{"id":139,"date":"2009-04-18T00:00:12","date_gmt":"2009-04-18T05:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=139"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:57","slug":"1917","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"1917"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century<\/h2>\n

Toward a Theory of Historical Regression<\/h2>\n

Presented <\/em>at the Left Forum in New York City, Pace University, April 18, 2009, and revised and expanded for presentation at the 1st annual Platypus international convention, Chicago, June 12, 2009. The panel, “The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century: Toward a Theory of Historical Regression,” was organized around four significant moments in the progressive diremption of theory and practice over the course of the 20th century: <\/em>2001 (Spencer A. Leonard), <\/em>1968 (Atiya Khan), <\/em>1933 (Richard Rubin), and <\/em>1917 (Chris Cutrone), introduced by Benjamin Blumberg.<\/em> (Video recording<\/a>.)<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

1917<\/h1>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all<\/em>.
\n\u2014 Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party <\/em>(1848)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hegel links the freedom of each to the freedom of all as something of equal value. But in doing so he regards the freedom of the individual only in terms of the freedom of the whole, through which it is realized. Marx, by contrast, makes the free development of each the precondition for the correlative freedom of all.
\n\u2014 Karl Korsch, Introduction to Marx\u2019s Critique of the Gotha Programme <\/em>(1922)<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

THE YEAR 1917 is the most enigmatic and hence controversial date in the history of the Left. It is therefore necessarily the focal point for the Platypus philosophy of history of the Left, which seeks to grasp problems in the present as those that had already manifested in the past, but have not yet been overcome. Until we make historical sense of the problems associated with the events and self-conscious actors of 1917, we will be haunted by their legacy. Therefore, whether we are aware of this or not, we are tasked with grappling with 1917, a year marked by the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place.<\/p>\n

The two most important names associated with the revolution that broke out in 1917 in Russia and in 1918 in Germany are the Second International Marxist radicals Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, each of whom played fateful roles in this revolutionary moment. Two Marxian critical theorists who sought to follow Luxemburg and Lenin to advance the historical consciousness and philosophical awareness of the problems of revolutionary politics, in the wake of 1917, are Georg Luk\u00e1cs and Karl Korsch.<\/p>\n

While neither Lenin nor Luxemburg survived the revolutionary period that began in 1917, both Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch ended up disavowing and distancing themselves from their works, both published in 1923, that sought to elaborate a Marxian critical theory of the revolutionary proletarian socialist politics of Lenin and Luxemburg. Luk\u00e1cs adapted his perspective to the prevailing conditions of Stalinism in the international Communist movement and Korsch became a critic of \u201cMarxist-Leninist\u201d Bolshevism, and an important theorist of \u201cLeft\u201d or \u201ccouncil communist\u201d politics. Meanwhile, Luxemburg was pitted against Lenin in a similar degeneration and disintegration of the revolutionary consciousness that had informed the revolution of 1917.<\/p>\n

The forms that this disintegration took involved the arraying of the principles of liberalism against those of socialism, or libertarianism against authoritarianism. Lenin and Luk\u00e1cs became emblems of authoritarian socialism, while Luxemburg and Korsch became associated with more libertarian, if not liberal, concerns.<\/p>\n

But what remains buried under such a misapprehension of the disputed legacy of 1917 is the substance of agreement and collaboration, in the revolutionary Marxist politics of that moment, among all these figures. Behind the fact of Luxemburg\u2019s close collaboration and practical political unity with Lenin lies the intrinsic relationship of liberalism with socialism, and emancipation with necessity. Rather than associating Lenin with revolutionary necessity and Luxemburg with desirable emancipation in such a one-sided manner, we need to grasp how necessity, possibility, and desirability were related, for both Luxemburg and Lenin, in ways that not only allowed for, but actually motivated their shared thought and action in the revolution that opened in 1917.<\/p>\n

Both Lenin and Luxemburg sought to articulate and fulfill the concerns of liberalism with socialism\u2014for instance in Lenin\u2019s (qualified) endorsement of self-determination against national oppression.<\/p>\n

Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch were among the first,<\/a> and remain the best, to have rigorously explored the theoretical implications of the shared politics of Luxemburg and Lenin, in their works History and Class Consciousness<\/em> and \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d respectively. Both Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch approached what they considered the practical and theoretical breakthrough of the Third International Marxist communism of Luxemburg and Lenin by returning to the \u201cHegelian\u201d roots of Marxism, a reconsideration of its \u201cidealist\u201d dimension, as opposed to a \u201cmaterialist\u201d objectivistic metaphysics that lied behind \u201ceconomism,\u201d for example.<\/p>\n

This involved, for Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch, an exploration of Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s break from the objectivistic \u201cvulgar Marxism\u201d of the politics and theory of the Second International, exemplified by Karl Kautsky. Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s term for such objectivism was \u201creification\u201d; Korsch addressed it by way of Marx\u2019s approach to the philosophical problem of \u201ctheory and practice,\u201d which, he argued, had become \u201cseparated out\u201d in the Second International period, their \u201cumbilical cord broken,\u201d while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to bring them back into productive tension and advance their relation through their revolutionary Marxism.<\/p>\n

Ironically, while the title of Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s work is History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, it was concerned with a more \u201cphilosophical\u201d exposition and categorial investigation of the problem of \u201creification\u201d and the commodity form as socially mediating, following Marx in Capital<\/em>. Meanwhile, Korsch\u2019s \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d actually addressed the historical vicissitudes of the theory-practice problem in Marx and Engels\u2019s lifetime and in the subsequent history of the Marxism of the Second International. In both cases, there was an attempt to grasp the issue of subjectivity, or the \u201csubjective\u201d dimension of Marxism.<\/p>\n

But it was this focus on subjectivity from which both Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch broke in their subsequent development: Luk\u00e1cs disavowed what he pejoratively called the attempt to \u201cout-Hegel Hegel,\u201d making his peace with Stalinist \u201cdialectical materialism,\u201d while (later) attempting to found a \u201cMarxist ontology.\u201d Korsch, on the other hand, distanced himself from what he came to call, pejoratively, the \u201cmetaphysical\u201d presuppositions of Marxism \u2014 even and, perhaps, especially as practiced by Lenin, though also, if to a lesser extent, by Luxemburg and even by Marx himself \u2014 pushing him ultimately to call for \u201cgoing beyond Marxism.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this complementary if divergent trajectory, Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch reflected, in their own ways, the return of the \u201cvulgar Marxism\u201d that they had sought to supersede in their theoretical digestion of 1917 \u2014 a return marked by the Stalinization of the international Communist movement beginning in the 1920s. For example, Theodor W. Adorno was excited to meet Luk\u00e1cs in Vienna in 1925, only to be repulsed at Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s disavowal of the work that had so strongly inspired Adorno and his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. Korsch, who had also, like Luk\u00e1cs, been associated with the Frankfurt School from its inception, had come by the end of the 1930s to scorn the Frankfurt critical theorists as \u201cMarxist metaphysicians,\u201d while in the 1960s Luk\u00e1cs wrote contemptuously of them as having taken up residence at the \u201cGrand Hotel Abyss,\u201d explicitly deriding them for following his early work. In such disavowals can be found evidence for the repression of the problems Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch had sought to address in elaborating Marxian theory from Lenin and Luxemburg\u2019s revolutionary thought and action in 1917\u201319.<\/p>\n

Likewise, in subsequent history, the relation between \u201cmeans\u201d and \u201cends\u201d for the Marxist radicals Lenin and Luxemburg in the moment of 1917 became obscured, Lenin being caricatured as believing, in some Machiavellian fashion, that the \u201cends justified the means,\u201d or exemplifying \u201crevolutionary will.\u201d Luxemburg was equally caricatured as an upholder of principled emancipatory means in extolling the virtues of practical defeat, seemingly happy to remain a Cassandra of the revolution. Biographically, this is crudely reconciled in the image of Luxemburg\u2019s quixotic martyrdom during the Spartacist uprising of 1919, and Lenin\u2019s illness and subsequent removal from political power at the end of his life, condemned to watch, helpless, the dawn of the Stalinist authoritarianism to which his political ruthlessness and pursuit of revolutionary ends had supposedly led.<\/p>\n

In either case, rather than serving as an impetus for a determined investigation of these revolutionary Marxists\u2019 thought and action at the level of the basis for their self-understanding and political judgment \u2014 models from which we might be able to learn, elaborate, and build upon further \u2014 they have been regarded only as emblems of competing principles, in the abstract (e.g., on the question of the Constituent Assembly, over which they had differed only tactically, not principally). So Lenin\u2019s writings and actions are scoured for any hint of authoritarian inhumanity, and Luxemburg\u2019s for anything that can be framed for its supposedly more humane compassion. At the same time, the futility of both their politics has been naturalized: It is tacitly understood that neither what Lenin nor Luxemburg aspired to achieve was actually possible to accomplish \u2014 either in their time or in ours.<\/p>\n

<\/a>In the words of Adorno\u2019s writing on the legacy of Lenin, Luxemburg, Korsch, and Luk\u00e1cs, in his last completed book, Negative Dialectics<\/em>, this way of approaching 1917 and its significance evinced \u201cdogmatization and thought-taboos.\u201d[1]<\/a> The thought and action of Lenin and Luxemburg are now approached dogmatically, and they and their critical-theoretical inheritors, Luk\u00e1cs, Korsch, Benjamin, and Adorno, are approached only with a powerful thought-taboo firmly in place: that the revolutionary moment of 1917 was doomed to failure, and that its fate was tragically played out in the character of the revolutionary Marxism of its time. Their Marxism is thus buried in an attempt to ward off the haunting accusation that it did not fail us, but rather that we have failed it \u2014 failed to learn what we might from it. But, like Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch in their subsequent development, after they convinced themselves of the \u201cerrors of their ways,\u201d we have not recognized and understood, but only rationalized, the problematic legacy of 1917.<\/p>\n

1917 remains a question \u2014 and it is the very same question that Lenin and Luxemburg went about trying address in theory and practice \u2014 whether we ask it explicitly of ourselves now or not. It is the great tabooed subject, even if that taboo has been enforced, either by a mountain of calumny heaped upon it, or the \u201cpraise\u201d it earns in Stalinist \u2014 or \u201cTrotskyist\u201d \u2014 \u201cadherence.\u201d<\/p>\n

For example, it remains unclear whether the \u201csoviets\u201d or \u201cworkers\u2019 councils\u201d that sprung up in the revolutions of 1917\u201319 could have ever been proven in practice to be an adequate social-political means (for beginning) to overcome capitalism. <\/a>The Luk\u00e1cs of the revolutionary period recognized, in \u201cThe Standpoint of the Proletariat,\u201d the third part of his essay on \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,\u201d the danger that<\/p>\n

[As Hegel said,] directly before the emergence of something qualitatively new, the old state of affairs gathers itself up into its original, purely general, essence, into its simple totality, transcending and absorbing back into itself all those marked differences and peculiarities which it evinced when it was still viable. .\u00a0.\u00a0. [I]n the age of the dissolution of capitalism, the fetishistic categories collapse and it becomes necessary to have recourse to the \u201cnatural form\u201d underlying them.[2]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Luk\u00e1cs recognized that the \u201cproducers\u2019 democracy\u201d of the \u201cworkers\u2019 councils\u201d in the revolutionary \u201cdictatorship of the proletariat\u201d was intrinsically related to, and indeed the political expression of, an intensification of the \u201creification\u201d of the commodity form. Nevertheless, it seems that the attempt, by Lenin and Trotsky\u2019s Bolsheviks, to bring \u201call power to the soviets\u201d in the October Revolution of 1917, and by Luxemburg\u2019s Spartacists in the German Revolution that followed, is something we can learn from, despite its failure. For this revolutionary moment raises all the questions, and at the most profound levels, of the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy that still haunt us today.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Korsch recognized that the revolutions of 1917\u201319 were the outcome of a \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d that had previously manifested in the Second International, in the reformist \u201crevisionist\u201d dispute, in which the younger generation of radicals, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky, first cut their teeth at the turn of the century. But, according to Korsch in 1923, this \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d remained unresolved. The unfolding of 1917 can thus be said to be the highest expression of the \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d that Luxemburg, Lenin, and Trotsky \u2014 and Korsch and Luk\u00e1cs after them \u2014 recognized as manifesting the highest expression of the crisis of capitalism<\/em>, in the period of war, revolution, counterrevolution, civil war, and reaction that set the stage for subsequent 20th century history. Arguably, the world never really overcame or even recovered from this crisis of the early 20th century, but has only continued to struggle with its still unresolved aftermath.<\/p>\n

In this sense 1917 was not, in the self-understanding of its thinkers and actors, an attempt to leap from the realm of necessity, but rather the attempt to advance a necessity \u2014 the necessity of social revolution and transformation \u2014 to a higher stage, and thus open a new realm of possibility. <\/a>The enigmatic silence surrounding the question of 1917 is masked by a deafening din of opprobrium meant to prevent our hearing it. It remains, as Benjamin put it, an \u201calarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds,\u201d whether we (choose to) hear it or not.[3]<\/a> But the degree to which those who have come later have done so, the repression of 1917 has been achieved only at the cost of a regression that, as Benjamin put it, ceaselessly consumes the past and our ability to learn from it, ceding the meaning of history and its sacrifices to our enemies, and rendering those sacrifices in past struggles vain.<\/p>\n

Recognizing the nature of the difficulty of 1917, that the problems we find in this moment comprise the essence of its potential pertinence for us, may be the first step in our recognizing the character of the regression the Left has undergone since then. Like a troubling memory in an individual\u2019s life that impinges upon consciousness, the memory of 1917 that troubles our conceptions of social-political possibilities in the present might help us reveal the problems we seek to overcome, the same problems against which Lenin and Luxemburg struggled. Even if a failure, theirs was a brilliant failure from which we cannot afford to be disinherited. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #17 (November 2009).<\/em>
\n<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

<\/a>[1]<\/a> Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics<\/em>, translated by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 2007), 143.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[2]<\/a> Georg Luk\u00e1cs, \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,\u201d in History and Class Consciousness<\/em>: Studies in Marxist Dialectics<\/em>, translated by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 208.<\/p>\n

<\/a>[3]<\/a> Walter Benjamin, \u201cSurrealism,\u201d in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings<\/em>, vol. 2, 1927\u20131930<\/em>, edited by Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 218.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Decline of the Left in the 20th Century Toward a Theory of Historical Regression Presented at the Left Forum in New York City, Pace University, April 18, 2009, and revised and expanded for presentation at the 1st annual Platypus international convention, Chicago, June 12, 2009. The panel, “The Decline of the Left in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[11,8,4,35,19,16,6],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-11","tag-conferences","tag-left-forum","tag-lenin","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":778,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/778"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}