The Platypus Ideology
The Critique of Chris Cutrone
The purpose of this essay is to describe the ideological errors of Chris Cutrone, pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated society. These errors lead Cutrone to adopt the most materially reactionary position in contemporary politics, specifically, an embrace of the petty bourgeois’ attempts to preserve existing social relations by identifying their political position as the one which furthers the project of liberal democracy foreclosed by both the bonapartist and administrative state.
It is illustrative to begin with Cutrone’s essay Why not Trump, again?, where he defends Trump against what he views as prosecution unjustified by liberal democratic rights. He writes: “In modern, that is to say, bourgeois society, it is understood that the law does not make society but society makes the law. Society does not serve the state, but the state serves society.”
Per the orthodox Marxism even Cutrone cites, “society” is not what makes law in a bourgeois society, it is a special group of armed men, special both in that they are specific and not a general group, and also specialized in creating the law itself. What is “understood” is nothing more or less than the ideological fiction which is the central conceit of bourgeois societies.
“There is indeed a Deep State of permanent bureaucratic “special bodies of armed men” in the state of capitalism, which has sought to escape political responsibility to the civilian authority of elected office in the Presidency. Trump was targeted by the Deep State as well as by his political adversaries (Democrats and Republicans) from the beginning of his candidacy.”
An absurd formulation to suggest that the President, the Commander in Chief, is not a member of this group of special armed men. Indeed, the president is one of the key lynchpins of this repressive and ideological state apparatus, as it is by his presence as a charismatic figure of authority that official acts of these men are made “special” that is granted legitimacy through the process of the intellectual labor the President performs. And, even beyond that, the President is a key node in the military’s command structure, as is the White House and Office of the Secretary of Defense (a Presidential appointee) more generally on even extremely mundane practical matters.
Cutrone suggests that giving the President immunity from prosecution will protect society from the state, people's individual rights from their violation. This is not a logical argument, even on the level of protecting bourgeois civil society, which itself is no point of resistance to the bourgeois state1. The possibility of a President having absolute executive control and immunity is one of an entire population being subject to the arbitrary whims of a single individual. Let's not forget, when Nixon, who Cutrone cites positively, was saying “When the president does it, it's not illegal” he was speaking of the Huston Plan, “the systematic use of wiretappings, burglaries, or so-called black bag jobs, mail openings and infiltration against anti-war groups and others.”2 A clear violation of civil rights and individual liberty if there ever was one. Similarly, among Trump's crimes, although not the one he was found guilty of, was fabricating slates of electors to overrule the ordinary electoral process, violating ex post facto the civil rights of everyone who voted in those elections. The timidity of bureaucrats is, if anything, one of the few bulwarks of freedom that remains. Every major expansion of the security state has not come at the deep state's prerogative, it almost always comes from the pen of the head of the executive, and when not, from the most high level politicians of the legislative and judiciary.
What does Cutrone seek to achieve by siding with the most political and high level members of the state apparatus? Very plainly, his project is a class collaborationist one, derived from an idealist and historicist reading of Marx. He wants to join with this most regressive sections of the bourgeoisie as only that section promises to enshrine forever what he treasures so: bourgeois civil society and its associated relations of production. In this, he is not too dissimilar from the Magacoms, albeit with less bombast.
Cutrone's class collaborationism has two distinct sources: his understanding of Marx’s categories of political economy, and his understanding of the role of the bourgeois revolution in history.
Beginning with the latter: in his critique of Mike Macnair’s Revolutionary Strategy Cutrone writes: “What requires explanation is the 19th century slipping of the state from adequate social control, and its ‘rising above’ the contending political groups and social classes, as a power in itself. Even if Bonapartism in Marx’s late 19th century sense was the expression of a potential inherent in the forms of bourgeois politics emerging much earlier, there is still the question of why it was not realised so until after 1848.”
What Cutrone is speaking of was the pacification of the social classes that began with Bonapartism. The history of the destruction of the first two French republics was the history of the bourgeois parties being superseded by dictators after it was shown that direct rule by the bourgeois was too unstable to persist. The pacification of the working class soon ensued, through violent repression and the creation of a civil society which attempted to ideologically shape the working class into one that would not disrupt the relations of production as it had attempted in the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune.
The reason we no longer have Bonapartist dictators everywhere running bourgeois states is because the state quickly developed more sophisticated methods of social control via the professional bureaucracy and intellectual laborers within the state ideological apparatuses. Unlike the Bonapartist dictator, which was dependent solely on an individual’s charismatic authority and their ability to create ideological legitimacy, a set of professional intellectual laborers can turn over ideological production to a specialized division of labor, making it more efficient and capable. Academics, bureaucrats, and political leaders, as professionals, are like a programmable digital computer compared to specialized analogue contraption of the Bonapartist dictatorship.
What is the problem with this pacification of the social classes according to Cutrone? It undermines the original bourgeois democratic revolution. As he says: “The problem with liberal democracy is that it proceeds as if the democratic revolution has been achieved already, and ignores that capitalism has undermined it.”
It wasn’t capitalism that undermined liberal democracy. It was the logic of the state itself. We can see this clearly, even when the mode of production, and even the relations of production, such as in the USSR and the collective era PRC, have shifted dramatically, the bonapartist figures re-assert themselves, the administrative state reappears3. The reason why is simple, and was elaborated most clearly by Althusser in his essay Marx in his Limits, the logic of the state is always the relative maximization of violence. New techniques of creating violence, the machine gun, the atom bomb, are paired with ever better methods of social control, the professional bureaucracy, systems of professional ideological production, ect, are constantly being created and deployed so that the state can maintain the largest capacities for violence in society.
But Cutrone doesn’t view this problem of the failure of democracy, and the pacification of the social classes in these terms. When he says “Bourgeois forms of politics will be overcome through advancing them to their limits – in crisis,” we can only interpret this in light of his defense of Trump as saying that what must be defended is liberal bourgeois rights in their crisis. Such that, all that is required to defeat the counter-revolution of liberal democracy is the political will to re-assert it, that its overcoming will naturally follow with these political defenses, including in a material sense. But this is not true. For one, overcoming the liberal democracy suppressing forces of bonapartist dictatorship or professional administration would require a set of social technologies that achieve greater stability and violence than either of them, something which, for example, more direct proletarian democratic forms, such as councils/soviets have failed to do . For two, the material economic impact of a particular political tendency depends on its ties to particular historical economic tendencies.
In order to say that the political defense of democracy during its crises will overcome capitalism’s material contradictions, we must see precisely the relationship between these politics to the mode of production and relations of production and their changes over time. However, as we shall see, Cutrone’s grasp of political economy is tenuous at best.
As he says: “Macnair addresses [the contradiction between democratic revolution and proletarianisation] by specifying the ‘proletariat’ as all those in society “dependent on the total wage fund” – as opposed to those (presumably) dependent upon ‘capital’ . This is clearly not a matter of economics, because distinguishing between those depending on wages as opposed to capital is a political matter of differentiation: all the intermediate strata depending on both the wage fund and capital would need to be compelled to take sides in any political dispute between the prerogatives of wages versus capital.... For the wage fund, according to Marx, is a form of capital: it is ‘variable’ as opposed to ‘constant capital’.”
This is where we get to the absurdity of Cutrone’s economic formulation. The fact that both variable and constant capital are types of capital is enough for him to say, with great satisfaction, that the distinction between them isn’t a matter of economics. But that’s precisely the opposite of what is true. For one, the capitalist class gets its share of income from neither variable or constant capital! The capitalist class gets its income from surplus, which, when added together with wages (the income or flow expression of variable capital) and depreciation (the income or flow expression of constant capital), comes to the whole income of society. What distinguishes variable from constant capital as types of capital is precisely a scientific, not political, distinction: they have different laws which determine them. Wages, as Marx makes abundantly clear, are determined by the cost of reproducing the working class. Constant capital, as the machinery and infrastructure required for production, decomposes into its own costs. And surplus is determined by what remains of their money capital when the capitalist class kicks off the m-c-m’ cycle of production by spending their money capital on wages and constant capital, Kalecki’s profit equations show convincingly that this will generally be equivalent to capitalist consumption and investment spending.
What would it mean if this was a purely political distinction? In Cutrone’s formulation, it would cause Marx’s whole scientific system to be reduced to the political forces which appear to stand in for a particular historical mission, such as a party announcing its association to the proletariat on purely historicist terms (as the Magacoms do, for instance). Hence, we return to where we began, defending Trump in the name of the historical mission of the proletariat.
Macnair, in contrast, returns the materialist contention of orthodox Marxism in his re-articulation of the merger formula. The merger of the working class with socialist intellectuals necessarily requires this encounter between socialists and an actual social group who have their income characterized by the wage fund, which has a totally different set of economic laws that govern it compared to the laws which govern income to capital. The intermediate strata that Cutrone uses to muddy the water still has its income governed by these laws, only in different proportions. This is actually a matter of great importance, but Cutrone cannot recognize this importance because he lacks any substantive understanding of the relevant political economy. For the petty bourgeoisie, their smaller accumulations of money capital mean they are acutely susceptible to both secular and cyclical drops in the rate of profit, more so than the high bourgeoisie. Similarly, pensioners and retirees are much more susceptible to changes in interest rates and profit rates than large financial institutions. The middle stratas are not just intermediate versions of the proletariat or bourgeoisie, they are defined by the terror of being on the knife's edge of proletarianization and immiseration if income to capital lapses.
For these middle stratas, their connection to the wage fund is directly inverse to their level of social atomization. Retirees who have working children helping to take care of them, small business owners who have working spouses or other family members, are the ones most exposed to the wage fund. The most socially atomized petty bourgeoisie and retirees are also the most dependent on surplus, and therefore also the ones tending most towards reaction.
This tendency towards reaction must be understood in terms first and foremost of political economy. They want to preserve the bourgeois relations of production in order to preserve their status. They stand athwart the very historical tendencies that Marx identified as the negation of the negation: the destruction of the capitalist class by its own hands. The accumulation of capital, to Marx, was its centralization, its socialization, one capitalist killing many.
We see this, empirically, in the petty bourgeois’ and MAGA movement’s support for stronger antitrust and tariff policies. They want to isolate themselves from competitive pressure from China, where the revolutionizing of the forces of production is proceeding at an incredible pace, and where capitalist political opposition to declining profit rates was summarily crushed the past few years. They want to punish the high bourgeoisie and protect themselves from consolidation and the rationalization of production. For the moment, the Trump coalition is willing to hold out olive branches to labor, but this will become increasingly less tenable as the US loses global market share to more productive and competitive Chinese firms, much as was the case in the 1970s and 80s when the US was confronted with a resurgent Germany and Japan. This global market share allows the US to maintain such large consumption bundles for workers, by commanding large amounts of cheaper labor abroad in the form of imports. We are already beginning to see the Chinese begin to dominate the automotive, battery, and solar panel industries. Without the strong market share of American capital, the petty bourgeois’ position could only be maintained through an increasing profit share of income, and a falling labor share: that is, through a new immiseration. Their politics is the politics of long term stagnation, inflation, and eventually the crushing of labor.
Neoliberalism was the first attempt by the capitalist class to break free of its historical logic by atomizing production while at the same time halting the increasing investment share of surplus which was destroying the ability for the capitalist class to reproduce itself. The worldwide explosion of non-agricultural petty bourgeoisie that resulted from neoliberalism provided a political base to perpetuate this situation. But, as Marx notes, to perpetuate such a situation would be “‘to decree universal mediocrity’”4.
This is what Cutrone stands for, in his tailing of the petty bourgeoisie and Trump: universal mediocrity5.
His defense of bourgeois civil society qua bourgeois civil society unwittingly terminates to a defense of bourgeois relations of production. But not even the bourgeois relations which revolutionize the means of production, only those which perpetuate these middling classes. What Cutrone cheers for, then, is nothing more nor less than our continued slide into historical irrelevance.
See my exchanges with Doug Lain on this matter in Cosmonaut’s Letters section here: https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/06/letter-the-shallow-deep-state/ and here: https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/07/8029/
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/sep/07/greatinterviews1
Only exceptions being areas where the broader security situation has broken down, such as in civil wars, or where it is generally difficult to enforce laws more generally.
I have written on these issues of the petty bourgeois at length here https://nicolasdvillarreal.substack.com/p/thesis-on-the-petty-bourgeoisie-as
This helps shed some extra light on the economic theory end of these contentions.
I must say that I find Cutrone to be intellectually dishonest at some level, the more paranoid intuition is to say he's a right-wing entryist purposefully muddying the waters on the Marxist left, and that reading his work on the death of the left seems to require walking through a rather mystical puzzle of logic. He seems to be leaning into narrative reversal against the left in such a way that rationalizes US nationalism and has a strange attachment to the classical liberal revolution of a few centuries ago.
Cutrone, in my observation, makes provocative statements that are flatly wrong and a concession to contemporary right-wing positions while hiding behind the idea that he's a mere victim of overdone thought taboos when people criticize his wild pronouncements.
His argument is at best a perverse kind of accelerationism that tails the right out of the misguided hope that it's accidentally good or the loaded idea that the Republicans actually represent proletariat interests, and he often takes right wing media talking points at face value when he shouldn't.
What this piece helps explain is how his stances are connected to his fixation on the idea that bourgeoisie society is the kernel of socialism that simply must be accelerated. *Of course* this terminates in rationalizations for stuff like a desperate attempt at US expansionism, and a deference to Trump's nationalistic populism is conflated with a window for socialism.
Agreed that Platypus is a petty bourgeois group, and that their obsession with “freedom” comes from the petty bourgeoise’s anxiety to cling to the liberal political order.
I think Platypus corresponds to a section of the petty bourgeoise that gravitates toward Marxism because they see in it a philosophical defense of “freedom” and “democracy” at a time when those ideals are becoming impossible under bourgeois democracy. But Marxism remains no more than ideology to them, divorced from any kind of practice other than an intellectual one. They openly refer to themselves as a radical reading group, with no pretenses of “reconstituting” anything themselves, and they make no attempt to locate the class basis of their own organization. They portray themselves as the high minded interpreters of Marxist orthodoxy, but they make a mockery of Marxism by transforming it into an idealist muddle of “philosophical” jargon and mysticism.
They want to hold onto bourgeois democracy but they fixate on ideals. Practically, they believe the working class is incapable of opposing the bourgeoise’s drive toward dictatorship. Their byline is that the left is dead - it died a hundred years ago, and their job is to record and mull over the lessons of the defeats like leftist librarians, so that in some distant future, it will be possible to “reconstitute the left.”The postwar revolutionary upheavals, the anti-colonial struggles, the worldwide spread of capitalism, and the crisis of capitalism and imperialism today are all dead letters to them - they see only defeat and despair wherever they look.
In times of crisis, pessimism always prevails among intellectuals, since they see nothing beyond bourgeois democracy. Trotsky describes their outlook in the following terms: “The revolutionary roads lead nowhere. We must adapt ourselves to the democratic regime; we must defend it against all attacks.” (“Intellectual Ex-Radicals and World Reaction”, 1939) Yet, “The working class is not a corpse. As hitherto, society rests upon it.” The core of the Platypus brand of Marxism is precisely to treat the working class as a corpse.
I’m not so sure about your thesis that “He [Cutrone] wants to join with this most regressive sections of the bourgeoisie as only that section promises to enshrine forever what he treasures so: bourgeois civil society and its associated relations of production.” But the right does not seek to preserve liberal democracy, but to overthrow it and replace it with fascist dictatorship. This is obvious even to the liberal establishment. So why would Cutrone back Trump, if he wants to shore up the liberal order? Possibly because, as you say, he has given up on stabilizing liberal democracy, and is more interested in the stability of capitalism, whatever form that needs to take. The other explanation, which I think is more likely, is that he fails to see the threat posed by fascism, and is closing his eyes to the crisis of bourgeois democracy. Keeping to his usual method, he wants to mount an intellectual defense of the ideals of bourgeois democracy divorced from any basis in working class action. He scolds the Democrats for failing to abide by the letter of bourgeois democracy, as though all that’s required to keep fascism at bay is a formal adherence to democratic principles. So I think Cutrone is still acting as a left critic of the liberal establishment rather than a cheerleader for Trump.
There is an interesting parallel to the DSA’s fixation on liberal abstractions like democracy. DSA is primarily a party of the declining petty bourgeoise, but unlike Platypus, they see some possibility of mobilizing the working class to defend bourgeois democracy against the bourgeoise’s movement toward dictatorship. The right wing of the DSA, basing itself on the labor bureaucracy, wishes to pressure the Democratic Party to the left and channel workers into supporting the more liberal sections of the bourgeoise against the fascists.
The leftwing of the DSA, realizing that this is hopeless, wants to break with the Democrats, but lacking the capacity to mobilize the working class, they remain fixated on electoral politics. Their brand of politics, while incomparably better than Platypus’s sickly, despairing scholasticism, retains the liberal fixation on “democracy” as an ahistorical abstraction. Even the most leftwing elements in the DSA, such as the Marxist Unity Group, retain this liberal obsession. MUG imagines that they can win the DSA to revolutionary politics as a first step toward a mass party that can politically organize and educate the working class and gradually gain a foothold in government in elections. Eventually, when enough workers have joined the party, they will democratically capture the state, call a constitutional convention, and institute a socialist Democratic Republic by fiat. They reduce the problems of the socialist revolution to organizing a political party, “winning the battle of democracy,” overturning the constitution, and so on, while neglecting the concrete tasks in the labor movement. They emphasize Marx and Engel’s discussion of the democratic republic in order to justify an electoral political practice over work in the labor movement. Since this requires ignoring the economic preconditions and class basis for political action, they are led to increasingly disregard, and sometimes outright reject, the materialist conception of history, though they do not descend so low into the gutter of idealism as does Platypus. But the class basis is largely the same and has led in both cases into an idealist Leninology.
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A separate point:
Your description of the evolution of the state is interesting but you seem to be considering the development of the state as something that can be analyzed according to its own internal logic, that’s to say apart from the development of world capitalism. Hence you write “It wasn’t capitalism that undermined liberal democracy. It was the logic of the state itself.” But the erosion of democracy is not a consequence of the development of the category “state” but rather of the development of world capitalism. The “pacification of social classes” is only possible under conditions of capitalist growth.
Another example: “...overcoming the liberal democracy suppressing forces of bonapartist dictatorship or professional administration would require a set of social technologies that achieve greater stability and violence than either of them, something which, for example, more direct proletarian democratic forms, such as councils/soviets have failed to do.” This seems to suppose that “social technologies” have their own internal logic. The success or failure of a “social technology” depends on the wider realities of class society. Thus, for example, the stability of a social form like the soviets is not purely a matter of the soviet form as such, but also of the social conditions under which the soviets appear (the level of development of the capitalist mode of production). In other words, this is an undialectical formulation.