{"id":2710,"date":"2017-12-01T00:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-12-01T05:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:56:58","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:56:58","slug":"the-end-of-the-gilded-age-discontents-of-the-second-industrial-revolution-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2710","title":{"rendered":"The end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading and discussion broadcast on Radical Minds, WHPK radio, Chicago:<br \/> <br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/embed\/TheendoftheGildedAgeRadicalMindsWHPKradio011818\" width=\"450\" height=\"40\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h2><a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/category\/platypus-review-authors\/chris-cutrone\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Chris Cutrone<\/a><\/h2>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/category\/pr\/issue-102\/\"><em>Platypus Review<\/em> 102<\/a> | December 2017 \u2013 January 2018<\/p>\n<p>THE ACCOUNT OF HISTORY is the theory of the present: How did we get here; and what tasks remain from the past \u2014 that however appear to be \u201cnew\u201d today? As Adorno put it, \u201cthe new is the old in distress.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn1\" name=\"_ednref1\">[1]<\/a> This is true of capitalism and its crisis now.<\/p>\n<p>The present crisis is a crisis of the world system of capitalism that emerged in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, a crisis of the capitalist world created by the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century \u2014 in fits and starts (such as the two World Wars and the Cold War) but nonetheless consistently and inexorably. That system has been led by the countries newly industrialized at the end of the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century, the U.S., Germany and Japan. All three have come to be in crisis in the early 21<sup>st<\/sup> century \u2014 the crisis of the EU can be regarded as a crisis of the management of \u201cGerman\u201d capital.<\/p>\n<p>David Harvey, in his book <em>The Condition of Postmodernity<\/em> (1990), written and published in the heyday of neoliberalism, regarded the history of capitalism as a succession of \u201cregimes of accumulation\u201d \u2014 concrete forms for socially and politically mediating the need to accumulate capital in its valorization process. But since, according to Marxism, capitalism is itself a form of social contradiction and thus a crisis and decay of society and politics, each successive form of capitalism takes up and perpetuates the crisis of the preceding form, however in an altered way.<a href=\"#_edn2\" name=\"_ednref2\">[2]<\/a> Capitalism really is a matter of \u201ckicking the can down the road,\u201d apparently indefinitely. But the banging can eventually returns, and we must ultimately pay the added costs of its deferral.<\/p>\n<p>The characterization by critical contemporaries of the late-19<sup>th<\/sup> \u2013 early-20<sup>th<\/sup> century era as the \u201cGilded Age\u201d<a href=\"#_edn3\" name=\"_ednref3\">[3]<\/a> expressed its quality as what Kant warned about a century earlier, in his 1784 essay on the \u201cIdea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,\u201d namely, \u201cthe danger that the vitality of mankind may go to sleep:\u201d \u201cEverything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn4\" name=\"_ednref4\">[4]<\/a> Gilded Age capitalism was such \u201cglittering misery.\u201d This quality of capitalism continues today, especially in the last generation of neoliberalism whose spell was broken in the recent crisis. Joseph Schumpeter tried to put a happy face on capitalism by calling it \u201ccreative destruction,\u201d but Marxism recognized to the contrary that it is actually destructive creation.<a href=\"#_edn5\" name=\"_ednref5\">[5]<\/a> And its destructiveness is not only immediate but has long-term consequences. The destruction of capitalism is cumulative: it makes claims on future generations that cannot be settled cheaply.<a href=\"#_edn6\" name=\"_ednref6\">[6]<\/a><\/p>\n<h3>Industrial production and Robber Barons<\/h3>\n<p>It was during the period of the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century Gilded Age that capitalists appeared not as entrepreneurs of production but as \u201cRobber Barons\u201d \u2014 an aristocracy of looting. Marx had already mordantly observed that in industrial production, with its high capital requirements, it was not the case that being a captain of industry made you money, but rather that having money made you a captain of industry. In industrial capitalism, it was not, as Adam Smith had thought, production developed by reinvestment of relatively low profits in the long run, with high wages facilitating increased consumption \u2014 wealth \u2014 in a virtuous cycle, but rather, as Marginal Utility Theory, developed precisely in this late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century era, regarded more cynically, that use-values of commodities decrease over time, so investors in their production better get in early and take their profits out while the going is still good and before it becomes a matter of diminishing returns \u2014 the miserable reasoning of what Smith regarded as \u201cmercantile interest,\u201d the profiteering of \u201cbuying cheap and selling dear,\u201d that he thought actually constrains and undermines the productivity of wealth in society, and so needed to be overcome as an impediment to growth. Marx pursued rather the self-contradiction in what became of Smith\u2019s labor theory of value in industrial capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>The accelerated technical production of the Industrial Revolution increased along with it the accumulation and concentration of capital, which Marx thought produced a crisis of value in industrial capitalism, in that such production was still socially mediated by the value of wage-labor, however anachronistically. Wage labor was inadequate for the social appropriation of industrial production. This was the self-contradiction of the capitalist mode of production in political-economic terms, according to Marx: the \u201cbourgeois social relations\u201d were contradicted by the \u201cindustrial forces of production;\u201d industrial technique served to increase capital but this outstripped the actual social productivity of human labor, eliminating workers from production so that, as Max Horkheimer wryly observed, \u201cmachines have made not work but the workers superfluous.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn7\" name=\"_ednref7\">[7]<\/a> Adam Smith\u2019s \u201cproprietors of stock\u201d were only a slight variation on the prior traveling merchants collecting the products of cottage industry, now gathering the previously disparate producers in factories; they were not capitalists in the Marxist sense of \u201cowners of the means of production:\u201d the role of the proprietors in Smith\u2019s view of production was minimal by comparison to the laborers who were actually making things with increased efficiency. Where Smith would have expected higher productivity to result in the increased value of time in work through cooperation that would not only increase the purchasing power of labor but also decrease labor-time and increase leisure-time, what happened for labor instead, at a societal level, was the pernicious combination of over-work and unemployment, not attributable merely to temporary labor-market corrections. Human labor was progressively eliminated from production in absolute and not only relative terms: increased production was no longer based primarily on human labor-power inputs in efficient cooperation (as in Adam Smith\u2019s example of the pin-factory), but rather on the development of science and technology, or what Marx called the \u201cgeneral social intellect,\u201d objectified in machine production.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201ccombined and uneven [i.e. self-contradictory] development\u201d of capitalism is exhibited by the paradoxical phenomena of simultaneously coexisting \u201crobots and sweatshops.\u201d Industrial development and the accumulation of capital undermine the entire bourgeois social ethos of rewarding productivity through work, the exchange of labor as a commodity. Contrary to Smith\u2019s expectation, Marx observed how in capitalism labor sinks from the most precious to \u201cthe most wretched of commodities.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn8\" name=\"_ednref8\">[8]<\/a> The workers are expropriated of the value of their labor at a societal level, and not merely through being super-exploited by their employers. There is a glaring problem in the development of wealth in society based on the value of labor. The ramifications of this are found in capitalism\u2019s social effects.<\/p>\n<p>This is what makes capitalists appear ambiguously as performing a social duty as investors but also as criminals ripping off society \u2014 what Smith had warned about, the constant danger of their \u201cconspiracy against the public.\u201d Bernard Mandeville\u2019s 1714 book <em>Fable of the Bees<\/em>, a parable of \u201cprivate vices, public benefits,\u201d seemed mocked by what was actually happening in the Gilded Age. Were the capitalists really, as today\u2019s parlance goes, \u201cjob creators?\u201d Yes and no: as often as not. When President Theodore Roosevelt went after J.P. Morgan for violation of anti-trust laws, and Morgan, a Republican supporter, complained, asking what he could do to avoid prosecution by the government, Roosevelt replied with a variation of Robespierre\u2019s injunction that if someone feels implicated by the gaze of judgment it is because he is guilty. Who wouldn\u2019t side with Roosevelt\u2019s sentiment against the Robber Baron? But Roosevelt was motivated not by altruism but what he regarded as necessary policy, to make capitalists responsible investors: Build the railroads, just don\u2019t rip us off. Marx thought that socialism would allow industrial production to go beyond capital and overcome the need for and value of labor in a socially beneficial and not destructive way. This was a problem of society, not reducible to the criminality of the individual capitalists. Even Roosevelt recognized the need for a change in policy beyond the mere curbing of excesses. For Marxism, the accumulation of capital in industrial production was a crisis for bourgeois society, but also an opportunity for changing it. Indeed, realizing the social potential of capitalism was a necessity \u2014 a task: it was \u201cinevitable.\u201d The only question was the depth and breadth of the needed change in society.<\/p>\n<h3>Discontents old and new<\/h3>\n<p>In the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century, the discontents of Gilded Age capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution led to what Harvey (after Antonio Gramsci) called \u201cFordism,\u201d a new \u201cregime of accumulation\u201d or concrete form for the valorization process of capital. It was a new and different form of production and consumption, a new economics and new politics, a new culture: a new way of life. The 20<sup>th<\/sup> century and its continuing legacy today express unresolved problems inherited from Gilded Age capitalism that Fordist capital was not able to overcome. We suffer today from discontents with the results not, for instance, of the 16<sup>th<\/sup>\u201318<sup>th<\/sup> century African slave trade or the 15<sup>th<\/sup> century Reconquista and New World discovery, but rather from, for example, the failure of Reconstruction in the U.S.,<a href=\"#_edn9\" name=\"_ednref9\">[9]<\/a> and the late, 2<sup>nd<\/sup>-wave colonialism from the era of what Marxists called \u201cimperialism\u201d at the end of the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century \u2014 hence the problem of so-called \u201cneo-colonialism.\u201d We live in the world created by the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century\u2019s attempts to solve those problems.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Hobsbawm wrote of the \u201clong 19<sup>th<\/sup>\u201d and \u201cshort 20<sup>th<\/sup>\u201d centuries.<a href=\"#_edn10\" name=\"_ednref10\">[10]<\/a> He regarded 1789\u20131914 as one cycle, and 1914\u20131991 as another. But perhaps we should consider the short 19<sup>th<\/sup> century, the core of which runs from the 1820s\u201370s (from the aftermath of the French Revolution until the U.S. Civil War, the Meiji Restoration and Franco-Prussian War), and the long 20<sup>th<\/sup> century which began, perhaps as early as the 1870s but certainly by the 1890s, and continued until the recent crisis of the 2000s\u201310s.<a href=\"#_edn11\" name=\"_ednref11\">[11]<\/a> The high 19<sup>th<\/sup> century of liberalism contrasts with the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century of state capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1990s, it seemed as if, after the \u201clong detour\u201d of fascism and \u201cCommunism\u201d (Stalinism) in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century,<a href=\"#_edn12\" name=\"_ednref12\">[12]<\/a> a responsibly reformed \u201cprogressive\u201d capitalism of the Second Industrial Revolution would finally have its unobstructed day in the sun: the U.S., Germany and Japan could inherit a progressively productive world at peace. The mirage of the purported Third Industrial Revolution of the post-WWII mid\u2013late 20<sup>th<\/sup> century was revealed to be merely the full flowering of the turn-of-the-20<sup>th<\/sup> century electromagnetic revolution that had succeeded the original Industrial Revolution\u2019s thermodynamics: cybernetics turned out to be the latest expression of liberal democracy; however Steampunk fantasies haunted historical memory in the 1990s. But already in the 1970s, <em>Star Wars<\/em>, <em>Alien<\/em> and <em>Blade Runner<\/em> showed us the \u201cused future\u201d of decrepit Fordist capital. Neoliberalism naturalized this.<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><div id=\"attachment_26707\" style=\"width: 460px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-26707\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-26707\" src=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/mount_rushmore.jpg\" alt=\"Mount Rushmore U.S. National Monument, depicting George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was designed in 1923, begun in 1927, before the Great Depression, and finished in 1941 during the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. \" width=\"450\" height=\"297\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-26707\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mount Rushmore U.S. National Monument, depicting George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was designed in 1923, begun in 1927, before the Great Depression, and finished in 1941 during the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n<h3>Retrospective history<\/h3>\n<p>The retrospective view from the present allows for regarding the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century as the outcome of the Gilded Age \u2014 of the Second Industrial Revolution. But the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century was conditioned by the mounting discontents of the Gilded Age and its crisis in the early 20<sup>th<\/sup> century \u2014 most apocalyptically in the First World War and its aftermath. We still live in the after-effects of the crisis that conditioned the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century. The inability to overcome the discontents of capital from a century ago still swamps us today.<\/p>\n<p>In the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century U.S., the Second Industrial Revolution was governed largely by the Republican Party, which was the combined party of progressive liberalism and big capital. The Democratic Party in this period, by contrast, was the party of the middle class and conservatism. So, for instance, Populism as a 1890s Depression phenomenon fed into the Democratic Party, with William Jennings Bryan the Democrats\u2019 (unsuccessful) candidate for President in 1896 and (again in) 1900. But Progressivism emerged as a reform effort from within the Republican Party against manifest problems of liberal capitalism in the 1890s\u20131900s \u2014 most dramatically under President Theodore Roosevelt.<\/p>\n<p>In Europe, discontents with the Gilded Age \/ Second Industrial Revolution manifested in the Socialist Parties of the Second International. Liberal capitalism was opposed by a mass industrial workers politics \u2014 most significantly in the major party of the Second International, the SPD (Social-democratic Party of Germany). In the U.K., discontents with liberalism led to the formation of the Labour Party. These parties had origins in the 1870s but experienced phenomenal growth especially in the aftermath of the crisis of the 1890s. Countries drawn into the Second Industrial Revolution more broadly but on a subordinate subsidiary basis included the Russian Empire and Italy, which also experienced mass radicalization in the form of new Social-Democratic and Socialist Parties.<\/p>\n<p>However these new socialist parties also experienced a crisis of their growth in the 1890s \u2014 a crisis of their political purpose: Were they, as they claimed, parties of political revolution, or rather of social reform? Eduard Bernstein was the most perspicacious of the commentators on the developments of this period in the 1890s. He regarded the growth of the U.K. workers movement that led to the formation of the Labour Party as evidence that a revolutionary socialist political party may not be necessary for the transformation of capitalism into socialism: socialism may socially evolve within capitalism rather than requiring its political overthrow. The eventual election of majority socialist or labor parties may be sufficient to crown the development of the social movement of the working class through its civil society organizations such as labor unions and other social collectives (such as women\u2019s organizations, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>The 20<sup>th<\/sup> century belied this socialist optimism of the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century that Marxism had in common with liberalism. Just as Progressivism expressed manifest problems of liberal capitalism, so the new distinctly \u201crevolutionary\u201d current in socialism beginning circa 1900 represented by Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky as well as by Debs (who was converted to Marxism in the late 1890s) expressed discontent with socialist reformism. Luxemburg for instance called Bernstein simply a \u201cliberal.\u201d What this meant was that Bernstein regarded liberal democracy as politically adequate for the activity of the working class in its struggle for socialism. Bernstein thought that the capitalist interest could be subordinated to a political majority. What Bernstein didn\u2019t reckon with was how the working class would become politically split in the crisis of capitalism.<a href=\"#_edn13\" name=\"_ednref13\">[13]<\/a> In the First World War and the Revolutions in Russia, Germany, Italy and Hungary that broke out in its aftermath 1917\u201319, the former socialist parties of the Second International divided between reformist Social Democrats and revolutionary Communists. In 1919, responding to criticisms of the course of the Russian Revolution, Debs declared that, \u201cFrom the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn14\" name=\"_ednref14\">[14]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>This is related to how Progressivism emerged contemporaneously from the crisis of liberalism. It was acrimonious as well, with incumbent President Taft condemning his challenger, his former friend and colleague Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party candidate for President in 1912, as \u201cthe most dangerous man in America.\u201d It led, via the actual beneficiary of the split among the Republicans, Woodrow Wilson\u2019s more socially conservative (for example, avowedly racist) Democratic Party Progressivism, to (Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s nephew-in-law) Franklin Delano Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal.<a href=\"#_edn15\" name=\"_ednref15\">[15]<\/a><\/p>\n<h3>\u201cProgressive\u201d capitalism<\/h3>\n<p>The question is the alternative to capitalist progressivism offered by Marxist socialism. In the U.S. Eugene Debs\u2019s Socialist Party of America sought to intervene with working-class socialism across the division of Republican Party big-capitalist liberalism versus Democratic Party middle-class conservatism. \u201cIndustrial democracy\u201d was the term of this socialist opposition under Marxist leadership.<\/p>\n<p>As a Marxist, Debs like Rosa Luxemburg understood that this pressed a contradiction.<a href=\"#_edn16\" name=\"_ednref16\">[16]<\/a> Marxism was not an authoritarian collectivist opposition to liberalism, but sought to combine and transcend middle class conservative-reactionary discontents over the destructive effects of capitalism with the revolutionary social potential of the dynamism of big capital. Debs articulated this in his 1900 election manifesto, first delivered as a speech in Chicago, on \u201cCompetition versus cooperation:\u201d<a href=\"#_edn17\" name=\"_ednref17\">[17]<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Republican platform is a self-congratulation of the dominant capitalist class. \u201cProsperity galore, give us four years more.\u201d The Democratic platform is the wail and cry of the perishing middle class; calamity without end. The Social Democratic platform is an indictment of the capitalist system; it is the call to class consciousness and political action of the exploited working class; and it is a ringing declaration in favor of collective ownership of all the means of production and distribution, as the clarion voice of economic freedom.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Progressivism sought to similarly transcend the liberal capitalist vs. conservative populist divide emerging from industrialization, which is why liberals could observe in 1912 that Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Progressive Party was seeking to usurp the mantles of both William Jennings Bryan\u2019s Populist Democrats and Debs\u2019s Socialists. Democrat Woodrow Wilson\u2019s election as President was the result of the split among the Republicans between Progressives and old-style liberals. This set the stage for the triumph of New Deal progressivism under FDR \u2014 however 20 years later, after the crisis of the Great Depression.<\/p>\n<p>But FDR\u2019s New Dealism, specifically as a Democratic Party phenomenon, combined but did not transcend the split of progressive capitalism with middle-class conservatism. The working class was thus bound in the Democratic Party to both big capital and the middle class. The working-class struggle for socialism found earlier in the old Socialist Party of America was squeezed out between these two aspects of the progressive New Deal Democrats. Socialism in the U.S. never recovered from this suppression. The New Deal Coalition Democrats became the ruling party in the U.S. in the high 20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<p>The Democrats have tried ever since FDR to retain a progressive capitalist alliance of liberal capital with middle-class conservatism. But what happened in the political crisis of the New Deal Coalition in the 1960s (signaled by the Civil Rights Movement as well as the U.S.\u2019s losing war in Vietnam), combined with the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s, was that the form of middle-class conservatism changed \u2014 and was captured by the Republicans instead. This was not only expressed in the Southern Strategy that captured the Dixiecrat middle class (racial) conservatives, but also the appeal to \u201claw and order\u201d that captured the Northern urban and suburban working class ethnics who had previously supported the New Deal Democrats.<\/p>\n<p>Subsequently, this has taken the otherwise longstanding form of the old split within liberalism that Progressivism represented: progressive liberalism versus conservative liberalism. The conservative liberals have promised the middle class that it will benefit from big capital; whereas the progressive liberals have actively sought policies that will ensure this. But neither the promise nor the policies have been able to prevent the social destruction and hence the conservative reaction of the middle class. Both the Republicans and Democrats have exploited middle-class discontents without satisfying them.<\/p>\n<p>The working class has been the passive object of this process, oscillating between big-capitalist liberalism and middle-class conservatism, however in the obscure form of oscillating between greater or lesser support for progressive liberalism \u2014 greater or lesser support for the Democrats. Politically, this means the subordination of the working class to the middle class. But which middle class?<\/p>\n<p>The 20<sup>th<\/sup> century saw the rise of the \u201cnew middle class\u201d of corporate capitalist managers, as opposed to the old middle class of small proprietors as well as of artisanal workers. The old middle class were the petite bourgeoisie, which were always distinct from the new industrial working class ever since the 19<sup>th<\/sup> century. So the question in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century became the relation between the proletarianized working class of wage-earners and the capitalist managerial middle class. Could the middle class be captured by progressive liberalism? Or would the perennial crisis of capitalism lead instead to populist conservatism? How could populism, whether middle or working class, be neutralized as a disruptive threat to the negotiations of big-capitalist politics?<\/p>\n<p>From the era of the late-19<sup>th<\/sup> century Second International, Debs serves as an example of how a populist could become a socialist \u2014 and not a progressive liberal. By contrast, Eduard Bernstein shows how a Marxist could become a progressive liberal, via the liquidation of proletarian socialism by neglect of the appeal of middle-class conservatism to which the working class could succumb in its trade unionism.<\/p>\n<h3>Proletarian socialism vs. middle-class revolt<\/h3>\n<p>The working class is susceptible to middle-class conservatism insofar as it remains attached to a prior form of capitalism \u2014 the accumulated ensemble of previous concrete forms of wage labor \u2014 that undergoes crisis and is destroyed. Progressivism depends conversely upon the amenability and \u201cliberalism\u201d of the middle class to go along with changes in capitalism led by big capital. Big capital benefits from all changes anyway \u2014 capitalists can shift their investments or retire into philanthropy and entire countries can adopt what Lenin called \u201ccoupon-clipping\u201d<a href=\"#_edn18\" name=\"_ednref18\">[18]<\/a> \u2014 so the real issue is the struggle to come out on top or simply not to sink entirely but keep one\u2019s head above water in the next wave of capitalism. Conservatives are always there to try to take advantage of those swamped and potentially left behind, with demagogic appeals to the status quo that people forget was itself once something new.<\/p>\n<p>The question is, who are the progressives and who are the conservatives, politically? Perhaps the progressives are the more cunning conservatives \u2014 or the conservatives are the more cunning progressives. In the last generation of neoliberalism the Republicans could plausibly claim to be the \u201ctrue revolutionaries\u201d in advancing capitalism, and thus addressed and exploited the manifest liabilities of the Democrats\u2019 conservatism. The game is to capture middle-class discontents in \u201cprogressive\u201d capitalist \u201creforms\u201d (e.g. \u201cwelfare reform,\u201d \u201ctrade reform\u201d etc.). The Republicans did so through the \u201cReagan Revolution,\u201d just as the Democrats had done in the 1930s FDR New Deal Coalition through which they had replaced the Republicans as the dominant majority party since the Civil War. Every \u201cold conservative\u201d was once a \u201cnew revolutionary\u201d in capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>Proletarian socialism \u2014 Marxism \u2014 by contrast sought to subordinate the middle class to the working class in reappropriating capital, which it proposed could only happen through the \u201cdictatorship of the proletariat.\u201d The political party for proletarian socialism thus sought to lead the broader \u201cmasses\u201d in \u201csocial democracy\u201d in order to achieve socialism.<\/p>\n<p>This would be especially true of the new managerial middle class which could simply take direction from the working class where they formerly did so from the capitalists \u2014 including from the capitalist state and its state capitalist managerial policies. Thus the capitalists could be retired into philanthropy. This was the vision of the Second International (1889\u20131914) and of mid-20<sup>th<\/sup> century Social Democratic politics. Especially since it was understood by Marxism, for instance by Lenin\u2019s conception of contemporary \u201cimperialism\u201d or monopoly capitalism, that not only the new middle class as corporate employees but also the working class itself subsisted not on the value of their own laboring activity but rather on a cut of the profits of capital, which was granted to them for political reasons, through a myriad of government subsidies, to prevent revolution \u2014 not merely to soften the blows of the business cycle of boom and bust.<\/p>\n<p>Theodore Roosevelt called this the need for a \u201cSquare Deal\u201d \u2014 indicatively not a \u201cfair\u201d deal, not merely enforcing liberal capitalism, but the government actively ameliorating its defects \u2014 and understood it explicitly as required to stave off socialism. But Roosevelt had, not Marx\u2019s vague \u201cspecter of communism,\u201d but Debs\u2019s actual mass Socialist Party of America staring him down to draw this political conclusion: it was a rear-guard action, but with a visionary long view. Progressivism was meant to institute political reforms required to be up-to-date with capitalist development: it was a matter not so much of advancing history as catching up with it; in this sense it still accorded with classical liberalism that the state should follow society and not try to determine it. But since Roosevelt\u2019s time, new problems arising from reforms attempted in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century have clouded the issue; however, the essential political predicament of liberal democracy in the industrial era remains.<\/p>\n<p>The problem and task of \u201cprogressive capitalism\u201d is the attempt to maintain capitalism through its manifest social and political crisis. The alignment of the working class with the middle class in common capitalist interest with big capital is always temporary and inevitably fraught. There is always a struggle for supremacy in the fractious, politically negotiated social alliance of capital, which will eventually burst forth from the inexorable obsolescence of any and all concrete forms of capitalism in society.<\/p>\n<p>The question the capitalists periodically face is: Can the conservative-reactionary middle class be made to go in peace (e.g. overdose on opioids \u2014 before that, on whiskey: it is important to note that the Progressives advocated Prohibition), or will it freak out and disrupt society and politics in uncontrollable ways? Trotsky called fascism the \u201cpetite bourgeoisie run amok.\u201d<a href=\"#_edn19\" name=\"_ednref19\">[19]<\/a> But every old middle class was once a new middle class \u2014 just as every old form of wage-labor was once a new form of capitalism: the working class\u2019s discontents are subsumed under middle-class conservatism; the potential for socialism in capitalism thus disappears. The contradiction of capital that Marxism once recognized is submerged.<\/p>\n<p>The \u201cprogressive capitalist\u201d political forms that emerged as an alternative to Marxist socialism after the crisis of the Gilded Age and were carried through the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century have exhausted themselves in two waves of crisis: the crisis of the 1960s\u201370s that led to neoliberalism; and the present crisis of neoliberalism itself in the 2000s\u201310s.<a href=\"#_edn20\" name=\"_ednref20\">[20]<\/a> The attempted return to the Gilded Age since the 1980s\u201390s has clearly failed \u2014 which is why this deeper history leading to the present reasserts itself today. It is undigested.<\/p>\n<p>Glenn Beck was not wrong to panic at the sight of Trump and take his ascendancy as the occasion to condemn the Progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson from a century ago.<a href=\"#_edn21\" name=\"_ednref21\">[21]<\/a> Beck counterposed the \u201cAmerica of the Founding Fathers Washington and Jefferson\u201d to that of the \u201cProgressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson,\u201d calling the 2016 election the final defeat of the former by the latter. Neglected by Beck in his division of American history is Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War as a second founding moment of the U.S. But the evident desire for return to the apparently more innocent time of the Second Industrial Revolution and its liberal optimism neglects its real discontents and actual crisis in the Gilded Age, which once were expressed by Marxist socialism in the era of the Marxist-led parties of the Second International, including the Socialist Party of America of Eugene Debs, but were captured instead by \u201cprogressive\u201d state capitalism in the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century that Beck and other conservative liberals constantly bemoan \u2014 regretting its political necessity.<\/p>\n<p>Today, the question is the future of that 20<sup>th<\/sup> century state capitalism that, no matter how rickety, still dominates the world. Its prospects look grim \u2014 China notwithstanding.<\/p>\n<p>But actually it is no more grim than the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century itself \u2014 or the late 19<sup>th<\/sup> century Gilded Age of Second Industrial Revolution capitalism that gave birth to the 20<sup>th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n<p>Now as before, the Republicans and Democrats compete over the political capture of middle-class conservative reaction by big capital in service of a capitalist \u201cprogress\u201d that is none. What disappears is the possibility once recognized by Marxism of the working class, through proletarian socialism, superseding both \u201cprogressive\u201d capital and middle-class reaction. Without it, capitalism is permanent, the middle class under threat periodically runs amok, old tenements are torn down, slums cleared, and new dormitories for the working class are hastily constructed, and in the end the best we can hope for is another Industrial Revolution \u2014 with all the destruction that it will inevitably bring. | <strong>P<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref1\" name=\"_edn1\">[1]<\/a> Adorno, \u201cReflections on Class Theory\u201d (1942), in <em>Can One Live after Auschwitz: A Philosophical Reader<\/em>, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. (Stanford University Press, 2003), 93\u2013110.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref2\" name=\"_edn2\">[2]<\/a> See my \u201cSymptomology: Historical Transformations in Social-Political Context,\u201d <em>Platypus Review<\/em> 12 (May 2009), available online at &lt;https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2009\/05\/15\/symptomology\/&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref3\" name=\"_edn3\">[3]<\/a> The term originated from Mark Twain\u2019s 1873 novel, co-written by Charles Dudley Warner, <em>The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today<\/em>, which expressed disappointments with the post-Civil War boom era in the U.S. It was adopted in the 1920s and retrospectively applied to the entire preceding era, especially from the 1870s\u20131890s.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref4\" name=\"_edn4\">[4]<\/a> Available online at: &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/subject\/ethics\/kant\/universal-history.htm&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref5\" name=\"_edn5\">[5]<\/a> Marx and Engels had observed, in their <em>Manifesto of the Communist Party<\/em> (1848, available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1848\/communist-manifesto\/&gt;), that the crisis of capitalism would end \u201ceither in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref6\" name=\"_edn6\">[6]<\/a> See Walter Benjamin, \u201cOn the Concept of History\u201d (AKA \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History,\u201d 1940), available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.sfu.ca\/~andrewf\/CONCEPT2.html&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref7\" name=\"_edn7\">[7]<\/a> Horkheimer, \u201cThe Authoritarian State\u201d (1942), <em>Telos<\/em> 15:2 (Spring 1973), 3.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref8\" name=\"_edn8\">[8]<\/a> <em>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844<\/em>, \u201cEstranged Labour,\u201d available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1844\/manuscripts\/labour.htm&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref9\" name=\"_edn9\">[9]<\/a> For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his high Jim-Crow era 1935 book <em>Black Reconstruction in America<\/em>, recognized it was the capitalist crisis of the 1870s after the Panic of 1873 that had spelled the doom of Reconstruction.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref10\" name=\"_edn10\">[10]<\/a> See Hobsbawm\u2019s books <em>The Age of Revolution:<\/em> <em>1789<\/em><em>\u20131848<\/em> (1962), <em>The Age of Capital:<\/em> <em>1848<\/em><em>\u20131875<\/em> (1975), <em>The Age of Empire:<\/em> <em>1875<\/em><em>\u20131914<\/em> (1987), and <em>The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century,<\/em> <em>1914<\/em><em>\u20131991<\/em> (1994).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref11\" name=\"_edn11\">[11]<\/a> Another way of considering this history is to regard the history of Marxism relative to the phenomenon of the emergence of so-called \u201cstate capitalism.\u201d See my \u201c1873\u20131973: The Century of Marxism: The Death of Marxism and the Emergence of Neo-Liberalism and Neo-Anarchism,\u201d <em>Platypus Review<\/em> 47 (June 2012), available online at &lt;https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2012\/06\/07\/1873-1973-the-century-of-marxism\/&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref12\" name=\"_edn12\">[12]<\/a> See James Weinstein, <em>The Long Detour: The History and Future of the American Left<\/em> (2003), excerpts in <em>The Nation<\/em> (July 7, 2003) and <em>In These Times<\/em> (May 28, 2003) available online, respectively, at &lt;https:\/\/www.thenation.com\/article\/long-detour\/&gt; and &lt;http:\/\/inthesetimes.com\/article\/the_long_detour\/the_long_detour&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref13\" name=\"_edn13\">[13]<\/a> See my \u201cRosa Luxemburg and the Party,\u201d <em>Platypus Review<\/em> 86 (May 2016), available online at &lt;https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2016\/05\/03\/rosa-luxemburg-party\/&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref14\" name=\"_edn14\">[14]<\/a> \u201cThe Day of the People\u201d (February 1919), written about the assassinations of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg during the Spartacist Uprising of the German Revolution, available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/debs\/works\/1919\/daypeople.htm&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref15\" name=\"_edn15\">[15]<\/a> See Ken Burns\u2019s recent documentary series <em>The Roosevelts: An Intimate History<\/em> (2014), which traces this lineage of Progressivism from TR to FDR, including that of TR\u2019s niece, FDR\u2019s wife Eleanor Roosevelt.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref16\" name=\"_edn16\">[16]<\/a> See Luxemburg, <em>Social Reform or Revolution?<\/em> (1900\/08), available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/luxemburg\/1900\/reform-revolution\/index.htm&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref17\" name=\"_edn17\">[17]<\/a> Available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/debs\/works\/1900\/0929-debs-competitionvcooperation.pdf&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref18\" name=\"_edn18\">[18]<\/a> See his pamphlet on <em>Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism<\/em> (1916), available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1916\/imp-hsc\/&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref19\" name=\"_edn19\">[19]<\/a> Trotsky\u2019s writings on fascism\u2019s nature and character were collected in <em>Fascism: What It Is, and How to Fight It<\/em> (Pioneer Publishers, U.S., 1944), available online at &lt;https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/trotsky\/works\/1944\/1944-fas.htm&gt;.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref20\" name=\"_edn20\">[20]<\/a> See my \u201cSymptomology,\u201d op. cit.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ednref21\" name=\"_edn21\">[21]<\/a> See for instance, Glenn Beck, \u201cWhy Teddy Roosevelt is America\u2019s New Founding Father\u201d (May 11, 2016), online at &lt;http:\/\/www.glennbeck.com\/2016\/05\/11\/history-lesson-teddy-roosevelt-americas-new-founding-father\/&gt;, where Beck says that,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>So the country is going to vote \u2014 the parameters are the Roosevelts. Those are the bookends. Theodore Roosevelt, the beginning of progressivism, to FDR, heavy statism. That\u2019s where we\u2019ll vote. And we\u2019ve just voted two people in the FDR category. Hillary Clinton is FDR. Trump could be Woodrow Wilson, where he silences people and throws them into jail if you have a differing opinion. He could be Woodrow Wilson. But she\u2019s probably FDR.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading and discussion broadcast on Radical Minds, WHPK radio, Chicago: Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 102 | December 2017 \u2013 January 2018 THE ACCOUNT OF HISTORY is the theory of the present: How did we get here; and what tasks remain from the past \u2014 that however appear to be \u201cnew\u201d today? As Adorno put it, [&hellip;]<\/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":[41,35,16,6,43],"class_list":["post-2710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-41","tag-lenin","tag-marxism","tag-the-platypus-review","tag-trump-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710","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=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3141,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions\/3141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}