{"id":2778,"date":"2019-04-06T08:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-04-06T13:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2778"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:56:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:56:44","slug":"redeeming-the-20th-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2778","title":{"rendered":"Redeeming the 20th century"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Statism and anarchy today<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Chris Cutrone <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Prepared opening remarks presented at the closing plenary of the 11th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, April 6, 2019, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A complete audio recording of the event, including response by Richard Rubin and audience Q&A, is available online at: <<\/em>https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/Redeeming20thCentury040619<\/em><\/a>>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"

Audience at the Platypus convention closing plenary discussion.<\/i>
http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/redeeming20thcentury040619audience.jpg<\/a><\/figcaption><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 20th century <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A SENIOR TEACHING COLLEAGUE of mine at the University of Chicago revised the college core syllabus, which he said needed to be \u201cbrought into the 21st century.\u201d What he really meant by this was brought into the 20th century \u2014 specifically, the late 20th century. But the 20th century was determined by the 19th century. There was very little that was new, and most of it was bad. I spoke at previous conventions about 1873\u20131973, 1917\u20132017 and 1918\u20132018.[1] In those discussions, I divided the 100-year cycles into their first and second halves of 50 years. What was new was Marxism and anti-Marxism. As Marxism died and its memory faded in the second half of the last century, there was absolutely nothing new. My colleague invoked ideas that had their genesis in the early 20th century as anti-Marxism: for example, Foucault \u2013 Heidegger \u2013 Nietzsche. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm defined the \u201cshort 20th century\u201d as the period 1914\u201391, from WWI to the fall of the Soviet Union. But perhaps the 20th century could be defined not by the catastrophe of world war in 1914 but the failure of the world socialist revolution in 1919, which was already prefigured by the capitulation of Marxism in 1914 \u2014 and the war certainly contributed to not only the crisis and the revolutionary opportunity but also the counterrevolutionary reality, in whose brutality the war continued.[2] 2019 marks the centenary of 1919, which was not the failure of the revolution, as we marked last year in 2018 as a function of both 1918 and 1968, but the triumph of the counterrevolution. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

100 years <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This year we observe the 100th anniversary of the defeat of the German Revolution in 1919 and the 30th anniversary of the collapse of Stalinism in 1989. It is unclear to me which of these takes priority in my talk now. I therefore want to build upon the last two years of anniversaries I have observed in my remarks at the annual Platypus conventions, namely, the centenaries of 1917 and 1918, and 50 years of 1968. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In my remarks last year on 1918\u20132018 as the \u201ccentury of counterrevolution,\u201d I thematized the issue of the presence of the revolution in the counterrevolution as the converse and complement to the issue of 1917 as the presence of the counterrevolution in the revolution. Usually, the 20th century is treated by the \u201cLeft\u201d as one of accomplishment. The supposed advances and gains of the 20th century take two forms: the so-called \u201cactually existing socialism\u201d of the East in the Stalinist-ruled states of the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba; and the social-democratic welfare state in the West. Today, in 2019, we are faced with what has been evident for the past few years: the reemergence of the legacies of neo-Stalinism and neo-social democracy, both of which are called \u201csocialism.\u201d In the Democratic Socialists of America and in the Momentum movement of the U.K. Labour Party, we see both tendencies present. In the abiding \u201ccontinuing struggles\u201d of \u201canti-imperialism\u201d and \u201canti-fascism\u201d \u2014 including \u201canti-sexism\u201d and \u201canti-racism\u201d \u2014 we find the united front of neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism: street-fighting as well as imposed government and para-state civil society \u2014 corporate and academic \u2014 \u201chate speech\u201d code restrictions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is because, as Trotsky and the Frankfurt School\nobserved already back in the 1930s, the liquidation of historical Marxism after\nthe failure of the world proletarian socialist revolution of 1917\u201319\nwas present in both Social Democracy and Stalinism. They are the twin\nheadstones at the grave of Marxism. In the 1930s, Trotsky treated both equally\nas varieties of reformist opportunism, whose residual differences were actively\nliquidated at the time in the Popular Front Against War and Fascism. Trotsky\nanticipated by one year the official announcement of the Popular Front in 1935\nwith his \u201cFrench Turn,\u201d having his followers join the official\nsocial-democratic parties world-wide in 1934. The fact that these parties had\nbetrayed Marxism both in WWI and in the revolutions that followed, that Social\nDemocracy was on the side of active counterrevolution as opposed to Stalinism\u2019s\napparent continuity with the revolution, did not matter one bit to Trotsky:\nStalinism was just as proven in his mind to be counterrevolutionary; and\nsocial-democratic parties were just as potentially transformable into\nrevolutionary socialist parties as the ostensibly \u201crevolutionary\u201d Communist\nParties could have been. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first assumption I must ask you to entertain is that both Social Democracy and Stalinism were forms of avoidance of the struggle for socialism in the 20th century, and that everything accomplished under their auspices was actually stepping back and away from and not towards socialism. As such, both Stalinism and Social Democracy represented obstacles to socialism. \u2014 Here, the anarchists and \u201cLeft communist\u201d Marxists would apparently agree. But historically, this was the perspective shared by the Frankfurt School and Trotsky, both of which must be distinguished from and recognized properly in their opposition to such \u201cLeft communism\u201d and anarchism, for both Trotsky and the Frankfurt School represented the memory of original historical Marxism, and of its last protagonists, Lenin and Luxemburg, among others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The forms of the liquidation of Marxism in the post-failed revolutionary aftermath of the 1920s\u201330s are various, but have continued to endure ever since then: they express the same problems we see on the \u201cLeft\u201d today, in both its neo-Stalinist and neo-social democratic guises. \u2014 These problems are also present in anarchism and so-called \u201cLeft communism.\u201d As such, they express not only problems of the \u201cLeft\u201d but the political antinomies of capitalism itself. In this sense, they were not new problems of the 20th century, but old problems that Marxism had already addressed and at least theoretically \u201covercome\u201d in the 19th century \u2014 at least, Marxism had appeared to have overcome these problems. This is the reason for Platypus\u2019s emphasis on pre-WWI Marxist history, to find the sources for 20th century problems that were originally obvious to Marxists historically but in the meantime have become obscure, elusive and intractable today. While it would seem that history proved in fact that the old problems had not actually been overcome by Marxism, such a perspective would assume that we somehow \u201cknow better\u201d today, that the 20th century had provided lessons that have been learned \u2014 even if some anarchists had already warned of them in the 19th century. So it is incumbent upon me in my defense of and advocacy for Marxism to prove otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Redemption <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The question of the potential \u201credemption\u201d of the 20th\ncentury hinges on the question of historical \u201cprogress.\u201d If progress has been\nmade since 1919, then no redemption of the 20th century is really necessary: we\ncan simply build upon past practices in the present and proceed accordingly. So\nthe issue of redemption is actually based on the reverse evaluation, that the\n20th century did not progress beyond the original issues of historical Marxism,\nand indeed regressed below it. This was the assumption of both Trotsky and the\nFrankfurt School by the 1930s. They regarded the problems of Stalinism and\nSocial Democracy as repetitions of past problems that Marxism had already\nconsciously processed in its history before WWI. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cLeft\u201d has tried to preserve itself through\nappropriating past history in a certain way. The paradox \u2014 actually\na contradiction \u2014 is as follows: On the one hand, the \u201cLeft\u201d treats itself\nas independent of the dominant society in capitalism, thus treating the society\nit seeks to change as outside of itself (perhaps treating the presence of\ncapitalist society within itself as an outside contagion to be fought against\nand expelled); on the other hand, the \u201cLeft\u201d claims the supposed \u201cprogress\u201d of society\nin the 20th century as its own, as the result of its own doing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is the way capitalist society always grasps itself:\nas an autonomous subject trying to take hold of an extrinsic object. Originally,\nby contradistinction, Marxism characterized itself \u2014 \u201ccommunism\u201d or \u201cproletarian\nsocialism\u201d \u2014\nas the \u201cactual self-consciousness of the real movement of history.\u201d Both\nStalinism and Social Democracy (reformist Revisionism) followed original\nMarxism in this, by identifying themselves with the real movement of history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that history and its movement in capitalism is self-contradictory, and is thus non-identical with itself. So, in identifying oneself with history, one inevitably falls into a partial, one-sided antinomical perspective that privileges some aspects of historical movement over others. The \u201cLeft\u201d thus leaves itself at the mercy of capitalism and is merely tossed about by the Sturm und Drang<\/em> of its contradictions and historical changes. When one looks soberly and honestly at the actual history of the action and thought of the \u201cLeft\u201d \u2014 Stalinism and Social Democracy, as well as anarchism and \u201cLeft communism,\u201d and liberalism, too \u2014 in the 20th century, one finds it always on all sides of all issues. The \u201cLeft,\u201d in one form or another, has variously justified and supported in certain moments of history even imperialism and fascism. It has been pro-imperialist and anti-imperialist, pro-fascist and anti-fascist \u2014 revolutionary and counterrevolutionary. The actual history in its violent vicissitudes is hence forgotten \u2014 repressed. The way this is done is to resolve history by ironing it out, and rest content that, through it all, \u201cprogress\u201d has been made in the end. \u2014 That is, until the next historical shift of capitalism unsettles history once again, throwing progress into doubt. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Antinomies <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

I have raised one set of antinomies already, namely, anti-imperialism and anti-fascism (the subject of a prior convention talk of mine in 2011[3]). There are others. For instance, parliamentarism-electoralism as opposed to extra-parliamentary activity, or the battle of the \u201cballots\u201d vs. that on the \u201cstreets.\u201d There is also \u201canti-exploitation\u201d vs. \u201canti-oppression,\u201d or socio-economic \u201cclass\u201d vs. \u201crace, gender and sexuality.\u201d In the time of the historical origins of Marxism, there was also \u201csocial\u201d vs. \u201dpolitical action\u201d \u2014 the debate which broke up the First International Workingmen\u2019s Association, in the original split in socialism between anarchism and Marxism. There is also the antinomy of political and economic struggles. What one will find today is that all tendencies on the \u201cLeft\u201d are actually riven by such divisions, still. For instance, all these oppositions are present in the DSA and in Labour\u2019s Momentum movement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This shows that the 20th century is still with us \u2014\nas is indeed the 19th century. That is actually cause for hope. The fact that\nsuch antinomies still beset the \u201cLeft\u201d shows that the problem of capitalism as\nMarxism originally understood it has not been overcome \u2014 if only we can continue to recall\nit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These antinomies must be regarded properly as forms for the\nsocial and political movement of capitalism itself. Capitalism is internally\ndivided and destroys itself periodically, only to reconstitute itself again,\nthrough its characteristic social and political struggles, whether between \u201cclasses\u201d\nor \u201cnations,\u201d etc. So the first task of redeeming the 20th century would be to\nrecognize properly that the only \u201cprogress\u201d made was progress in capitalism<\/em> \u2014 namely, actually the regression<\/em> from socialism, at least as\nfar as the political struggle for socialism as Marxism originally understood it\nis concerned. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hypothetically, the perpetuation of capitalism also means\nsustaining the possibility for socialism. The only question is how this\npotential possibility is manifest and grasped in practice and theory. There, we\ncan observe an obvious regression in political potential for socialism from the\nearly 20th century to today. \u2014 Unless we assume that the election and\npolicies of \u201csocialist\u201d Democrats and Labourites and\/or demands of those\nengaged in street fighting or guerilla warfare immediately promise the\nachievement of socialist revolution, which I think we have reason to doubt: the\nmid-20th century is not about to be repeated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, the implementation of what would now be considered\n\u201csocialist\u201d policies by either elected officials or leaders of political revolutions\nin the 20th century can be considered today as part of the history of capitalism<\/em> \u2014 the history for whatever\npotential for socialism exists concretely in the world today, which is after\nall how Marxism originally addressed capitalism to begin with: capitalism is\nthe possibility and necessity for socialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscillation <\/strong>\u2014 vicissitude <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Towards the end of his life, my old professor Moishe Postone\nraised the specter of history oscillating between liberal and authoritarian\nstate-centric forms of capital \u2014 this was always Postone\u2019s great\napprehension and suspicion of Platypus with our positive appraisal of Lenin and\nTrotsky \u2014\nso that the state-mediated capitalism succeeding the original liberal forms of\ncapitalism in the early 20th century reverted by the end of the 20th century to\nneoliberalism, but might be followed by another phase of statist capital as a\nresult of the crisis of neoliberalism in the 21st century. I addressed this phenomenon\nof reaction against the failure of Marxism in my Platypus convention\nPresident\u2019s report in 2012, in the wake of the demise of Occupy Wall Street, on\n\u201c1873\u20131973:\nThe century of Marxism: The death of Marxism and the emergence of\nneo-liberalism and neo-anarchism.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is striking now is how, at the terminus of the Millennial Left, anarchism has been nearly completely suppressed in favor of statist forms of \u201csocialism,\u201d in both neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism. This is very different from where the Millennial Left originally started out, in the new Students for a Democratic Society (established in the same year, 2006, as Platypus), steeped as it was in neo-anarchism, especially as inherited from the 1990s anti-globalization and avowedly \u201cpost-\u201c if not simply \u201canti-political Left\u201d of Generation X. Despite the anti-imperialism of the anti-war movement at that time, which prioritized defense of Third World regimes against the U.S., this neo-anarchism persisted through #Occupy. It can be seen in the more general anti-austerity movement in response to the post-2008 global economic crisis. But as the Great Recession wore on, eventually there was a turn to state-oriented and capitalist electoral politics, for instance with SYRIZA in Greece, but also Podemos in Spain \u2014 despite the latter\u2019s avowedly \u201canti-political\u201d stance, which, unlike SYRIZA, failed to take power and faded, Podemos having lost out to the traditional Socialists.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The turn towards the Labour Party in the U.K. through Momentum under Jeremy Corbyn\u2019s leadership and towards the Democrats, first via Bernie Sanders\u2019s campaign for the Democratic Party nomination for President, and then through its ostensibly \u201csocialist\u201d progressive liberal fringe, the Democratic Socialists of America, after the Brexit vote and Trump\u2019s election, shows the utter collapse \u2014 indeed, I called it the \u201cdeath\u201d \u2014 of the Millennial \u201cLeft.\u201d[4] \u201cMarxism\u201d was originally disputed by the Millennial Left in opposition to both Social Democracy and Stalinism, but now has been completely assimilated to these two latter legacies. Whatever potential possibility and hope for opportunity of historical change that had come with the Millennial Left was expressed by its rejection of the traditional identification of Marxism with statism. Now this has disappeared. This repeated the failure of the 1960s New Left to overcome the problems of its elders in Stalinism and Social Democracy and subsequent assimilation to their legacy. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I wrote in \u201cThe Sandernistas,\u201d about the Millennial Left\u2019s enthusiasm for Bernie, what \u201csocialism\u201d means is merely return to the New Deal and Great Society government programs of the Democratic Party in the 20th century.[5] Similarly, the Corbynistas want to return to the old Labour policies before neoliberalism. Where has the original \u201canarchist\u201d spirit of the Millennials gone? \u2014 This is as striking as the disappearance of ostensible \u201clibertarian\u201d discontents from the Republican Party under Trump, however they are still expressed positively in moves to criminal justice reform as well as \u201cfree speech\u201d efforts against Political Correctness that Trump has initiated. Trump remains the central phenomenon of our time, however shadowed by militant neo-social democracy and neo-Stalinism in response to him. The crisis of neoliberalism will deepen before it abates. In any case, the center of action remains the state. What the \u201cLeft\u201d wants above all is to unelect Trump and reverse the Brexit vote, to which everything else is subordinated. The calls for increased welfare provisions, nationalization of industry and other capitalist state reforms are just enabling fictions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Statism and anarchy\ntoday <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Significantly, I myself would characterize the task of\nsocialism today as essentially \u201canarchist\u201d in nature, but not as \u201cpost-political\u201d\nas with post-New Left neo-anarchism, but rather pre<\/em>-political, namely, the necessity to organize the potential for\ncivil-social action independent of the state and capitalist politics, as a\nprecondition for any kind of political formation let alone socialist\nparty-building. This must be distinguished sharply from \u201cmovement-\u201c or\n\u201cbase-building,\u201d however, in that they are, by contrast, dependent on their\nconverse and complementary phenomenon, electoralism: the \u201cmovement\u201d is always\nunderstood as a pressure-tactic on elected officials, whether in government or\nlegislative-parliamentary opposition. The ostensible \u201cbase-building\u201d is\naccording to the model of \u201ccommunity organizing\u201d and NGO activism, that is, as\ncivil society constituencies for electoral parties, especially in the\nneoliberal mode of privatized outsourcing of political action. In this way, I\nwould distinguish the actual present historical necessity from the past\nneoliberal model which expressed not a return to but actually the thinning-out\nof civil society and capitulation to statism, however post-Fordist in character.\nThe \u201cLeft\u201d today is stuck in the characteristic post-New Left neoliberal\nmodality of social-movement activism, which is actually just a training ground\nfor NGO lobbyism and its group identity-politics and professional-managerial cultural\nracketeering. Any pre-socialist organizing today would need to cut sharply\nacross the established divisions in the capitalist-state management of civil\nsociety. The crisis of neoliberalism provides an opportunity for this \u2014\nwhich the Millennial Left in its death is precisely avoiding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new phase of capitalism now emerging from the crisis of\nits past neoliberal forms since the 1970s will offer possibilities for such\norganizing, as existing civil society is destroyed and reconstructed according\nto the new needs of capital. This is an opportunity to return to the original\nMarxist vision of socialism as immanent to and building upon the foundations of\ncapitalism. The statist turn of the Millennial Left fails at this in its\nclinging to the established prior forms of neoliberal capitalism embodied by\nthe existing Democrat and Labour Parties, which will be as slow to change now\nas they were in the face of the neoliberal shift beginning in the 1970s \u2014\nthey didn\u2019t complete their turn for another 20 years, in the 1990s. The\nMillennials joining them now will be their unopposed official leadership in 20\nyears\u2019 time, just as Hillary and Bill Clinton came to power in 1992, 20 years\nafter their youthful participation in the (losing) 1972 McGovern Democrat campaign\nfor President. The Millennials will learn through their defeats now how to\nadapt to capitalist politics in the long run, as usual, through a backward and\nshamefaced movement \u2014 by contrast, the avowed Right will be more\nstraightforward, unabashed, and hence successful. This will give the\nMillennials\u2019 electoralism and statist orientation an apparently more\n\u201cprincipled and responsible\u201d character, by contrast to the more blatant\nopportunism of the Right in pushing through whatever capitalism requires. But\n\u201cresistance\u201d or not, the overall drift is the same. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

History <\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

By contrast to Postone, I regard neoliberalism as a form of statism and not anti-statism, with anarchism and libertarianism always marginalized fringe ideological phenomena, and so post-neoliberalism will not require any profound changes in capitalist politics at the level of the state, which however requires periodic fine-tuning. The mid-late 20th century New Left, with its characteristic confusions about the capitalist state, mistaking it as a compromise formation with socialism (in this way recapitulating the old opportunist reformist Revisionism), was always deeply ambivalent in its neo-anarchist social-movementism, by the 1980s resigning itself to and even celebrating its powerlessness as some principled virtue \u2014 the \u201cLeft\u201d itself came to be actually identified with such powerlessness, mocking the original 1960s New Left vision of \u201cbe realistic, demand the impossible.\u201d That is not going to change in the least with the present electoral turn of the Millennial Left. The resulting statist managerial professionals emerging from the Millennial generation will always be regarded as bastard children and not recognized as the Left\u2019s own \u2014 just as the 1980s yuppies and the 1990s Clintons were never recognized as the offspring of the New Left that they were. But the continuing \u201cLeft\u201d on the marginal fringe won\u2019t matter at all, other than as the usual paragon of hypocritical denial for which the New Left has served as eminent historical example. See the \u201clong march through the institutions\u201d through which New Left Maoists gave us academic \u201cLeft\u201d blather, charter schools and Obama\u2019s Presidency. Before them, the Old Left Stalinists had always been what they ended up being, bureaucrats of corporate management and the capitalist state \u2014 many more of them lived out illustrious post-WWII careers than were purged by McCarthyism, in which they had not been \u201ccoopted\u201d or \u201csold out\u201d but rather fulfilled their original 1930s youthful Great Depression vision for reformed capitalism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Lenin observed and Adorno repeated 50 years later, the apparent rebirth of anarchism in the wasteland of the defeat of Marxism was only a symptom of historical failure and never more than a return of a \u201cghost\u201d (or, as Lenin put it, a \u201cphantasm\u201d).[6] But the ghost was not actually of anarchism itself but rather of what Marxism originally had been, the effective union of social and political action. That the historical mission accepted by Marxism became divided between the reduction of politics to statism and the reduction of social freedom to capitalist anarchy is the symptom that must be worked through towards any possibility for socialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Historically, Marxism already traversed this path, in the 1860s\u201370s, in the prelude to the mass socialist parties of the late 19th \u2013 early 20th centuries. Marxism emerged ascendant and anarchism diminished in the 1880s\u201390s, and the Second Industrial Revolution expanded the ranks of the proletariat and of socialist politics internationally through the Second or Socialist International, as the geopolitical order of capitalism found new players in the rise of Germany, Japan and the United States, and the older 19th century British and French socialist traditions were taken up and subsumed by Marxism. At the same time, Bonapartist states in the industrializing countries led capitalism into a new and even greater era. The freewheeling Gilded Age saw the most massive quantitative transformations in the history of civilization. The Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th century resulted in mass socialist parties unprecedented in world history, and within a generation they were prepared to take power.[7] This produced what Luxemburg and Lenin regarded as the welcome \u201ccrisis of Marxism\u201d itself, which they took as opportunity to clarify the tasks of socialism. We are nowhere near such a condition today. Indeed, the question of the meaning of socialism is being suppressed through its advocacy: precisely when everyone is claiming to be \u201csocialist\u201d its memory is being buried. Socialism currently is being not constituted but liquidated. The last time this happened was in the mid-20th century, when Stalinism and Social Democracy liquidated Marxism and adapted to continuing capitalism. It is happening yet again. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Redeeming the 20th century, then, means recognizing its repetition today. The reigning statism of the Millennial Left arriving at adulthood, whether neo-social-democratic or neo-Stalinist, is the death-mask imposed upon it by its 20th century forebears, smothering it from birth \u2014 especially the 1960s New Left, internalizing, through \u201canti\u201d-authoritarian rebellion, the mocking face of state \u201csocialism.\u201d Any haunting reminders of anarchism that may trouble its conscience moving forward will be a mere spectral apparition and no living spirit of socialism. That spirit can only find life in a rebirth of Marxism, which for now exists outside and against the stream of the present, and, like Benjamin\u2019s Angel of History, sees not a chain of events, carrying us helplessly from one \u201cdamned thing\u201d to another, but only one single mounting catastrophe.[8] As for Benjamin, the only hope is not in the flow of time, but in the monstrous abbreviation and compression of history that can blast the continuity of the present. | P<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Notes <\/h2>\n\n\n\n

[1] See my: \u201c1873\u20131973: The century of Marxism: The death of Marxism and the emergence of neo-liberalism and neo-anarchism,\u201d Platypus Review<\/em> 47 (June 2012), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2012\/06\/07\/1873-1973-the-century-of-marxism\/<\/a>>; \u201c1917\u20132017\u201d PR<\/em> 99 (September 2017), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/08\/29\/1917-2017\/<\/a>>; and \u201c1918\u20132018: The century of counterrevolution\u201d PR<\/em> 106 (May 2018), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2018\/05\/04\/1918-2018-the-century-of-counterrevolution\/<\/a>>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2] See my \u201c1914 in the history of Marxism,\u201d PR<\/em> 66 (May 2014), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2014\/05\/06\/1914-history-marxism\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3] See my: \u201cThe \u2018anti-imperialist\u2019 vs. \u2018anti-fascist\u2019 Left: Some genealogies and prospects,\u201d available online at: <http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=1203<\/a>>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4] See my \u201cThe Millennial Left is dead,\u201d PR<\/em> 100 (October 2017), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/10\/01\/millennial-left-dead\/<\/a>>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5] \u201cThe Sandernistas: The final triumph of the 1980s,\u201d PR<\/em> 82 (December 2015 \u2013 January 2016), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2015\/12\/17\/sandernistas-final-triumph-1980s\/<\/a>>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6] See V.I. Lenin, \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder<\/em> (1920), Chapter 4 \u201cThe Struggle Against Which Enemies Within the Working-Class Movement Helped Bolshevism Develop, Gain Strength, and Become Steeled,\u201d available online at: <https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1920\/lwc\/ch04.htm<\/a>>; and Theodor W. Adorno, \u201cResignation\u201d (1969), trans. Henry W. Pickford, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 292. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7] See my \u201cThe end of the Gilded Age: Discontents of the Second Industrial Revolution today,\u201d PR<\/em> 102 (December 2017 \u2013 January 2018), available online at: <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/12\/02\/end-gilded-age-discontents-second-industrial-revolution-today\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8] Walter Benjamin, \u201cOn the concept of history\u201d (1940), AKA \u201cTheses on the philosophy of history,\u201d in Illuminations<\/em>, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253-64. Available online at: <https:\/\/www.sfu.ca\/~andrewf\/CONCEPT2.html<\/a>>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statism and anarchy today Chris Cutrone Prepared opening remarks presented at the closing plenary of the 11th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, April 6, 2019, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A complete audio recording of the event, including response by Richard Rubin and audience Q&A, is available online at: <https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/Redeeming20thCentury040619>. […]<\/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":[44],"class_list":["post-2778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-44"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778","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=2778"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3104,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2778\/revisions\/3104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}