The Last Marxist

Chris Cutrone debates Marxism, Trotskyism and Stalinism (including Maoism) with Alexander Mckay of the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute (U.K.) and Tara Van Dijk of Morbid Symptoms podcast.

Post-debate debrief with Doug Lain for Sublation Media.

(Chris Cutrone prepared opening remarks:)

A long time ago, when I was in college and a member of the orthodox Trotskyist Spartacus Youth Club associated with the Spartacist League, I watched a rerun of the Star Trek Original Series episode, “The Omega Glory,” from 1968, in which a post-apocalyptic civilization was beset by war between the Yangs and the Kohms — I thought that this is what the end of history would look like: Maoists vs. Trotskyists!

I consider Stalinism to be, simply, Right-wing Marxism. — A Right-wing liquidation of Marxism. It’s easy to understand why Communists in the Soviet Union and China have had to pretend to be “Marxist,” since they seemed to represent the Russian Revolution’s outcome. But there is no excuse for anyone who is not an apparatchik with vested interests in this pretense to accept this.

I am not sure why you are Stalinists: are you ignorant; opportunists; or do you want to be the hangmen of the revolution? Would you be Marxist at all if there were no “actually existing socialist states” to admire from afar?

Similarly, I am not sure what I am here to defend about myself: my ideas; my practical strategy; or my soul.

Actual Stalinists and Maoists have rejected Dengism as Revisionism and post-Mao China as a fascist-led state-capitalist country.

Mao himself said, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, that the supposed “Left-wing followers of Marx often become fascists.”

Stalin and Mao themselves would regard you are Revisionists — or as “useful idiots.”

In my time, back in the day, anti-Revisionist Maoism was represented by the Maoist International Movement, or MIM Notes, and J Sakai’s book Settlers represented this tendency. But they would have — rightly — rejected your perspective as non- and even anti-Marxist.

But divisions among Stalinists are longstanding: there was the Sino-Soviet split between Mao and Khruschev; the Sino-Vietnamese war; and the various African, Asian and Middle Eastern civil wars in which Communist China and the Soviet Union fought on opposite sides and chewed up countries as cannon-fodder in wars that had nothing to do with socialism whatsoever. Each side called the other “imperialist,” and had spurious pseudo-“Marxist” explanations for why this was so.

There was also the U.S.-China alliance under Mao against the Soviet Union, which involved these armed conflicts.

Mao claimed to uphold Stalin against Khruschev’s denunciations, but even Mao said that Stalin’s Purge Trials were wrong — too bureaucratic and authoritarian. His solution was the Cultural Revolution; his slogan was “bombard the [Communist Party] headquarters.” But now you defend the Chinese Communist Party — Mao was calling to bombard the people in China you have placed your hopes in; he was calling to bombard you.

On Israel-Palestine and the Gaza war, if I can speak personally: I was horrified by the Oct. 7 attacks, but not because of the atrocities against civilians, but because of what I expected the Israeli response would be. I identify spontaneously with the Palestinians, not the Israelis — and this is precisely why I oppose Hamas. Leaving aside the question of the struggle for socialism entirely, I am opposed to terrorism, which I consider liberalism with bombs and reformism with guns — as Lenin called it. And he meant targeted attacks on the state, not communitarian violence against civilians. To defend it is to defend the slaughter of Palestinians that was its intended result: Hamas wanted this “genocide” to happen (they call it “martyrdom”), and that’s why they are wrong — from a proletarian socialist perspective.

Yes, Lenin said about Marxists who had qualms about the 1916 Easter Uprising, which had significant participation by Irish socialists, that if you can’t stomach petit bourgeois outrages, you will not be able to support the revolution. But he meant the proletarian socialist revolution. Whereas today we have nothing but petit bourgeois outrages — and petit bourgeois “radical” cheerleaders or spectators.

We have had a century of so-called Third World revolution: it has not brought the world closer to socialism. But it has distorted the minds of Western “Leftists” such as yourselves.

Which brings me to practical strategy. I have two distinct tracks: Platypus and my Campaign for a Socialist Party. I notice that the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin-Mao Institute’s mission is “education and analysis.” This makes you no different from any other “Left” tendency, which I consider to be inherently limited to propaganda — mis-education. There is no political practice whatsoever. There is “analysis,” supposedly, which since it is divorced from any viable political strategy, is just tendentious ideology. Platypus addresses the dead “Left” reduced to mere trafficking in misunderstood ideas, which serve only to justify, in a crackpot way, what are capitalist politics and policies, to a very limited audience of virtual fanboys (and girls).  In Platypus we are trying, at the level of ideas, to “clear ideological obstacles” to a real proletarian socialist movement. It is an inherently limited project. We are addressing the “Left,” which is of course a petit bourgeois milieu.

By contrast, my Campaign is taking on the practical tasks of laying some kind of foundation for a proletarian socialist movement and politics. As I have said repeatedly, this will necessarily look like anarchism — or like grassroots “long-march” Maoism. So be it. But unlike the anarchists, we won’t fetishize social action and oppose political action — the eventual struggle for state power, and building a party to achieve it — on principle; unlike the Maoists, we won’t tail after supposedly “progressive” or “working-class” capitalist politics, which, again, has clearly led nowhere — nowhere but capitalist politics — since the 1970s. Similarly, however, we are addressing “Leftists” — petit-bourgeois radicals — who might want to serve as potential cadres of what, to actually be socialist, must become a working-class movement. We’re not there yet.

The 20^th century leaves a lot of treacherous debris — and unexploded ordinance — from the disintegration of Marxism and proletarian socialism. I recognize that we are beginning today from scratch. But we have to avoid the traps awaiting the ignorant or unwary.