on the newly published collection of essays Marxism in the Age of Trump (Platypus Publishing, 2018) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on March 9, 2018 ëěŁ ëě¤íë ě´.
A book talk on the newly published collection of essays Marxism in the Age of Trump (Platypus Publishing, 2018) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on March 9, 2018 ëěŁ ëě¤íë ě´.
Platypus Review 105 | April 2018
An abridged version of this article was presented at the 4th Platypus European Conference closing plenary panel discussion, “What is the Future of Socialism?,” with Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute of Globalization and Social Movements), Alex Demirovic (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation), Mark Osborne (Alliance for Workersâ Liberty; Momentum) and Hillel Ticktin (Critique journal), at Goldsmiths University in London on February 17, 2018.
The liquidation of [Marxist] theory by dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice. . . . The interrelation of both moments [of theory and practice] is not settled once and for all but fluctuates historically. . . . Those who chide theory [for being] anachronistic obey the topos of dismissing, as obsolete, what remains painful [because it was] thwarted. . . . The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth-content only by those who agree with [Friedrich] Schiller that âworld history is the world tribunal.â What has been cast aside but not absorbed theoretically will often yield its truth-content only later. It festers as a sore on the prevailing health; this will lead back to it in changed situations.
âAdorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)[1]
THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM is the future of capitalismâthe future of capitalism is the future of socialism.
Socialism is an illness of capitalism. Socialism is the prognosis of capitalism. In this respect, it is a certain diagnosis of capitalism. It is a symptom of capitalism. It is capitalismâs pathology. It recurs, returning and repeating. So long as there is capitalism there will be demands for socialism. But capitalism has changed throughout its history, and thus become conditioned by the demands for socialism. Their histories are inextricably connected and intertwined. This is still true today.
Society under capitalism in its concrete form will be conditioned by the need to realize capital. This means that society will be conditioned by the contradiction of capital. The future of socialism will be conditioned by that contradiction. This is an illness of self-contradiction of society in capitalism.
What kind of illness is capitalism?
Friedrich Nietzsche described the modern affliction of nihilism in capitalismâhe didnât use the term âcapitalismâ but described itâas an âillness, but the way pregnancy is an illness.â
Socialism is the pathology of capitalismâin terms of Marx and Engelsâs Manifesto, âcommunismâ is the âspecterâ âand capitalism is the pathology of socialism, always threatening its return íëě ëźě´í¸. The question is the prognosis of socialismâthe prognosis of capitalism.
Capitalism is an illnessâa pathologyâof potential. We suffer from the unrealized potential of capital.
Capitalism is an imbalance of production and appropriation. It is a problem of how society produces, and how society appropriates its own production. As such it is a problem of metabolism. This is often referred to, for instance by Keynesians, as a problem of overproductionâa problem of underconsumption. But it is more self-contradictory than that. It is more than a temporary market imbalance awaiting correction, either by the state or by the market itself. Turning over the issues of production and consumption, we find that capitalism is also a problem of an overconsumption of resourcesâMarx called it the wearing-out of both the worker and natureâand an underconsumption of value, for instance in an overabundance of money without outlet as capital investment. It is also, however, an underproduction of resourcesâa wastage of nature and laborâand an overproduction of value. It is, as Marx called it, a problem of surplus-valueâof its production and consumption.
The pathology of capitalism is a metabolic disorder. As capitalism is usually addressed by contemporary commentators, it is not however a disorder of scarcity or of (over-)abundance, nor of hierarchy or of equalityâfor instance, a problem of leveling-down. But, rather, as a problem of what Marx called the âsocial metabolism,â it exhibits all of these symptoms, alternately and, indeed, simultaneously.
In the way that Nietzsche regarded capitalist modernity as an illness, but an illness the way pregnancy is an illness, it is not to be cured in the sense of something to be eliminated, but successfully gone through, to bring forth new life.
Is it a chronic or an acute condition? Capitalism is not well analogized to cancer because that would imply that it is a terminal condition. No. Rather than socialism waiting for capitalism to die, however, the question is whether socialism is merely a fever-dream of capitalism: one which chronically recurs, occasionally, but ultimately passes in time asp net excel. Capitalism is not a terminal condition but rather is itself a form of life. A pathological form of life, to be sure, but, as Nietzscheâand Christianity itselfâobserved, life itself is a form of suffering. But what if capitalism is not merely a form of lifeâhence a form of sufferingâbut also a potential form of new life beyond itself? What if the recurrent symptom of socialismâthe crisis of capitalismâis a pregnancy that we have failed to bring to term and has instead miscarried or been aborted? The goal, then, would be, not to eliminate the pregnancy of socialism in capitalism, not to try to cure the periodic crises of capitalism, but for capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism.
This would mean encouraging the health of capitalism in a certain sense. Perhaps humanity has proven too ill when undergoing capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism; but the pregnancy has been mistaken for an illness to be cured, rather than what it actually was, a symptom of potential new life in the process of emerging.
Past Marxists used the metaphor of ârevolution as the midwife of history,â and they used this very precisely. Socialist revolution would make socialism possible, but would not bring forth socialism ready-made. An infantâmoreover one that is not yet bornâis not a mature form of life.
These are the stakes of properly recognizing capitalism for what it isâthe potential for socialism. If we mistake capitalism for an illness to be eliminated, then we undergo its pathology periodically, but fail to bring forth the new life that capitalism is constantly generating from within itself. The point then would be, not to avoid capitalism, not to avoid the pregnancy of socialism, but to allow capitalism to give birth to socialism. Bourgeois ideology denies that there is a new form of life beyond itselfâthat there is socialism beyond capitalismâand so seeks to terminate the pregnancy, to cure the ailment of capitalism, to eliminate the potential that is mistaken for a disease, whether thatâs understood as infection by a foreign body, or a metabolic imbalance to be restored. But capitalism is not a malignant tumor but an embryo. The recurrent miscarriage of socialism, however, makes capitalism appear as a tumor, more or less benign, so long as it passesâor is extracted or otherwise extirpated.
As a cancer, capitalism appears as various kinds of cancer cells running rampant at the expense of the social body: whether of underclass criminals, voracious middle classes, plutocratic capitalists, or wild âpopulistâ (or even âfascistâ) masses, all of whom must be tamped down if not eliminated entirely in order to restore the balanced health of the system. But capitalism does not want to be healthy in the sense of return to homeostasis, but wants to overcome itselfâwants to give birth to socialism. Will we allow it Download the recorder app?
For this would mean supporting the pregnancyâseeing the symptoms through to their completion, and not trying to stop or cut them short.
What is the prognosis of socialism?
Socialism is continuous with the ârights of human beings and citizens,â according to the principles of âliberty, equality and fraternity,â that âall men are created equal,â with âinalienable rightsâ of âlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.â Socialism seeks to realize the bourgeois principle of the âfree association of producers,â in which each is provided âaccording to his needâ while contributing âaccording to his ability.â The question is how capitalism makes this both possible and impossible, and what it would take to overcome its impossibility while realizing its possibility.
Moishe Postone, in his 2006 essay on âTheorizing the Contemporary World: Brenner, Arrighi, Harveyââa companion-piece to his other well-known essay from 2006, âHistory and Helplessnessââgrasped this contradiction of our time as that between islands of incipient post-proletarian life surrounded by seas of superfluous humanityâpostmodernist post-humanism and religious fundamentalist defense of human dignity, in a world simultaneously of both post-proletarian cities of abundance and sub-proletarian slums of scarcity.
Peter Frase, in an early foundational article for the Democratic Socialists of Americaâs Jacobin magazine in 2011, wrote of the âFour Possible Futuresââthis was later expanded into the 2016 book subtitled âLife after Capitalismââon the supposed âinevitable endâ of capitalism in four potential outcomes: either in the âcommunism of abundance and egalitarianism;â the ârentism of hierarchy and abundance;â the âsocialism of egalitarianism and scarcity;â or the âexterminism of hierarchy and scarcity.â The future was supposed to lie between two axes of contradiction: egalitarianism vs. hierarchy; and scarcity vs. abundance.
Unlike Postoneâwho, like Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek around the same moment, grasped the simultaneous existence of postmodernism and fundamentalism as two sides of the same coin of late capitalismâFrase neglects the dialectical proposition that all four of his âpossible futuresâ will come trueâindeed, that all four are already the case in capitalism. They are not merely in the process of coming true, but have been the actual condition of capitalism throughout its history, ever since its inception in the Industrial Revolution. There has been the coexistence of hierarchy and egalitarianism and of scarcity and abundance, and each has been the precondition for itsâdialecticalâopposite.
One could say that this has been the case since the early emergence of bourgeois society itselfâthat capitalist contradiction was always the caseâor, indeed, since the beginning of civilization itself. One could say that this has been the condition of âclass society as a whole,â the condition of the existence of a âsocial surplusâ throughout history.
This is the perspective of Alain Badiouâs âcommunist hypothesis,â for example. Badiou has mobilized a rather literal reading of Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto, and a straightforward, if rather naĂŻve, interpretation of communism or socialism from Babeufâs âconspiracy of equalsâ onwardsâindeed perhaps all the way back from Jesus and His Apostles onwards. âCommunismââin Peter Fraseâs terms, âegalitarian abundanceââis the âland of milk and honey,â where the âlast shall be first, and the first shall be last.â
Capitalism, understood undialectically, then, is, by contrast, the exterminism of rentism, the inhumanity of exploitation, in which scarcity and hierarchy rule through elite appropriation of the surplus Download SuperBad 3. But this has been true since the dawn of civilization, since the beginningâin terms of Engelsâs clever footnote to the Manifestoâs assertion that âhistory is the history of class struggleââof ârecorded history.â
So what is different with capitalism? What has changed is the form of the social surplus: âcapital.â To say, as Marxists did, that, as the possibility for socialism, capitalism is the potential âend of prehistoryâ is to say that all of history is the history of capital: the history of civilization has been the development of the social surplus, until it has finally taken the form of capital.
Ancient civilizations were based on a specific kind of social surplus, however. The surplus of grain beyond subsistence produced by peasant agriculture allowed for activity other than farming. Peasants could tighten their belts to feed the priests rather than lose the Word of God, and so that some knights could protect them from the heathen. But for us to return to the religious basis of civilization would also mean embracing values quite foreign to the bourgeois ethos of work, such as that âthe sick are blessed,â with the divine truth of the vanity of life, whereas we rightly consider sickness to be a curseâat the very least the curse of unemployability in society.
So what is the social surplus of capital? According to Marx, capital is the surplus of labor. It is also, however, the source of possibilities for employment in production: the source of social investment. Does this make it the source of hierarchy or of equality, of scarcity or of abundance, of post-humanism or of ontologicalâfundamentalâhumanity? It is the source of all these different apparently opposed values. It is their common condition. It is society itself, albeit in âalienatedâ form. As such, it is also the source of societyâs possible change.
Socialism aims at the realization of the potential of society. But it will be achievedâor notâon the basis of capitalism, under conditions of capital. The social surplus of capital is the source of potential societal change, of new forms of productionâmanifold new forms of human activity, in relation to others, to Nature, and to ourselves. Changes in capital are changes in our social relations. Capital is a social relation.
Capital is the source of endless new forms of social scarcity and new forms of social abundanceâof new forms of social expropriation and of social productionâas well as of new forms of social hierarchy and of new forms of social equality. Capital is the source of all such changes in society over the course of the last two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution.
Hillary Clinton, in an interview during her failed campaign for President of the U.S., said that what keeps her âawake at nightâ is the problem of figuring out policy that will encourage the investment of capital to produce jobs Download Skycastle 8. Indeed, this is precisely what motivated Trumpâsâsuccessfulâcampaign for President as well. Interestingly, it is unclear whether this is what properly motivated Bernie Sanders as an alternative to Clinton, or if this now motivates Jeremy Corbyn as the head of the U.K. Labour Party. In the case of Corbyn and Sanders, it seems that they have been motivated less by the problem of capital and labor than by a more nebulous concern for âsocial justiceââregardless of the latterâs real possibilities in capitalism. In the U.K., for example, Theresa Mayâs âRed Toryismââby prioritizing the circumstance of the âBritish worker,â like Trumpâs stated priority for the âAmerican workerââis actually more realistic, even if it presently has a rather limited organized political base. Corbyn, as a veteran New Leftist âsocial justice warrior,â is actually closer to the criteria of neoliberal politics than May, whose shifting Conservative Party is not (yet) able to support her agenda. By contrast, it is a solidly neoliberal Blairite Labour Party that Corbyn leads. But Brexit, and the crisis of the EU that it expressed, is changing the landscape. May is still, however, leading the way. As is, of course, Trump.
In this sense, the issue of socialism was closer to the actual concerns of Clinton and Trump than to Sanders. Sanders offered to his followers the Obama Presidency that never was, of a ânew New Dealâ that is never going to be. By contrast, both Clinton and Trump were prepared to move on from the 2008 economic crisis: How to make good of the crisis of neoliberalism, now a decade old? For every crisis is an opportunity for capitalism. This is what must be the concern of politics.
This is the ageless question of capitalism: How is society going to make use of its crisis of overproduction, its surplus in capitalâits surplus of labor? How are the social possibilities of capital going to be realized? What is the actual potential for society in capitalism?
Of course, the narrow horizons of the perspectives of both Clinton and Trump and of May for realizing the potentials of capitalism are less appealing than the apparent idealism of Corbyn and Sanders. But, realistically, it must be admitted that the best possible outcomeâwith the least disruption and dangerâfor U.S. and thus global capitalism at present would have been realized by a Clinton Presidency. If Trumpâs election appears to be a scary nightmare, a cruise into the unknown with a more or less lunatic at the helm, then, by contrast, a Sanders Presidency was merely a pipe-dream, a safe armchair exercise in idealism Eye-catching. Today, the stock market gambles that, whatever Trumpâs gaffes, the Republican Party remains in charge. The captain, however wild-eyed, cannot actually make the ship perform other than its abilities. The question is whether one trusts a CEO trying to build the company by changing it, or one trusts the shareholders who donât want to risk its profitability. Trump is not a safe bet. But he does express the irrepressible impulse to change. The only question is how.
So the question of the future of socialism is one of potential changes in capitalism. The question is how capitalism has already been changingâand will continue to change.
What seems clear is that capitalism, at least as it has been going on for the past generation of neoliberalism, will not continue exactly the same as it has thus far. There has been a crisis and there will be a change. Brexit and the fall of David Cameron as well as Trumpâs victory and Hillaryâs defeatâthe successful challenge by Sanders and the rise of Corbyn alongside Mayâs Premiershipâcannot all be chalked up to the mere accidental mistakes of history.
In the face of historical change, continuity must be reckoned withâprecisely as the basis for this change. How is neoliberal capitalism changing out of its crisis?
Neoliberalism is old and so is at least in need of renewal. The blush has gone off the rose. Its heroic days are long behind us. Obama rallied it to a certain extent, but Hillary was unable to do so again. The Republicans might be stuck in vintage 1980s Reaganism, but Trump is dragging them out of it. In the face of Trump, the question has been posed: But arenât we all good neoliberals? Not only Nancy Pelosi has said that, all respect to Bernie, we need not try to become socialists but remain capitalists. The mainstream Republican contender Marco Rubio said the same about Trump, while Ted Cruz retired to fight another day, against what he indicatively called Trumpâs âsocialism.â But the Tea Party is over. Now, the specter of âfascismâ in the crisis of neoliberalismâwhich, we must remember, regards any and all possible alternatives to itself as more or less fascistâis actually the specter of socialism.
But what does the actual hope for socialism look like today? Does it inevitably appear as nationalism, only with a difference of style? Must the cosmopolitanism of capitalism take either the form of unmediated globalization (which has never in fact existed) or rather inter-nationalism, relations between nations Avira Hangul edition? These apparent alternatives in themselves show the waning of neoliberal optimismâthe decline of Clintonâs âglobal village.â We are now livingâby contrast with the first Clinton era of the 1990sâin the era of neoliberal pessimism, in which all optimism seems reckless and frightening by comparison: Hillaryâs retort that âAmerica is great already!â raised against Trumpâs âMake America Great Again!â Trump was critical of, and quite pessimistic about, existing conditions, but optimistic against Hillaryâs political pessimismâto which Hillary and Obama could only say that things arenât so bad as to justify (either Sanders or) Trump.
Were the Millennials by contrast too optimistic to accept Hillaryâs sober pragmatismâor were they so pessimistic as to eschew all caution of Realpolitik and embrace Sanders and Corbyn? Have they clung, after the election of Trump, now, to the shreds of lip-service to their concerns, as the best that they could hope for? Does Sandersâlike Corbyn in the U.K.âmerely say, better than Hillary or Obama, what they want to hear? By comparison, Hillary and Trump have been a salutary dose of realityâwhich is bitterly resented. Obama was the âchange we can believe inââmeaning: very little if any. Clinton as the continuation of Obama was the sobriety of low-growth ârealism.â Now Trump is the reality of changeâwhether we like it or not. But it is in the name of the optimism for growth: âJobs, jobs, jobs.â
The problem of capitalismâthe problem that motivates the demand for socialismâis that of managing and realizing the possibilities of a global workforce. This is in fact the reality of all politics, everywhere. All countries depend on international and, indeed, global trade, including the circulation of workers and their wages. Even the âHermit Kingdomâ of North Korea depends not only on goods in trade but on remittances from its workers abroad. This issue of the global workforce is the source of the problem of migrationâthe migration of workers. For instance, wars are waged with the problem of refugees foremost in mind. Political crisis seeks alleviation in either benign ways such as the âbrain drainâ of the emigrating middle-class, or malignantly in ethnic cleansingâin either case the exodus of restive surplus populations that cannot be integrated. International aid as well as military intervention is calculated in effects on migration: how to prevent a refugee crisis? The U.S. has paid countries such as Egypt and Pakistan to subsidize their unemployed through bloated militaries. What is to be done with all those seeking work? Where will they find a job? It is a global problem.
Capital is the social form of this surplus of laborâthe social surplus of production. Capital is the way society tries to manage and realize the potential of that surplus. But the source of that surplus is no longer so much human activityâlaborâas it is science and technology oracle client 10g. The problem is that, politically, we have no way of marshaling this surplus other than through possibilities for laborâfor instance, through managing nation-states as labor markets. The question is realizing the potential possibilities of the social surplus beyond the reproduction of an increasingly redundant laboring workforce. Will they be starved or exterminated? Or will they be freed?
The only alternatives capitalism offers is in freedom to workânot the worst form of freedom the world has ever known, but its possibilities in capitalism are increasingly narrow. The question is the freedom from work. How will this be realized? There has been mounting evidence of this problem ever since the Industrial Revolution: unemployment. Social Darwinism was not a program but a rationalization for the crisis of capitalism. It remains so today. Will humanity free itself from the confines of capitalâthe limits of labor?
Were Jacobinâs Peter Fraseâs four possible alternative futures merely alternatives in rhetoric? Nearly no one claims to favor exterminism, scarcity, or inequality. The real future of capitalism does not actually belong to such expressions of pessimism. Fortunately, it will be appreciably better than our worst fearsâeven if, unfortunately, it will be much worse than our best desires. Capitalism for better or worse does indeed have a future, even if it will be different from what we are now used to. It will also be different from our dreams and nightmares.
Jacobinâs Frase seems to assume that not what he calls âcommunismâ but âsocialismââthe combination of egalitarianism and scarcityâis both more possible and more desirable: for Frase, abundance carries the danger, rather, of continued capitalist ârentismâ and hierarchy. For Frase, among others, the future of social conflict seems to be posed over the terms of scarcity: equality vs. âextermination;â for instance, egalitarianism vs. racism.
Both Moishe Postoneâs and Peter Fraseâs antinomiesâof postmodernism and fundamentalism, and of scarcity and egalitarianism (the latter combination as Fraseâs formula for âsocialismâ)âare expressions of pessimism pspice 9 1 ë¤ě´ëĄë. They form the contemporary face of diminished hopes. But capitalism will not tarry over them. It will move on: it is already moving on.
What is the future of abundance, however with hierarchyâthat of continued capitalism, that is, of âcapital rentsââin society, and how does this potential task any future for socialism? Where will the demand for socialism be raised? And how is it to be realized?
We should not assume that capitalist production, however contradictory, is at an end. No. We are not at an end to forms of scarcity under conditions of abundance, or at an end to hierarchies conditioned by social equality.
Citizen Trump shows us this basic fact of life under continued capitalism.
As Walter Benjamin observed in conversation with Bertolt Brecht during the blackest hour of fascism at the midnight of the last century, we must begin not with the âgood old daysââwhich were in fact never so goodâbut with the âbad new ones.â We must take the bad with the good; we must take the good with the bad.
We must try to make good on the reality of capitalism. As Benjamin put it, we must try to redeem its otherwise horrific sacrifices, which indeed are continuous with those of all of civilization. Historyâthe demand for socialismâtasks us with its redemption.
The future of capitalism is the future of socialismâthe future of socialism is the future of capitalism.
Perhaps capitalism is the illness of bourgeois society, and socialism is the potential new form of life beyond the pregnancy of capitalism. Bourgeois society does not always appear as capitalism, but does so only in crisis. We oscillate in our politics not between capitalism and socialism but between bourgeois ideology and anti-capitalismânowadays usually of the cultural ethno-religious fundamentalist communitarian and identitarian type: forms of anti-bourgeois ideology. But socialism was never, for Marxism at least, simply anti-capitalism: it was never anti-bourgeois. It was the promise for freedom beyond that of bourgeois society. The crisis of capitalism was regarded by Marxism as the tasking of bourgeois society beyond itself by socialism. It was why Lenin called himself a Jacobin; and why Eugene Debs called the 4th of July a socialist holiday. Socialism was to be the realization of the potential of bourgeois society, which is otherwise constrained and distorted in capitalism. So long as we live in bourgeois society there will be the promiseâand taskâof socialism ęľŹę¸ ë˛ě ěěą ë¤ě´ëĄë. |P
[1] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Seabury Press, 1973), 143â144.
Reading and discussion broadcast on Radical Minds, WHPK radio, Chicago:
Platypus Review 102 | December 2017 â January 2018
THE ACCOUNT OF HISTORY is the theory of the present: How did we get here; and what tasks remain from the past â that however appear to be ânewâ today? As Adorno put it, âthe new is the old in distress.â[1] This is true of capitalism and its crisis now.
The present crisis is a crisis of the world system of capitalism that emerged in the 20th century, a crisis of the capitalist world created by the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century â in fits and starts (such as the two World Wars and the Cold War) but nonetheless consistently and inexorably. That system has been led by the countries newly industrialized at the end of the 19th century, the U.S., Germany and Japan. All three have come to be in crisis in the early 21st century â the crisis of the EU can be regarded as a crisis of the management of âGermanâ capital.
David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), written and published in the heyday of neoliberalism, regarded the history of capitalism as a succession of âregimes of accumulationâ â concrete forms for socially and politically mediating the need to accumulate capital in its valorization process. But since, according to Marxism, capitalism is itself a form of social contradiction and thus a crisis and decay of society and politics, each successive form of capitalism takes up and perpetuates the crisis of the preceding form, however in an altered way.[2] Capitalism really is a matter of âkicking the can down the road,â apparently indefinitely. But the banging can eventually returns, and we must ultimately pay the added costs of its deferral.
The characterization by critical contemporaries of the late-19th â early-20th century era as the âGilded Ageâ[3] expressed its quality as what Kant warned about a century earlier, in his 1784 essay on the âIdea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,â namely, âthe danger that the vitality of mankind may go to sleep:â âEverything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery.â[4] Gilded Age capitalism was such âglittering misery.â This quality of capitalism continues today, especially in the last generation of neoliberalism whose spell was broken in the recent crisis. Joseph Schumpeter tried to put a happy face on capitalism by calling it âcreative destruction,â but Marxism recognized to the contrary that it is actually destructive creation.[5] And its destructiveness is not only immediate but has long-term consequences. The destruction of capitalism is cumulative: it makes claims on future generations that cannot be settled cheaply.[6]
It was during the period of the late 19th century Gilded Age that capitalists appeared not as entrepreneurs of production but as âRobber Baronsâ â an aristocracy of looting. Marx had already mordantly observed that in industrial production, with its high capital requirements, it was not the case that being a captain of industry made you money, but rather that having money made you a captain of industry. In industrial capitalism, it was not, as Adam Smith had thought, production developed by reinvestment of relatively low profits in the long run, with high wages facilitating increased consumption â wealth â in a virtuous cycle, but rather, as Marginal Utility Theory, developed precisely in this late 19th century era, regarded more cynically, that use-values of commodities decrease over time, so investors in their production better get in early and take their profits out while the going is still good and before it becomes a matter of diminishing returns â the miserable reasoning of what Smith regarded as âmercantile interest,â the profiteering of âbuying cheap and selling dear,â that he thought actually constrains and undermines the productivity of wealth in society, and so needed to be overcome as an impediment to growth Frog. Marx pursued rather the self-contradiction in what became of Smithâs labor theory of value in industrial capitalism.
The accelerated technical production of the Industrial Revolution increased along with it the accumulation and concentration of capital, which Marx thought produced a crisis of value in industrial capitalism, in that such production was still socially mediated by the value of wage-labor, however anachronistically. Wage labor was inadequate for the social appropriation of industrial production. This was the self-contradiction of the capitalist mode of production in political-economic terms, according to Marx: the âbourgeois social relationsâ were contradicted by the âindustrial forces of production;â industrial technique served to increase capital but this outstripped the actual social productivity of human labor, eliminating workers from production so that, as Max Horkheimer wryly observed, âmachines have made not work but the workers superfluous.â[7] Adam Smithâs âproprietors of stockâ were only a slight variation on the prior traveling merchants collecting the products of cottage industry, now gathering the previously disparate producers in factories; they were not capitalists in the Marxist sense of âowners of the means of production:â the role of the proprietors in Smithâs view of production was minimal by comparison to the laborers who were actually making things with increased efficiency. Where Smith would have expected higher productivity to result in the increased value of time in work through cooperation that would not only increase the purchasing power of labor but also decrease labor-time and increase leisure-time, what happened for labor instead, at a societal level, was the pernicious combination of over-work and unemployment, not attributable merely to temporary labor-market corrections. Human labor was progressively eliminated from production in absolute and not only relative terms: increased production was no longer based primarily on human labor-power inputs in efficient cooperation (as in Adam Smithâs example of the pin-factory), but rather on the development of science and technology, or what Marx called the âgeneral social intellect,â objectified in machine production.
The âcombined and uneven [i.e. self-contradictory] developmentâ of capitalism is exhibited by the paradoxical phenomena of simultaneously coexisting ârobots and sweatshops.â Industrial development and the accumulation of capital undermine the entire bourgeois social ethos of rewarding productivity through work, the exchange of labor as a commodity. Contrary to Smithâs expectation, Marx observed how in capitalism labor sinks from the most precious to âthe most wretched of commodities.â[8] The workers are expropriated of the value of their labor at a societal level, and not merely through being super-exploited by their employers. There is a glaring problem in the development of wealth in society based on the value of labor. The ramifications of this are found in capitalismâs social effects.
This is what makes capitalists appear ambiguously as performing a social duty as investors but also as criminals ripping off society â what Smith had warned about, the constant danger of their âconspiracy against the public.â Bernard Mandevilleâs 1714 book Fable of the Bees, a parable of âprivate vices, public benefits,â seemed mocked by what was actually happening in the Gilded Age. Were the capitalists really, as todayâs parlance goes, âjob creators?â Yes and no: as often as not. When President Theodore Roosevelt went after J.P. Morgan for violation of anti-trust laws, and Morgan, a Republican supporter, complained, asking what he could do to avoid prosecution by the government, Roosevelt replied with a variation of Robespierreâs injunction that if someone feels implicated by the gaze of judgment it is because he is guilty. Who wouldnât side with Rooseveltâs sentiment against the Robber Baron? But Roosevelt was motivated not by altruism but what he regarded as necessary policy, to make capitalists responsible investors: Build the railroads, just donât rip us off. Marx thought that socialism would allow industrial production to go beyond capital and overcome the need for and value of labor in a socially beneficial and not destructive way 경ěě ëŹ´ëŁ ë¤ě´ëĄë. This was a problem of society, not reducible to the criminality of the individual capitalists. Even Roosevelt recognized the need for a change in policy beyond the mere curbing of excesses. For Marxism, the accumulation of capital in industrial production was a crisis for bourgeois society, but also an opportunity for changing it. Indeed, realizing the social potential of capitalism was a necessity â a task: it was âinevitable.â The only question was the depth and breadth of the needed change in society.
In the 20th century, the discontents of Gilded Age capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution led to what Harvey (after Antonio Gramsci) called âFordism,â a new âregime of accumulationâ or concrete form for the valorization process of capital. It was a new and different form of production and consumption, a new economics and new politics, a new culture: a new way of life. The 20th century and its continuing legacy today express unresolved problems inherited from Gilded Age capitalism that Fordist capital was not able to overcome. We suffer today from discontents with the results not, for instance, of the 16thâ18th century African slave trade or the 15th century Reconquista and New World discovery, but rather from, for example, the failure of Reconstruction in the U.S.,[9] and the late, 2nd-wave colonialism from the era of what Marxists called âimperialismâ at the end of the 19th century â hence the problem of so-called âneo-colonialism.â We live in the world created by the early 20th centuryâs attempts to solve those problems.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote of the âlong 19thâ and âshort 20thâ centuries.[10] He regarded 1789â1914 as one cycle, and 1914â1991 as another. But perhaps we should consider the short 19th century, the core of which runs from the 1820sâ70s (from the aftermath of the French Revolution until the U.S. Civil War, the Meiji Restoration and Franco-Prussian War), and the long 20th century which began, perhaps as early as the 1870s but certainly by the 1890s, and continued until the recent crisis of the 2000sâ10s.[11] The high 19th century of liberalism contrasts with the 20th century of state capitalism.
In the 1990s, it seemed as if, after the âlong detourâ of fascism and âCommunismâ (Stalinism) in the 20th century,[12] a responsibly reformed âprogressiveâ capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution would finally have its unobstructed day in the sun: the U.S., Germany and Japan could inherit a progressively productive world at peace. The mirage of the purported Third Industrial Revolution of the post-WWII midâlate 20th century was revealed to be merely the full flowering of the turn-of-the-20th century electromagnetic revolution that had succeeded the original Industrial Revolutionâs thermodynamics: cybernetics turned out to be the latest expression of liberal democracy; however Steampunk fantasies haunted historical memory in the 1990s. But already in the 1970s, Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner showed us the âused futureâ of decrepit Fordist capital. Neoliberalism naturalized this ě the guest 9í.
The retrospective view from the present allows for regarding the 20th century as the outcome of the Gilded Age â of the Second Industrial Revolution. But the 20th century was conditioned by the mounting discontents of the Gilded Age and its crisis in the early 20th century â most apocalyptically in the First World War and its aftermath. We still live in the after-effects of the crisis that conditioned the 20th century. The inability to overcome the discontents of capital from a century ago still swamps us today.
In the late 19th century U.S., the Second Industrial Revolution was governed largely by the Republican Party, which was the combined party of progressive liberalism and big capital. The Democratic Party in this period, by contrast, was the party of the middle class and conservatism. So, for instance, Populism as a 1890s Depression phenomenon fed into the Democratic Party, with William Jennings Bryan the Democratsâ (unsuccessful) candidate for President in 1896 and (again in) 1900. But Progressivism emerged as a reform effort from within the Republican Party against manifest problems of liberal capitalism in the 1890sâ1900s â most dramatically under President Theodore Roosevelt.
In Europe, discontents with the Gilded Age / Second Industrial Revolution manifested in the Socialist Parties of the Second International. Liberal capitalism was opposed by a mass industrial workers politics â most significantly in the major party of the Second International, the SPD (Social-democratic Party of Germany). In the U.K., discontents with liberalism led to the formation of the Labour Party. These parties had origins in the 1870s but experienced phenomenal growth especially in the aftermath of the crisis of the 1890s. Countries drawn into the Second Industrial Revolution more broadly but on a subordinate subsidiary basis included the Russian Empire and Italy, which also experienced mass radicalization in the form of new Social-Democratic and Socialist Parties lg dna ë¤ě´ëĄë.
However these new socialist parties also experienced a crisis of their growth in the 1890s â a crisis of their political purpose: Were they, as they claimed, parties of political revolution, or rather of social reform? Eduard Bernstein was the most perspicacious of the commentators on the developments of this period in the 1890s. He regarded the growth of the U.K. workers movement that led to the formation of the Labour Party as evidence that a revolutionary socialist political party may not be necessary for the transformation of capitalism into socialism: socialism may socially evolve within capitalism rather than requiring its political overthrow. The eventual election of majority socialist or labor parties may be sufficient to crown the development of the social movement of the working class through its civil society organizations such as labor unions and other social collectives (such as womenâs organizations, etc.).
The 20th century belied this socialist optimism of the late 19th century that Marxism had in common with liberalism. Just as Progressivism expressed manifest problems of liberal capitalism, so the new distinctly ârevolutionaryâ current in socialism beginning circa 1900 represented by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky as well as by Debs (who was converted to Marxism in the late 1890s) expressed discontent with socialist reformism. Luxemburg for instance called Bernstein simply a âliberal.â What this meant was that Bernstein regarded liberal democracy as politically adequate for the activity of the working class in its struggle for socialism. Bernstein thought that the capitalist interest could be subordinated to a political majority. What Bernstein didnât reckon with was how the working class would become politically split in the crisis of capitalism.[13] In the First World War and the Revolutions in Russia, Germany, Italy and Hungary that broke out in its aftermath 1917â19, the former socialist parties of the Second International divided between reformist Social Democrats and revolutionary Communists. In 1919, responding to criticisms of the course of the Russian Revolution, Debs declared that, âFrom the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.â[14]
This is related to how Progressivism emerged contemporaneously from the crisis of liberalism. It was acrimonious as well, with incumbent President Taft condemning his challenger, his former friend and colleague Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate for President in 1912, as âthe most dangerous man in America.â It led, via the actual beneficiary of the split among the Republicans, Woodrow Wilsonâs more socially conservative (for example, avowedly racist) Democratic Party Progressivism, to (Theodore Rooseveltâs nephew-in-law) Franklin Delano Rooseveltâs New Deal.[15]
The question is the alternative to capitalist progressivism offered by Marxist socialism. In the U.S. Eugene Debsâs Socialist Party of America sought to intervene with working-class socialism across the division of Republican Party big-capitalist liberalism versus Democratic Party middle-class conservatism. âIndustrial democracyâ was the term of this socialist opposition under Marxist leadership.
As a Marxist, Debs like Rosa Luxemburg understood that this pressed a contradiction Download Mac YouTube mp3.[16] Marxism was not an authoritarian collectivist opposition to liberalism, but sought to combine and transcend middle class conservative-reactionary discontents over the destructive effects of capitalism with the revolutionary social potential of the dynamism of big capital. Debs articulated this in his 1900 election manifesto, first delivered as a speech in Chicago, on âCompetition versus cooperation:â[17]
The Republican platform is a self-congratulation of the dominant capitalist class. âProsperity galore, give us four years more.â The Democratic platform is the wail and cry of the perishing middle class; calamity without end. The Social Democratic platform is an indictment of the capitalist system; it is the call to class consciousness and political action of the exploited working class; and it is a ringing declaration in favor of collective ownership of all the means of production and distribution, as the clarion voice of economic freedom.
Progressivism sought to similarly transcend the liberal capitalist vs. conservative populist divide emerging from industrialization, which is why liberals could observe in 1912 that Theodore Rooseveltâs Progressive Party was seeking to usurp the mantles of both William Jennings Bryanâs Populist Democrats and Debsâs Socialists. Democrat Woodrow Wilsonâs election as President was the result of the split among the Republicans between Progressives and old-style liberals. This set the stage for the triumph of New Deal progressivism under FDR â however 20 years later, after the crisis of the Great Depression.
But FDRâs New Dealism, specifically as a Democratic Party phenomenon, combined but did not transcend the split of progressive capitalism with middle-class conservatism. The working class was thus bound in the Democratic Party to both big capital and the middle class. The working-class struggle for socialism found earlier in the old Socialist Party of America was squeezed out between these two aspects of the progressive New Deal Democrats. Socialism in the U.S. never recovered from this suppression. The New Deal Coalition Democrats became the ruling party in the U.S. in the high 20th century.
The Democrats have tried ever since FDR to retain a progressive capitalist alliance of liberal capital with middle-class conservatism. But what happened in the political crisis of the New Deal Coalition in the 1960s (signaled by the Civil Rights Movement as well as the U.S.âs losing war in Vietnam), combined with the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s, was that the form of middle-class conservatism changed â and was captured by the Republicans instead. This was not only expressed in the Southern Strategy that captured the Dixiecrat middle class (racial) conservatives, but also the appeal to âlaw and orderâ that captured the Northern urban and suburban working class ethnics who had previously supported the New Deal Democrats.
Subsequently, this has taken the otherwise longstanding form of the old split within liberalism that Progressivism represented: progressive liberalism versus conservative liberalism. The conservative liberals have promised the middle class that it will benefit from big capital; whereas the progressive liberals have actively sought policies that will ensure this Download the guangxi song of the west windowse style. But neither the promise nor the policies have been able to prevent the social destruction and hence the conservative reaction of the middle class. Both the Republicans and Democrats have exploited middle-class discontents without satisfying them.
The working class has been the passive object of this process, oscillating between big-capitalist liberalism and middle-class conservatism, however in the obscure form of oscillating between greater or lesser support for progressive liberalism â greater or lesser support for the Democrats. Politically, this means the subordination of the working class to the middle class. But which middle class?
The 20th century saw the rise of the ânew middle classâ of corporate capitalist managers, as opposed to the old middle class of small proprietors as well as of artisanal workers. The old middle class were the petite bourgeoisie, which were always distinct from the new industrial working class ever since the 19th century. So the question in the 20th century became the relation between the proletarianized working class of wage-earners and the capitalist managerial middle class. Could the middle class be captured by progressive liberalism? Or would the perennial crisis of capitalism lead instead to populist conservatism? How could populism, whether middle or working class, be neutralized as a disruptive threat to the negotiations of big-capitalist politics?
From the era of the late-19th century Second International, Debs serves as an example of how a populist could become a socialist â and not a progressive liberal. By contrast, Eduard Bernstein shows how a Marxist could become a progressive liberal, via the liquidation of proletarian socialism by neglect of the appeal of middle-class conservatism to which the working class could succumb in its trade unionism.
The working class is susceptible to middle-class conservatism insofar as it remains attached to a prior form of capitalism â the accumulated ensemble of previous concrete forms of wage labor â that undergoes crisis and is destroyed. Progressivism depends conversely upon the amenability and âliberalismâ of the middle class to go along with changes in capitalism led by big capital. Big capital benefits from all changes anyway â capitalists can shift their investments or retire into philanthropy and entire countries can adopt what Lenin called âcoupon-clippingâ[18] â so the real issue is the struggle to come out on top or simply not to sink entirely but keep oneâs head above water in the next wave of capitalism. Conservatives are always there to try to take advantage of those swamped and potentially left behind, with demagogic appeals to the status quo that people forget was itself once something new íźě¤ ë°ě¤.
The question is, who are the progressives and who are the conservatives, politically? Perhaps the progressives are the more cunning conservatives â or the conservatives are the more cunning progressives. In the last generation of neoliberalism the Republicans could plausibly claim to be the âtrue revolutionariesâ in advancing capitalism, and thus addressed and exploited the manifest liabilities of the Democratsâ conservatism. The game is to capture middle-class discontents in âprogressiveâ capitalist âreformsâ (e.g. âwelfare reform,â âtrade reformâ etc.). The Republicans did so through the âReagan Revolution,â just as the Democrats had done in the 1930s FDR New Deal Coalition through which they had replaced the Republicans as the dominant majority party since the Civil War. Every âold conservativeâ was once a ânew revolutionaryâ in capitalism.
Proletarian socialism â Marxism â by contrast sought to subordinate the middle class to the working class in reappropriating capital, which it proposed could only happen through the âdictatorship of the proletariat.â The political party for proletarian socialism thus sought to lead the broader âmassesâ in âsocial democracyâ in order to achieve socialism.
This would be especially true of the new managerial middle class which could simply take direction from the working class where they formerly did so from the capitalists â including from the capitalist state and its state capitalist managerial policies. Thus the capitalists could be retired into philanthropy. This was the vision of the Second International (1889â1914) and of mid-20th century Social Democratic politics. Especially since it was understood by Marxism, for instance by Leninâs conception of contemporary âimperialismâ or monopoly capitalism, that not only the new middle class as corporate employees but also the working class itself subsisted not on the value of their own laboring activity but rather on a cut of the profits of capital, which was granted to them for political reasons, through a myriad of government subsidies, to prevent revolution â not merely to soften the blows of the business cycle of boom and bust.
Theodore Roosevelt called this the need for a âSquare Dealâ â indicatively not a âfairâ deal, not merely enforcing liberal capitalism, but the government actively ameliorating its defects â and understood it explicitly as required to stave off socialism. But Roosevelt had, not Marxâs vague âspecter of communism,â but Debsâs actual mass Socialist Party of America staring him down to draw this political conclusion: it was a rear-guard action, but with a visionary long view. Progressivism was meant to institute political reforms required to be up-to-date with capitalist development: it was a matter not so much of advancing history as catching up with it; in this sense it still accorded with classical liberalism that the state should follow society and not try to determine it. But since Rooseveltâs time, new problems arising from reforms attempted in the 20th century have clouded the issue; however, the essential political predicament of liberal democracy in the industrial era remains.
The problem and task of âprogressive capitalismâ is the attempt to maintain capitalism through its manifest social and political crisis. The alignment of the working class with the middle class in common capitalist interest with big capital is always temporary and inevitably fraught ěąę˛˝ ě°ŹěĄ. There is always a struggle for supremacy in the fractious, politically negotiated social alliance of capital, which will eventually burst forth from the inexorable obsolescence of any and all concrete forms of capitalism in society.
The question the capitalists periodically face is: Can the conservative-reactionary middle class be made to go in peace (e.g. overdose on opioids â before that, on whiskey: it is important to note that the Progressives advocated Prohibition), or will it freak out and disrupt society and politics in uncontrollable ways? Trotsky called fascism the âpetite bourgeoisie run amok.â[19] But every old middle class was once a new middle class â just as every old form of wage-labor was once a new form of capitalism: the working classâs discontents are subsumed under middle-class conservatism; the potential for socialism in capitalism thus disappears. The contradiction of capital that Marxism once recognized is submerged.
The âprogressive capitalistâ political forms that emerged as an alternative to Marxist socialism after the crisis of the Gilded Age and were carried through the 20th century have exhausted themselves in two waves of crisis: the crisis of the 1960sâ70s that led to neoliberalism; and the present crisis of neoliberalism itself in the 2000sâ10s.[20] The attempted return to the Gilded Age since the 1980sâ90s has clearly failed â which is why this deeper history leading to the present reasserts itself today. It is undigested.
Glenn Beck was not wrong to panic at the sight of Trump and take his ascendancy as the occasion to condemn the Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson from a century ago.[21] Beck counterposed the âAmerica of the Founding Fathers Washington and Jeffersonâ to that of the âProgressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson,â calling the 2016 election the final defeat of the former by the latter. Neglected by Beck in his division of American history is Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War as a second founding moment of the U.S. But the evident desire for return to the apparently more innocent time of the Second Industrial Revolution and its liberal optimism neglects its real discontents and actual crisis in the Gilded Age, which once were expressed by Marxist socialism in the era of the Marxist-led parties of the Second International, including the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs, but were captured instead by âprogressiveâ state capitalism in the 20th century that Beck and other conservative liberals constantly bemoan â regretting its political necessity.
Today, the question is the future of that 20th century state capitalism that, no matter how rickety, still dominates the world. Its prospects look grim â China notwithstanding.
But actually it is no more grim than the 20th century itself â or the late 19th century Gilded Age of Second Industrial Revolution capitalism that gave birth to the 20th century.
Now as before, the Republicans and Democrats compete over the political capture of middle-class conservative reaction by big capital in service of a capitalist âprogressâ that is none. What disappears is the possibility once recognized by Marxism of the working class, through proletarian socialism, superseding both âprogressiveâ capital and middle-class reaction ěŹëě ë°°í°ëŚŹ. Without it, capitalism is permanent, the middle class under threat periodically runs amok, old tenements are torn down, slums cleared, and new dormitories for the working class are hastily constructed, and in the end the best we can hope for is another Industrial Revolution â with all the destruction that it will inevitably bring. | P
[1] Adorno, âReflections on Class Theoryâ (1942), in Can One Live after Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. (Stanford University Press, 2003), 93â110.
[2] See my âSymptomology: Historical Transformations in Social-Political Context,â Platypus Review 12 (May 2009), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2009/05/15/symptomology/>.
[3] The term originated from Mark Twainâs 1873 novel, co-written by Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which expressed disappointments with the post-Civil War boom era in the U.S. It was adopted in the 1920s and retrospectively applied to the entire preceding era, especially from the 1870sâ1890s.
[4] Available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm>.
[5] Marx and Engels had observed, in their Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848, available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>), that the crisis of capitalism would end âeither in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.â
[6] See Walter Benjamin, âOn the Concept of Historyâ (AKA âTheses on the Philosophy of History,â 1940), available online at <https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html>.
[7] Horkheimer, âThe Authoritarian Stateâ (1942), Telos 15:2 (Spring 1973), 3.
[8] Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, âEstranged Labour,â available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm>.
[9] For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his high Jim-Crow era 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, recognized it was the capitalist crisis of the 1870s after the Panic of 1873 that had spelled the doom of Reconstruction.
[10] See Hobsbawmâs books The Age of Revolution: 1789â1848 (1962), The Age of Capital: 1848â1875 (1975), The Age of Empire: 1875â1914 (1987), and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914â1991 (1994).
[11] Another way of considering this history is to regard the history of Marxism relative to the phenomenon of the emergence of so-called âstate capitalism.â See my â1873â1973: The Century of Marxism: The Death of Marxism and the Emergence of Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Anarchism,â Platypus Review 47 (June 2012), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2012/06/07/1873-1973-the-century-of-marxism/>.
[12] See James Weinstein, The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left (2003), excerpts in The Nation (July 7, 2003) and In These Times (May 28, 2003) available online, respectively, at <https://www.thenation.com/article/long-detour/> and <http://inthesetimes.com/article/the_long_detour/the_long_detour>.
[13] See my âRosa Luxemburg and the Party,â Platypus Review 86 (May 2016), available online at <https://platypus1917.org/2016/05/03/rosa-luxemburg-party/> Download Sims 4 Toddler.
[14] âThe Day of the Peopleâ (February 1919), written about the assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during the Spartacist Uprising of the German Revolution, available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1919/daypeople.htm>.
[15] See Ken Burnsâs recent documentary series The Roosevelts: An Intimate History (2014), which traces this lineage of Progressivism from TR to FDR, including that of TRâs niece, FDRâs wife Eleanor Roosevelt.
[16] See Luxemburg, Social Reform or Revolution? (1900/08), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/index.htm>.
[17] Available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1900/0929-debs-competitionvcooperation.pdf>.
[18] See his pamphlet on Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/>.
[19] Trotskyâs writings on fascismâs nature and character were collected in Fascism: What It Is, and How to Fight It (Pioneer Publishers, U.S., 1944), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm>.
[20] See my âSymptomology,â op. cit.
[21] See for instance, Glenn Beck, âWhy Teddy Roosevelt is Americaâs New Founding Fatherâ (May 11, 2016), online at <http://www.glennbeck.com/2016/05/11/history-lesson-teddy-roosevelt-americas-new-founding-father/>, where Beck says that,
So the country is going to vote â the parameters are the Roosevelts. Those are the bookends. Theodore Roosevelt, the beginning of progressivism, to FDR, heavy statism. Thatâs where weâll vote. And weâve just voted two people in the FDR category. Hillary Clinton is FDR. Trump could be Woodrow Wilson, where he silences people and throws them into jail if you have a differing opinion. He could be Woodrow Wilson. But sheâs probably FDR.
Platypus Review 100 | October 2017
Audio recording of reading and discussion of this essay at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on October 18, 2017 is available at: <https://archive.org/details/cutrone_millennialleftisdeadsaic101817>.
Video recording of discussion of this essay at the 4th Platypus European Conference at Goldsmiths University in London on February 17, 2018 is available at: <:https://youtu.be/tkR-aSK60U8>.
Those who demand guarantees in advance should in general renounce revolutionary politics. The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process. It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. No one has bothered to pave in advance the road of revolutionary upsurge for the proletariat. With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past. Those who are frightened by this had better step aside. (âRealism versus Pessimism,â in “To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew,” 1933)[1]
They had friends, they had enemies, they fought, and exactly through this they demonstrated their right to exist. (âArt and Politics in Our Epoch,â letter of January 29, 1938)
The more daring the pioneers show in their ideas and actions, the more bitterly they oppose themselves to established authority which rests on a conservative âmass base,â the more conventional souls, skeptics, and snobs are inclined to see in the pioneers, impotent eccentrics or âanemic splinters.â But in the last analysis it is the conventional souls, skeptics and snobs who are wrongâand life passes them by. (âSplinters and Pioneers,â in âArt and Politics in our Epoch,â letter of June 18, 1938)[2]
â Leon Trotsky
THE MILLENNIAL LEFT has been subject to the triple knock-out of Obama, Sanders, and Trump Direct11. Whatever expectations it once fostered were dashed over the course of a decade of stunning reversals. In the aftermath of George W. Bush and the War on Terror; of the financial crisis and economic downturn; of Obamaâs election; of the Citizens United decision and the Republican sweep of Congress; of Occupy Wall Street and Obamaâs reelection; and of Black Lives Matter emerging from disappointment with a black President, the 2016 election was set to deliver the coup de grâce to the Millennialsâ âLeftism.â It certainly did. Between Sanders and Trump, the Millennials found themselves in 2015â16 in mature adulthood, faced with the unexpectedâunprepared. They were not prepared to have the concerns of their âLeftismâ become accused by BLMâindeed, Sanders and his supporters were accused by Hillary herselfâof being an expression not merely of âwhite privilegeâ but of âwhite supremacy.â The Millennialsâ âLeftismâ cannot survive all these blows. Rather, a resolution to Democratic Party common sense is reconciling the Millennials to the status quoâespecially via anti-Trump-ism. Their expectations have been progressively lowered over the past decade. Now, in their last, final round, they fall exhausted, buffeted by âanti-fascismâ on the ropes of 2017.
A similar phenomenon manifested in the U.K. Labour Party, whose Momentum group the Millennial Left joined en masse to support the veteran 1960s âsocialistâ Jeremy Corbyn. But Brexit and Theresa Mayâs election did not split, but consolidated the Millennialsâ adherence to Labourâas first Sanders and then Trump has done with the American Millennial Left and the Democrats.
All of us must play the hand that history has dealt us. The problem is that the Millennial Left chose not to play its own hand, shying away in fear from the gamble. Instead, they fell back onto the past, trying to re-play the cards dealt to previous generations. They are inevitably suffering the same results of those past failed wagers.
The Left has been in steady decline since the 1930s, not reversed by the 1960sâ70s New Left. More recently, the 1980s was a decade of the institutionalization of the Leftâs liquidation into academicism and social-movement activism. A new socialist political party to which the New Left could have given rise was not built Melon Download top100 for week 1 in January. Quite the opposite. The New Left became the institutionalization of the unpolitical.
Michael Harringtonâs (1928â89) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), established in 1982, was his deliberate attempt in the early 1980s Reagan era to preserve what he called a âremnant of a remnantâ of both the New Left and of the old Socialist Party of America that had split three ways in 1973. It was the default product of Harrington and othersâ failed strategy of ârealigningâ the Democratic Party after the crisis of its New Deal Coalition in the 1960s. No longer seeking to transform the Democratic Party, the DSA was content to serve as a ginger-group on its âLeftâ wing.
Despite claims made today, in the past the DSA was much stronger, with many elected officials such as New York City Mayor David Dinkins and Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger. The recent apparent renaissance of the DSA does not match its historic past height. At the same time, Bernie Sanders was never a member of the DSA, considering it to be too Right-wing for his purposes.
In 2017, the DSAâs recent bubble of growthâperhaps already bursting now in internal acrimonyâis a function of both reaction to Hillaryâs defeat at the hands of Trump and the frustrated hopes of the Sanders campaign after eight years of disappointment under Obama. As such, the catch-all character of DSA and its refurbished marketing campaign by DSA member Bhaskar Sunkaraâs Jacobin magazineâSunkara has spoken of the âmissing linkâ heâs trying to make up between the 1960s generation and Millennialsâis the inevitable result of the failure of the Millennial Left. By uniting the International Socialist Organization (ISO), Solidarity, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), and others in and around the way-station of the DSA before simply liquidating into the Democrats, the Millennial Left has abandoned whatever pretenses it had to depart from the sad history of the Left since the 1960s: The ISO, Solidarity, and SAlt are nothing but 1980s legacies.
The attempted reconnection with the 1960s New Left by the Millennials that tried to thus transcend the dark years of reaction in the 1980sâ90s âpost-politicalâ Generation-X era was always very tenuous and fraught. But the 1960s were not going to be re-fought. Now in the DSA, the Millennials are falling exactly back into the 1980s Gen-X mold. Trump has scared them into vintage Reagan-era activityâincluding stand-offs with the KKK and neo-Nazis linux openssl ë¤ě´ëĄë. Set back in the 1980s, It and Stranger Things are happening again. The Millennials are falling victim to Gen-X nostalgiaâfor a time before they were even born. But this was not always so.
The founding of the new Students for a Democratic Society (new SDS) in Chicago in 2006, in response to George W. Bushâs disastrous Iraq War, was an extremely short-lived phenomenon of the failure to unseat Bush by John Kerry in 2004 and the miserable results of the Democrats in the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections. Despite the warning by the old veteran 1960s SDS members organized in the mentoring group, the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), to not repeat their own mistakes in the New Left, the new SDS fell into similar single-issue activist blind-alleys, especially around the Iraq War, and did not outlive the George W. Bush Presidency. By the time Obama was elected in 2008, the new SDS was already liquidating, its remaining rump swallowed by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO)âin a repetition of the takeover of the old SDS by the Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party after 1968. But something of the new SDSâs spirit survived, however attenuated.
The idea was that a new historical moment might mean that âall bets are off,â that standing by the past wagers of the Leftâwhether those made in the 1930sâ40s, 1960sâ70s, or 1980sâ90sâwas not only unnecessary but might indeed be harmful. This optimism about engaging new, transformed historical tasks in a spirit of making necessary changes proved difficult to maintain.
Frustrated by Obamaâs first term and especially by the Tea Party that fed into the Republican Congressional majority in the 2010 mid-term elections, 2011âs Occupy Wall Street protest was a quickly fading complaint registered before Obamaâs reelection in 2012. Now, in 2017, the Millennials would be happy for Obamaâs return.
Internationally, the effect of the economic crisis was demonstrated in anti-austerity protests and in the election and formation of new political parties such as SYRIZA in Greece and Podemos in Spain; it was also demonstrated in the Arab Spring protests and insurrections that toppled the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and initiated civil wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria (and that were put down or fizzled in Bahrain and Lebanon). (In Iran the crisis manifested early on, around the reform Green Movement upsurge in the 2009 election, which also failed.) The disappointments of these events contributed to the diminished expectations of the Millennial Left.
In the U.S., the remnants of the Iraq anti-war movement and Occupy Wall Street protests lined up behind Bernie Sandersâs campaign for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 2015 Download sap cts. Although Sanders did better than he himself expected, his campaign was never anything but a slight damper on Hillaryâs inevitable candidacy. Nevertheless, Sanders served to mobilize Millennials for Hillary in the 2016 electionâeven if many of Sandersâs primary voters ended up pushing Trump over the top in November.
Trumpâs election has been all the more dismaying: How could it have happened, after more than a decade of agitation on the âLeft,â in the face of massive political failures such as the War on Terror and the 2008 financial collapse and subsequent economic downturn? The Millennials thought that the only way to move on from the disappointing Obama era was up. Moreover, they regarded Obama as âprogressive,â however inadequately so. This assumption of Obamaâs âprogressivismâ is now being cemented by contrast with Trump. But that concession to Obamaâs conservatism in 2008 and yet again in 2012 was already the fateful poison-pill of the Democrats that the Millennials nonetheless swallowed. Now they imagine they can transform the Democrats, aided by Trumpâs defeat of Hillary, an apparent setback for the Democratsâ Right wing. But change them into what?
This dynamic since 2008âwhen everyone was marking the 75th anniversary of the New Dealâis important: What might have looked like the bolstering or rejuvenation of âsocial democracyâ is actually its collapse. Neoliberalism achieves ultimate victory in being rendered redundant.
Like Nixonâs election in 1968, Trumpâs victory in 2016 was precisely the result of the failures of the Democrats. The 1960s New Left was stunned that after many years protesting and organizing, seeking to pressure the Democrats from the Left, they were not the beneficiaries of the collapse of LBJ. Like Reaganâs election in 1980, Trumpâs election is being met with shock and incredulity, which serves to eliminate all differences back into the Democratic Party, to âfight the Right.â Antifa exacerbates this ěě¤í¸ëĄ apk.
From anti-neoliberals the Millennial Left is becoming neoliberalismâs last defenders against Trumpâjust as the New Left went from attacking the repressive administrative state under LBJ in the 1960s to defending it from neoliberal transformation by Reagan in the 1980s. History moves on, leaving the âLeftâ in its wake, now as before. Problems are resolved in the most conservative way possible, such as with gay marriage under Obama: Does equality in conventional bourgeois marriage meet the diverse multiplicity of needs for intimacy and kinship? What about the Millennialsâ evident preferences for sex without relationships, for polyamory, or for asexuality? The Millennials act as if Politically Correct multiculturalism and queer transgenderism were invented yesterdayâas if the world was tailor-made to their âsensitivity trainingââbut their education is already obsolete. This is the frightening reality that is dawning on them now.
Signature issues that seem to âchange everythingâ (Naomi Klein), such as economic âshock therapy,â crusading neoconservatism, and climate change, are sideswipedâushered off the stage and out of the limelight. New problems loom on the horizon, while the Millennialsâ heads spin from the whiplash.
Ferdinand Lassalle wrote to Marx (December 12, 1851) that, âHegel used to say in his old age that directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable.â We see this now with the last gasps of the old identity politics flowing out of the 1960s New Left that facilitated neoliberalism, which are raised to the most absurd heights of fever pitch before finally breaking and dissipating. Trump following Obama as the last phenomenon of identity politics is not some restoration of âstraight white patriarchyâ but the final liquidation of its criterion. The lunatic fringe racists make their last showing before achieving their utter irrelevance, however belatedly. Many issues of long standing flare up as dying embers, awaiting their spectacular flashes before vanishing.
Trump has made all the political divisions of the past generation redundantâinconsequential. This is what everyone, Left, Right and Center, protests against: being left in the dust. Good riddance.
Whatever disorder the Trump Administration in its first term might evinceâlike Reagan and Thatcherâs first terms, thereâs much heat but little lightâit compares well to the disarray among the Democrats, and, perhaps more significantly, to that in the mainstream, established Republican Party ě¤ë˛ěěš íľ ëŹ´ëŁ. This political disorder, already the case since 2008, was the Millennialsâ opportunity. But first with Sanders, and now under Trump, they are taking the opportunity to restore the Democrats; they may even prefer established Republicans to Trump. The Millennials are thus playing a conservative role.
Trumpâs electionâespecially after Sandersâs surprise good showing in the Democratic primariesâindicates a crisis of mainstream politics that fosters the imagination of alternatives. But it also generates illusions. If the 2006 collapse of neoconservative fantasies of democratizing the Middle East through U.S. military intervention and the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession did not serve to open new political possibilities, then the current disorder will also not be so propitious. At least not for the âLeft.â
The opportunity is being taken by Trump to adjust mainstream politics into a post-neoliberal order. But mostly Trump isâavowedlyâa figure of muddling-through, not sweeping change. The shock experienced by the complacency of the political status quo should not be confused for a genuine crisis. Just because thereâs smoke doesnât mean thereâs a fire. There are many resources for recuperating Republican Party- and Democratic Party-organized politics. As disorganized as the Parties may be now, the Millennial âLeftâ is completely unorganized politically. It is entirely dependent upon the existing Democrat-aligned organizations such as minority community NGOs and labor unions. Now the Millennials are left adjudicating which of these Democrats they want to follow.
Most significant in this moment are the diminished expectations that carry over from the Obama years into the Trump Presidency. Indeed, there has been a steady decline since the early 2000s. Whatever pains at adjustment to the grim ânew normalâ have been registered in protest, from the Tea Party revolt on the Right to Occupy Wall Street on the Left, the political aspirations now are far lower Download the iStation.
What is clear is that ever since the 1960s New Left there has been a consistent lowering of horizons for social and political change. The âLeftâ has played catch-up with changes beyond its control. Indeed, this has been the case ever since the 1930s, when the Left fell in behind FDRâs New Deal reforms, which were expanded internationally after WWII under global U.S. leadership, including via the social-democratic and labor parties of Western Europe. What needs to be borne in mind is how inexorable the political logic ever since then has been. How could it be possible to reverse this?
Harry S. Truman called his Republican challenger in 1948, New York Governor Thomas Dewey, a âfascistâ for opposing the New Deal. The Communist Party agreed with this assessment. They offered Henry Wallace as the better âanti-fascist.â Subsequently, the old Communists were not (as they liked to tell themselves) defeated by McCarthyite repression, but rather by the Democratsâ reforms, which made them redundant. The New Left was not defeated by either Nixon or Reagan; rather, Nixon and Reagan showed the New Leftâs irrelevance. McGovern swept up its pieces. Right-wing McGovernitesâthe Clintonsâtook over.
The Millennial Left was not defeated by Bush, Obama, Hillary, or Trump. No. They have consistently defeated themselves. They failed to ever even become themselves as something distinctly new and different, but instead continued the same old 1980s modus operandi inherited from the failure of the 1960s New Left. Trump has rendered them finally irrelevant. That they are now winding up in the 1980s-vintage DSA as the âbig tentââthat is, the swampâof activists and academics on the âLeftâ fringe of the Democratic Party moving Right is the logical result. They will scramble to elect Democrats in 2018 and to unseat Trump in 2020. Likely they will fail at both, as the Democrats as well as the Republicans must adapt to changing circumstances, however in opposition to Trumpâbut with Trump the Republicans at least have a head start on making the necessary adjustments Install os x 10.10 developer preview.app. Nonetheless the Millennial Leftists are ending up as Democrats. Theyâve given up the ghost of the Leftâwhose memory haunted them from the beginning.
The Millennial Left is dead. | P
Chris Cutrone, âThe Sandernistas,â Platypus Review 82 (December 2015âJanuary 2016); âPostscript on the March 15 Primaries,â PR 85 (April 2016); and âP.P.S. on Trump and the crisis of the Republican Partyâ (June 22, 2016).
Cutrone, âWhy not Trump?,â PR 88 (September 2016).
Cutrone, Boris Kagarlitsky, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, âThe crisis of neoliberalismâ (panel discussion February 2017), PR 96 (May 2017).
Cutrone, Catherine Liu and Greg Lucero, âMarxism in the age of Trumpâ (panel discussion April 2017), PR 98 (JulyâAugust 2017).
Cutrone, “Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today: ‘The Left is dead! â Long live the Left!’,” PR 1 (November 2007).
Cutrone, âObama: Progress in regress: The end of âblack politicsâ,â PR 6 (September 2008).
Cutrone, âIraq and the election: The fog of âanti-warâ politics,â PR 7 (October 2008).
Cutrone, âObama: three comparisons: MLK, JFK, FDR: The coming sharp turn to the Right,â PR 8 (November 2008) ëśěëł´ě2 ë¤ě´ëĄë.
Cutrone, âObama and Clinton: âThird Wayâ politics and the âLeftâ,â PR 9 (December 2008).
Cutrone, Stephen Duncombe, Pat Korte, Charles Post and Paul Street, âProgress or regress? The future of the Left under Obamaâ (panel discussion December 2008), PR 12 (May 2009).
Cutrone, âSymptomology: Historical transformations in social-political context,â PR 12 (May 2009).
Cutrone, “The failure of the Islamic Revolution in Iran,” PR 14 (August 2009).
Cutrone, Maziar Behrooz, Kaveh Ehsani and Danny Postel, “30 years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran” (panel discussion November 2009), PR 20 (February 2010).
Cutrone, “Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons: 1979, 1789, and 1848,” PR 33 (March 2011).
Cutrone, “To the shores of Tripoli: Tsunamis and world history,” PR 34 (April 2011)
Cutrone, âWhither Marxism? Why the Occupy movement recalls Seattle 1999,â PR 41 (November 2011).
Cutrone, âA cry of protest before accommodation? The dialectic of emancipation and domination,â PR 42 (December 2011âJanuary 2012).
Cutrone, âClass consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) today,â PR 51 (November 2012) 3d íëłź ë¤ě´ëĄë.
[1] Leon Trotsky, “To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew” (1933), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330715.htm>.
[2] Trotsky, âArt and Politics in Our Epoch,â Partisan Review (June 1938), available online at <https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/06/artpol.htm>.
Platypus Review #91 | November 2016
Whenever approaching any phenomenon, Adornoâs procedure is one of immanent dialectical critique. The phenomenon is treated as not accidental or arbitrary but as a necessary form of appearance that points beyond itself, indicating conditions of possibility for change. It is a phenomenon of the necessity for change. The conditions of possibility for change indicated by the phenomenon in question are explored immanently, from within. The possibility for change is indicated by a phenomenonâs self-contradictions, which unfold from within itself, from its own movement, and develop from within its historical moment.
Everything is taken not merely as it âis,â as it happens to exist, but rather as it âoughtâ to be, as it could and should be, yielding as-yet unrealized potentials and possibilities. So it is with âauthoritarianism,â in Adornoâs view. For Adorno, the key is how psychological authoritarianism is self-contradictory and points beyond itself. Adorno is interested in the âactualityâ of authoritarianism: as Wilhelm Reich put it, the âprogressive character of fascism;â[1] as Walter Benjamin put it, the âpositive concept of barbarism.â[2]
This demands a critical approach rather than a merely descriptive or analytically positive or affirmative approach. For something can be affirmed either in its justification and legitimation or in its denunciation. In either case, the phenomenon is left as it is; whereas, for Adorno, as a Marxist, âthe point is to change it.â[3]
So, what possibilities for change are indicated by authoritarianism, and how are such possibilities pointed to by the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis? For Adorno, it is unfortunate that social contradiction has passed from ideology and politics in society to individual psychology (indeed, this expresses a political failure), but there it is ëę¸ëę¸ í´ëĄąě´ ę˛ě.[4] The âF-scaleâ is misleading, as Adorno notes, in that it might â despite its being posed as a âscaleâ â be mistaken for a matter of difference in kind rather than degree. Meaning that, for Adorno, everyone is more or less susceptible to fascism â everyone is more or less authoritarian.
The competing aspects of the individual psyche between liberal individuality and authoritarian tendencies is itself the self-contradiction of authoritarianism Adorno sought to explore. In capitalism, liberalism is the flip-side of the same coin as fascism. Individualism and collectivism are an antinomy that express capitalist contradiction. For individualism violates true individuality and collectivism violates the true potential of the social collectivity. Individuality and collectivity remain unfulfilled desiderata, the aspirations and goals of bourgeois society, its emancipatory promise. For Adorno (as for Marx), both are travestied in capitalism â mere âshams.â
Authoritarianism is an expression of that travesty of society. Fascism is the sham collectivity in which the sham individuality hides itself; just as liberalism is the sham individuality that conceals the collective condition of society. That collective condition is not a state of being but the task of the need for socialism beyond capitalism. Fascism as well as liberalism expresses that unfulfilled need and tasking demand for socialism in capitalism.
So what would it mean to critique authoritarianism in an immanently dialectical manner? What is the critical value of authoritarianism, in Adornoâs view? How can the potential possibility pointing beyond capitalism be expressed by authoritarianism and revealed rather than concealed by individual psychology softether vpn client manager ë¤ě´ëĄë? How is society critically revealed in authoritarianism, pointing to socialism?
In âSociology and psychologyâ[5] Adorno diagnoses the division of psychology from sociology as itself a symptom of contradiction in society â of the actual separation and contradiction of the individual and the collective in capitalism.
In The Authoritarian Personality,[6] Adorno et al. wrote that the fascist personality was characterized by identification with technology, the love for instruments as âequipment.â Here, Adorno found the emancipatory potential beyond capitalism precisely in such identification and imitation: it becomes a matter of the form of individuation. In âImaginative excesses,â orphaned from Minima Moralia,[7] Adorno wrote that,
[N]o⌠faith can be placed in those equated with the means; the subjectless beings whom historical wrong has robbed of the strength to right it, adapted to technology and unemployment, conforming and squalid, hard to distinguish from the wind-jackets of fascism the subhuman creature who as dishonourâs progeny shall never be allowed to avert it.
The bearers of technical progress, now still mechanized mechanics, will, in evolving their special abilities, reach the point already indicated by technology where specialization grows superfluous. Once their consciousness has been converted into pure means without any qualification, it may cease to be a means and breach, with its attachment to particular objects, the last heteronomous barrier; its last entrapment in the existing state, the last fetishism of the status quo, including that of its own self, which is dissolved in its radical implementation as an instrument. Drawing breath at last, it may grow aware of the incongruence between its rational development and the irrationality of its ends, and act accordingly.
In âOn the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,â Adorno seeks to redeem authoritarianism in his conclusion when he offers that, âEven discipline can take over the expression of free solidarity if freedom becomes its content.â He goes on that, âAs little as [authoritarianism] is a symptom of progress in consciousness of freedom, it could suddenly turn around if [individual psychology], in unity with the society, should ever leave the road of the always-identicalâ[8] â that is, in going beyond capitalism. Here, critical authoritarianism is met by a critical individualism in which âcollective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.â[9] What are the aims of the collectivity expressed by the identification with technology? What Adorno following Benjamin called âmimesisâ[10] Freud analyzed psychologically as âidentification.â Adorno wrote that âthe pressure to be permitted to obey⌠is today more general than ever.â But what Marx called the âindustrial forces of productionâ are constrained and distorted by the âbourgeois social relations of productionâ in capitalism Download the voice. There is a homologous contradiction within the individual personality.
In âReflections on Class Theoryâ, Adorno wrote that,
Dehumanization is no external power, no propaganda, however conceived, no exclusion from culture. It is precisely the intrinsic reality of the oppressed in the system, who used formerly to stand out because of their wretchedness, whereas today their wretchedness lies in the fact that they can never escape. That they suspect that the truth is propaganda, while swallowing the propaganda culture that is fetishized and distorted into the madness of an unending reflection of themselves.
This means, however, that the dehumanization is also its opposite. In reified human beings reification finds its outer limits. They catch up with the technical forces of production in which the relations of production lie hidden: in this way these relations lose the shock of their alien nature because the alienation is so complete. But they may soon also lose their power. Only when the victims completely assume the features of the ruling civilization will they be capable to wresting them from the dominant power.[11]
Karl Marx regarded the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ as a phenomenon of âBonapartismâ â the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte as a result of the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in France. This was Marxâs difference from the anarchists: the recognition of the necessity of the state in capitalism.[12] Hence one should regard Marx on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a âcritical Bonapartist.â[13] Bonapartism expressed an objective societal need rather than a subjective attitude. Bonapartist response to the objective social crisis and contradiction of capitalism pointed beyond itself and so required a dialectical critique, which Marx thought the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon failed to provide by treating Bonapartism as objectively determined, apologizing for it, as did the sentimental socialist Victor Hugo who treated Bonapartism as a monstrous historical accident like a âbolt from the blue.â[14] Fatalism and contingency were two sides of the same contradiction that obscured a necessity that could be addressed properly only in a dialectical way evocreo ë¤ě´ëĄë. These are the terms in which Adorno addressed âauthoritarianism.â
Adornoâs “critical authoritarianism” addresses what the “immanent dialectical critique” of authoritarianism would mean, both in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic categories of description, and in terms of (absent) politics for socialism. Adorno’s Dream Notes records a dream of his participating in a gang-rape, as a primal scene of fascism.[15] The âdelightful young mulatto . . . the kind of woman one sees in Harlemâ who catches his eye admonishes him that âThis is the style of the Institute.â The homosexuality and sado-masochism of authoritarianism in pre-Oedipal psychology; the desire as well as fear to “liquidate the ego” in ambivalence about individuality; critical (as opposed to methodological or affirmative) individualism; the desire and fear of collectivity in authoritarian collectivism; projection, identification and counter-identification providing for social cohesion as well as for separation and atomization â these are the themes of Adornoâs critical approach to psychology in late capitalism.
A similar thought was articulated contemporaneously by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, which characterizes negrophobic racism as ârepressed homosexualityâ and a ânarcissistic disorder.â Fanon describes the Freudian approach to rape fantasies as a masochistic fear and desire that is an internalized projection of parental authority, a self-sadism. One fears what one wishes to happen; a wish is a way of mastering a fear by internalizing it; a fear is a way of repressing a wish. The reason rape is so traumatic is that it activates and violates such infantile experiences. There is the experience of parental seduction harking back to the anal phase of libido development, when the child experiences itself as unable to control its excretion, which is experienced as disturbingly involuntary, a blow to narcissism in the difficulty of toilet training, seeking to please the parentsâ expectations. The parentsâ cleaning of the infant is pleasurably stimulating, and the child internalizes the parentâs simultaneous desire and disgust, attraction and repulsion, which becomes the complex of feelings, the combination of shame and guilt with pleasure, that the child takes in its own bodily functions. Humiliation at loss of self-control is a formative experience of transforming narcissism into identification. The infantâs desire for the parents is an identification with the feared power.[16] The parents embody the ego-ideal of self-control. This is channeled later through gendered object-libido in the Oedipus complex as genital pleasure, but retains the sado-masochistic qualities of the anal phase, which precedes gender identification and so exhibits more basic, homosexual (ungendered) qualities that prevents the recognition of difference and individuality tts íęľě´ ë¤ě´ëĄë. In a narcissistic â authoritarian â society everyone becomes trapped in a static and self-reinforcing identity, where the need was actually to allow the opening to non-identity of freedom: the freedom to âovercome oneselfâ allowed by the healthy ego.
Fanon sought to provide an account of how âracial narcissismâ â the failure of the individual ego â could yet point beyond itself, specifically in its treacherously dyadic character of Self and Other, to the need that was blocked: âthe world of the You.â[17]
Adorno brings into his discussion of The Authoritarian Personality a key background writing for Fanonâs BSWM, Jean-Paul Sartreâs Anti-Semite and Jew, which assumes, as Adorno does, contemporary anti-Semitism as a norm and not an aberration. He states simply that what needs to be explained is why anyone is ânot anti-Semitic.â But this pointed not to a problem of psychology but of society. As Adorno commended Sartreâs treatment of anti-Semitism:
We distinguish between anti-semitism as an objective social phenomenon, and the anti-semite as a peculiar type of individuality similar to Sartreâs exposĂŠ which, for good reasons, is called âPortrait of the Antisemiteâ rather than âPsychology of Anti-semitismâ. This kind of personality is accessible to psychological analysisâŚ. It would be quite impossible to reduce the objective phenomenon of present-day anti-semitism with its age-old background and all social and economic implications, to the mentality of those who, to speak with Sartre, have to make their decision in regard to this issue. Today, each and every man is faced with a tremendous bulk of objectively existing prejudices, discriminations and articulate anti-semitic attitudes. The accumulated power of this objective complex is so great and apparently so far beyond individual powers of resistance that one might indeed ask, why are people not antisemitic, [sic] instead of asking why certain kinds of people are anti-semitic. Thus, it would be naive to base a prognosis of anti-semitism, this truly âsocialâ disease, on the diagnosis of the individual patients.
This means that the self-contradiction expressed by (non-)racism is one of society as well: the racist society points beyond itself objectively as well as subjectively, socially as well as individually. Racism as a problem contains the key to its own solution.[18] Anti-Semitic demagogues identified with Jews when imitating their stereotypical mannerisms;[19] white racists of the Jim Crow era performed minstrel shows in black-face. As Fanon put it, âLong ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a white existence;â âFor the black man there is only one destiny íľíě íë ě´ě´. And it is white.â[20] Racism will end when black people become white. Or, as Adorno put it in âReflections on Class Theory,â âOnly when the victims completely assume the features of the ruling civilization will they be capable to wresting them from the dominant power.â Racismâs abolition will be its Aufhebung: it will be its Selbstaufhebung, its self-completion as well as its self-negation. So will be the overcoming of authoritarianism in capitalism more generally.
The infamous âF-scaleâ of The Authoritarian Personality is a scale, which means that authoritarianism or predisposition to fascism is not a difference in kind but of degree: Everyone is more or less authoritarian. The most authoritarian thing would be to deny â to fail to recognize â oneâs own authoritarianism. | §
[1] â[T]he mass basis of fascism, the rebelling lower middle classes, contained not only reactionary but also powerful progressive social forces. This contradiction was overlooked [by contemporary Marxists]â in Wilhelm Reich, âIdeology as Material Powerâ in The Mass Psychology of Fascism [1933/46], trans. Vincent Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 3â4.
[2] Walter Benjamin, âExperience and Povertyâ [1933], Selected Writings vol. 2 1927 â34, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, Harvard, 1996), 732.
[3] Marx, âTheses on Feuerbachâ [1845], available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/>.
[4] See Max Horkheimer, âOn the Sociology of Class Relationsâ [1943] and my discussion of it, âWithout a Socialist Party, there is no Class Struggle, only Rackets,â Nonsite.org (January 11, 2016), available on-line at: <http://nonsite.org/the-tank/max-horkheimer-and-the-sociology-of-class-relations>. In âThe Authoritarian Stateâ [1940/42], Horkheimer wrote that,
Sociological and psychological concepts are too superficial to express what has happened to revolutionaries in the last few decades: their will toward freedom has been damaged, without which neither understanding nor solidarity nor a correct relation between leader and group is conceivable. (The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt [New York: Continuum, 1985], 95â117.)
[5] âSociology and Psychologyâ [1955], originally written by Adorno for a festschrift celebrating Max Horkheimerâs sixtieth birthday, The piece was published in English translation in two parts in the New Left Review, vol maroon 5 animals ë¤ě´ëĄë. 46, Nov-Dec 1967, 63-80 and vol. 47, Jan-Feb 1968, 79-97.
[6] Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
[7] Adorno, âImaginative Excessesâ an unpublished piece intended for Minima Moralia,[1944â47] published as section X of âMessages in a Bottle,â trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review, vol. 200, July-August 1993, 12â14.
[8] Adorno, âOn the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listeningâ [1938], Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 314.
[9] Ibid., 315.
[10] See Benjamin, âOn the Mimetic Faculty,â Selected Writings vol. 2 1927â34, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 19989). 720â722: âThe child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but a windmill and a trainâ (720).
[11] Adorno, âReflections on Class Theoryâ, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 93-110.
[12] See Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852] Ch. VII, where he finds that political atomization leads inexorably to the authoritarian state in Bonapartism:
Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection . . . and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class Professional baseball. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them . . . and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The[ir] political influence . . . therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. (Available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm>.)
Marxâs discussion of the French peasants of the mid-19th century also applied to what he called the âlumpenproletariatâ as a constituent of Bonapartism, and so would apply to the working class in capitalism today without a political party organized for the struggle to achieve socialism. The âsack of potatoesâ or of âhomologous magnitudesâ is what Adorno, among others, characterized as the âmassesâ in the 20th century. (For instance, Benjamin wrote in the Epilogue to âThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionâ [1936] that fascism gave the masses the opportunity to express themselves while depriving them their right to change society.)
Adorno paraphrases Marx here when he writes that,
The masses are incessantly molded from above, they must be mulded, if they are to be kept at bay. The overwhelming machinery of propaganda and cultural industry evidences the necessity of this apparatus for the perpetuation of a set-up the potentialities of which have outgrown the status quo. Since this potential is also the potential of effective resistance against the fascist trend, it is imperative to study the mentality of those who are at the receiverâs end of todayâs social dynamics. We must study them not only because they reflect these dynamics, but above all because they are the latterâs intrinsic anti-thesis.
The manifestation â and potential resolution â of this contradiction of the masses in capitalism that otherwise resulted in Bonapartism was through the politics of socialism: Marxâs âdictatorship of the proletariatâ was to be achieved by the mass-political socialist party Download Master of Life. Marx broke with the anarchists over the latterâs refusal to take âpolitical actionâ and to thus consign the working class to merely âsocial action.â i.e. to avoid the necessary struggle for state power.
[13] See my âProletarian dictatorship and state capitalism,â Weekly Worker 1064 (June 25, 2015), available on-line at: <http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1064/proletarian-dictatorship-and-state-capitalism/>.
[14] Marx, Preface to the 1869 edition of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/preface.htm>.
[15] Adorno, âNew York, 8 February 1941â in Dream Notes (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 5-6.
[16] See Anna Freud, âIdentification with the Aggressor,â Ch. IX, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence [1936].
[17] Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, [1952], trans., Charles Lam Markmann, (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 181.
[18] This is because, according to Adorno, âThose who are incapable of believing their own cause⌠must constantly prove to themselves the truth of their gospel through the reality and irreversibility of their deeds.â Violent action takes the place of thought and self-reflection; but this suggests the converse, that critical thinking could prevent such disastrous action. See Adorno, âEducation after Auschwitzâ [1966], in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and ed. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 191â204.
[19] See Adorno, âFreudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propagandaâ [1951], in The Culture Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 132â157 íěś¤ë ¸ë.
[20] Fanon, Black Skin, 178.
Platypus Review #89 | September 2016
Distributed as a flyer [PDF] along with “The Sandernistas: P.P.S. on Trump and the crisis of the Republican Party” (June 22, 2016) [PDF].
If one blows all the smoke away, one is left with the obvious question: Why not Trump?[1]
Trumpâs claim to the Presidency is two-fold: that heâs a successful billionaire businessman; and that heâs a political outsider. His political opponents must dispute both these claims. But Trump is as much a billionaire and as much a successful businessman and as much a political outsider as anyone else ě쪽íë mp3.
Trump says heâs fighting against a ârigged system.â No one can deny that the system is rigged.
Trump is opposed by virtually the entire mainstream political establishment, Republican and Democrat, and by the entire mainstream news media, conservative and liberal alike. And yet he could win. That says something. It says that there is something there.
Trump has successfully run against and seeks to overthrow the established Republican 1980s-era “Reagan Revolution” coalition of neoliberals, neoconservatives, Strict Construction Constitutionalist conservatives and evangelical Christian fundamentalists â against their (always uneasy) alliance as well as against all of its component parts.
It is especially remarkable that such vociferous opposition is mounted against such a moderate political figure as Trump, who until not long ago was a Centrist moderate-conservative Democrat, and is now a Centrist moderate-conservative Republican — running against a moderate-conservative Democrat.
Trump claims that he is the âlast chanceâ for change. This may be true.
Indeed, it is useful to treat all of Trumpâs claims as true — and all of those by his adversaries as false ě˛ë§ę´ę°ëí. For when Trump lies, still, his lies tell the truth. When Trumpâs opponents tell the truth they still lie.
When Trump appears ignorant of the ways of the world, he expresses a wisdom about the status quo. The apparent âwisdomâ of the status quo by contrast is the most pernicious form of ignorance.
For example, Trump says that the official current unemployment rate of 5% is a lie: there are more than 20% out of work, most of whom have stopped seeking employment altogether. It is a permanent and not fluctuating condition. Trump points out that this is unacceptable. Mainstream economists say that Trumpâs comments about this are not false but âunhelpfulâ because nothing can be done about it.
The neoliberal combination of capitalist austerity with post-1960s identity politics of ârace, gender and sexualityâ that is the corporate status quo means allowing greater profits — necessitated by lower capitalist growth overall since the 1970s — while including more minorities and women in the workforce and management Steam Re-Download. Trump is attacking this not out of “racism” or “misogyny” but against the lowered expectations of the “new normal.”
When Trump says that he will provide jobs for âall Americansâ this is not a lie but bourgeois ideology, which is different.
The mendacity of the status quo is the deeper problem.[2]
For instance, his catch-phrase, âMake America Great Again!â has the virtue of straightforward meaning. It is the opposite of Obamaâs âChange You Can Believe Inâ or Hillaryâs âStronger Together.â
These have the quality of the old McDonaldâs slogan, âWhat you want is what you getâ — which meant that you will like it just as they give it to you — replaced by todayâs simpler âIâm loving it!â But what if weâre not loving it? What if we donât accept what Hillary says against Trump, âAmerica is great alreadyâ?
When Trump says âIâm with you!â this is in opposition to Hillaryâs âWeâre with her!â — Hillary is better for that gendered pronoun Download emacs?
Trump promises to govern âfor everyoneâ and proudly claims that he will be âboringâ as President. There is no reason not to believe him.
Everything Trump calls for exists already. There is already surveillance and increased scrutiny of Muslim immigrants in the âWar on Terror.â There is already a war against ISIS. There is already a wall on the border with Mexico; there are already mass deportations of âillegalâ immigrants. There are already proposals that will be implemented anyway for a super-exploited guest-worker immigration program. International trade is heavily regulated with many protections favoring U.S. companies already in place. Hillary will not change any of this. Given the current crisis of global capitalism, international trade is bound to be reconfigured anyway Overa downloaded the man.
One change unlikely under Hillary that Trump advocates, shifting from supporting Saudi Arabia to dĂŠtente with Russia, for instance in Syria — would this be a bad thing?[3]
But everything is open to compromise: Trump says only that he thinks he can get a âbetter deal for America.â He campaigns to be ânot a dictatorâ but the ânegotiator-in-chief.â To do essentially whatâs already being done, but âsmarterâ and more effectively. This is shocking the system?
When heâs called a ânarcissist who cares only for himselfâ — for instance by âPocahontasâ Senator Elizabeth Warren — this is by those who are part of an elaborate political machine for maintaining the status quo who are evidently resentful that he doesnât need to play by their rules.
This includes the ostensible âLeft,â which has a vested interest in continuing to do things as they have been done for a very long time already ë¨ě§ ě¤íźě¤. The âLeftâ is thus nothing of the sort. They donât believe change is possible. Or they find any potential change undesirable: too challenging. If change is difficult and messy, that doesnât make it evil. But what one fears tends to be regarded as evil.
Their scare-mongering is self-serving — self-interested. It is they who care only for themselves, their way of doing things, their positions. But, as true narcissists, they confuse this as caring for others. These others are only extensions of themselves.
Trump says that he âdoesnât need thisâ and that heâs running to âserve the country.â This is true.
Trumpâs appeal is not at all extreme — but it is indeed extreme to claim that anyone who listens to him is beyond the boundaries of acceptable politics Download youtube 4k videos. The election results in November whatever their outcome will show just how many people are counted out by the political status quo. The silent majority will speak. The only question is how resoundingly they do so. Will they be discouraged?
Many who voted for Obama will now vote for Trump. Enough so he could win.
This leads to the inescapable conclusion: Anti-Trump-ism is the problem and obstacle, not Trump.
The status quo thinks that change is only incremental and gradual. Anything else is either impossible or undesirable. But really the only changes they are willing to accept prove to be no changes at all.
This recalls the character in Voltaireâs novel Candide, Professor Pangloss, who said that we live in âThe best of all possible worlds.â No one on the avowed âLeftâ should think such a thing — and yet they evidently do visual studio 2005 professional.
There is significant ambivalence on the âfar Leftâ about opposing Trump and supporting Hillary. A more or less secret wish for Trump that is either kept quiet or else psychologically denied to oneself functions here. There is a desire to punish the Democrats for nominating such an openly conservative candidate, for instance, voting for the Greensâ Jill Stein, which would help Trump win.
The recent Brexit vote shows that when people are given the opportunity they reject the status quo. The status-quo response has been that they should not have been given the opportunity.
Finding Trump acceptable is not outrageous. But the outrageous anti-Trump-ism — the relentless spinning and lying of the status quo defending itself — is actually not acceptable Download Rhino 4.0. Not if any political change whatsoever is desired.
In all the nervous hyperventilation of the complacent status quo under threat, there is the obvious question that is avoided but must be asked by anyone not too frightened to think — by anyone trying to think seriously about politics, especially possibilities for change:
Why not Trump?
For which the only answer is: To preserve the status quo.
Not against âworseâ — that might be beyond any U.S. Presidentâs control anyway — but simply for things as they already are.
We should not accept that.
So: Why not Trump? | P
[1] See my June 22, 2016 âP.P.S. on Trump and the crisis in the Republican Party,â amendment to my âThe Sandernistas: Postscript on the March 15 primaries,â Platypus Review 85 (April 2016), available on-line at: <http://platypus1917.org/2016/03/30/the-sandernistas/#pps> chorus of geniuses.
[2] See Hannah Arendt, âLying in Politics,â Crises of the Republic (New York, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1969): âA characteristic of human action is that it always begins something new. . . . In order to make room for oneâs own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed. . . . Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves . . . and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. . . . [T]he deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.â
[3] See Robert Parry, âThe Danger of Excessive Trump Bashing,â in CommonDreams.org August 4, 2016, available on-line at: <http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/08/04/danger-excessive-trump-bashing>.
Further amendment to “The Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s” (Platypus Review 82, December 2015 – January 2016) and “Postscript on the March 15 primaries” (Platypus Review 85, April 2016), after the end of the primary elections Corel Draw 2018.
Trump is no “fascist,” nor even really a “populist,” (( See Tad Tietze, âThe Trump paradox: A rough guide for the Left,â Left Flank (January 25, 2016) mssql ë¤ě´ëĄë. Available on-line at <http://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/> ěąę°ë ě ëł´. )) but is precisely what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat — like the socially and economically liberal but blowhard “law-and-order” conservative former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch 19 ë¨ěĄ ë¤ě´ëĄë. Trump challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar moderate Centrist positions on the U.S. political spectrum, whatever their various differences on policy 읡ěěë. Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different in this election season: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties ë°ëŞŹ í´. Trump has successfully run against and seeks to overthrow the established Republican 1980s-era “Reagan Revolution” coalition of neoliberals, neoconservatives, Strict Construction Constitutionalist conservatives and evangelical Christian fundamentalists — against their (always uneasy) alliance as well as against all of its component parts Download this. Established Republicans recoil at undoing the Reagan Coalition they have mobilized since the 1980s. Marco Rubio as well as Ted Cruz — both of whom were adolescents in the 1980s — denounced Trump not only for his “New York values” but also and indicatively as a “socialist.” Glenn Beck said that Trump meant that the America of “statism” of the Progressives Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had won over the America of “freedom” of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson Download Rocket Dog Skin. Of course that is ideological and leaves aside the problem of capitalism, which Trump seeks to reform. Sanders could have potentially bested Trump as a candidate for reform, perhaps, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats, whose nostalgia for the New Deal, Great Society and New Left does not provide the necessary resources Download Minecraft 1.8.
Trump has succeeded precisely where Sanders has failed in marshaling the discontents with neoliberalism and demand for change. Sanders has collapsed into the Democratic Party Download Hunterx Hunter. To succeed, Sanders would have needed to run against the Democrats the way Trump has run against the Republicans. This would have meant challenging the ruling Democratic neoliberal combination of capitalist austerity with New Left identity politics of “race, gender and sexuality” that is the corporate status quo. The results of Trump’s contesting of Reaganite and Clintonian and Obama-era neoliberalism remain to be seen. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. Trump will win if he mobilizes more of them than Clinton. Clinton is the conservative in this election; Trump is the candidate for change. The Republicans have been in crisis in ways the Democrats are not, and this is the political opportunity expressed by Trump. He is seeking to lead the yahoos to the Center as well as meeting their genuine discontents in neoliberalism. Of course the change Trump represents is insufficient and perhaps unworkable, but it is nonetheless necessary. Things must change; they will change. As Marx said, “All that is solid melts into air.” The future of any potential struggle for socialism in the U.S. will be on a basis among not only those who have voted for Sanders but also those who have and will vote for Trump. | §
Platypus Review #86 | May 2016
IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical âRevisionist Dispute,â in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that âthe movement is everything, the goal nothing,â the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871â1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: âIt is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.â ((Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 38â39; also available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1898/10/04.htm>. ))
Critique of socialism
What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have âclass struggleâ at all? This goes to the heart of Luxemburgâs own Marxism, and to her most enduring contribution to its history: her Marxist approach to the political party for socialismâa dialectical understanding of class and party, in which Marxism itself was grasped in a critical-dialectical way. When Luxemburg accused Bernstein of being âundialectical,â this is what she meant: That the working classâs struggle for socialism was itself self-contradictory and its political party was the means through which this contradiction was expressed. There was a dialectic of means and ends, or of âmovementâ and âgoal,â in which the dialectic of theory and practice took part: Marxism demanded its own critique. Luxemburg took the controversy of the Revisionist Dispute as an occasion for this critique.
In this, Luxemburg followed the young Karl Marxâs (1818â83) own formative dialectical critiques of socialism when he was in his 20s, from the September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge calling for the âruthless critique of everything existing,â to the critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), as well as in The German Ideology and its famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx had written of the socialist movement that:
The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles . . .
[W]e 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 as taught by Cabet, DĂŠzamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesisâthe private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrinesâsuch as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc.âarising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle . . .
Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. . . . We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for ě the guest 3í. . .
The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.
Such formulations recurred in Marxâs Theses on Feuerbach a couple of years later:
But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice.
For Marx, this meant that socialism was the expression of the contradiction of capitalism and as such was itself bound up in that contradiction. A proper dialectical relation of socialism with capitalism required a recognition of the dialectic within socialism itself. Marx followed Hegel in regarding contradiction as manifestation of the need for change. The âproletariatââthe working class after the Industrial Revolutionâcontradicted bourgeois society, not from outside but from within. As such, the contradiction of capitalism centered on the proletariat itself. This is because for Marx âcapitalismâ is nothing in itself, but only the crisis of bourgeois society in industrial production and hence its only meaning is the expression of the need for socialism. The very existence of the proletariatâa working class expropriated from its bourgeois property-rights in labor as a commodityâdemanded socialism.
Lassallean party
But had the social-democratic workersâ party been from its outset a force for counterrevolutionâfor preserving capitalismârather than for revolutionary transformation and the achievement of socialism? Its roots in Ferdinand Lassalleâs formulation of its purpose as the âpermanent political campaign of the working classâ evinced a potential contradiction between its Lassalleanism and Marxism. Marxists had not invented the social-democratic workersâ party, but rather joined it as an emergent phenomenon of the late 19th century. The social-democratic workersâ party in Germany, what became the SPD, had, through its fusion of 1875 at Gotha, attained Marxist or ârevolutionaryâ leadership. But this had elicited Marxâs famous Critique of the Gotha Programme, to which Marxâs own followers, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, could only shrug their shoulders at the difficulty of pleasing the âold men in Londonâ (that is, Marx and Engels). The development of the SPD towards its conscious direction beyond mere Lassalleanism was more clearly enunciated in the SPDâs Erfurt Programme of 1891 spell 2.7. Nonetheless the ghost of Lassalle seemed to haunt subsequent developments and was still present, according to Engelsâs critique of it, in the âMarxistâ Erfurt Programme itself. (Indeed, one of Rosa Luxemburgâs earliest achievements in her participation in the life of the SPD was to unearth and discover the significance of Engelsâs critique of Bebel, Kautsky, and Bernsteinâs Erfurt Programme.)
Luxemburg, in her critique of the SPD through regarding the party as a manifestation of contradiction, followed Marx and Engels, whose recognition was the means to advance it beyond itself. Lassalle had made the mistake of opposing the political against and derogating the economic action of the workers, rejecting labor unions, which he called merely the âvain efforts of things to behave like human beings.â (( Quoted in Georg LukĂĄcs,âThe Standpoint of the Proletariat,â Part III of âReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariatâ in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 195. Available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc07_5.htm>. )) Lassalle thus ontologized the political struggle. For Lassalle, the workers taking political power would be tantamount to the achievement of socialism; whereas for Marx this would be merely a transitional revolutionary âdictatorship of the proletariatâ that would lead to socialism. Engels called it the transition from the âgoverning of menâ to the âadministration of thingsââan eminently dialectical formulation, since humans are both subjects and objects of society.
Lassalleâs political ontology of socialism was complementary to the one-sided âvulgar Marxistâ misapprehensions of the Revisionists who prioritized and indeed ontologized the economic over the political, reducing the social to the economic, and relating the social to the political âmechanicallyâ and âundialecticallyââneglecting the contradiction between them in an âeconomic determinismâ that subordinated politics. Where Lassalle subordinated economics to politics in a âstate socialism,â Marx regarded this rather as a state capitalism. Indeed, despite or rather due to this antinomy, the Lassalleans and the economistic reformists actually converged in their political perspectivesâgiving rise later to 20th century welfare-state capitalism through the governance of social-democratic parties.
Rather than taking one side over the other, Luxemburg, as a Marxist, approached this problem as a real contradiction: an antinomy and dialectic of capitalism itself that manifested in the workersâ own discontents and struggles within it, both economically and politically. For instance, Luxemburg followed Marx in recognizing that the Lassallean goal of the workers achieving a âfree stateâ in political revolution was a self-contradiction: An unfree society gave rise to an unfree state; and it was society that needed to be emancipated from capitalism. But this was a contradiction that could be posed only by the workersâ revolutionary political action and seizing of state powerâif only to âwitherâ it away in the transformation of society beyond capitalism. In this way the Lassallean party was not a mistake but rather a necessary stage manifesting in the history of the workersâ movement. So it needed to be properly recognizedââdialecticallyââin order to avoid its one-sided pitfalls in the opposition of Revisionist, reformist economic evolutionism versus the Lassallean political revolutionism. Kautsky followed Marx in a critical endorsement of Lassalleanism in regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat as the seizing of state power by the workersâ party for socialism ojdbc7.jar ë¤ě´ëĄë. Hence, Luxemburg expressed her sincere âgratitudeâ that the Revisionists had occasioned this critical self-recognition, by posing the question and problem of âmovementâ and âgoal.â
Antinomy of reformism
Luxemburg made her great entrance onto the political stage of her time with the pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? (1900). In it, Luxemburg laid out how the original contradiction of capitalism, between its chaotic social relations and its socialization of production had been further developed, exacerbated, and deepened by the development of a new contradiction, namely the growth of the workersâ movement in political organization and consciousness: Its movement for socialism was a self-contradictory expression of the contradiction of capitalism. This contrasted with Bernsteinâs view that the growth and development of the workers’ movement was the overcoming of the contradiction of capitalism and the gradual âevolutionâ of socialism. For Bernstein, the movement for socialism was the achievement of socialism, whereas the goal of socialism was a dispensable figment, a useful enabling fiction.
For Luxemburg, however, the contradiction of the industrial forces of production against their bourgeois social relations in capitalism was recapitulated in the contradiction between the means and ends of the workersâ movement for socialism. Socialism was not built up within capitalism; but only the contradiction of capital deepened through workersâ struggle against exploitation. How so? Their demand for a share of the value of production was a bourgeois demand: the demand for the value of their labor as a commodity. However, what was achieved by increases in wages, recognition of collective bargaining rights, legal protections of workers in capitalist labor contracts and the acceptance of responsibility of the state for the conditions of labor, including the acceptance of the right to political association and democratic political participation in the state, was not the overcoming of the problem of capitalâthat is, the overcoming of the great divergence and social contradiction between the value of capital and wages in industrial productionâbut rather its exacerbation and deepening through its broadening onto society as a whole. What the workers received in reforms of capitalism was not the value of their labor-power as a commodity, which was relatively minimized by developments of industrial technique, but rather a cut of the profits of capital, whether directly through collective bargaining with the employers or indirectly through state distribution of social welfare benefits from the tax on capital. What Bernstein described optimistically as the socialization of production through such reforms was actually, according to Luxemburg, the âsocializationâ of the crisis of capitalist production.
The workersâ party for socialism, through its growth and development on a mass scale, thus increasingly took political responsibility for capitalism. Hence, a new contradiction developed that was focused on the party itself. Was its purpose to manage capitalism, or rather, as Luxemburg put it in her 1898 Stuttgart speech, to âplay the role of the banker-lawyer who liquidates a bankrupt companyâ? Luxemburg posed the political task of the socialist party in Reform or Revolution? succinctly: âIt is an illusion, then, to think that the proletariat can create economic power within capitalist society. It can only create political power and then transform [aufheben] capitalist property.â The proletarian socialist party was the means for creating that political power Download Mobile Hemp King. This differed from the development of bourgeois social relations in feudalism that led to revolution:
What does it mean that the earlier classes, particularly the third estate, conquered economic power before political power? Nothing more than the historical fact that all previous class struggles must be derived from the economic fact that the rising class has at the same time created a new form of property upon which it will base its class domination.
However, according to Luxemburg, âThe assertion that the proletariat, in contrast to all previous class struggles, pursues its battles, not in order to establish class domination, but to abolish all class domination is not a mere phrase.â This is because the proletariat does not develop a new form of âpropertyâ within capitalism, but rather struggles economically, socially and politically, on the basis of âbourgeois propertyââon the basis of the bourgeois social relations of labor, or of labor as a commodity. What the working classâs struggle within capitalism achieves is consciousness of the need to overcome labor as a commodity, or, to transform capital from bourgeois property into social property that is no longer mediated by the exchange of labor. This is what it meant for Marx that the proletariat struggles not to ârealizeâ but to abolish itself, or, how the proletariat goes from being a class âin itselfâ to becoming a class âfor itselfâ (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) in its struggle for socialism.
For Luxemburg, the achievement of reforms within capitalism accomplish nothing but the greater practical and theoretical realization, or âconsciousness,â of the need to abolish labor as a commodity, since the latter has been outstripped by industrial production. The further economic, social, and political reforms only dramatically increase this disparity and contradiction between the economic value of labor as a commodity and the social value of capital that must be appropriated by society as a whole.
In other words, the workersâ movement for socialism and its institution as a political party is necessary to make the otherwise chaotic, unconscious, âobjectiveâ phenomenon of the economic contradiction and crisis of wage-labor and capital into a conscious, âsubjectiveâ phenomenon of politics. As Luxemburg wrote later, in The Crisis of German Social Democracy (AKA the âJunius Pamphlet,â 1915):
Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind. For this reason, Friedrich Engels designated the final victory of the socialist proletariat a leap of humanity from the animal world into the realm of freedom. This âleapâ is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development. But this can never be realized until the development of complex material conditions strikes the incendiary spark of conscious will in the great masses. The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history 몏ě¤í°íí° ë¤ě´ëĄë.
Why âviolent tests of strengthâ? Was this mere ârevolutionaryâ passion, as Bernstein averred? No: As Marx had observed in Das Kapital, in the struggle over the âworking day,â or over the social and legal conventions for the condition of labor-time, workers and capitalists confronted each other, both with âbourgeois rightâ on their side. But, âWhere right meets right, force will decide.â Such contests of force did not decide the issue of right in capitalism, but only channeled it in a political direction. Both capital and wage-labor retained their social rights, but the political arena in which their claims were decided shifted from civil society to the state, posing a crisisâthe need for ârevolution.â
1848: state and revolution
For Luxemburg, the modern state was itself merely the âproduct of the last revolution,â namely the political institutionalization of the condition of class struggle up to that point. The âlast revolutionâ was that of 1848, in which the âsocial questionâ was posed as a crisis of the democratic republic. As such, the state remained both the subject and the object of revolutionary politics. Marx had conflicted with the anarchists in the First International over the issue of the need for âpoliticalâ as well as âsocial actionâ in the working classâs struggle for socialism. The Revisionists such as Bernstein had, to Luxemburgâs mind, reverted to the pre-Marxian socialism of anarchism in abandoning the struggle for political power in favor of merely social action. In this, Luxemburg characterized Bernstein as having regressed (like the anarchists) to mere âliberalism.â What Bernstein like the anarchists denied was what Marx had discovered in the experience of the revolutions of 1848, namely, the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariat,â and hence the necessary political separation of the workersâ âsocial democracyâ from the mere âdemocracyâ of the bourgeois revolution, including the necessary separation from the âpetit bourgeois democratsâ who earned Marxâs most scathing scorn.
While liberals denied the need for such âsocial democracyâ and found political democracy to be sufficient, anarchists separated the social from the political, treating the latter as a fetishized realm of collusion in the bourgeois state and hence capitalism. Anarchists from the first, Proudhon, had avoided the issue of political revolution and the need to take state power; whereas Marxists had recognized that the crisis of capitalism inevitably resulted in political crisis and struggle over the state: If the working class failed to do so, others would step in their place. For Marx, the need for workersâ political revolution to achieve socialism was expressed by the phenomenon of Louis Bonaparteâs election in 1848 and coup dâĂŠtat in 1851, which expressed the inability of the âbourgeoisie to ruleâ any longer through civil society, while the proletariat was as yet politically undeveloped and thus ânot ready to ruleâ the state. But for Marx the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ was that the âworkers must ruleâ politically in order to overcome capitalism economically and socially.
Marx characterized Louis Bonaparteâs politics as both âpetit bourgeoisâ and âlumpenproletarian,â finding support among the broad masses of capitalismâs discontented. But according to Marx their discontents could only reproduce capitalism since they could only at best join the working class or remain dependent on the realization of the value of its labor as a commodity íŹě° ë˛ęˇ¸ í. Hence, there was no possible withdrawal from the crisis of bourgeois politics and the democratic state, as by libertarians and anarchists, but the need to develop political power to overcome capitalism. For the capitalist wage-labor system with its far-reaching effects throughout society to be abolished required the political action of the wage laborers. That the âworkers must ruleâ meant that they needed to provide political leadership to the exploited and oppressed masses. If the organized working class did not, others would provide that leadership, as Bonaparte had done in 1848 and 1851. The means for this was the political party for socialism. As Luxemburg put it in her 1898 Stuttgart speech:
[B]y final goal we must not mean . . . this or that image of the future state, but the prerequisite for any future society, namely the conquest of political power. This conception of our task is closely related to our conception of capitalist society; it is the solid ground which underlies our view that capitalist society is caught in insoluble contradictions which will ultimately necessitate an explosion, a collapse, at which point we will play the role of the banker-lawyer who liquidates a bankrupt company.
The socialist political party was for Luxemburg the means for this necessary achievement of political power. But the party was not itself the solution, but rather the necessary manifestation and concretization of the problem of political power in capitalism and indeed the problem of âsocietyâ itself.
1905: party and class
Luxemburg took the occasion of the 1905 Revolution in Russia to critique the relation of labor unions and the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in her pamphlet on The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). This was a continuation of Luxemburgâs criticism of the reformist Revisionist view of the relation of the economic and political struggles of the working class for socialism, which had found its strongest support among the labor union leadership. In bringing to bear the Russian experience in Germany, Luxemburg reversed the usual assumed hierarchy of German experience over Russian âbackwardness.â She also reversed the developmental order of economic and political struggles, the mistaken assumption that the economic must precede the political. The âmassâ or political strike had been associated with social- and political-historical primitiveness, with pre-industrial struggles and pre-Marxian socialism, specifically anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism (especially in the Latin countries), which had prioritized economic and social action over political action. Luxemburg sought to grasp the changed historical significance of the political strike; that it had become, rather, a symptom of advanced, industrial capitalism. In the 1905 Russian Revolution, the workers had taken political action before economic action, and the labor unions had originated out of that political action, rather than the reverse.
The western Russian Empire was rapidly industrialized and showed great social unrest in the 1890sâ1900s. It exhibited the most up-to-date techniques and organization in industrial production: The newest and largest factories in the world at this time were located in Russia asp net url íěź ë¤ě´ëĄë. Luxemburg was active in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in the Russian part of Poland, through her own organization, the Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). The 1905 Russian Revolution was precipitated by a political and not âeconomicâ crisis: the shaking of the Tsarist state in its losing war with Japan 1904â05. This was not merely a liberal-democratic discontent with the arbitrary rule of the Russian absolutism. For Luxemburg, the Russo-Japanese War was a symptom of capitalism, and so was the resulting crisis of Tsarism in Russia triggered by this war. The political strike was, as she put it, a revolt of âbourgeois Russia,â that is, of the modern industrial capitalists and workers, against Tsarism. What had started out in the united action of the capitalists and workers striking economically against the Tsarist state for liberal-democratic political reasons, unfolded into a class struggle by the workers against the capitalists. This was due to the necessity of reorganizing social provisions during the strike, in which mass-action strike committees took over the functions of the usual operations of capitalism and indeed of the Tsarist state itself. This had necessitated the formation of workersâ own collective-action organizations. Luxemburg showed how the economic organization of the workers had developed out of the political action against Tsarism, and that the basis of this was in the necessities of advanced industrial production. In this way, the workersâ actions had developed, beyond the liberal-democratic or âbourgeoisâ discontents and demands, into the tasks of âproletarian socialism.â Political necessity had led to economic necessity (rather than the reverse, economic necessity leading to political necessity).
For Luxemburg, this meant that the usual assumption in Germany that the political party, the SPD, was âbasedâ on the labor unions, was a profound mistake. The economic and social-cooperative actions of the unions were âbased,â for Luxemburg, on the political task of socialism and its political party. This meant prioritizing the political action of the socialist party as the real basis or substance of the economic and other social action of the working class. It was the political goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat through socialist revolution that gave actual substance to the workersâ economic struggles, which were, for Luxemburg, merely the necessary preparatory âschool of revolution.â
Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet while summering at a retreat with Lenin and other Bolsheviks in Finland. It was informed by her daily conversations with Lenin over many weeks. Lenin had previously written, in What is to be Done? (1902) (a pamphlet commissioned and agreed-upon by the Marxist faction of the RSDLP as a whole, those who later divided into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), that economism and workerism in Russia had found support in Bernsteinian Revisionism in the SPD and the greater Second International, trying to subordinate the political struggle to economic struggle and thus to separate them Download Edel and Ernest. In so doing, they like the Revisionists had identified capitalist development with socialism rather than properly recognizing them as in growing contradiction. Lenin had, like Luxemburg, regarded such workerism and economism as âreformistâ in the sense of separating the workersâ struggles for reform from the goal of socialism that needed to inform such struggles. Luxemburg as well as Lenin called this âliquidationism,â or the dissolving of the goal into the movement, liquidating the need for the political party for socialism. In What is to be Done? Lenin had argued for the formation of a political party for the workersâ struggle for socialism in Russia. He took as polemical opponents those who, like the Revisionists in Germany, had deprioritized the necessity of the political party, thus deprioritizing the politics of the struggle for socialism, limiting it to economic action. (( See also my essay âLeninâs Liberalismâ, Platypus Review 36 (June 2011). Available online at: <http://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/>. )) The political party had thus redeemed itself in the 1905 Revolution in Russia, showing its necessary role for the workersâ political, social, and economic action, confirming Lenin and Luxemburgâs prior arguments against economism.
Luxemburg regarded the lessons of the 1905 Revolution in Russia to be a challenge to and hence a âcrisisââa potential critical turning pointâof the SPD in Germany. Continuing her prosecution of the Revisionist Dispute, Luxemburg argued for the concrete necessity of the political leadership of the party over the unions that had been demonstrated by the 1905 Revolution in Russia. By contrast, the tension and indeed contradiction between the goal of socialism and the preservation of the institutions of the workersâ movementâspecifically of the labor unionsâ self-interestâwhich might be threatened by the conservative reaction of the state against the political action of the socialist party, showed a conflict between movement and goal. The Revisionists thought that a mass political strike would merely provoke the Right into a coup dâĂŠtat.
Demand for redemption
Walter Benjamin, in his draft theses âOn the Concept of Historyâ (AKA âTheses on the Philosophy of History,â 1940), cited Luxemburg in particular when describing history itself as the âdemand for redemption.â Not only did Luxemburg raise this demand with her famous invocation of Marx and Engels on the crossroads in capitalism of âsocialism or barbarism,â but as a historical figure she herself calls out for such redemption.
The conflict in and about the party on which Luxemburg had focused was horribly revealed later by the outbreak of war in 1914, when a terrible choice seemed posed, between the political necessity to overthrow the Kaiserreich state to prevent or stop the war, and the need to preserve the workersâ economic and social organizations in the unions and the party. The war had been the Kaiserreichâs preemptive coup dâĂŠtat against the SPD. The party capitulated to this in that it facilitated and justified the unionsâ assertion of their self-preservation at the cost of cooperation with the stateâs war. This self-preservationâwhat Luxemburg excoriated as trying to âhide like a rabbit under a bushâ temporarily during the warâmay have been justified if these same organizations had served later to facilitate the political struggle for socialism after the Prussian Empire had been shaken by its loss in the war Download the Picture Den Hangul Patch. But the SPDâs constraining of the workersâ struggles to preserve the state, limiting the German Revolution 1918â19 to a âdemocraticâ one against the threat of âBolshevism,â meant the partyâs suppression of its own membership. Past developments had prepared this. The Revisionistsâ prioritization of the movement and its organizations over the goal of socialism had been confirmed for what Luxemburg and Lenin had always warned against: the adaptation and liquidation of the working classâs struggles into, not a potential springboard for socialism, but rather a bulwark of capitalism; the transformation of the party from a revolutionary into a counterrevolutionary force. As Luxemburg had so eloquently put it in WWI, the SPD had become a âstinking corpseââsomething which had through the stench of decomposition revealed itself to have been dead for a long time alreadyâdead for the purposes of socialism. The party had killed itself through the Devilâs bargain of sacrificing its true political purpose for mere self-preservation.
In so doing, supposedly acting in the interests of the workers, the workersâ true interestsâin socialismâwere betrayed. As Luxemburg put it in the Junius Pamphlet, the failure of the SPD at the critical moment of 1914 had placed the entire history of the preceding â40 yearsâ of the struggles by the workersâsince the founding of the SPD in 1875ââin doubt.â Would this history be liquidated without redemption? This underscored Luxemburgâs warning, decades earlier, against dissolving the goal into the movement that would betray not only the goal but the movement itself. Reformist revisionism devoured itself. The only point of the party was its goal of revolution; without it, it was ânothingââindeed worse than nothing: It became a festering obstacle. The party was for Luxemburg not only or primarily the âsubjectâ but was also and especially the object of revolutionary struggle by the working class to achieve socialism. This is why the revolution that the party had facilitated was for Luxemburg merely the beginning and not the end of the struggle to achieve socialism. The political problem of capitalism was manifest in how the party pointed beyond itself in the revolution. But without the party, that problem could never even manifest let alone point beyond itself.
During the German Revolutionâprovoked by the collapse of the Kaiserreich at the end of WWIâLuxemburg split and founded the new Communist Party of Germany (KPD), joining Lenin in forming the âThirdâ or Communist International, in 1919: to make clear the political tasks that had been manifested and advanced but ultimately abdicated and failed by the social-democratic parties of the Second International in war and revolution. Just as Luxemburg and Lenin had always maintained that the political party for socialism was necessary to advance the contradiction and crisis of capitalism as it had developed from Marxâs time to their own, so it became necessary in crisis to split that party and found a new one. Turning the international war of capitalism into a socialist revolution meant manifesting a civil war within the workersâ movement and indeed within Marxism itself sap. Whereas her former comrades in the SPD recoiled from her apparent revolutionary fanaticism, and âsavedâ themselves and their party by betraying its goal (but ultimately faded from historical significance), Luxemburg, as a loyal party-member, sacrificed herself for the goal of socialism, redeeming her Marxism and making it profoundly necessary, thus tasking our remembrance and recovery of it today. | §
Postscript to “The Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s” (December 2015) ëëźě´ë˛ ěíëěě¤ě˝.
The primary elections for the nomination of the Democrat and Republican candidates for President have demonstrated the depth and extent of the disarray of the two Parties Download the Dream White Paper. Sanders has successfully challenged Hillary and has gone beyond being a mere messenger of protest to become a real contender for the Democratic Party nomination Download lounge music. But this has been on the basis of the Democrats’ established constituencies and so has limited Sanders’s reach. Turnout for the Democratic Party primaries has not been significantly raised as Sanders hoped ěě°ŹěĄę°ëŁę¸°. The Republican primaries by contrast have reached new highs.
Donald Trump has been the actual phenomenon of crisis and potential change in 2016, taking a much stronger initiative in challenging the established Republican Party, indeed offering the only convincing possibility of defeating Clinton ěě´íě´ëĄë§. The significant crossover support between Sanders and Trump however marginal is very indicative of this crisis. Trump has elicited hysteria among both established Republicans and Democrats Download the level-up project. Their hysteria says more about them than about him: fear of the base. Sanders has attempted to oppose the 1930â40s New Deal and 1960sâ70s Great Society and New Left base of the Democratic Party, established and developed from FDR through the Nixon era, against its 1980sâ2010s neoliberal leadership that has allegedly abandoned them 기ěě˛ ěëŁ ë¤ě´ëĄë. Trump has done something similar, winning back from Obama the “Reagan Democrats.” But the wild opportunism of his demagogy allows him to transcend any inherent limitations of this appeal ííěě ę°ě ěŠ.
Trump is no “fascist” nor even really a “populist,” ((See Tad Tietze, “The Trump paradox: A rough guide for the Left,” Left Flank (January 25, 2016) ë¤ě´ë˛ ë¤ě보기 ë¤ě´ëĄë. Available on-line at:<http://left-flank.org/2016/01/25/the-trump-paradox-a-rough-guide-for-the-left/>.)) but is what the Republicans accuse him of being: a New York-style Democrat (like the blowhard former 1980s New York City Mayor Ed Koch) ěěš´ëŚŹě¤ 2. He challenges Hillary precisely because they occupy such similar Centrist positions in U.S. politics, whatever their differences on policy. But Trump more than Sanders represents something new and different: a potential post- and not pre-neoliberal form of capitalist politics, regarding changes in policies that have continued from Reagan through Obama, driven by discontents of those alienated from both Parties. Sanders could potentially best Trump, but only on the basis of a much greater and more substantial mobilization for a different politics than it is evidently possible to muster through the Democrats. The biggest “party” remains those who don’t vote. | §
Originally published in The Platypus Review 85 (April 2016).
Marx and Spencer’s facing graves (photograph by Christian Fuchs)
Originally published in Weekly Worker 1088 (January 7, 2016). [PDF] Also published in The Platypus Review #82 (December 2015 – January 2016). Re-published by BitĂĄcora (Uruguay).
Audio recording
Herbert Spencerâs grave faces Marxâs at Highgate Cemetery in London Daeyoung Young. At his memorial, Spencer was honoured for his anti-imperialism by Indian national liberation advocate and anti-colonialist Shyamji Krishnavarma, who funded a [lectureship] at Oxford in Spencerâs name.
What would the 19th century liberal, utilitarian and social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who was perhaps the most prominent, widely read and popular philosopher in the world during his lifetime – that is, in Marxâs lifetime – have to say to Marxists or more generally to the left, when such liberalism earned not only Marxâs own scorn but also Nietzscheâs criticism? Nietzsche referred to Spencer and his broad appeal as the modern enigma of âthe English psychologists.â Nietzsche critiqued what he took to be Spencerâs assumption of a historically linear-evolutionary development and improvement of human morality leading to a 19th century epitome; where Nietzsche found the successive âtransvaluations of valuesâ through profound reversals of âself-overcomingâ (On the genealogy of morals: a polemic, 1887). Nietzsche regarded modern liberal morality not as a perfection but rather as a challenge and task to achieve an âover-man,â that, failing, threatened to result in a nihilistic dead-end of âthe last manâ instead ě¤í ě´ěŚ 본 ost. Marx regarded Spencerian liberalism as an example of the decrepitude of bourgeois-revolutionary thought in decadence. Marxâs son-in-law, the French socialist Paul Lafargue, wrote, just after Marxâs death, against Spencerâs âbourgeois pessimismâ, to which he offered a Marxist optimism.1 Such Marxism fulfilled Nietzscheâs âpessimism of the strong.â By the late 19th century, Marxists could be confident about transcending bourgeois society. Not so today.
Spencerâs distinction of âmilitantâ vs âindustrialâ society (The principles of sociology Vol 2, 1879-98) – that is to say, the distinction of traditional civilization vs bourgeois society – is still, unfortunately, quite pertinent today, and illuminates a key current blind-spot on the ostensible âleftâ, especially regarding the phenomenon of war. Spencer followed the earlier classical liberal Benjamin Constantâs observation (âThe liberty of the ancients as compared with that of the modernsâ 1816) that moderns get through commerce what the ancients got through war; and that for moderns war is always regrettable and indeed largely unjustifiably criminal, whereas for ancients war was virtuous – among the very highest virtues pandora ë¤ě´ëĄë. Do we moderns sacrifice ourselves for the preservation and glory of our specific âculture,â as âmilitantsâ do, or rather dedicate ourselves to social activity that facilitates universal freedom – a value unknown to the ancients? Does the future belong to the constant warfare of particular cultural differences, or to human society? Marx thought the latter.
The question is whether we think that we will fight or, rather, exchange and produce our way to freedom. Is freedom to be achieved through âmilitantâ or rather âindustrialâ society? Marx assumed the latter.
When we seek to extol our political leaders today, we do not depict them driving a tank but waking at 5 oâclock and staying up past midnight to do societyâs business. We do not speak of their scars earned in combat but their grey hairs accumulated in office. Not enjoying the spoils of war on a dais but getting in their daily morning jog to remain fit for work Windows 7 iso genuine. We judge them not as cunning warriors but as diligent workers – and responsible negotiators. In our society, it is not the matter of a battle to win but a job to do. Carl Schmitt thought that this has led to our dehumanization. But few would agree.
What would have appeared commonplace to Spencerâs contemporary critics, such as Nietzsche and Marx, must strike us today, rather, as profoundly insightful and indeed critical of our society. This is due to the historical regression of politics and society since Marxâs time, and, moreover, to the liquidation of Marxism. What Marx would have regarded as fatally one-sided and undialectical in Spencer, would today seem adequate to the prevailing condition, in the absence of the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic. The Marxist critique of liberalism has been rendered moot, not in the sense of liberalismâs actual social supersession but by historical regression lol ëśëŻ¸ěë˛ ë¤ě´ëĄë. Society has fallen below the historical threshold of not only socialism but of classical liberalism – of bourgeois emancipation itself. Not only have we fallen below the criteria of Kant and Hegel that surpassed 18th century empiricism, we have fallen below its 19th century successor, positivism, as well. The question is the status today of liberalism as ideology. It is utopian. As Adorno put it, it is both promise and sham.
Militant and industrial tendencies confront each other today not as different societies, but as opposed aspects of the same society, however contradictorily and antagonistically, in capitalism. Similarly, the phases of âreligious,â âmetaphysicalâ and âpositiveâ forms do not succeed one another sequentially in a linear development but rather interact in a dynamic of social history. What Spencer regarded as regressive âmetaphysicsâ remains valid in capitalism, as âideologyâ calling for dialectical critique. We cannot now claim to address problems in the clear air of enlightenment ěě´í° ěíí¸ě¨ě´.
If Adorno, for instance, critiqued sociological âpositivism,â this was not as a romantic anti-positivist such as Max Weber, but rather as a critique of positive sociology as ideology in capitalism. For Adorno, positivism and Heideggerian ontology, as well as Weberian âcultural sociology,â opposed each other in an antinomy of capitalism that would be overcome not in one principle triumphing over another, but rather in the antinomy itself being succeeded dialectically in freedom. Weber denied freedom; whereas Spencer assumed it. Both avoided the specific problem of capitalism. To take a condition of unfreedom for freedom is the most salient phenomenon of ideology. This is what falsified positivism as liberal enlightenment, its false sense of freedom as already achieved that still actually tasked society. Freedom is not to be taken as an achieved state but a goal of struggle acoustic cafĂŠ.
An emancipated society would be âpositivistâ – enlightened and liberal – in ways that under capitalism can only be ideologically false and misleading. Positivism should therefore be understood as a desirable goal beyond rather than a possibility under capitalism. The problem with Herbert Spencer is that he took capitalism – grasped partially and inadequately as bourgeois emancipation – to be a condition of freedom that would need yet to be really achieved. If âmetaphysics,â contra positivism, remains valid in capitalism, then this is as a condition to be overcome. Capitalist metaphysics is a real symptom of unfreedom. Positivism treats this as merely an issue of mistaken thinking, or to be worked out through âscientificâ methodology, whereas it is actually a problem of society requiring political struggle Oasis. The antinomy of positivism vs metaphysics is not partisan but social. As Adorno observed, the same individual could and would be scientifically positivist and philosophically ontological-existentialist.
Spencerâs opposition to âsocialismâ in the 19th century was in its undeniable retrograde illiberal aspect, what Marx called âreactionary socialism.â But Marx offered a perspective on potentially transcending socialismâs one-sidedness in capitalism. Spencer was entirely unaware of this Marxian dialectic. Marx agreed with Spencer on the conservative-reactionary and regressive character of socialism. Marx offered a dialectic of socialism and liberalism presented by their symptomatic and diagnostic antinomy in capitalism that pointed beyond itself. 18th century liberalismâs insufficiency to the 19th century problem of capitalism necessitated socialist opposition; but liberalism still offered a critique of socialism that would need to be fulfilled to be transcended, and not dismissed let alone defeated as such ě ëëĄě§.
Only in overcoming capitalism through socialism could, as Marx put it, humanity face its condition âwith sober senses.â This side of emancipation from capital, humanity remains trapped in a âphantasmagoriaâ of bourgeois social relations become self-contradictory and self-destructive in capital. This phantasmagoria was both collective and individual – socialist and liberal – in character. Spencer naturalized this antinomy. His libertarian anti-statism and its broad, popular political appeal down through the 20th century was the necessary result of the continuation of capitalism and its discontents.
Spencer regarded the problem as a historical holdover of traditional civilization to be left behind rather than as the new condition of bourgeois society in capitalist crisis that Marx recognised needed to be, but could not be, overcome in Spencerâs liberal terms. Marx agreed with Spencer on the goal, but differed, crucially, over the nature of the obstacle and, hence, how to get there from here. Not only Spencerâs later followers (more egregiously than Spencer himself), but Marxâs own, have falsified this task íě í¤íź. It has been neglected and abandoned. We cannot assume as Marx did that we are already past Spencerâs classical liberalism, but are driven back to it, ineluctably, whether we realize it or not. Only by returning to the assumptions of classical liberalism can we understand Marxâs critique of it. The glare of Marxâs tomb at Highgate stares down upon a very determinate object. If one disappears, they both do. | §
1. www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1884/06/herbert-spencer.htm