{"id":3289,"date":"2022-02-01T13:53:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T18:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=3289"},"modified":"2022-02-02T13:56:38","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T18:56:38","slug":"the-left-is-a-concept-but-social-revolution-is-not-a-response-to-benedict-cryptofash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=3289","title":{"rendered":"The Left is a concept — but social revolution is not: A response to “Benedict Cryptofash”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

Platypus Review <\/a><\/em>143<\/a> | <\/em>February 2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LESZEK KO\u0141AKOWSKI\u2019S \u201cTHE CONCEPT OF THE LEFT\u201d (1958) is useful for addressing what it means to say that there is a Left and a Right in Marxism.[1]<\/sup><\/a> It is derived from the Revisionist Dispute regarding Orthodox Marxism and the question of reform vs. revolution in the 2nd<\/sup> Socialist International. The actual occasion for Ko\u0142akowski\u2019s article was Soviet Premier and Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev\u2019s denunciation of Stalin for \u201ccrimes against Leninism\u201d and against socialism. What did this mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It goes back to the accusation against the Socialist Party-associated labor unions and the Marxist theorist Eduard Bernstein and his Revisionist associates in the 2nd<\/sup> International, who advocated reform struggles within liberal democratic capitalism at the expense of socialist revolution, that they were \u201copportunists.\u201d This is what characterized them as the Right. Ko\u0142akowski describes this as adaptation to and expression of the \u201cinertia of the status quo\u201d that characterizes the Right as conservative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By contrast, Orthodox and \u201crevolutionary\u201d Marxism upheld what Ko\u0142akowski called the Left as \u201cutopia.\u201d Ko\u0142akowski wrote that what characterized the Left was an \u201cidea\u201d and moreover its \u201cnegation\u201d of the status quo, not programmatically as in a blueprint for a better society, but rather as a \u201cmysterious and obscure\u201d expression of historical potential and possibility that is not yet realized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This goes back to the bourgeois revolutionary philosophy of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and others which contrasted what \u201cis\u201d with what \u201cought\u201d to be, the process of becoming within a state of being that expressed what could and should be but \u201cis not\u201d yet. Marxism descended from this revolutionary philosophy of the era of bourgeois emancipation and enlightenment from traditional civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what is the difference that makes this such a contentious issue? Capitalism has its origins in the bourgeois revolution, but for Marxism expresses a potential beyond it: socialism\/communism \u2014 \u201ccommunism\u201d as an Ancient religious ideal of collective equality; \u201csocialism\u201d as a modern political ideology stemming from the potential inherent in capitalism but not possible previously and not yet existing in historical reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is not that the Marxist Left \u2014 the revolutionary political ideology and \u201c[Hegelian] scientific theory\u201d of historical Marxists such as Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, among others \u2014 is descended from bourgeois revolutionary philosophy, but rather that since the failure of Marxism historically to achieve socialist revolution in the early 20th<\/sup> century, capitalism itself has tried to adapt to the threat of proletarian discontent and disorder through \u201cprogressive liberal\u201d democratic capitalist welfare-state measures and the national organization of capital accumulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stalinism was an adaptation to this failure of world socialist revolution and assimilation instead to \u201cprogressive capitalism,\u201d thus making Stalinism the modern expression of the Right wing of Marxism, expressing the inertia of history and society and becoming the ideology of the liquidation of the proletarian struggle for socialism. Trotsky called Stalinism the \u201cantithesis of Bolshevism\u201d \u2014 of Marxism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Left is dead today because it is the Right \u2014 not because it is the Left. The Left as a historical idea of Marxism motivating the proletarian struggle for the socialist transformation of capitalism has become instead a late bourgeois ideology of the \u201cprogressive\u201d reform of capitalism. This already happened nearly 100 years ago and is still in effect very strongly today. Marxism is thus entombed in history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a>The Left\u2013Right distinction is not social but political and ideological in nature. Its meaning for Marxism comes from a division and split in the political party for socialism \u2014 the split of the 3rd<\/sup> Communist from 2nd<\/sup> Socialist International in the Russian Revolution and its world-historic aftermath: the old Socialists were the Right and the new Communists were the Left. From a Marxist perspective, the established Socialist Parties existing today are still the Right, despite being called the \u201cLeft.\u201d Trotsky and his comrades called themselves the Left Opposition to Stalinism in the Communist International. They made a claim to uphold the true spirit of Marxism and proletarian socialist revolution that still haunts us today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lenin (in)famously observed that socialist ideology must come from outside the social and economic and political struggles of the working class within capitalism.  What was this \u201coutside\u201d? It wasn\u2019t sociological \u2014 from bourgeois intellectuals \u2014 but rather historical: it comes from the past accumulation of experience of the bourgeois democratic revolution and its self-contradiction and defeat in capitalism. Lenin called socialists \u201cJacobins indissolubly connected to the workers movement.\u201d This is the idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The workers movement comes from bourgeois discontents in capitalism: capitalism\u2019s contradiction and betrayal of \u201cequality of inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\u201d (Jefferson \u2014 who importantly led the Left wing of the American Revolution). Only historical experience and its critical lessons can teach the proletarianized working class in capitalism that the goal of its struggle is beyond bourgeois emancipation and freedom, within which their struggles are otherwise inevitably circumscribed, reproducing capitalism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only a Marxist socialist Left could possibly lift the horizon of such struggle beyond capitalism. But only the working class can actually achieve the real goals of this struggle in social revolution. | P<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> See Benedict Cryptofash, “The Left is not a concept,” Platypus Review<\/em> 142 (December 2021 \u2013 January 2022), available online at <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2021\/12\/01\/the-left-is-not-a-concept\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 143 | February 2022 LESZEK KO\u0141AKOWSKI\u2019S \u201cTHE CONCEPT OF THE LEFT\u201d (1958) is useful for addressing what it means to say that there is a Left and a Right in Marxism.[1] It is derived from the Revisionist Dispute regarding Orthodox Marxism and the question of reform vs. revolution in the 2nd […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[47,35,16,6],"class_list":["post-3289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-47","tag-lenin","tag-marxism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289","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=3289"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3291,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3289\/revisions\/3291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}