{"id":4123,"date":"2025-02-24T14:34:52","date_gmt":"2025-02-24T19:34:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=4123"},"modified":"2025-12-29T18:41:53","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T23:41:53","slug":"a-marxist-science-of-politics-audio-recording","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=4123","title":{"rendered":"A Marxist science of politics (audio recording)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Chris Cutrone <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/embed\/ccps-2-24-25-panel\" width=\"450\" height=\"60\" frameborder=\"0\" webkitallowfullscreen=\"true\" mozallowfullscreen=\"true\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Presented on a panel, &#8220;A Marxist science of politics?,&#8221; with Atiya Khan-Singh on &#8220;Decolonization in the Age of Anti-Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,&#8221; moderated by Edward Remus, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 24, 2025.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What is politics? It is the art of constituting the community. What is a science? A form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility. What is Marxism as a science of politics? It is knowledge of the constitution of modern capitalist society, and how this knowledge of society is made possible by capitalism itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Modern capitalism is, according to Marxism, defined, as a mode of production, by the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bourgeois society is the community of labor. Politics in capitalism is the art of constituting the community of labor in the industrial age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The industrial age is that of the Industrial Revolution: the process of automation. We are still living in capitalism insofar as we are in the community of labor contradicted by the process of automation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a specific society with a specific condition, task and form of politics. To achieve adequate knowledge of this society and its politics requires a specific kind of science. Namely, a conception of contradiction is necessary. Moreover, what is needed is a conception of how a contradiction points to a potential change from within itself: a dialectical conception of contradiction. But such a knowledge \u2014 self-consciousness \u2014 is peculiar to capitalism and how it points beyond itself to socialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Political science as a discipline is a fairly late phenomenon. It is from the end of the 19th century at the earliest, but really from the 20th century. James Burnham in <em>The Machiavellians<\/em> dated the birth of political science to Machiavelli, but really to Italian Elite Theory of the turn of the 20th century. What is remarkable, then, is the birth of modern political science as a contemporary response to Marxism \u2014 and its 20th century efflorescence as a response to the failure of Marxism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marxism is commonly accused of lacking a political theory \u2014 lacking an account, let alone a science of politics. Specifically, it is said to have a deficient understanding of politics as such, instead attributing politics to economics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what about Marxism as a social science \u2014 a science of society? Is society reducible to economics? The bourgeois social relations of production are not merely economic: they are legal-juridical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marx\u2019s critique of political economy was a critique of the self-consciousness of bourgeois society: political economy was social theory: a theory of social relations. Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, for instance, were moral philosophers \u2014 neither economists nor political philosophers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Moral philosophy was descended from theology, as part of the broader descent of philosophy from religious thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What is the history of science \u2014 of knowledge? What is the history of our consciousness of society? The first form of knowledge of society was through religion: our community in and with the Divine; our Divine community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The first state or polis was that of a religious community. It was understood to have been created by a Divine act, creating a fundamental and originary relation between the community and Divinity. The ruling class was the priestly caste, called the First Estate in European Christendom. In this way our first knowledge of society was through our knowledge of the Divine character of the polis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The other ruling class of traditional civilization, the Second Estate, was the warrior caste. Often the Divine act that established the community was a war, whether a human war on Earth or a war of God or the gods in Heaven, or a combination of both. God aided the humans or humans aided God in their victory. If a community or a people or a god perished, this was itself understood as a Divinely preordained fate. As such the Divine act that established or abolished a community was outside of time, standing either at the beginning or the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What was the \u201crational kernel within the mystical shell,\u201d in Marx\u2019s language, of such a conception? That history itself was identical with the time of the community, defined throughout its course by its origin and telos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The modern world of bourgeois society overthrew the gods and secularized time, making history identical with this process of revolution. The American conservative thinker Eric Voegelin criticized Marxism for seeking to \u201cimmanentize the Eschaton\u201d or trying to make Heaven on Earth. But this was not Marxism\u2019s doing but that of bourgeois society itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Bourgeois society\u2019s social relations of labor humanized the Divine act of creating community, placing it in social cooperation itself. Rather than a singular Divine act, this Divine character of community became the unfolding process of history itself through human action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Not Carl Schmitt\u2019s \u201cDivine violence\u201d of political theology that identifies the community with God and deifies politics itself, but rather Hannah Arendt\u2019s notion of the \u201cvita activa\u201d of the \u201chuman condition.\u201d Both were contemporaries of the apocalypse of modern society in the 20th century, in which the action of politics became deeply uncertain. How can we know the truth of political action? This is the fundamental question of political science as a modern knowledge of society and its self-conscious direction &#8212; not human secular action merely as the unconscious phenomenon of the Divine acting through it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>James Burnham in <em>The Managerial Revolution<\/em> tried to summarize the lessons of Italian Elite Theory of the early 20th century, synthesizing Mosca, Sorel, Michels and Pareto to grasp the dynamics of modern politics as a \u201cmanagerial revolution\u201d as the latest of Pareto\u2019s \u201ccycle of elites.\u201d Burnham borrowed from Marxism the idea of history as succession of modes of production, but eliminated the dialectical character of capitalism in Marx\u2019s view, which made it very different from other historical phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Gaetano Mosca supposedly innovated from Marxism\u2019s focus on the subaltern\u2019s revolutionary class struggle, turning instead to the issue of the reproduction of the ruling class.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If the bourgeois Third Estate of Commoners had overthrown the Divine violence of the gods and the ruling castes, replacing them with the constitution of society by labor, then Burnham took from Mosca a reinterpretation of the ruling class as the organizers and managers of production, with changes driven by military or technical developments. \u2014The gods were replaced by the Divine force of technology, and entrepreneurs as the new priests and warriors, bringing about an apocalyptic change of social production and its community.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The industrial forces contradicting the bourgeois social relations of production in Marx\u2019s view became instead a deus ex machina of the Divine force of nature on the stage of history victimizing the poor laboring humans.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Far from bringing about Heaven on Earth, Hell had descended upon Creation instead.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The struggle of elites in capitalism reverted back to more or less civilized or barbaric wars over the interpretation of the will of the gods between rival warrior-priests \u2014 as history had always been, the revelation of the inscrutable and mysterious Divine, to which we had to submit and bear witness.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Was \u201cscience,\u201d then, merely what it had always been, the religious veneration of the Divine, led by holy men, who might turn out not to be Saints but doing the Devil\u2019s work, leading us astray from the proper reverence we owed our Creator as Lord, Savior and Redeemer?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Marx called this the \u201cfetishism\u201d of the last stage of prehistory. Burnham\u2019s Marxist contemporaries Adorno and Horkheimer called it the \u201cveil of technology\u201d that was so visibly thin it demanded to be pierced through.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But what made such consciousness \u2014 as opposed to Burnham\u2019s reification of alienated technology, society and politics \u2014 possible?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Marxism, it was contradiction itself that produced consciousness \u2014 that made knowledge possible. This followed from Hegel\u2019s discovery that knowledge itself \u2014 Absolute Knowing \u2014 was borne of the struggle for freedom in and through a condition of self-contradiction and its recognition. \u201cClass struggle\u201d was not against an evil Master \u2014 who was merely the character-mask of conditions, and not their cause or responsible actor \u2014 but a process of self-recognition borne of contradiction.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Such contradiction was not a Divine force \u2014 which would amount to a fetishization and mystification or deification of the dialectic itself \u2014 but actually the specific knowledge of a specific society in a certain era of history.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>(It is notable that James Burnham himself rejected dialectics &#8212; even when he considered himself a Marxist. Burnham deemed dialectics to be a regrettable holdover from theology. Trotsky for his part called Burnham\u2019s approach to politics that of a \u201cwitch-doctor.\u201d This was memorably recorded in the debates among Trotsky and his followers at the time Burnham departed their company. As Trotsky reportedly put it, \u201cYou might not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you!\u201d In his January 1940 open letter to Burnham, Trotsky noted the historical specificity of the Marxian dialectic itself, which he expected to be superseded &#8212; once capitalism was overcome.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dialectical and historical materialism was the adequate consciousness produced by the self-contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of labor in the industrial era of production at the moment of its revelation. It was the necessary consciousness of the proletarianized working class in its struggle to overcome capitalism \u2014 where capitalism itself was not the evil magical spell conjured by the ruling class \u2014 perverse priests heretically violating Divine Creation in the Satanic Mills of their devices \u2014 but the alienated society produced and reproduced by cooperative labor, contradicting and demanding overcoming itself.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Political science was not meant to be yet another iteration of pondering the Divine, but the consciousness of revolution in history.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This recognition, already nearly 200 years old, is the meaning of Marxism as a science of politics, called for by capitalism.&nbsp;| <strong>\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Cutrone Presented on a panel, &#8220;A Marxist science of politics?,&#8221; with Atiya Khan-Singh on &#8220;Decolonization in the Age of Anti-Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,&#8221; moderated by Edward Remus, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 24, 2025. What is politics? It is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[51,18,16,21],"class_list":["post-4123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-presentations","tag-51","tag-adorno","tag-marxism","tag-postmodernism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123","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=4123"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4478,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4123\/revisions\/4478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}