Was Lenin PMC? How Elite Theory doesn’t fit the movement for socialism

Chris Cutrone

This is the nucleus of the question which causes all the differences. Is the antagonism between the middle class and the proletariat so great as to prevent the proletariat from allying itself with certain factions of the middle class against other groups of the middle class? Or are there within the middle class enmities greater than the hostility which exists between the middle class and the working class, so that in some circumstances it is possible and even necessary to establish by the alliance of the working class with certain factions of the middle class a great reform party, a new party of such strength and stability as to be able to share in the government? Is this alliance of the proletariat with parties of the middle class for the purpose of forming a government party a necessary stage in the march of the proletariat to the conquest of political power?

Or is it an occasional act made possible or even necessary by exceptional contingencies, rather than simply a normal stage of the evolution through which the party in all countries should pass?

This is the question which is the basis of our dissensions.

— Karl Kautsky, “The two tendencies” (1902)

Was Marxism merely an elite ideology, for marshaling the working class against an existing elite by an aspiring elite? Was it a deception of the workers — as well as a self-deception — by a radical intelligentsia? What was the relation between proletarian socialism and would-be socialist intellectuals?

Lenin described himself and other Marxists, positively, as “Jacobins indissolubly linked to the organization of the class-conscious proletariat.” As a “Jacobin,” wasn’t he just a petit bourgeois radical, seeking power on the backs of the workers?

But Hal Draper, for one, classified Lenin as a “socialist from below” — by contrast to Stalinism as “socialism from above.”[1] Lenin was leader of an actual working-class movement and party in a real working-class revolution.[2] He fulfilled the Marxist vision.

Judging the Russian Revolution from its results in the Soviet Union and beyond, it seems that this was an illusion: the purported “workers’ state” was in fact a party-state. It was what James Burnham called a “managerial revolution.” It was what Noam Chomsky and his anarchist followers such as Michael Albert called a project of the “coordinator class.” They all agreed with Stalinism that the Soviet Union was the authentic result of 1917 and not its betrayal. In this its dialectical character is lost.

Insofar as the Millennials have rediscovered Sociology and Political Science as disciplines — social and political theory — it has been in the form of Elite Theory. Its attraction has been agonizingly ambivalent: Did the Millennials want to be a new elite, or not?

Until the proletarian socialist movement is successful, Elite Theory will appear not only plausible but true — truer than Marxism. It will be the default, implicit and gut-level consciousness of politically-minded people. For the working class remains a passive object of politics today. The elite are the subject.

Musa al-Gharbi has written and spoken on the class of “symbolic capitalists” — the Pareto Principle’s top 20%, as opposed to the bottom 80% — and on the crisis of “elite overproduction” that led to the “culture wars.”[3] Benjamin Studebaker has written and spoken on the conflict of “falling professionals” vs. the remaining established “rump professionals,” and the political crisis of democracy and problem of legitimacy that results from it. For Studebaker it is also a problem of education: the 40% who have “higher” formal education today, beyond the previously historically conventional 20%.

Catherine Liu has addressed the problem of PMC or “professional managerial class” ideology, following Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s work coining the concept of the PMC from the previous 1960s New Left generation. But the Ehrenreichs and Liu wanted the PMC to recognize themselves not as elites but as workers. It was an analogue to the Maoist theory of “white skin privilege” as an ideology that prevented class consciousness of the “white” workers. Al-Gharbi, by contrast, wants to emphasize the inevitable self-deceptions of the PMC as beneficiaries of the system, and disputes their self-conception that they are exploited as workers, seeing them instead as “capitalists,” however “symbolic” ones. This is especially true during periods of “elite overproduction” and the resulting “culture wars” in their Darwinian struggle for existence, when the stakes of their conflicts become outsized.

The question is the role of the intelligentsia in society and politics, especially as mediating between the capitalists and workers. Al-Gharbi cites Marx’s Capital vol. 3 on the “functional capitalists” as opposed to “owner capitalists,” and recognizes their prominent role in making policy: setting the conditions for capitalist production.

In my call for “Socialist unity!” (2025), I addressed aspiring socialists today as actually “capitalist politicians.” What would it take to be otherwise? How would it be possible to avoid the fate of past generations of would-be socialists becoming state and other political and social managers of capitalism?

Antonio Gramsci offered a way of distinguishing between what he called “state intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals.” “State intellectuals” are those who are not only employed by the state but all those who have official education, what Curtis Yarvin calls the “Cathedral,” meaning academia and other NGO entities, whether public or private, as the support structure for the state and its political ruling class. But for Gramsci, the only possible “organic intellectuals” under capitalism were in and as a function of the proletarian socialist party. Activists might style themselves as such, but there is no such party, hence intellectuals today are by default “state intellectuals.” Gabriel Rockhill, in his apostate academic agony, calls this disparagingly the “compatible Left.”

What made Lenin more and other than PMC was the proletarian socialist party. But there was no guarantee that this was the case. Lenin himself acknowledged that the party, even and including in and as a function of the socialist revolution itself, became the vehicle for workers to become “careerist bureaucrats” (who, as Lenin wrote, “deserved only to be shot”!), which the history of the Soviet Union and the states that followed it has borne out. But not only Stalinism and its offsprings but also the politics in the avowedly capitalist world have demonstrated this tendency, and specifically in the labor bureaucracy, or officials in the labor movement and unions, whom C. Wright Mills included in his sociology of politics in The Power Elite (1956).

Robert Michels, an associate of German sociologist Max Weber and key Elite Theorist, in his book on Political Parties (1911), centered on analysis of the Marxist SPD (Social-democratic Party of Germany), wrote of the “iron law of oligarchy,” which he observed operating in the socialist workers’ movement and party. This was not merely a function of the intellectuals in the party, whom Michels observed actually maintained the goal of socialism, in ways that workers, rising to party organizational responsibility and leadership, tended to abandon, in favor of maintaining their political and social positions.

So, the real question is not what the party does to and for workers, making them part of a rising elite component of the system, but rather what it does for and to the intellectuals, allowing them to transcend their mere role as intellectuals. Lenin thought it accomplished this through becoming party militants. As I wrote four years ago for Sublation, in “Dogmatization and thought-taboos on the Left” (2022), the default perspective for intellectuals is to regard things in terms of alternative and politically competing capitalist policies — to see themselves as potentially in the position of the ruling class, but doing things differently — but the task is to see things in terms of, not if we had power, but of what the workers would do if they had power.

Now, I would like to specify further — and hopefully better — the nature of the problem, namely, not what the workers would do if they had power within capitalism, but if they had the goal of socialism, of overcoming capitalism. Of course, this would depend on how they saw capitalism as a problem: it would need to be more than a matter of mere distribution; it would require seeing capitalism as something other and more than an efficiency problem. Socialists should want more than a change in management. The Millennial Left, unfortunately, has cashed out — or cashed in? — as offering new managers for capitalism: new policies for the state; and new cultural standards for society. Today, it is the rise of “democratic socialism” — within the Democratic Party. This is not and cannot be Marxism.[4]

This is why Marxism — Marxist “theory” — remains important: in setting the goal of socialism — of overcoming capitalism. Specifically, Marxism as “critical theory” — as setting criteria for socialism: it must be seen as a matter of freedom.

The confrontation of present societal realities — the reality of labor in a technological society with the limitations of the bourgeois definition of freedom: the freedom to sell one’s labor and buy the products of others’ labor; the freedom of commodities, to circulate and be bought and sold — provides some sense of what freedom beyond capitalism might mean. But it would be the fulfillment of the avowed desiderata of liberal capitalism — “meritocracy.” It would also seem to fulfill the criteria of bourgeois freedom: autonomy within social production. Despairing of this freedom has produced a reactionary anti-capitalism that would negate it, reestablishing fixed societal roles and political authority. The desire of the intellectuals is to establish a clerisy or indeed perhaps even the clergy. It is for rational bureaucracy — rational religion. What this leaves aside is its inevitable subordination to capitalist irrationality. There is no way out.

Anti-neoliberalism has produced a great deal of confusion about and obscured what Marxism originally aimed for in socialism, whether in favor of or opposition to it: a generation on both the ostensible “Left” and the avowed Right has regressed to pre-Marxian forms of socialism, mostly statist but also anarchist in character. The pre-neoliberal high 20th century has become an object of nostalgia and has thus occluded what an actual post-capitalist future could be.

Even the intellectuals’ agonizing over their status as PMC betrays an anxiety about “what is to be done?” — to put it in Lenin’s famous and indelible phrase. Specifically, the question is “what is to be done” in order to overcome capitalism. A Marxist answer would remind that the past two centuries have produced no changes beyond capitalism but only within it. Marxism, properly understood, forces us to confront how what we want is actually improved capitalism and not something beyond it. Marxism must task and challenge us on this score.

But this is not an exhortation to do better. This year marks not only the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its promise of freedom, but 100 years after the death of Eugene Debs as the preeminent American socialist in the time of high Marxism.[5] Was he a moral figure of political principle, or an actual Marxist contemporary of others such as Lenin? Recently, it has been suggested that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America has now surpassed the historic high-point of Debs’s SPA Socialist Party of America, in terms of numbers of members. This is a strange distraction from the substance of their differences.

The DSA is a “progressive” faction within the Democratic Party as a ruling capitalist party. The SPA was an independent working-class socialist political party of intransigent opposition to capitalism, which was crushed by the capitalist state. The DSA’s “Marxism” is only a cultural artifact of professed values, a shared language of the educated and initiated; whereas Marxism provided the actual guiding theory and strategy of the SPA. The Millennial DSA’s growth has been spurred by disgruntled PMCs inspired by Bernie Sanders to fulfill Obama’s program of capitalist reform from two decades ago, nostalgically harking back to the 1960s and ’30s for their symbols, but really trying to resurrect the 1980s, as if to undo the Reagan Revolution.[6] The original SPA grew out of the working class’s own struggle for socialism, charting new ground in undiscovered territory, for which Marxism provided consciousness of its historical mission. But such struggle is not taking place today.

The question is what will motivate a proper understanding of the Marxist critique of capitalism. It cannot be accomplished on an abstract theoretical or conceptual level alone, since concrete realities will always confuse, mystify and divert the mind from its true object and goal.

This is a problem that cannot be solved theoretically ahead of time. For the issue is what objects we are looking at to begin with. If we are only looking at the capitalist state and its actions and policies, we will be immediately misled. If we regard capitalist corporations and other enterprises only negatively, we will be driven to the state to try to remedy them. It means adopting what could only be a dissident ruling class and thus capitalist perspective. For what makes the state capitalist is not its collaboration with or compromise by the capitalist class, but that it upholds the needs and imperatives of capital-accumulation. This puts the state and its ruling class in inevitable war against society, even and especially when it claims to be acting on its behalf. The Marxist term for this was “Bonapartism.” In Marx’s time, the most thorough Bonapartists claimed to be “socialist.” This is still true today. The eunuchs of the capitalist state are just what the avowed Right thinks they are.

Without an actual working class socialist movement and politics, we cannot even see the problem of capitalism in its true form, for we will not see its actual limits: the constraint on freedom that capitalism actually is. We will only see practical and moral or even merely ethical failures within a structure that we take for granted and naturalize as unchangeable; and we will only offer corrections to the system that will help maintain things in capitalism.

In order to have any hope of overcoming capitalism, then, the dangers of the party must be courted and potentially reproduced. There is a risk of producing a new bureaucratic elite. But the danger of the party isn’t from the intellectuals, but from the party itself.

Lenin, in What is to Be Done? (1902), pointed out that socialist consciousness comes not from the workers but the intelligentsia. But this was not original to Lenin or unique to “Leninism” but was the “merger formula” of workers and intellectuals articulated by Karl Kautsky as the official Marxist perspective (with which others such as Rosa Luxemburg[7] of course agreed — for it did not even originate with Kautsky but with Marx and Engels themselves). The socialist party was where both workers and intellectuals transcended their traditional roles in society through becoming party militants. But if socialist consciousness comes from “outside” the workers’ own movement, which can only remain within “trade-union consciousness,” then where does it come from? It originates not from intellectuals as a sociological group but from history: the theoretical and intellectual tradition of socialists. It is not immediate but historically mediated consciousness. The party was meant to embody that history, preserving at a practical level the historical experience of the movement.

But the spontaneous tendency of that movement was not beyond but within capitalism. Trade unionism was considered an intrinsic part of capitalism, necessary for workers to realize the value of their labor as a commodity. Other civil-social non-remunerative or “decommodified” activity i.e. “unpaid labor” by the working class created forms of social cooperation that Marx regarded as a “free gift to capital” and part of the conditions for capitalist production.

So, the intellectuals in the party preserved the goal of the movement that the movement could not on its own. This was not a static proposition, because the goal would itself develop and change, becoming more focused and clarified, through the history of the movement, concretizing the meaning of the task of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This concrete meaning changed in the history of capitalism, and was affected by the growth and development of the workers’ movement for socialism. Without the continuity of the party across substantial historical experience, including through its own internal conflicts as well as its antagonism to dominant society and politics, the goal of socialism could not be maintained in a concrete but only in an abstract and hence partial or even one-sided and thus misleading way. Marxism’s Hegelian-dialectical view meant recognizing how it could even become reversed across the course of history. Without this consciousness, the movement cannot actually succeed in its goal.

As Arthur Rosenberg pointed out, in his book, The History of Bolshevism: From Marx to the First Five-Year Plan (1932), the history of Marxism itself demonstrated how both the movement and its goal became internally divided and opposed: Was the movement to achieve socialism or rather to secure the place of the working class in capitalism; was the goal to establish workers’ democracy to manage capitalism, or the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat to overthrow it? How could these different sides of the movement as well as its goal be separated out, let alone divided, since they depend on each other? And yet Marxism in its history did become so internally divided and opposed. What was a means to an end became an end in itself.

The party provided the basis for making these issues concretely political and not merely abstract principles; and the intellectuals provided the theoretical perspective through which they could be reflected upon and recognized, especially through their historical changes. Marxism provided the basis for this consciousness of history, specifically through the critique of socialism — the critique of the workers’ movement for socialism.

If this process were to be resumed, it could be that Marxism will be surpassed in such a struggle and development. For now, Marxism haunts us uncomfortably, with its greater vision, higher aspiration and deeper critique than any alternative perspectives on offer today or for the last hundred years. If “Marxism” is more than a code-word for progressivist state capitalism, then its meaning is too painful to bear.

Marxists such as Lenin and Debs stand as example and warning of the task that is required of socialist intellectuals. As in the past, even our most “utopian” imaginations, if realized, will only become dystopian circumstances for the workers: they will be projections of capitalism onto and into the future. The history of the last century — the century after Lenin and Debs’s deaths — proves it: If we are not thinking about an actual proletarian socialist movement and its realities, building a party to serve it, we will not see however dimly beyond it, but remain enclosed within and thinking only of capitalism. | §

_________________________

Postscript on the Millennial DSA

Bhaskar Sunkara is the great success-story of the Millennial Left. He had his vision — of renewing the DSA through uniting the “Left” in it, first by founding a new journal in Jacobin magazine — and he has fulfilled it. But what has this actually achieved?

There were two souls of the Millennial “Left”: one reached to recover the history of Marxism and socialism, harking back to Eugene Debs and his SPA; the other is for achieving “progressive” reforms of capitalism, whether in foreign or domestic policies: ending U.S. “imperialist” interventionism and general war-policy; and implementing economic reforms in the crisis of capitalism — looking to FDR and Henry Wallace, as against Truman and JFK. 

There is a specific danger in adopting theories that originate in and imply strategies and purposes that are not acknowledged let alone properly understood. There is also the problem of maintaining a strategy from a different time. This is the case with the Millennial inheritance of the DSA, an organization and framework which was conceived in an earlier historical era and had a very different intention from the one Millennials have sought. The Millennials adopted a position of setback as an advance. When established in 1982, Michael Harrington’s DSA was a defensive and rearguard action.

But the Millennials hoped for more — even if theirs has been a similar move in the face of Trump to Harrington’s under Reagan. I am aware of the repetition of the 1980s, remembering David Dinkins’s DSA NYC Mayoralty as analogue to Zohran Mamdani’s. It took a long time for the “Left” to acknowledge let alone recognize neoliberalism. Bernie Sanders for one started out as a New Left socialist who became an elected capitalist politician criticizing the Democrats for abandoning their New Deal and Great Society agenda to neoliberalism and accommodating Reagan — even as they disclaimed it. The fact that Sanders became inspirational for many Millennials speaks volumes.

Leaving aside theoretical “Marxism,” there is the issue of basic political outlook and strategy. The founder of the DSA, Michael Harrington, was a member and acolyte of the Socialist Party of America when he joined it in the late 1950s as part of a group led by longtime Marxist socialist and former Trotskyist Max Shachtman. There was a capitalist electoral political “realignment strategy” that was suspended by Harrington in forming the DSA in the 1980s. This was a calculation under conditions of the Reagan Revolution and what was perceived as a general turn to the Right in the neoliberal era. The idea was that the best one could do was retain a “Left” position on the margin of the Democratic Party. The electoral realignment strategy he abandoned was not original to Harrington but goes back to Shachtman in the 1950s and ’60s-era SPA Socialist Party of America. 

It was based, more broadly, on Shachtman’s 1940s theory of “bureaucratic collectivism” as a historical tendency focused on but not limited to the Communist Party-ruled states. It was a theory of Stalinism that applied to the Communist Parties in general. It was Shachtman’s answer to Burnham’s “managerial revolution” thesis, trying to salvage its descriptive accuracy from its fundamentally anti-Marxist theoretical and political basis. Bureaucratic collectivism was a symptom of the failure and decline of the proletarian socialist movement. Insofar as the historical condition for bureaucratic collectivism was alternative to and in the absence of proletarian socialist politics in the U.S. as elsewhere, Shachtman thought that the New Deal Democrats were potentially the bureaucratic collectivist party — the Communist Party’s involvement in it appeared to prove this. The question for socialists was what to do about it. 

The New Deal Coalition was a very heterogeneous electorate and political alliance between Southern conservatives and Northern progressives, Midwestern farmers and urban workers. But this history is usually fudged and thus suppressed. As an example, the histories of Populism and socialism in the U.S. are conflated. But the DSA is aware of the history of Shachtman’s realignment strategy, for example in an article written in the DSA’s journal by Alexander Hernández in 2022: 

What is Realignment?

Realignment is a strategy based on Marxist analysis largely credited to Max Shachtman and DSA founding chair Michael Harrington. [In its] classic formulation, the realignment strategy sought to drive conservatives out of the Democratic coalition and consolidate left, labor, and liberal forces within it. In Shachtman’s and Harrington’s view, this consolidation was a prerequisite for both gaining a progressive governing majority and opening up possibilities for a democratic socialist movement in the U.S.[8]

The latter point is left vague. And the class basis is left out entirely: Shachtman and Harrington considered both the Democrats and Republicans to be parties of the ruling capitalist class with middle-class support, to which the working class was tied. They wanted to free the working class from them to form an independent socialist party, but to do so the equivocal and ambiguous basis for the cross-class — capitalist and middle-class — alliance in both Parties had to be clarified and re-sorted: Democrats as progressive middle-class and Republicans as conservative middle-class. This is because the capitalists were understood as needing middle-class support to govern, and to be neither and both progressive and conservative, i.e. free of ideological motivation or even hard policy preferences, and just following exigent necessities, including political ones of finding middle-class support — also among the bureaucracy, without which they cannot affect government policy. 

There was a two-step strategy, in which Shachtman wanted to realign the Democratic Party into being the progressives and the Republicans the conservatives, so that there would be space for a working class-based socialist party to emerge and occupy politically. He was trying to restore the conditions of the old SPA from the turn of the 20th century, when the Republicans were the progressive, black and labor party, and the Democrats were the conservatives. This had been reversed by FDR with the New Deal Coalition, which fulfilled the earlier effort by his uncle-in-law Theodore Roosevelt to advance progressivism in the Republican Party: his unrealized attempt to build upon his original Square Deal in running for reelection in 1912 thus became the New Deal agenda for FDR’s election 20 years later.

Anti-black racism and segregation, de jure in the Jim Crow laws of the South and de facto elsewhere in the country, was a key fracture-point in the capitalist Parties. The Republicans routinely put forward Civil Rights legislation under the Democrat Congressional majorities for decades before LBJ marshalled Democrat support to join them in finally passing it in the 1960s. This alienated the Southern Democrats, splitting them. The Republicans, for their part, recoiled at the government bureaucratic administration of anti-discrimination policies by the Great Society Democrats, and came to express voter discontents with the way Civil Rights reform was implemented.

Thus, the realignment eventually happened, but it was through the Republicans’ “Southern Strategy,” in which they won over the Dixiecrats to their side — but not without the hiccup of renegade Democrat Governor George Wallace, whose independent third-party candidacy for President helped elect Nixon in 1968. Reagan was different from Nixon, and even different from Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, with which Reaganism is usually associated. The circumstances changed. The Vietnam War happened, its failure causing disarray among the Democrats. And the Southern Democrats were not pushed out, but left on their own accord.  So it did not have the effect Shachtman wanted. It was part of a conservative reaction against, rather than coming up against the limits of, capitalist progressivism. Nixon winning in 1968 (let alone his landslide in 1972, or Reagan’s victory in 1980) was not part of the plan. When Socialists Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph promoted the Freedom Budget under LBJ, they assumed economic growth that would make it feasible (but perhaps it was meant merely to throw down the gauntlet to the conservatives among the Democrats?). The unanticipated post-1973 economic downturn that led to neoliberalism was the actual basis for Reagan’s eventual success, consolidating the realignment on a conservative rather than progressive basis, as Shachtman had hoped.

Shachtman and Harrington expected a division to develop when the progressivism of the Democrats reached its limits and went into crisis — of its success. But Shachtman did not advocate joining the Democrats (let alone the Republicans), whereas Harrington’s DSA did join them — in anticipation of a later break into a renewed socialist party. The role of the DSA was not to advocate socialism but to bolster the flagging progressives of the Democratic Party in the Reagan era. In order to do this and not appear disloyal, the true nature of the former Shachtman strategy Harrington still believed in but had to suspend in the DSA was downplayed or actively suppressed. The Millennials inherited this ambivalence about the Democrats. Their confusion is over how socialism differs from capitalist progressivism.  It’s not a difference of degree but of kind. It’s not about policy, but politics: not what is done, but who is doing it. Will it be the PMC, or the working class?

The recent interviews with Bhaskar Sunkara by Ross Douthat in The New York Times and on Fox News, and the ongoing Millennial DSA’s debates about possibilities for a “clean vs. dirty break” with the Democrats, show the ambiguity and equivocation about this.[9] Sunkara knows but will not explicitly state the strategy — whether Shachtman or Harrington’s. Is it for an independent socialist party or progressivism in the Democratic Party? This sows confusion among the DSA members, preventing a clear discussion of things. Sunkara cannot be excused in this just because, as he told Douthat, he will be “perfectly comfortable” to watch the “centuries it might take” to “enact socialism” from his “hyperbaric chamber.” In the meantime, it is a matter of capitalist progressivism.

If the DSA were to be clear about their status as PMC progressive capitalists — as al-Gharbi advocates — seeking policy reforms in capitalism through the Democratic Party, they would lose their organizational raison d’être. But the latter is based on a lie — or at least a self-deception. As Sunkara said, he doesn’t want the DSA to follow the path of the Congressional Black Caucus betraying their progressive roots in the politics of the Democratic Party — painfully aware as he is that they killed the Bernie Sanders candidacy in 2020, as well as having supported Hillary over Bernie in 2016. Nor does he want the DSA to replicate the experience of the labor union bureaucracy or other NGO base organizations of the Democratic Party. But the DSA has inevitably become just another canvassing unit for candidates in the Democratic Party. And the DSA serves as test-marketing for messaging to the youth and other progressive voters for other Democrats. This is how the Party is evaluating their efforts.

The DSA trying to discipline Democrats by endorsing only its own members as candidates is more a matter of brand-control than actual politics. Their angst about Democrat candidates is a deflection from the actual issue, which is whether and how the DSA could represent the working class, let alone socialism. They grudgingly admit that the Democrats don’t and won’t. For instance, the DSA’s “rank-and-file strategy” for organized labor leads its members to join the union staff: the labor bureaucracy — which is an organized base for the Democratic Party no less than the NAACP, NOW, Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign, et al.; the neo-Stalinist “Left” that criticizes and opposes the DSA is just oriented to the other constituency bases for the Democrats: minority community organizations. The “Marxist Left” has been doing this for generations, now. It has led to ostensible “Marxists” promoting “progressive” capitalist policies in the labor movement or minority community organizations — to representing the “Left-wing” of the Democratic Party.

The DSA does not try to organize the working class, but it does claim to represent them. However, its endorsed candidates have been elected with middle-class professional rather than working-class votes. This follows the more general Democratic Party pattern. Bhaskar Sunkara told Ross Douthat that the DSA can win over professionals to paying higher taxes to redistribute wealth to the working class. Whether that vision is politically viable long-term is questionable, considering the inevitable vicissitudes of capitalism:  Won’t professionals ultimately vote in their economic interests and not charity; won’t they (like many workers) need to move to the suburbs and vote Republican for lower taxes?

It seems inarguable that while original historical Marxism was not a PMC phenomenon, the DSA, representing Millennial “socialism,” with its authentic roots going back to the “Left” of the 1930s and ’60s, actually is. | §

[1] Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (1966), available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/>.

[2] See my opening remarks in “1917–2017,” transcript of panel discussion with Bryan Palmer and Leo Panitch, Platypus Review 99 (September 2017), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2017/08/29/1917-2017/>.

[3] See Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (Princeton, 2024); and interview with Briahna Joy Gray, “Who is responsible for woke?,” Bad Faith, June 25, 2026, available online at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mPRkXbpFjs>.

[4] See my “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100(October 2017), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead/>; and “The end of Millennial Marxism,” Compact, July 1, 2022, available online at: <https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-end-of-millennial-marxism/>.

[5] See my “The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,” Platypus Review 102 (December 2017 – January 2018), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2017/12/02/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today/>.

[6] See my “The Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s,” Platypus Review 82 (December 2015 – January 2016), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2015/12/17/sandernistas-final-triumph-1980s/>.

[7] See my “Rosa Luxemburg and the party,” Platypus Review 86 (May 2016), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2016/05/03/rosa-luxemburg-party/>, also published as “Sacrifice and redemption,” Weekly Worker 1115 (July 15, 2016), available online at: <https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1115/sacrifice-and-redemption/>.

[8] Alexander Hernández, “The case for realignment,” Socialist Forum (Fall 2022), available online at: <https://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/fall-2022/the-case-for-realignment/>.

[9] See Ross Douthat and Bhaskar Sunkara, “A vision of a ‘society without capitalism’,” New York Times (July 16, 2026), available online at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/16/opinion/democratic-socialist-capitalism-bhaskar-sunkara.html>; “A ‘society without capitalism’,” Interesting Times with Ross Douthat,  July 16, 2026, available online at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCoFP6Zma7s>; and interview with Aishah Hasnie, Fox News Channel, July 18, 2026, available online at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYFLliGfIg4&t=201s>.

Chris Cutrone

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

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Chris Cutrone, James Vaughn and Spencer Leonard with Doug Lain on America 250

Chris Cutrone, James Vaughn and Spencer Leonard discuss America 250 with Doug Lain, on the occasion of Cutrone and Vaughn’s July 3, 2026 articles published in Compact Magazine.

Articles:

https://www.compactmag.com/article/why-marxists-loved-the-american-revolution

https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-new-worlds-declaration-of-independence-from-the-old

Spencer Leonard with Doug Lain on America and remembering and forgetting 1776:

Why Marxists loved the American Revolution

Chris Cutrone

Published in Compact, July 3, 2026

Illustration by Scott Menchin

Hegel is usually understood to have found the final form of human society in the constitutional monarchy of Prussia, but he made an exception to his philosophy of history for America as the “land of the future.” He acknowledged to a friend that his model political regime was improved in the American constitutional republic as the ideal form of state for bourgeois civil society, with its elected monarchy in the presidency counterbalancing democracy so as to preserve the freedom of civil society. Marx and Engels regarded the United States as the most bourgeois, democratic, and free country of their time. Lenin called the American Revolution a “truly revolutionary war” and wrote in the early twentieth century that in America “freedom was most complete.” 

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

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

“Marxists regarded the American Revolution as a ‘bourgeois’ revolution.”

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

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

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

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

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

The bourgeois revolution was the emancipation of the rights of labor against its traditional restrictions in the previous state: the ancien régime and its official religious sanctification. In this respect, it was the rights of private production and appropriation in civil society, which was the right of individuals to pursue their own chosen labor, offering its products on the free market. But this was a social form of labor: the social relations of free exchange, trade and commerce as the form of social cooperation and community; the freely associated laborers. 

Trade in traditional civilization was restricted politically by the caste order, and was primarily in luxury or specialized goods for the ruling castes, and not the subsistence needs for the vast majority of people. The rise of bourgeois society was the transformation of immediate local subsistence production into production for trade and commerce. One produces not for one’s own subsistence needs or those of one’s immediate local community, but for trade to acquire subsistence goods for one’s own consumption from more distant others: the dependence of the majority on the commerce in subsistence goods. The exchange of traditional civilization governed by custom was replaced by trade according to worth freely negotiated according to the value of labor in the market. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Furthermore, in this period, the working class was greatly internationalized, with many workers migrating for work around the world, often not permanently settling but returning to their home countries after earning their fortunes. It was a smaller world at that time of original historical Marxism than we tend to appreciate. Many workers from around the world had experience living and working in the United States in this period, and they were influenced profoundly by its social freedom—much as Marx and Engels had been influenced by the freedom they experienced as exiles in France and England. 

“Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America.”

Interestingly, Marx seriously considered permanently relocating to America, to which many radical political refugees from Europe had emigrated in the nineteenth century, such as the “red ’48ers” and “Bohemians” who had fled from the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany and Central Europe. These German émigrés, with whom Marx was associated, participated in the abolitionist movement and the new Republican Party in the United States, whose leading newspaper, the New York Tribune, Marx regularly wrote for in the 1850s, and the red ’48ers served as officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and figured as Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Later, in the period before the Russian Revolution, many leading and rank-and-file Bolsheviks lived and worked and organized as socialists in the United States. They took that American experience back with them in leading the Revolution in Russia. Many American socialists inspired by the Russian Revolution had first met the Bolsheviks in America. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the contemporary left tends to doubt the identical fates of the bourgeois revolution—with America as its last standing avatar—and the struggle for socialism, imagining the real struggle is taking place somewhere else. This consensus reflects not enlightenment but its forgetting. Marx’s and historical Marxism’s clear perspectives on the foundational character of the American Revolution and central character of the United States historically in the struggle for socialism have become obscured in the present. A reactionary anti-capitalism, both on the ostensible left and the avowed right, has made a casualty of America and its revolutionary history. But these doubts about the possibility of overcoming capitalism in America, the predominant capitalist country, are also doubts about socialism itself. This is not merely because of the political and economic centrality of the United States, but because bourgeois social relations and their contradiction in capitalism are expressed most purely in America. 

In America’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth year, this is particularly poignant. In the recent era of neoliberalism—the Reagan and Thatcher revolution of neoliberal capitalism—the American “left” has reached to post-war European social democracy as a contrasting counter-model, and capitalism has been hastily identified with Anglo-Americanism. In this, both the counterrevolutionary character of social democracy and the revolutionary character of capitalism itself have been obscured. What was forgotten is that original historical Marxism opposed the welfare state of capitalism, which was seen—rightly—as intentionally undercutting the workers’ own social capacities and struggles by making them dependent wards of capitalist politics. 

“This counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted as good coin.”

Instead, this counterfeiting of socialism has been accepted as good coin. The Millennial “left,” for instance the Democratic Socialists of America, has been content to accept what the right denounces demagogically as “socialism” in the welfare state, inverting its value positively as their own program. The original meaning of not only Marxism but socialism itself as the promised self-overcoming and transcendence of capitalism has been deranged beyond recognition. Worse still, “freedom” has become a strangely tabooed concept, both on the “left” and beyond. Pessimism about America expresses pessimism about socialism. It is pessimism about freedom. Choosing the pessimistic version of capitalism in “progressive” welfarism has meant doubting the possibility of socialism that Marxism originally recognized in capitalism as a self-contradictory form of freedom. 

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

| Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

The American Revolution at 250

Why Marxists loved America

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel with Matt McManus, Joel Kotkin and Gerald Celente in New York City, June 21, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 21, 2026 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

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

Rejoinder on Marxism and individuals

Chris Cutrone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marx to Engels (Feb. 11, 1851):

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

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

Engels to Marx (Feb. 13, 1851):

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

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

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

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

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

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

[25 March:]

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

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

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

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

ADORNO: We should not blind ourselves to this.

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

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

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

ADORNO: With a strictly Leninist manifesto.

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

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

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

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

HORKHEIMER: That is conformism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[30 March:]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ADORNO: We live on the culture we criticize.

HORKHEIMER: I meant the society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

HORKHEIMER: The party no longer exists.

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

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

ADORNO: The problem of he who speaks.

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