{"id":2893,"date":"2020-02-22T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-22T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2893"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:56:44","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:56:44","slug":"the-american-revolution-and-the-left-audio-recording","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2893","title":{"rendered":"The American Revolution and the Left (audio recording)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\">Cutrone&#8217;s opening remarks begin at ~42:20:&nbsp;<br><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"450\" height=\"40\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/embed\/amrevpanelcolumbia22220\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n<p align=\"center\"><figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"501\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-501x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"Nikole Hannah-Jones cancels 1776.\" class=\"wp-image-2897\" srcset=\"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-501x1024.jpeg 501w, https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-147x300.jpeg 147w, https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-768x1570.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-751x1536.jpeg 751w, https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-1002x2048.jpeg 1002w, https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/nikolehannahjones17761619-scaled.jpeg 1252w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 501px) 100vw, 501px\" \/><\/figure><\/p><p align=\"center\"><em>Nikole Hannah-Jones cancels 1776.<\/em><br><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (CPUSA) and Bertell Ollman at Columbia University on February 22, 2020.&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>\u201cWe should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>* * * <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>\u201cI am delighted to come and visit. Behind the fact of [Fidel] Castro coming to this hotel, [Nikita] Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveler in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognize that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad they came to the United States. We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>\u2014 Senator John F. Kennedy, speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York during his 1960 presidential election campaign, October 12, 1960 &nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>ANY REVOLUTION IN THE UNITED STATES will express the desire to preserve, sustain and promote the further development of the original American Revolution. The future of socialism, not merely in North America but in the whole world, depends on the fate of the American Revolution.&nbsp;But the \u201cLeft\u201d today denies this basic truth. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marx called the United States Civil War the alarm bell tolling the\ntime of world socialist revolution in the 19th century. That did not happen as\nhe wanted, but the subsequent rise of the massive world-transforming force of\nAmerican capitalism signaled \u2014 and still signals today \u2014 the task of\nsocialism.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My old comrades in the Spartacist League had a slogan, \u201cFinish the Civil War!\u201d It was vintage 1960s New Leftism in that it was about the Civil Rights Movement and overcoming de jure Jim Crow segregation as a legacy of failed Reconstruction. More than 50 years later, we can say that the task is more simply to complete the American Revolution. Former President John Quincy Adams (the son, not the father), speaking before the United States Supreme Court in the Amistad case advocating the freedom of slaves who rebelled, foresaw the future U.S. Civil War over the abolition of slavery and called it \u201cthe last battle of the American Revolution.\u201d He did not foresee capitalism and its new tasks and future battles.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The American Socialist Eugene Debs famously said that the 4th of\nJuly was a socialist holiday and that American Revolutionary figures such as\nJefferson and Lincoln belonged to the struggle for socialism \u2014 and not to the\ncapitalist political parties of Democrats and Republicans. Today, more than 100\nyears later, this remains no less true.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Up to the 1960s New Left, the American and global Left and\nsocialists and Communists all used to know this basic truth. \u2014 Indeed\nmainstream capitalist politics acknowledged this fact of the ongoing task of\nthe American Revolution: Kennedy claimed the revolutionary heritage for the\nU.S. against the Soviet Union; even Nixon in 1968 at the Republican National\nConvention before his election called for a \u201cnew American Revolution.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Today, Bernie Sanders and Trump call themselves not politicians but leaders of a movement; Sanders calls for a \u201cpolitical revolution\u201d in the name of \u201cdemocratic socialism.\u201d What they mean of course is an electoral shift to support new policies. In 1992, when conceding to Bill Clinton\u2019s electoral victory after 12 years of Republican rule, George Herbert Walker Bush (the father, not the son) said that the U.S. accomplishes through elections what other countries require civil wars.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We are discussing the meaning of the American Revolution for the\nLeft today because we face a general election later this year.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such elections for the President and Congress, which have\nstakes&nbsp;at a global and not merely national level, raise issues of the U.S.\npolitical system and its foundation in the American Revolution. The future of\nthe American Revolution is at stake.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the recent Trump impeachment farce, there was at least the\npantomime of conflict over the future of the American Republic: Was Trump a\nthreat to the Republic? \u2014 Were the Democrats and their allies in the Deep State\npermanent bureaucracy?&nbsp;There has been an evident crisis of legitimacy of\nthe political order. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Do the rather mild and moderate policy reforms Trump has been implementing\nand seeks to accomplish amount to a Constitutional crisis \u2014 threaten a civil\nwar? Despite the overheated language of the Democrats, Trump\u2019s confident and\nrather blas\u00e9 attitude, and the matter-of-fact Constitutional arguments by his\nlawyers and Republican Senators and Congressmen seem appropriate \u2014 indeed\nunimpeachably correct.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What about \u201cfascism\u201d? This favored word on the Left and even among\nDemocrats speaks to the threat of civil war \u2014 extra-legal action and perhaps\nviolence. There has been the so-called \u201cresistance\u201d \u2014 a term that Attorney\nGeneral Barr said implied the danger of civil war and even revolution: he also\nsaid, in the same speech before the Federalist Society last year, that the U.S.\nPresidency embodied the \u201cperfected Whig ideal of executive authority\u201d as\nenvisioned by Locke and the English Glorious Revolution \u2014 that is, a\nrevolutionary ideal of political authority. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Mao said to Nixon in China that one finds among the Left-wing\nfollowers of Marx actual fascists. He was contrite about the results of the\nCultural Revolution and admitted its pathology. \u2014 Today\u2019s Maoists and DSA Democratic\n\u201csocialists\u201d ought to listen and take heed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It is not a matter of wanting the revolution but rather of its\nactuality.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The struggle for socialism will not be according to the fevered\nfantasies of today\u2019s supposed \u201crevolutionaries.\u201d A socialist revolution will\ntake place \u2014 if at all \u2014 on the basis of a mass desire to save society, not\ndestroy it. Capitalism will appear as the threat to America, not\nsocialism.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem is the exaggerated rhetoric of mainstream politics\ntoday. It expresses a partial if distorted truth, that capitalism recurrently\nproduces crises in society, over which political conflicts take place. We are\nin the midst of such a crisis now \u2014 expressed by the crisis of the major\ncapitalist political parties symbolized by Trump and Sanders.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It has happened before. The Great Depression brought a sea-change\nin American and indeed world politics: in the U.S., a change of the political\nparty system through FDR\u2019s New Deal Coalition overturned the more than 50-year\npost-Civil War and Reconstruction dominance of the Republican Party. The 1960s\nexperienced a new crisis and change of politics with an upheaval among the\nDemocrats and bringing forth not only the New Left but the New Right that\ntriumphed 50 years after the New Deal. 50 years after the 1960s, today we are\nexperiencing another change out of the crisis of the New Right \u2014 the crisis of the\nReagan Coalition of neoliberalism and neoconservatism and of the culture wars\nthat came out of the New Left and the crisis of American society that followed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Democrats have desperately sought to stem\nthe tide of Trumpian post-neoliberalism \u2014 and\nindeed against the swell of support for Bernie Sanders\u2019s Democratic\n\u201csocialism.\u201d They have done so on the basis of their prior existing post-\u201960s\nneoliberal electoral coalition of wealthy progressives, ethno-cultural and\/or\n\u201cracial\u201d minorities, liberally educated women and others, queers and what\nremains of organized labor. Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and immigrant rights\nactivists have protested not only against Trump, but have hounded Bernie and\nhis Sandernistas, the much-maligned \u201cBernie Bros\u201d and Millennial hipster straight\nwhite male Brocialists more generally \u2014 the \u201cSquad\u201d of Congressional\nRepresentatives AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley\nnotwithstanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Last year\u2019s New York Times 1619 Project led by\njournalist Nikole Hannah-Jones \u2014 aimed at\ndelegitimating Trump after the failure of the Russia collusion hoax, in what Editor\nDean Baquet called the \u201cshift from Russia to race\u201d \u2014\ntook the occasion of marking the quart-centenary of the arrival of African\nslaves in the English colonies and explicitly sought to negate the American\nRevolutionary founding in 1776. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Trump\u2019s\nPresidency seems to prove the invalidity of the American Revolution, and indeed\nhas implied that its meaning was confined to privileged white males who must at\nall cost be cowed in the public sphere. It seems obvious that women, blacks and\nother minorities have no stake in and must disavow the American Revolution. The\nidea of a kind word being said about the American Revolutionaries \u2014 the\nFounding Fathers \u2014 nowadays seems importune if not simply a provocative offense\nand outrage \u2014 the Tory Alexander Hamilton\u2019s musical fame under Obama\nnotwithstanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a sad\ncommentary on our historical moment today. It speaks to the utter and complete\ndestruction of the original historical Left, socialism and Marxism \u2014the\ncomplete triumph of counterrevolutionary ideology over everything from\nClassical Liberalism onwards. Such ideology ensures the continuation of\ncapitalism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>However, this is a historical phenomenon only 50 years or so old. And it speaks not to the future but the past. The Millennials blew their chance to relate to history in new ways that challenged and tasked them beyond post-\u201960s doxa.[1]  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The problem is\nthat the recent and ongoing crisis of the post-\u201960s neoliberal political order\nhas been expressed either by Trump and his new direction for the Republican\nParty or by a nostalgic desire to reconstitute the old Democratic Party New\nDeal Coalition that fell apart a half-century ago, symbolized by the old New\nLeftist Sanders and the reanimation of the post-\u201960s collapse into the\nDemocratic Socialists of America, both of which date to the Reagan Revolution\nera of the 1980s and its \u201cresistance\u201d to that time\u2019s neoliberal changes in\ncapitalism. This does not augur new possibilities but holds to old memories\nfrom a time many if not most were not yet even alive. Its spectral \u2014 unreal \u2014 quality\nis evident. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cThe past is not\ndead; it is not even past.\u201d And: \u201cThose who do not learn from history are\ncondemned to repeat it\u201d \u2014 are condemned to be trapped by it. These banal\ncatch-phrases can hide but also reveal a meaningful truth: that we are tasked\nby history, whether or not we recognize it. American history continues,\nregardless. The U.S. President is indeed, as is said, \u201cthe leader of the free\nworld.\u201d As Trump says, America is the greatest country in world history; as his\nimpeachment prosecution declared, his Senate jury is the \u201chighest deliberative\nbody in the history of the world.\u201d This is simply \u2014 and undeniably \u2014 true. Why\nand how it was constituted so, historically, is an unavoidable fact of life,\nfor people here and around the world, now and for the foreseeable future. \u2014 Can\nwe live up to its task? <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>My own rejoinder\nto Trump\u2019s Make America Great Again is to Make America Revolutionary Again. \u2014 But\nno one else on the Left seems to be seeing the sign of the times. Instead,\neveryone seems eager to rescue the neoliberal Democrats from the dustbin of\nhistory. Even Bernie must genuflect to their PC orthodoxy. \u2014 But not Trump! <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is indeed a\ntime of reconsideration of history and its haunting memories. The question is\nwhether they must, as Marx said, remain \u201ctraditions of dead generations\nweighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living,\u201d or can they be redeemed\nby the struggle for freedom in the present. It seems that the Millennial Left\nof the last two decades has joined the dead generations that came before it.\nAny rebirth of a true socialist Left and of a Marxist recognition of its actual\ntasks and possibilities must reckon with the history that has been abandoned by\nrecent generations, starting at least since the 1960s, and pursue its\nunfulfilled potential. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For the American Revolution still lives. | <strong>\u00a7<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>_________________<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>1. See my \u201cThe Millennial Left is dead,\u201d <em>Platypus Review<\/em> 100 (October 2017), available online at: &lt;<a href=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/10\/01\/millennial-left-dead\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" aria-label=\"https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/10\/01\/millennial-left-dead\/ (opens in a new tab)\">https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2017\/10\/01\/millennial-left-dead\/<\/a>&gt;. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cutrone&#8217;s opening remarks begin at ~42:20:&nbsp; Nikole Hannah-Jones cancels 1776. Chris Cutrone Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (CPUSA) and Bertell Ollman at Columbia University on February 22, 2020.&nbsp; \u201cWe should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part [&hellip;]<\/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":[45,16,23,43],"class_list":["post-2893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-45","tag-marxism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-trump-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893","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=2893"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3028,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2893\/revisions\/3028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}