{"id":2119,"date":"2015-01-22T00:00:23","date_gmt":"2015-01-22T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2119"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:57:11","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:57:11","slug":"concrete-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2119","title":{"rendered":"Concrete issues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Originally published in abridged form as a letter in <\/em>Weekly Worker<\/strong> 1042<\/a> (January 22, 2015).<\/em> [PDF]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not Weberian<\/h3>\n

Mike Macnair\u2019s January 15 letter<\/a> comes closer than his December 18 article<\/a> to the concrete issues with which I have been concerned in my writings on democratic revolution, the contradiction of capital, and the issue of political party for the Left. It\u2019s evidently possible that I have written on these issues poorly or at least unclearly. But that does not mean that I should be saddled with conventional misreadings of the Frankfurt School or Luk\u00e1cs. I wrote my PhD dissertation on \u201cAdorno\u2019s Marxism\u201d and addressed there the prevalent and glaring misinterpretation of Adorno that neglected or misunderstood his Marxism. But I am not a historian and so I approach the issue at the textual level of theoretical \u201cideas\u201d rather than tell a story of influences and development. If Adorno had a critique of Luk\u00e1cs, it was not against Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s own (Marxist) critique of Weber, with which Adorno agreed. — So, no \u201cWeberian Marxism\u201d there. Luk\u00e1cs and Adorno disagreed with Weber that capitalism was aporetic theodicy, a wrong turn and dead end beginning with the Protestant Reformation and its \u201cwork ethic,\u201d but followed Marx in considering capitalism as constrained revolution become self-contradictory, which is different. For Luk\u00e1cs and Adorno, Weber was counterrevolutionary. Was Weber a \u201cbourgeois liberal?\u201d Certainly not in the sense of Benjamin Franklin. For Weber, capitalism would continue \u201cuntil the last ton of fossil fuel is burned up.\u201d Not so for Luk\u00e1cs and Adorno, who continued to regard capitalism as \u201cdialectical\u201d and subject to change and not one-dimensional. I\u2019ve tried to lay out the political<\/em> categories for this.<\/p>\n

Police state<\/h3>\n

I agree with Macnair that the difference between Hegel and Marx is \u201cconcrete,\u201d but not in terms of \u201cmethod\u201d but what changed historically between Hegel and Marx\u2019s time. This change was \u201ccapitalism,\u201d meaning, for Marx, the Industrial Revolution. Regarding my use of categories in the \u201cMarxist\u201d rather than \u201ccolloquial\u201d sense, this doesn\u2019t mean that Marx et al. never used terms colloquially. But they did use them in specific and, to those unfamiliar, peculiar ways. One such category is \u201cthe state,\u201d which Lenin, following Marx, defined strictly as \u201cspecial bodies of armed men.\u201d This does not mean the legislature, judiciary or even the government bureaucracy. The \u201cstate\u201d for Marxists is not the \u201crule of law.\u201d It is the \u201cspecial bodies of armed men.\u201d Prior to the failed revolution and Bonapartist resolution of 1848, in the Communist Manifesto<\/em>, Marx had characterized the state as the \u201ccommittee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.\u201d But after 1848 the essence of the state was revealed to be rather the \u201cspecial bodies of armed men.\u201d<\/p>\n

One concrete issue that demonstrates this specifically Marxist sense of \u201cthe state\u201d is the new rise of police forces in the early 19th century, and not previously. This was meant to be according to the liberal \u201cPeelian Principles\u201d that however have never been realized but only violated. It is not a coincidence that the police arose during the Industrial Revolution, nor that they have always betrayed their original liberal principles. This goes to the issue of \u201cBonapartism,\u201d in the Marxist and not colloquial sense. Specifically, about Louis Bonaparte or \u201cNapoleon III,\u201d not Napoleon Bonaparte the First, and hence about 1848 and its aftermath, not the Great French Revolution: Louis Bonaparte\u2019s gang of criminals became the perfect police force for the capitalist state in the 19th century. Marx asked why, politically.<\/p>\n

Trotsky called the USSR under the Stalinized Communist Party, not \u201ctotalitarian,\u201d but a \u201cpolice state,\u201d and a \u201ccriminal\u201d one at that — criminal against the revolution. This wasn\u2019t an accident but of necessity. Trotsky wrote that where there is a line for bread there must be police to maintain order. The \u201cpolice\u201d in question was the Party\u2019s own Central Control Commission under Stalin. The Party itself was the primary object of repression in the USSR as a \u201cpolice state.\u201d However, if the USSR is not regarded as a \u201cpolice state,\u201d then perhaps a Gulag — a prison? Foucault wrote, in Discipline and Punish<\/em> (1975), of how from its original inception in the early 19th century the prison has violated its intended principle of labor rehabilitation, and that in its \u201caustere institution\u201d one could nevertheless still hear the \u201cdistant roar of battle\u201d — of the Revolution of 1848 and its failure<\/em>. For Foucault, the prison is the parodic \u201cfarce\u201d of the \u201ctragedy\u201d of industrial labor: it was punitive \u201cdiscipline\u201d for its own sake — and not Franklin\u2019s or even Jeremy Bentham\u2019s ideal. Furthermore, for Foucault in this \u201ccarceral\u201d society starting in the 19th century, \u201cpower\u201d leads to either \u201cpolitics or prison.\u201d The police state and its prisons are \u201cBonapartist\u201d in Marx\u2019s sense: counterrevolutionary, undemocratic, and illiberal; politically<\/em> repressive. It is a nihilistic travesty of bourgeois society. It is a symptom specific to capitalism — to the 19th century — and the failure to transition from the Industrial Revolution to socialism in the crisis of the 1840s.<\/p>\n

1848 crisis<\/h3>\n

Regarding the failure of 1848, Marx wrote, in The Class Struggles in France 1848-50<\/em>, that,<\/p>\n

Just as the period of crisis began later [elsewhere] than in England, so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. [Elsewhere] the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form. . . . Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which revolutions [elsewhere] affect England is at the same time the [barometer] that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations. On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that this grasps recent history very well, with regard for instance to the Wall Street crash and resulting Arab Spring and Occupy. Marx does not serve merely as a description of the crisis of the \u201chungry 1840s\u201d and the resulting Revolution of 1848, but of the historical trajectory of bourgeois society in capitalism more generally — \u201cworld historically.\u201d What this means is that bourgeois-democratic revolution in the \u201cextremities\u201d will fail the degree to which it does not \u201cput into question bourgeois life conditions\u201d in the \u201cheart\u201d but \u201ctouch only their political formations.\u201d This will be to \u201call the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats.\u201d This was Marx\u2019s estimation of the necessary \u201crevolution in permanence\u201d revealed by 1848. The bourgeois revolution was not finished but in crisis in capitalism. Marx was Marx because of his formative historical moment, the 1840s, which remains with us: Marx\u2019s critique of 1848\u2019s failed democratic republicanism still tasks us.<\/p>\n

Still revolutionary<\/h3>\n

To return to my primary thesis to which Macnair has not yet responded, the question of revolutionary politics and capitalism, Rosa Luxemburg, in Reform or Revolution<\/em> (1900), pointed out that the state in the bourgeois epoch was the product of revolution, and continued to be informed in its action by the energy of that revolutionary origin. This was true in capitalism as well, and so affected politics. Even Luxemburg\u2019s Wilhelmine Prussian Empire was the product of revolution — of 1789 if not 1848. In 1806, Hegel had regarded Napoleon\u2019s \u201chistory on horseback\u201d in liberated Jena and popped a champagne cork to celebrate. The most important political party of Wilhelmine Prussia was the SPD, which was the only legitimate political inheritor of the revolutionary energy of 1789 and the new, continued tasks of 1848.<\/p>\n

If the Hegelian dialectic had become for Marx \u201cideological\u201d by the mid-19th century then this was due to capitalism, and not a \u201cthought error\u201d by Hegel. What was once a bourgeois dialectic of freedom had become falsified in capitalism as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Marx indicated as early as the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts<\/em> that he was concerned with how the original bourgeois-revolutionary categories had been betrayed in capitalism — that is, since the Industrial Revolution — and that he was proceeding to critique such bourgeois categories \u201cimmanently.\u201d The problem with Hegel as with all bourgeois-revolutionary thought was that it became merely formal or \u201cabstract\u201d as a description of the concretely changed society of capitalism, which was thus a crisis of bourgeois society and its categories of self-understanding. Such categories had come to merely describe and hence affirm, and so were no longer critical, revolutionary insights into the potential emancipatory transformation of society.<\/p>\n

No anachronism<\/h3>\n

The problem with retrospective and hence anachronistic critiques of Hegel et al. is that they neglect precisely this concrete historical change in capitalism. Capitalism is a concrete issue that Hegel\u2019s as all revolutionary bourgeois dialectical categories could not adequately grasp in their self-contradiction in capitalism. This was true in practice and not merely in theory. So what was once a productive dialectic of freedom between the individual and the collective in society, or between liberty and equality or justice, for Locke and Rousseau and their revolutionary followers such as Smith and Kant in the 18th century, became instead a destructive antinomy of unfreedom and crisis in 19th century capitalism. Such self-contradiction indicated for Marx and his followers a potential change originating from within bourgeois society, not outside it: still the bourgeois revolution\u2019s struggle for liberal democracy, but in self-contradiction. This contradiction was for Marx expressed not only by communism but in capitalist politics as well. Today\u2019s advanced capitalist countries are ruled by a police state that calls itself liberal and democratic, and indeed still regards itself as revolutionary — at least in the U.S. For Marx and for later Marxists this contradiction of the bourgeois revolution arose also within the working class\u2019s own political parties. I think this is still so, necessarily and not accidentally, remaining to be worked through. Marx\u2019s dialectic goes beyond Hegel\u2019s because capitalism goes potentially beyond bourgeois society. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone Originally published in abridged form as a letter in Weekly Worker 1042 (January 22, 2015). [PDF] Not Weberian Mike Macnair\u2019s January 15 letter comes closer than his December 18 article to the concrete issues with which I have been concerned in my writings on democratic revolution, the contradiction of capital, and the issue […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,32,16],"class_list":["post-2119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-37","tag-cpgb","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119","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=2119"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3173,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2119\/revisions\/3173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}