Chris Cutrone explains why a socialist Left needs the Marxist as opposed to liberal conception of “Bonapartism.” In the second half, Lain and Cutrone discuss Walter Benjamin’s “The author as producer” (1934) and the relation between socialist politics and art and literature.
Bonapartism is not Bonaparte
Chris Cutrone
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
‘Cause I’m in need of some restraint
â Rolling Stones, âSympathy for the Devilâ (1968)
Two theories
THERE ARE TWO DISTINCT THEORIES of âBonapartismâ: one liberal; the other Marxist. The liberal theory of Bonapartism is about âstrong-man ruleâ and focused on the character of the political leader; the Marxist theory is with respect to the role of the state in capitalism. Liberalism takes Napoleon Bonaparte or Julius Caesar as exemplary; Marxism developed its theory on the occasion and figure of Louis Bonaparte particularly, but also other contemporary phenomena more generally, such as Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli in the UK, and Bismarck in Prussian Empire Germany. Bonapartism for Marxism is not Napoleon but Louis. For what happened historically between them is capitalism â the necessity and possibility of socialism.
Louis Bonaparte was for Marx a Bonapartist figure from his very election as President of the Second Republic in 1848, and not merely after his â18th Brumaireâ coup dâĂ©tat in 1851 or in his Second Empire of 1852â70. Moreover, the Marxist theory addressed Bonapartism as an expression of the crisis of bourgeois society and the state in capitalism, linked to its dialectical opposite: the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Needless to say, liberalism does not concur with this latter conclusion.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who famously blamed âideologistsâ for the travails of the Revolution, later prognosed from prison in exile on St. Helena that in â50 years Europe will be either Cossack or republican.â That meant that if the democratic republic â the revolution â did not prevail, it would be the police-state instead. He didnât reckon with capitalism for this outcome. Marx concluded that the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the condition for achieving the democratic republic â but on the way to the âwithering away of the state,â in overcoming capitalism and achieving socialism and communism. The achievement of the proletarian socialist revolution will be the final battle of democracy. But the result of the frustrated 1848 revolutions was what Marx called the âCossack republicâ â Bonapartism: the state as its own special caste ruling over society.
Louis Bonaparte was a repetition of Napoleon insofar as there are still political figures trying simultaneously to revolutionize and preserve the state. But in the era of capitalism it is not the squabbling of political factions driving the need for a strong leader to master them, but the subordination of politics to bureaucratic imperatives necessitated by capitalism, in which the apparent political leader is actually just a figurehead of a process of rule that constrains the very choices available from which politicians can possibly choose. The Marxist view of capitalism is that the needs of capital overrule all other considerations. But this can appear as a function of the mere failure of politics; whereas in actuality it is the self-contradiction of society in capitalism that drives antinomical values and irresolvable conflicts, presenting impossible choices among bad alternatives. Such choices can be deferred and avoided, or done in hidden and unaccountable ways.
One way that the state mediates society is through political parties that vet and select viable political characters who can serve the role of making bureaucracy something to which the public can assent: a convincing rationalization for what must be done anyway. This means that political parties will be present only as necessary to perform this mediation. Insofar as they are unnecessary for bureaucracy to function, they will wither in their ability to win the popular consent of the governed. Discontents will provoke crises of political parties and their renovation, or the emergence of new parties to take their place.
In this respect, Bonapartism is a tendency of the state and politics in capitalism, endemic but expressed more or less prominently at different moments in its history.
Bonapartism in the 20th century
20th-century Marxism regarded the new phenomenon of fascism as a species of Bonapartism â Leon Trotsky considered Stalinism in the USSR, which was not personal but bureaucratic rule, as a phenomenon of Bonapartism. (Liberals called Stalinism âred fascismâ; many 20th-century Marxists agreed.) How did Marx and Marxism define Bonapartism? It was a situation in which the âbourgeoisie can no longer, and the proletariat not yet rule.â This increasingly took the form of either the exacerbation of class struggle or the submerging of class in the Marxist sense into the mass of society, seen in the indistinct separation of, yet still opposition between society and the state. This was for Marxism not a contingent circumstance but a permanent condition of capitalism after 1848. As Walter Benjamin put it, the âstate of emergencyâ is not momentary but constant: it is not the exception but the rule.[1] What characterized Bonapartism for Marxism? The state rising above society and becoming a power in itself â indeed as an end in itself. This is increasingly the case as capitalism develops â as the contradiction and crisis of capitalism grows.
What was the âcontradiction and crisis of capitalism,â according to Marxism? The contradiction of âbourgeois social relations of laborâ and âindustrial forces of production.â In capitalism; this was a crisis of âsocialism or barbarismâ: capitalism was barbarized bourgeois society, necessitating socialism â workers were reduced from humanistic free artisans in society to wage-slave âappendages of the machine.â The state in capitalism is the key phenomenon of this: not Hobbesâs majestic Leviathan of the bourgeois social contract but a monstrous abomination, the Behemoth of damnation in the Devilâs bargain of capitalism.
Bonapartism is characterized for Marxism by precisely the inability of leading political figures to render society and the state tractable: Louis Bonaparte is the âfarce,â compared to Napoleonâs (and Caesarâs) âtragedy,â because of his futility; he is not a cunning hero but a comedic villain. Where celestial forces swirl around a protagonist of Divine Fate, instead, we have the folly and error of someone who is merely âhuman, all-too humanâ (Nietzsche): not punished but merely scorned by the gods. While the conquering Napoleon summoned Goethe to insist that âthere is no Destiny, only politics,â he was for Hegel nonetheless the âWorld Soulâ of eternal History[2] when he rode his horse into town at the young professorâs first academic appointment. Louis Bonaparte is not the substantial character of political action, but a holographic projection of greater forces that neither he nor anyone else can master: âBonapartismâ is Marx/ismâs term for the self-alienation of politics in capitalism. As Marx summed it up about the plebeian masses in capitalism (petite bourgeoisie, lumpenproletariat, et al. â including workers, insofar as they are not self-organized into a social and political force of their own): they cannot represent themselves; they must be represented; they will be represented.[3] Bonapartism means the state represents everyone and no one. The state is universal but also its own particular interest.
Police and military are âcitizens in uniformâ â as are bureaucrats â and hence playing a role that anyone could; and yet in capitalism they become their own specific caste apart from everyone. This is not merely a function of specialized knowledge but of role: the peculiar political role of the state in capitalism. Bureaucracy is considered by Marxism to be endemic in capitalism differently from its role in traditional civilization, which was of course a caste system that bourgeois society is not or at least is not supposed to be. Bureaucracy is a function of reification of social and political activity in an alienated society.
For liberalism, by contrast, Bonapartism is a historical accident and mistake to be avoided; like all crime, it is the responsibility of a bad actor. For Marxism, however, it is not an error or moral infraction of wrong choice but inevitable, because it expresses a necessity in capitalism: if the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat leading to socialism is not met, then the inexorable result is Bonapartism. What is this necessity? For the state to manage the crisis of capitalism.
Liberalism treats Bonapartism as the cause; whereas for Marxism it is only the effect. This feature of the capitalist state is more or less prominent; but it is not an acute but a chronic condition: it is not a bug of the political system but its very origin. âOut, damned spot!â is the guilty conscience of political action: âTo be, or not to be, that is the question.â But this is not a question of the supposed violent founding of the political state.
Marxism agreed with liberal political thought that society should subordinate the state; and politics would be of minimal importance in the life and course of mankind. What raised politics to its primacy in the 19th century was the âsocial questionâ that drove the popular demand for âdemocracyâ: the need for the state to ameliorate the condition of the proletariat. Emergency measures were meant only to return bourgeois society to its normal life of peaceful commerce, without coercive force or violence. But the capitalist state established new institutions of police and prisons and a permanent standing army. The police are Bonapartist, not the politicians trying to control them; Bonapartism is the police-state, not the elected civilian authorities mandated by democracy. The police are meant to be the instruments of politics; but politics becomes the instrument of the state.
With the police-state also comes lawfare, which is no less Bonapartist, in that it reduces the law to a weapon and the judiciary to a competing executive authority. The law becomes mere power-play of casuistic manipulation. It is, as Edmund Burke warned about what the Jacobins represented, the rule of sophistry in service of venality. Shakespeare might have been critical of the motives for characters uttering âfirst, we kill all the lawyers,â but they appear justified today.
How did such a counterrevolution against the original bourgeois revolution and modern liberal-democratic republic come about? Through the need to control the proletariat: the more or less chronically unemployed masses constantly produced by capitalism out of the petite bourgeoisie; those thrown in and out of wage-labor in the continuously revolutionized industrial society. This called for extraordinary powers of the state, clamored for not only by the capitalist haute bourgeoisie but by the workers themselves: the social security and welfare programs demanded to counteract the displacements of capitalist upheaval â no one can count on the wages earned either by themselves or members of their family â and the forces required to contain the pathologies of the increasing numbers of broken and breaking members of the disintegrating social contract. There is no social-welfare-state without the police-state. The state is inseparable from the spreading cancer in the organic metabolism of society, in the end for which the cure proves to be worse than the disease; but there are no other available treatments for the inescapable condition. There is only political wrangling to try to control it, which in the end proves futile. It is much easier for the police to get rid of politicians than the reverse.
Marxism disagreed with liberalism that a strong constitution would stave off and prevent the malady; what happened instead was the constant abrogation of the law in order to preserve the law: âbourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies in the name of orderâ[4] â by workers armed by the state. Worse still, the state itself becomes inseparable from crime: the powerful are merely the stronger criminals; the police are merely the most powerful gang, observing an honor code for protecting its own colors. And âpoliticsâ became indistinguishable from racketeering: as Foucault wryly commented, the âpath of power leads to either politics or prisonâ â often both. To fall from the grace of political favor means being charged with a criminal offense. Politics becomes the court intrigue of clannish dynastic struggles; more prosaically, it means bureaucratic in-fighting among craven careerists, reduced to mere profiteering off the public misery once they realize the limited good they can do. In capitalism, bureaucratic âexpertsâ are competent not in their fields of specialization so much as in gaming the system, in which public benefit is only a by-product of their private vice (the reverse of Mandevilleâs âprivate vice leading to public benefitâ[5] in competition that proves to be cooperation). This potential abuse was supposed to be curtailed by limiting power; but society in its capitalist deformations and pathologies requires greater scope of action than can ever be admitted in principle. Everyone does what they can get away with, clothed in the justification of exigency â until they find themselves caught out and exposed, if and when their actions fail to serve adequately the interests of other powerful people.
Superficially, this picture resembles Ancient Athens or Rome, or perhaps the Italian Renaissance of the Medicis and Borgias. But, no, this is a specifically modern problem of capitalism.
Trump: Bonaparte contra Bonapartism?
Donald Trump arrived as a tribune of the people to vanquish âCrooked Hillary and Joe,â who seemed to symbolize everything that had seemingly gone wrong in the prior two (or three) Presidencies: the bankrupt frauds of neoliberalism and neoconservatism under (Clinton,) Bush and Obama; but he ended up confronting the Deep State instead. The drama that has unfolded on the political stage of the Age of Trump has been âphantasmagoricalâ indeed: it is a shadow-play of smoke-and-mirrors in the lurid lantern show at the apparent twilight of the American Empire.
âConspiracy theoriesâ are the essence of Bonapartism as a political phenomenon. The opening act of âWho killed Vince Foster?,â and the âvast Right-wing conspiracyâ of âbimbo explosionsâ detonating around Monica Lewinskyâs blue dress, was shuffled off the stage, in favor of 9/11 âTruth,â and finally replaced by Pizzagate Washington pedophile rings revealed by QAnon; the Dirty Dossier and âPee Tapeâ speculated by MI6 and Hillary Clinton; Mossadâs Kompromat factory on Epstein Island; and Hunter Bidenâs Laptop from Hell â loudly attested by top intelligence officers to have âall the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.â Whoâs the actual Manchurian Candidate, and who are they working for? Russia? Israel? China? Ukraine? Various kingdoms of the Arabian Peninsula? The KGB surviving the demise of the USSR? The Illuminati? Davos? Bohemian Grove? Reptilians of the Hollow Earth? UFOs/UAPs? â There is more than enough evidence to âproveâ them all.
The opacity is the point â the paranoia of misapprehension: the seeming impossibility of ever getting to the bottom of things in politics. The point is that with bureaucratic rule in the administrative state, the left hand doesnât know what the right hand is doing. Did Anthony Fauci expose us to COVID or save us from it? Perhaps both. Trumpâs crusade against the Deep State and its elusive, apparently âsecretâ ruling class is either insincere, part of the ruse pulling the wool over our eyes; or, if sincere, quixotic. In any case itâs a wild gamble, by either Trump himself or the public that voted for him. Trump is âkeeping all his promises,â and has been (painfully) transparent in all his actions. Elon Musk joined Trump on stage for the variety act as either point-man or fall-guy: heâs actually running the government as the power behind the throne; or perhaps heâs a court-jester as celebrity volunteer from the audience for performing a magic trick â the richest dupe of the powers-that-be the world has even seen, whose wealth is just that much liability when his wild goose chase comes up empty â in either deuces or snake-eyes. DOGEâs slashing the Deep State turned out to be a foolâs errand. At the same time, there are such lingering questions from recent political history as: who couped Joe Biden; why was his Afghanistan withdrawal â prepared politically by Trump â so botched; how was Kamala picked to begin with; and even âWhat is a woman?â (Why are we even asking such questions?)
How did all this happen? â Where did it go so completely wrong? But wasnât it happening all the time? Trumpâs election besets the âLeftâ with problems going back at least a couple of generations now. Like the New Left, culminating not in ârevolutionâ but Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980, all the talk of âsocialismâ for the last couple of decades resulted in: Trump. Does this mean that he is Hitler stopping Communism? Of course not.
The Nixonite true believers in the âUnitary Executiveâ are not seized by the ghost of Carl Schmitt, formulating Constitutional justifications for a âfascistâ seizure of power, albeit in American terms. No. The problem goes back to the height of the American Century itself: Eisenhowerâs specter of the âMilitary-Industrial Complexâą.â If the Deep State killed (both) Kennedy(s and Malcolm and MLK) and ousted Nixon, then perhaps the same struggle is being fought out today. If the American Republic became an Empire in Vietnam and the War on Terror, then the silver-spooned draft-dodger has come to stop it. Can it be done? Liberalism will claim to try; but Marxism says: no.
Unlike the Bonaparte of Bonapartism, as either hero or villain, Trump is coming not at the beginning but the end of a history â or the dawn of a new one. He repeats the history of either the liberal or Marxist story of Bonapartism: both and neither. We are always in capitalism simultaneously in 1776/1789 and 1848/1876: in bourgeois revolution and capitalist counterrevolution. The infamous John Eastman Memo, seeking to justify Trumpâs disputing the electoral outcome of 2020, pointed as precedence to two very different events: the Jeffersonian Revolution of 1800; and the counterrevolution against Reconstruction in 1876 â the former defending and extending the spirit of the American Revolution; the latter bringing about an â18th Brumaireâ coup against the intentions of Lincoln and U.S. Grant and the results of the revolutionary Civil War and its abolition of slavery, to ârestore orderâ and consolidate a Bonapartist capitalist state in America.
We have been told not to ânormalizeâ Trump; we are asked what we are currently doing when âfirst they come for . . .â and during an âactual genocide.â How will history judge Trump? How will posterity judge us? But this is indeed the ânormalâ state of affairs during the history of capitalism â even given Benjaminâs warning against treating âfascism as the norm.â History is not coming to an end; its bloody saga will continue.
Deportations
For instance, Trumpâs unjust deportations are clearly political in character: he promised to deport the âPalestine solidarityâ protesters (âuseful idiotsâ and the rest) and all the immigrants Biden let in when he opened the border â especially and starting with the gangsters. â Indeed, itâs very easy to find links for the Palestine protests to actual gangsters through Hamas, since terrorism necessarily operates in the criminal netherworld, as does of course capitalist politics more generally; and anyway, not only the politicians but the universities and their âgood worksâ are funded and founded by the more or less dirty, laundered money of ill-gotten gains â organized crime. But the Palestiniansâ only hope is Trump; and Trump is deporting people now at a slower pace than Biden or Obama.
Itâs not as if there werenât unjust detentions and deportations before Trump: itâs just that he is proudly demagoguing and photo op-ing them in broad daylight; whereas previously it went on in the dark of night â it is the latter not the former which is characteristic of the Bonapartist state for Marxism. While Trump could be challenged in the public sphere and voted upon, Biden and Obama could not; itâs hard to say exactly that Trump was elected to institute injustice, that his voters wanted to strengthen the state â one could argue that it was quite the opposite. The outcome of a plebiscite is always ambiguous, but especially in capitalist politics. Are the voters saints or sinners? No matter: the bureaucratic machine, once set in motion, as a function more or less of popular will, is necessarily and not accidentally â inevitably â a juggernaut rolling over all questions of justice. Itâs all apparently very âdemocratic.â
Everyone hates the cops until they need them; and arenât our taxes paying for the police salaries, so shouldnât they serve the public better â serve and not abuse us? But: police cannot exist without wrongful arrests and unjustified use of force; prosecutors cannot exist without wrongful convictions; prisons cannot exist without innocent people languishing and dying in them. But focusing on the brutality of deportations leaves aside the violence of migration itself, for instance and not least, the rank exploitation and profiteering and even enslavement of âhuman traffickingâ that is inseparable from it â against which Trump loudly proclaims to be fighting, and indeed as his priority concern.
Trumpâs opponents donât have the monopoly on compassion. Far from it. From the very moment he descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower, he called out by name the ârapists and murderersâ of the cartels controlling the Mexican border. Who are their primary victims? The migrants themselves. As Marx long ago observed, right is on both sides of the contradictions of capitalism; and each side in its one-sidedness demagogues everything, such that all public exposĂ©s and accusations of injustice serve as just so much apologetic propaganda and political cover on the part of the accusers. Meanwhile, the needs of capitalism grind on.
Bonapartism and socialism
Where Hegel found in Napoleon the rogue to play a heroâs part, in Louis Bonaparte and other contemporary phenomena Marx finds that even heroes inevitably play the part of rogues in capitalism. Even and perhaps especially trying to do good results in evil: as Hegel described it, âthe Unreason which is associated not only with them, but even (rather we might say especially) with good designs and righteous aims.â[6] This is where liberalism maintains a point: we should avoid empowering the state as much as possible; but Marxism recognizes that this is actually impossible in capitalism. If we donât understand that Trump is actually trying to do good, then we will understand nothing about what is really happening and why.
Napoleon was a Jacobin, and Louis Bonaparte was a Saint-Simonian Utopian Socialist. They claimed to defend the Revolution, but expressed its inherent limits. In the case of Louis Bonaparte, or Bonapartism per se, those limits are those of capitalism. The political limits of capitalism are found in bureaucratic rule.
Where liberalism treats the history of capitalism as the end of the world, Marxism finds the end of the world, as ever, in History. As Adorno wrote, âthe world has survived its downfallâ[7]; but âits end today is not the end.â[8] Our farce in the Play for Today is that the Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth is not a grand Existential allegory but a real one: âThere is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.â â Kafkaâs humor is easily lost on the melancholic! For Marxism, there was no way out of politics but politics; but only as socialist politics: the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat â not as a millennial dream, but as the real bid for power against the capitalist state. Will it end in tragedy? ( â Children, please donât go to prison!)
Whether as Napoleon or Louis, with Trump as with them, âBonapartismâ is not Bonaparte: not the figure, but the condition is historically significant. But this still means that âthere is no Destiny, only politics.â There will be a future for capitalism and capitalist politics; will there be for socialism â will there be the âclass struggleâ for the dictatorship of the proletariat, or only the Bonapartism of the capitalist state?
For Marxism, the only politics that matters in capitalism â the only actual politics of world-historic consequence â is the âclass struggleâ; but: âOnly he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ (Lenin, The State and Revolution). Today, we have only the pseudo-politics of the delusional pseudo-reality and the ânormative psychosis of the political social worldâ[9] of the state in capitalism: it is Bonapartism â not Bonaparte. | P
[1] Walter Benjamin, âOn the Concept of Historyâ (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938â1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 392.
[2] For what is eternal in history is freedom â its transformation. From G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, in The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 96, 127â28: âWhile we are thus concerned exclusively with the Idea of Spirit, and in the History of the World regard everything as only its manifestation, we have, in traversing the past â however extensive its periods â only to do with what is present; for philosophy, as occupying itself with the True, has to do with the eternally present. Nothing in the past is lost for it, for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. These have indeed unfolded themselves in succession independently; but what Spirit is it has always been essentially; distinctions are only the development of this essential nature. The life of the ever present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which looked at in one aspect still exist beside each other, and only as looked at from another point of view appear as past. The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present. . . .
âSpirit once more driven back upon itself, produces its work in an intellectual shape, and becomes capable of realizing the Ideal of Reason from the Secular principle alone. Thus it happens, that in virtue of elements of Universality, which have the principle of Spirit as their basis, the empire of Thought is established actually and concretely. The antithesis of Church and State vanishes. The Spiritual becomes reconnected with the Secular, and develops this latter as an independently organic existence. The State no longer occupies a position of real inferiority to the Church, and is no longer subordinate to it. The latter asserts no prerogative, and the Spiritual is no longer an element foreign to the State. Freedom has found the means of realizing its Ideal â its true existence. This is the ultimate result which the process of History is intended to accomplish, and we have to traverse in detail the long track which has been thus cursorily traced out. Yet length of Time is something entirely relative, and the element of Spirit is Eternity. Duration, properly speaking, cannot be said to belong to it.â
[3] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, second ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 608.
[4] Ibid., 603.
[5] The Fable of the Bees (1714).
[6] Hegel, Introduction, 34.
[7] Theodor W. Adorno, âThose Twentiesâ (1962), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 47.
[8] Theodor W. Adorno, âReflections on Class Theoryâ (1942), in Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110.
[9] âPseudo-politicsâ and âpseudo-realityâ are terms of Adorno; the ânormative psychosis of the political social worldâ is a phrase by the Marxist-informed Freudian psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell: âthe normative delusions of an acceptable psychotic status quo, which is what our political world very often is.â See E. Efe Ăakmak and BĂŒlent Somay, âThere is never a psychopathology without the social context: An interview with Juliet Mitchell,â Eurozine (April 12, 2006), <https://www.eurozine.com/there-is-never-a-psychopathology-without-the-social-context/>.
Chris Cutrone discusses Communisation theory with a student
Cutrone discusses Marx, Lenin, Adorno and the history of Marxism on the state and the proletarian struggle for socialism and communism.
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on his Marxism, philosophy and prognoses about Trump
Chris Cutrone discusses with Doug Lain his Marxism in relation to philosophy and his prognoses about Trump. They touch on the 2020 essay written by Cutrone on philosophy and Marxism included in the book Marxism and Politics (2024):
https://platypus1917.org/2020/11/01/on-philosophy-and-marxism-response-to-suther-and-velissaris/
Chris Cutrone with Doug Lain on Trump’s tariffs and “Fear itself”
In this episode of the CutroneZone, the Last Marxist discusses his latest essay for Sublation Magazine and speculates on why Compact Magazine rejected it for publication. How is it that established opinion is incapable of taking up and thinking through the significance of Trump’s tariffs?
Read Cutrone’s essay “Fear itself” in Sublation Magazine:
Fear itself

Chris Cutrone
This is Trumpâs world, and we are just living in it. The only question is how we feel about this. FDR gave his famous speech, âThe only thing to fear is fear itself,â to address concerns about his New Deal reforms, which were at the time unprecedented steps and so legitimately frightening. The second Trump Administration â which is really in many ways actually his first â message is the same: the threat is not from any measure he is taking but the scare-mongering about it. Stock- and bond-market panic reaction seemed to temporarily complicate the tariff negotiation process, but these are tactical, not strategic matters: the objective remains the same. And the 10% baseline, already a massive increase, is kept in place. Trump will not be deterred from his goal, which is to restructure the American and global economy. He has already irreversibly affected things. Who knows how it will all work out? Trump and his team seem confident in their knowledge of what they are doing.
Whatever behind-the-scenes drama there might have been (or not) among Trumpâs advisors, it was over âsequencingâ and not pacing: the 90-day pause was preceded by a similar 30-day delay on the earlier tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico. It was to give time to negotiate and not avoid them. Trump has at least two years to achieve his goals.
âLiberation Dayâ was not only declared for the U.S. but the world. Not only doesnât Ukraine âhave the cards,â but neither does anyone else â except the U.S., who remains the sole dealer of the game, calling in all the bets. And everyone knows that one should never bet against the house â not least because the casino is owned by the biggest gangsters of all. Trump is neither a protectionist nor an isolationist. If anything, Trump is showing that the era of imperial restraint is over. If everyone is going to take advantage of the empire and complain about it, then Trump is apt to act like it, bringing the recalcitrant to heel â and the delinquent to account. Trump wants to be generous, but he has to put himself in the position to be able. What is easily overlooked is just how much the world needs and wants him to do so. American leadership is not only still possible but necessary.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says that âstrategic ambiguity is key to any negotiation,â and so the market jitters are inevitable. But as of this writing, stocks have already recovered. Resistance to Trumpâs policy is from all who have an interest in the status quo that he is trying to shake up and overthrow. Heâs resetting the table, and all prior bets are off. We are all concerned, but some are more invested than others. Trump is upping the ante on them, and they will have to fold or risk losing it all. Trump isnât bluffing: he doesnât have to. All he has to do is get his own house in order â and it turns out the easiest way for him to do so is to act on the world stage, delivering a restructured world economy as a fait accompli to domestic politics.
Bessent declared that for the past generation Wall Street has done well but now itâs Main Streetâs turn. He points out that the economy has worked to advance only the top 10%, while it has worked to the detriment of the bottom 50% who have lost ground; and the middle 40% have struggled merely to tread water. He wants it to serve the 90% and not merely the 10 or 50%. If America is threatening to come apart, Trump has come to repair it.
Bessent described the opening salvo of the tariffs as sorting the worldâs countries into âthree buckets: ally, neutral and enemyâ â in which China was exposed as a âbad actor.â All that means is driving a harder bargain with them, not an actual trade war â which China can only lose. But Trump is promising benefit to China, whose economy is as much in need of change as Americaâs. It doesnât mean casting China into an adversarial position â unless they insist on it â but handling the relationship differently. Though Trump uses zero-sum rhetoric, he does not negotiate that way but rather seeks mutual benefit. Trump considers the world to have already been in a trade war with the U.S., but the U.S. wasnât fighting back. But what would be the point of the U.S. winning? He thinks the fight has been to everyoneâs detriment, and that he can serve not only the U.S.âs but all their interests better. The âwarâ analogy is perhaps not appropriate, because it has been a parasitic relationship that is slowly killing the host, but to let that happen will drag the world down with it.
Who are the principal actors? The U.S., China and Europe (such as it exists) â the rest of the world just doesnât want to get gobbled up. But China is the monkey on the U.S.âs back weighing it down; and Europe is a Cold War creation of the U,S. that now thinks it independently exists. The only way for either to become itself would be in tandem with the other, contra the U.S. But neither trusts the other more than the U.S. And there is Russia: when Europe looks at Russia it sees China; when China looks at Russia it sees Europe. And now Trumpâs U.S. wants to approach Russia with an offer of normalization as an alternative to becoming an appendage of either China or Europe. So the U.S. remains in the priority and privileged position of being able to deal with all and sundry, severally and together. It can also â at least threaten to â withdraw into its own hemisphere and let the Old World consume itself. (Which it would surely do without the U.S. â as shown by all the last and this centuryâs wars.)
As Trump promised, lowering the price of oil has drained Russia and Iranâs ability to conduct war. They will beg to be brought down from the ledge. The Biden Presidencyâs long night of depraved horrors is vanishing as mirages in the mist at the dawn of Trumpâs new American Golden Age. Not only the U.S. but the world is eager to wake from the nightmare.
The trade war will not lead to WWIII; rather, Trump is working to prevent it. The way he is doing so is, as his critics accuse him, leading the U.S. into âbankruptcy.â Trump is preemptively declaring the U.S. âbankrupt,â not to liquidate it but to renegotiate terms with its creditors: as with his companies, they have a greater interest in keeping the U.S. in business. If anything is âtoo big to failâ it is the U.S. Anticipating eventual default, Trump is getting out ahead of it. As with Nixon breaking and reordering the post-WWII Bretton Woods system by taking the U.S. off the gold standard, and Reagan similarly devaluing the dollar by gaining assent from U.S. creditors in the Plaza Accord, Trump is seeking to revalue the dollar internationally so as to no longer disadvantage the American economy. One advantage that he has for pursuing this is that the U.S. is actually significantly less dependent on international trade than most other countries.
Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors Stephen Miranâs white paper proposing a âMar-a-Lago Accordâ has been adopted as a means towards this end â whether officially or not is deliberately unclear. Miran wrote that the world depends on two âpublic goodsâ provided by the U.S.: universal currency for trade; and global military security. This was and remains in the U.S. interest, but the terms became unbalanced once the world recovered from WWII by the 1960s. Since then, the U.S. started accepting an undue burden subsidizing other countries that undermines not only America but the world. Defense costs have been explicitly factored into the trade negotiations, and Miran has even proposed a userâs fee for the dollar as trade currency.
Investor Ray Dalio sees in the present crisis the end of several cycles in domains that have proved unsustainable: financial, trade, geopolitical, and domestic-political â both within the U.S. and many other countries. Trump represents potential transformation in all of them, to a new post-neoliberal political and economic order. The alternative is to try to avoid the necessary changes through a patchwork approach. But the can has already been kicked down the road as far as it could go. The bill has come due, and Trump is willing to pay it â before the cost becomes too high.
But the neoliberalism of the past generationâs âbipartisan consensusâ was not a mere policy but an entire complex political, economic, cultural, and even psychological form of capitalism. It was both a change from and in continuity with the prior form of capitalism in the high 20th century. The question is the character of the historical rhythm of transformations in capitalism.
Trump has always wanted to do this: From his earliest intimations of running for President in the late 1980s, Trump has complained about American potential being squandered. That he is implementing it forty years later is typical of prior changes in capitalism: John Maynard Keynes formulated his approach before the first World War but it was only implemented after the second and in the wake of the Great Depression; Milton Friedman sought reforms in the 1940s in response to automation that were adopted after the 1970s crisis and downturn in an era of deindustrialization. Such changes only caught up belatedly with longstanding necessities in capitalism. They all represented a political crisis that altered ideologies and parties and reconfigured electorates. While responding in terms of a state of affairs already past â Trumpâs opportunity came after Obama failed to adequately meet the crisis of the post-2008 Great Recession â they nonetheless set conditions for the future.
I have spent the last 10 years â ever since Trump emerged as a candidate â observing the dawning of post-neoliberalism that Trump expresses. It has taken this long for the dismissive denial of Trump as an aberration to wear off. But the confusion and fear continue. Ezra Klein calls Trump a âradical moderate,â which means someone who uses extreme means â for instance intemperate rhetoric â to achieve what are ultimately modest ends. Trump is pursuing changes rather conservatively, but even this is too much to bear for an ossified establishment and a public it has trained to fear.
It is dizzyingly disorienting, but one can find landmarks to steady oneself if one is willing to open oneâs eyes to the signs of the times: Trump as a blast from the past is a reminder that the account of history cannot be settled cheaply. One form of capitalism has run its course. It is fitting that a dissident from its high period should be the one to change it now. Like Bernie Sanders, Trump is a figure of the 1980s Reagan Revolution who warned of its dangerous deficiencies, which others failed to acknowledge. The quaintly old-fashioned can appear suddenly up-to-date, meeting the needs of the present. What is required is the will to do so. Trumpâs will is terrifyingly implacable. There are those who are exhilarated by it, and others incredulously insisting on its impossibility. But things must change, and they will: they already have.
When Jeb Bush called Trump the âchaos candidateâ a decade ago in the 2016 Republican primaries, he meant to warn against someone who would not observe the pieties of the established order â or simply party-loyalty to the Republicans. But it went much further than that: Trump is willing to sacrifice everything and everyone to do what he thinks is right. It is a CortĂ©s âburning the boats,â no-turning-back moment, in which the leader forces his followers to advance in order to conquer this new world that has been opened up to them. But if they refuse, Trump will not feel culpable for their inaction, for he did everything he could bringing them to this point: it will now be up to them to seize the opportunity.
Trump doesnât necessarily care about the Republican Partyâs fortunes or even those of his voters, as they served merely to place him in the position to act that he is using now. His actions are meant to benefit coming generations: it is for his votersâ (and othersâ) children and grandchildren, not themselves. Representative democracy means electing politicians to exercise judgment and make decisions on our behalf, not to implement our will, which we can hardly know in matters of state anyway. The only recourse for disappointment is to vote them out. That Trump has nothing to lose as a âlame duckâ exacerbates the problem: there is no way to hold him accountable other than (another) impeachment and removing him from office. That is not going to happen. Most of those who even disapprove of his actions wonât support taking him out. And many do continue to support what he is doing.
Will Trump succeed? That is anything but clear. But he will try. Like it or not, we are on this ride now. We have never had a say with the drivers â other than to choose them. Ben Shapiro said that nothing is guaranteed but the adventure in capitalism. Itâs times like these that test the basic propositions of the open society, in which nothing is safe and the risks are real. What we can be certain of is that Trump is no empty suit. He has claimed the right and freedom to act. The only thing to count on is what a transaction contracts between the interested parties â at least for the duration of their interaction. Trump is confident there are always deals to be made: he can make clients out of would-be adversaries; and mutual self-interest will win out to hold fast the relationship in the end.
Trumpâs gamble is that in this game of chicken others have much more to lose and little to gain in refusing to give way. Staring down his opponents, one thing we can be sure of is that he wonât be the one to blink. Or break faith: he is making commitments for America and the world to last for decades to come. He has nothing to fear, and neither should we.
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