A discussion among Platypus pedagogues on readings from the Platypus Affiliated Society’s academic year syllabus of primary Marxist readings.
Readings addressed: Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History Chris Cutrone, “Capital in history” (2008), “The Marxist hypothesis” (2010), “Class consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) today” (2012) and “Badiou’s ‘communism’: a gerontic disorder” (2011) Leszek Kolakowski, “The concept of the Left” Max Horkheimer, selections from Dämmerung (trans. Dawn and Decline) 1926-31 Theodor Adorno, “Imaginative excesses” (orphaned from Minimal Moralia, published in “Messages in a bottle”) Karl Marx, “To make the world philosophical” (excerpt from dissertation); Letter to Arnold Ruge September 1843; selections from 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) Marx, “The coming upheaval” from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) Marx, Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League (1850); selections from The Class Struggles in France (1851) and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852); and Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer March 5, 1852
Platypus academic year primary Marxist readings syllabus:
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )
Chris Cutrone and Doug Lain discuss Trump’s Gaza plan, and, in the second half, the debate between Cutrone and Benjamin Studebaker on Platonism and Marxism.
A rejoinder to Benjamin Studebaker on political disturbance and social freedom
Chris Cutrone
Benjamin Studebaker attributes modern social and political thought to Stoicism, which he understands to be at heart Neo-Platonist — by contrast with Plato’s own Platonism.[1] In his view, it comes down to us from late Hellenism — Alexandrianism? But is capitalism Epicurean, as Studebaker avers, and socialism Stoic? Studebaker rejects the vision of socialism as society going beyond politics, which he interprets as the impossible or undesirable state without “disturbance”: an inhuman dystopia.
I wrote previously in response to Studebaker on ideology and social relations in capitalism.[2] Here, I will take a different tack, and try to rejoin all of Studebaker’s criticisms together.
Studebaker describes himself as a “non-liberal pluralist” — a Hobbesian. But the struggle for socialism comes from reaching the limits of liberalism — not from rejecting or as an alternative to it. Socialism arises from the self-contradiction of liberalism in capitalism — the self-contradiction of bourgeois social relations. But liberalism and capitalism are not identical — or, their identity is only a “speculative” one. This is not a matter of principles or ideals but social reality itself. Hobbes was a modern — which means a liberal. There was an emancipation of bourgeois society from traditional civilization: the emancipation of labor and social cooperation. The issue is not the self-conscious political or economic order but society itself, which comprehends both the economic and political realms — and includes culture and psychology. It is the actual unity of theory and practice. This includes “philosophy.” All thinking in modern society is a function of modern society — even when it draws from Ancient sources. As Durkheim observed, forms of thought are social forms. They remain modern. Modern civil liberties and rights will not be politically constrained, as they subsist in social reality itself. Their abrogation remains a crime — against social freedom.
Studebaker challenges me to support “Medicare for all,” the demand of the Bernie Presidential campaign and central to the DSA’s reform program. But we already had “human infrastructure” — as opposed to physical infrastructure, which was denounced as “masculine” and bad for the environment — funded by the Biden Administration as a way of buttressing the “service economy” after the stresses of the COVID pandemic. This is backward-looking. The moment for radical health care reform has passed — even as it remains, as they say, core to the Democratic Party brand: even Obama now says that the Affordable Care Act should have been public and not private provision of health care. This is mere sloganeering. Trump flirted with the idea of public health care as a cost-cutting measure for American capitalism — to make it competitive with other advanced capitalist countries that have such government provision. But he soon realized that it was not impossible but unnecessary. The Democrats will dangle it forever — or for so long as it holds the attention of voters, which, like climate change, seems to be already passing as a political issue. I pointed out to Ben that the Republicans are correct that health care is not — cannot possibly be — a “right,” but is a “good”: a commodity, whether provided by the market or the state; either a cheap or expensive one.[3] Capitalism will adjust to the new situation if not new needs, with or without political action. As Trump is driving down pharmaceutical costs, he is also proud to point out that the private sector is already making great strides on carbon reduction, even in developing cleaner fossil fuel production and use. The issues of the future will be different.
Studebaker takes issue with what he calls “Quixotic socialism” — it’s unclear whether he includes me in this category, but he might.[4] Are we still fighting the battles of the past? But which past? The history of a dead movement — Marxism — might indeed seem to be tilting at windmills. But there be dragons. The issue, it seems, is the “progressive” wave in politics from Obama through Biden, cresting with Bernie Sanders and the Squad of AOC et al. (Zohran Mamdani?) during the Trump era. What did this have to do with socialism and capitalism? There is an evident disconnect between the “Left” — animated by Democratic Party issues — and Marxism. Is the latter merely a noble position belonging to a past world? Platypus poses two questions: Does Marxism even matter? And: What is Marxism? — What is the Left? If it is only the “Left-wing” of capitalism, then certainly Marxism is irrelevant. As Marx himself said, he did not discover class divisions or the class struggle of the workers — liberals already had.[5] (Marx only found the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat — which liberals of course reject.)
Is Studebaker’s dreaded stasis of “Epicureanism and Stoicism” just the “dynamic equilibrium” of capitalism itself, which he associates with neoliberalism’s termination of politics — which is now in political crisis and in the political process of transformation to post-neoliberalism? But he denies that this is taking place at all — thus agreeing with the DSA’s Vivek Chibber, who thinks that Trump is just another typical Republican President.[6] There is evidently a deep ambivalence about the passing of the “post-political” technocracy of neoliberalism, which has been underway since George W. Bush’s War on Terror, and certainly after Obama’s failed Presidency — or what the Aufhebunga crew has called “the end of the end of history.” Studebaker associates me with a broader traditional (“)Marxist(“) approach to socialism and its implicit agreement with a more endemic alleged eschewing of the political in the neoliberal era (which he thinks began with the post-WWII U.S.-led world “liberal political order” — why not in the U.K.-led post-1814 Pax Britannica, i.e. the capitalist era itself?) — or in liberalism tout court.
By contrast, Studebaker cites — against me — my own “Lenin’s liberalism,” where I wrote that the goal is to free politics from capitalism. But this was about the goal of proletarian socialism as a movement and as a revolution: the desideratum of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I wrote about this as follows:
Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Theodor Adorno, teasing out a “Hegelian” dimension to Lenin’s Marxism, derived from Lenin’s theoretical writings and political practice an elaboration of the Marxist theory of social mediation in capital, through the politics of proletarian socialism, that sought to recover Lenin from a bad utopian perspective of the desire to do away with politics altogether. Rather, such Marxist critical theory following Lenin understood overcoming the “alienation” and “reification” of capital as providing the possibility for the true practice of politics, a neglected but vital contribution Lenin made to the development of Marxism. Lenin did not attempt to destroy modern forms of political mediation, but rather to achieve the true mediation of theory and practice, in politics freed from society dominated by capital. This was the content of Lenin’s liberalism, his “dialectical” Marxist attempt, not to negate, but rather to fulfill the desiderata of bourgeois society, which capital had come to block, and which could only be worked through “immanently.”[7]
Nevertheless, the “utopian” horizon of socialism should be maintained. Because neither Lenin nor Marx and Engels, or Lukács, Adorno et al. tried to foresee what society beyond capitalism would be, defining it negatively as overcoming the unfreedom of capitalism, but only anticipated and pursued politically the dictatorship of the proletariat, I was similarly addressing the latter and not the former. Dialectically: since original historical Marxism considered the only true politics in capitalism to be that of the class struggle of the workers for achieving socialism (the rest being merely pseudo-politics or racketeering — mere power-struggles), the realization of this will be their exercise of social and political power, in order not to merely manage but overcome the problem of capitalism.
The dictatorship of the proletariat will thus still be a politics of capitalism. It will still need to be political. But it will be more truly political than can be the case under capitalism. It will be the final form of state — but not any state, but one in particular: the capitalist state. It is this state that will “wither away” along with capitalism in being overcome. This is the dialectical relationship between what Marxism called Bonapartism and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a final state.
Studebaker dislikes the Marxist theory of the state, regarding “Bonapartism” as too pejorative a characterization of the state, discouraging of politics.[8] But recognizing how and why we are politically alienated in capitalism is important if we are not to be misled — simply by remaining aware of how we are liable to be misled. As I wrote in my previous article in response to Studebaker, capitalism inevitably misleads us: it is what Marx called a “false necessity” that dominates us. This means that what appears necessary to us is precisely what must be overcome. But the problems that appear to us presently both must and cannot be worked through in their own terms. All of our problems stem from capitalism, and yet none of them can be solved in their own terms — none, not even the struggle against exploitation, leads out of but only more deeply into capitalism. It is for this reason that we have need of the state. It is a false need.
“False” is a tricky designation because it suggests the truth by contrast with it. We don’t know our true needs in capitalism — other than the need to overcome it. What Marxism meant by the “false consciousness” of ideology was its self-contradiction: contradictory consciousness. Capital accumulation is a self-contradictory necessity in capitalism: it is self-destructive and self-defeating even while it remains necessary. It is because of this self-contradiction of social necessity in capitalism that the state arose to meet it in the 1800s.
In many crucial and decisive respects the state as such — as we know it in capitalism — is unique, a new and different phenomenon specific to capitalism. For instance, there were no police or prisons before capitalism — before the Industrial Revolution. The state, as thus recognized by Marxism, is composed of the “special bodies of armed men.” This is not the more conventional, colloquial definition of the state as the legal-juridical constitutional order of politics. The fate of the specifically coercive state in this Marxist view is clear; what is more obscure is the fate of politics. Friedrich Engels wrote that it would involve the replacement of the “governing of men” by the “administration of things” — actually, the Utopian Socialist Saint-Simon had first formulated it thusly (very little positive in Marxism is original to it).
Studebaker objects to this view, seeing in it the end of social freedom, which requires the “disturbance” that Epicureans and Stoics seek to avoid. But social disturbance need not be political in character — need not, as Marx described it, be a matter of “when right meets right, force will decide.” This is not even the case always today under capitalism, let alone beyond it in socialism. Bourgeois society is able to tolerate all kinds of difference: there is scope for a great deal of collective and individual right without conflict unknown to prior history.
Studebaker conflates the political with the social, restricting the social to the realm of agreement and characterizing the political as the domain of disagreement. Rousseau explained, following Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees as well as John Locke’s theory of property rights, that commercial competition was a form of cooperation. Rousseau’s social compact is implicit not explicit: it is the interdependence developed through the contract involved in any transaction — even what Hegel called “military transactions” in war. Society developed through antagonism and not only or even primarily concord. Social development has accelerated through commercial activity in ways that could never have been achieved through war.
And politics before capitalism was all about war — except in the American republic. Even Plato’s ideal state was a republic of war. It is important to note that the participants in the Ancient republic — ancient politics — were members of the warrior caste: the nobility/aristocracy. War might be “politics by other means;” but politics is not another means for war; and war is no longer the principal way to achieve political goals, let alone greater social freedom.
The socialist party I seek to lay a foundation for building might be a party for war — class war — but it will not be primarily a military party; however it will be a party with the required martial discipline to achieve power. Plato’s Republic banned all music except for marching.
Stoic resolve is necessary in order to avoid unnecessary disturbance in our Campaign. But the disturbance to be avoided is the torment of mistaken aspiration. Are we in global capitalism a civilization in decline? If so, the fall has been long — and we are nowhere near the bottom of it.
We already live in a unified world of peaceful cooperation — including competition — and interdependence that includes a great deal of diverse multiplicity without violent conflict. Pax Americana remains. Because we have been living through a period of economic and political crisis and transformation for the last 20 years, it might be easy to naturalize this, but we will forget that, despite this, commercial social relations and cooperative production at a global scale continue, largely unperturbed, nonetheless. ( — The horror is that open warfare with millions of casualties is inconsequential in the course of modern history. This means wars are actually unnecessary, even if the pathologies of capitalism still make them possible. The U.S. is correct to regard them as impermissible, even if in fact they are quite tolerable.) This is only increasingly the case over the course of the last 200 years of capitalism. It is an irreversible trend.
Studebaker asserts that Marxism was a phenomenon of “early capitalism” that prematurely declared “late capitalism,” but we need to accept living in “middle capitalism” for the foreseeable future.[9] But it was always both too late and too early for socialist revolution. It is a perennial need. This is because capitalism is in a constant state of “creative destruction” — actually, destructive creation — that is always planting the seeds for its future crises even while recovering from current ones. It moves, as Marx wrote, in “fits and starts.” The transition from capitalism to socialism can never come too soon and is always long overdue. The Industrial Revolution pointed directly to communism. We have been stuck in an incomplete transition and suffered from its pathology ever since. When the proletariat emerged in bourgeois society it was time to transcend it. Not every community has been tasked with overcoming itself, but capitalism is. By deferring the question of capitalism, Studebaker abdicates from it. By treating the Marxist philosophy of history as a Platonic “noble lie,” he inhibits true recognition of the task we face. We pay an accumulating price for deferring the task of building a socialist party that could take power.
Studebaker doesn’t like the idea of being “tasked,” thinking that this is somehow counterposed to the cultivation of virtue. He cursorily observes the scientific and technical progress of the Enlightenment and its aftermath, but downplays its significance. — A common misapprehension of Marxism is that it is technological determinism or technophilia. But the technology we currently have is what capitalism needs, and is neither the cause or problem nor the solution and answer to our suffering in modernity. Technology is a social relation — an alienated social relation. Its appearance is a key indication of the task we face in capitalism.
It must be consoling to think that we are confronted with the same problem as ever, but only in different forms. Perhaps we do. But the forms in which our problems appear still matter. We must deal with the specific problem of capitalism. That is not addressable in terms of capitalist politics.
Studebaker wants politics. He wants dissensus against the prevailing stale — rotten, disintegrating — default “consensus.” He just wants it to be true, meaningful political disagreement — rather than how it appears now: false, confused and meaningless — which means debating the “good.” No: the debates today are truly over the direction of capitalism — which everyone knows will not be detained over questions of the “good.” Those in power know very well that in the realities of global capitalism we are already far beyond questions of good and evil. But what if we are in a pre-political moment — so far as the issue of capitalism and socialism is concerned?
Studebaker wants a better conservative, liberal and socialist politics — or at least improved political discourse. But the only way to develop liberal and conservative political thinking and action would be in the face of the challenge of socialist politics, which is currently entirely absent. We only have debates between progressive and conservative perspectives that are largely beside the point since capitalism will conservatively and “progressively” reform as needed, not according to sentiment. To improve the overall political situation in capitalism, in the sense of any possible clarification of stakes, we need a socialist movement and politics. We need a socialist party. Without this, capitalist politics degenerates, both in theory and practice, inexorably.
As a former Bernie supporter, Studebaker is a populist; as a disappointed Sandernista, he is disenchanted with the prospect of fundamental political change — such as demanded by the pursuit of socialism. Democracy seems to be a more tractable issue — even if it has become chronic rather than acute. His main complaint is against the Democratic Party. He has said that Marx’s philosophy of history is good because it is useful to motivate a movement; but Marx’s theory of exploitation is good because it is true.[10] It is actually the opposite: the theory of exploitation is useful as a political analysis motivating the class struggle of the workers, but the philosophy of history is true — so far as capitalism is concerned. We are in a unique historical moment — tasked with overcoming pre-history and achieving true history: the true “progress in consciousness of freedom.”[11]
Bonapartism is the farce of the tragedy that appears in our political alienation.[12] It is a grotesque visage of our comedy. It is not a fetish for warding off the demon of politics, but a recognition of what possesses us in our political passions. It is not to purge the passions that we must exorcize the demon. But it is not to dispel the political but only its fetish. Shakespeare couldn’t play in Ancient Athens. Trump is not the Lear but the Hamlet of our politics, from which the domino has slipped in our “carnival of philosophy.” Can we learn from what has thus been revealed — or must we treat it as still concealed, hidden behind its death-mask?
I seek the participation of those such as Studebaker in building the social and political movement for a socialist party in the United States. All would-be socialists should be united in this effort — whether Platonic or not.
I don’t despair of the necessity of this task, which asserts itself objectively and not merely subjectively. It was abdicated by the Millennials, in favor of “progressivism.” But the needed “progress” of our moment in capitalism has been met by Trump, not the “Left.”
The political question of our time is overcoming capitalism. Its name is “socialism.”
As the young Marx wrote,
In fact, the internal obstacles seem almost greater than external difficulties. For even though the question “where from?” presents no problems, the question “where to?” is a rich source of confusion. Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.[13] | P
[1] “The Buddha’s bastards,” October 3, 2025, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-buddhas-bastards>.
[2] “Social relations and ideology: An anti-critique,” Platypus Review 180 (October 2025), available online at: <https://platypus1917.org/2025/10/01/social-relations-and-ideology-an-anti-critique/>.
[3] See our discussion of my call for “Socialist unity!” (published in Sublation Magazine, July 29, 2025, available online at: <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/socialist-unity>), posted to my YouTube channel at: <https://youtu.be/BJer4nbmrCk?si=ApcYukrgjI8kDzVF>.
[4] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.
[9] “The Left as hope industry: Beyond Quixotic socialism,” November 3, 2024, available online at: <https://bmstudebaker.substack.com/p/the-left-as-a-hope-industry>.
[10] See “What is Marxism for?,” panel discussion of April 2, 2022, recording available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl5i4orxCAM>; transcript published in Platypus Review 153 (February 2023), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2023/02/01/what-is-marxism-for/>.
[11] Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History.
[12] See my “Bonapartism is not Bonaparte,” Platypus Review 177 (June 2025), available online at: < https://platypus1917.org/2025/06/01/bonapartism-is-not-bonaparte/>.
[13] Letter to Arnold Ruge, September 1843, available online at: < https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09-alt.htm>.
Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain his article “Social relations and ideology: an anti-critique” published in The Platypus Review issue 180 (October 2025), written in response to Benjamin Studebaker’s article “Beyond ideology critique” in Platypus Review 179 (September 2025). In the second half Parrot Room, Cutrone and Lain discuss Trump’s Gaza peace plan and the ICE raids and National Guard deployments to Chicago and Portland, Oregon.
Chris Cutrone discusses with Ed Remus capitalist political realignment and socialism, with reference to Cutrone’s articles “Symptomology” (2009) and “The end of the Gilded Age” (2017).
[T]he ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production. In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange? What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature — those of his own nature as well as those of so-called “nature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution — i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick — an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy — and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds — this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean. — Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1858)
UNFORTUNATELY, it seems that the Millennial moment, on both Left and Right, has been motivated by anti-postmodernism and anti-neoliberalism. This has meant adopting absolutism as opposed to relativism and collectivism as opposed to individualism, statism as opposed to the market, and hence nationalism as opposed to “globalism.” This has meant remaining blind and irrelevant to developments of post-neoliberalism, which will be both continuity and change — and never one without the other. For capitalism to continue it must change; for it to change it must continue.
In the midst of the manifest on-going social and political crisis of capitalism, people want something solid to believe in and ground to stand on: religion, nation, “race” — “politics.” Also: “philosophy.” (As well as, perhaps, “science”?)
But as Marx pointed out, in capitalism “all that is solid melts into air.” Capitalism is a moving proposition that we must engage from within and as part of its motion. There is no stable standpoint from which to view — theorize — it. But that doesn’t mean that it somehow isn’t real. Its shifting illusion is its reality. There is nothing else.
We are shaken but evidently not stirred — not stirred to action — but paralyzed. The incessant images flood over us. We reach out for the Truth. But it constantly escapes our grasp. We shrink back and collapse into ourselves.
Benjamin Studebaker has written a critique of “ideology critique” that offers an alternative “Platonist” reading of Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and situates non-identity not as a matter of self-contradictory social relations and unfreedom but of thinking about the good.1
Studebaker proposes that where I say freedom he says good, and that freedom is best understood in terms of the good and the good should be understood in terms of freedom. He writes that the good must be the essential starting-point for “laddering up” to political goals.
But the pursuit of the emancipation and transformation of social relations is very different from that of the good.2 For the issue is not the good that resides in every body, but rather the social relations that develop the subjectivity of everyone.
Social relations are more than the sum of their parts: they express the “general will” that transcends the individual wills of interested parties. Social relations are the result of interaction that produces something beyond the individual actions. Society is a third party with an interest of its own. Social freedom means the freedom of society itself to develop.
Studebaker raises Louis Althusser’s approach to ideology in order to attack the limitations of Althusser’s “interpellation” as a theory of subjectivity that loses sight of the good. It seems that Studebaker understands — and disagrees with — “social relations” in such Althusserian structuralist terms, saying that it amounts to an “ontology” that he disputes.
Studebaker among many other Millennials prefers a political to a social or societal ontology. But he prefers not just any ontologization of politics, but one in particular, Plato’s. For Plato, politics is the bringing back together what has been divided and separated: the One. This is why Studebaker says that it is because we are in separate bodies that politics is necessary. No: that bodily differentiation does not even make society or social relations necessary. Plato’s ontology only allows for cycles of separation and return, appropriate to his world of agricultural production. It is no longer appropriate to the modern world of capitalist production.
What if it is only society — what Studebaker means by “politics,” as in the zoon politikon (“political animal”) — that allows for the differentiation of humanity, to become other than what it is or originally was, to transform its being? And this transformation is necessary.
This was what Marx thought — following from Rousseau, among others: social relations are not merely the relations between people or to others, but also to and with Nature and to and with oneself. Social relations are what allow and motivate the elaboration of diverse multiplicity and complexification of our being.
It is such a process of not only the realization of existing but generation of new potential that Marx found capitalism to constrain and distort — dominate. It is not about people but social relations. Capitalism was the domination limiting social freedom: the freedom to elaborate and transform social relations — society.
Social relations are not causal or determinative but conditioning and elaborative. Social relations are not structural but cosmological. The universe is still expanding. So are our social relations. So is our freedom.
“Ideology” in the original historical Marxist sense of “ideology-critique” meant the exploration of conditions of possibility for transforming our social relations from within them. As a Hegelian, Marx thought that manifest contradiction indicated the possibility and necessity for change. Capitalism was a new social — societal — self-contradiction — a self-contradiction of society, of social relations — that brought about a new task: socialism. Socialism was for Marx the highest form of “bourgeois ideology.” Marx critiqued socialist ideology according to its self-contradictory character: statist vs. anarchist; individualist vs. collectivist, reactionary vs. progressive, etc.
But the appearance of contradiction was not only a potential recognition but also and most importantly a misrecognition: misrecognitions are necessarily forms of recognition; forms of recognition are also necessarily forms of misrecognition. We must struggle in and through forms of misrecognition that are our only possible forms of recognition — we must struggle from within and on the basis of and find our way out of ideology. There is no breaking the spell or stepping outside of ideology. There is no leaving Plato’s Cave.
There will be no returning to the One. The yearning for totality is understandable given the manifest exhaustion of postmodernism and neoliberalism and the self-contradiction, fragmentation, and crisis of society in capitalism. But this does not actually return us to Plato’s Republic, a utopia that was never meant to be realized but only to get us thinking about politics. A very long time ago. What Plato and Aristotle meant by “politics” is not our social and political world. Their misrecognitions were different from ours. Their “ideology” was different from ours. Actually, they didn’t have ideology; only we have ideology — and hence only we have ideology-critique. Only we have Marxism. We need something more and other to think about the problem of capitalism and the political task of socialism. Only we need Marxism — only we need Marxist ideology-critique. It was not the critique of inadequate or contradictions between different definitions of the good, but of a self-contradictory freedom of our social relations, to which we are all subject, and of which we are all subjects.
We are not only bodies separated from the original One, but members of society — participants in social relations. There is a higher good and necessity we must serve than the good of our bodies: the freedom of society. The misery of capitalism might break our bodies, but its wrong is against society and its potential, which goes far beyond our physical selves. As Ortega y Gassett put it, what nature is for animals, history is for humans. We are more than the product of a natural or divine act, but at least in part produce our own being — our spiritual not physical being. It is not our existence as homo sapiens that is free but our humanity.
The zoon politikon is not an origin but a result. The point is that it changes. We are not political but become political in society. Society humanizes us: our social relations make us human — they also make us political. Society changes our humanity — constantly. It is the self-contradiction of our social relations in capitalism that jeopardizes our humanity — even to the point of placing the (supposed) physical needs of our bodies above it. Whereas all human cultures and communities, ever, have valued spirit above body. — Do we still?
At issue in politics is not our bodies but our social relations. It is a peculiar form of politics that is demanded and required by the problem of capitalism. If Durkheim recognized that society is an object sui generis, then the crisis of society in capitalism is a problem sui generis — a unique problem of politics unprecedented in history. Marxism is the “sui generis form of cognition” (Gillian Rose) prompted by the political problem of capitalism.
Ideology expresses the social origin of our manifest phenomena: the misrecognitions through which we must act politically to change society. It is the source of our cognition and the means through which we must cognize our reality. It is not a problem of consciousness but produces our consciousness. It is a cosmos in crisis, a cosmology of crisis — a total crisis and hence the totality one is looking for. But it is a negative totality of contradiction, and one which reproduces itself in and through that crisis. As Adorno wrote to his friend Benjamin: “The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.”3 The explosion is not the calamity but the potential and possibility of freedom, however only perceptible through its phantasmagoria. Its appearances don’t deceive but indicate: “The Delphic god shouts out to you, at the very start of your trek to that goal, his aphorism: ‘Know thyself.’ It is a difficult saying; for that god ‘hides nothing and announces nothing, but only points the way,’ as Heraclitus has said. But what direction is he indicating to you?”4
Can we yet know ourselves as members of society, and read the writings on the wall of capitalism, directing us to the task of socialism? Can this be our politics — of freedom? | P
3 Theodor W. Adorno to Walter Benjamin (August 2, 1935), in Aesthetics and Politics, eds. Rodney Livingstone, et al., trans. Anya Bostock, et al. (London: Verso, 2007), 111, 113.
4 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), trans. Ian C. Johnston for The Nietzsche Channel.
In the second half Parrot Room, Chris Cutrone discusses with Ed Remus the necessity of socialist independence from capitalist politics, with reference to Chris Cutrone’s tweet, “They are killing each other.”
Chris Cutrone and Doug Lain discuss Cutrone’s teachers Adolph Reed and Moishe Postone’s political compromises. In the second half, they discuss capitalism and the spectacle of politics.