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.
——————————————————
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.
Two things: I think one reason Cutrone thinks what he does about trump is because he is getting information feeds and arguments from typical right partisan news feeds/media. Two, the reason I talk about social technologies like professional bureaucracy like that is because of this historical logic of the relative maximization of violence. Yes, class formations matter in terms of what types of technologies a society can use, but those contradictions can take quite some time to play out. The collapse of the USSR is very much the result of proletarian class formations being incompatible with process bureaucracy. In China, where they tried to get past professional bureaucracy, particularly in the cultural revolution, they found it impossible for the simple reason that there was no working mode of production to go with it. I said this in my recent cosmonaut letter. https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/07/letter-the-economics-of-feasible-degrowth/ a non-professional social technology of government will also require a working non-capitalist relations of production.
I don’t support Trump and Trumpism but criticize anti-Trump-ism, especially on the “Left.”
Althusser and Kalecki were not Marxists like Marx and Lenin. That doesn’t mean they weren’t right. But I’m trying to uphold an original historical Marxist perspective. I do so for remembering the lingering questions and problems raised by this history that tend to be avoided and forgotten by later thinkers.
I hope readers who are interested in Marxism will find my collected theoretical and historical writings in my book Marxism and Politics (Sublation, 2024) interesting food for thought.
Even if you disagree with Althusser and Kelecki, your interpretation of Marx's economic categories is untenable, and the way you deploy them is totally different from his method of argumentation. Same with the idea of the special group of armed men. Even your defense of liberal democratic rights and Bourgeois civil society is totally alien to Marx's analysis of the 2nd French Republic and Bonaparte.
Most readings of Marx are mistaken, committing category-errors and proceeding on false premises. For Marx the capitalist mode of production is the increasing contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of production and the industrial forces of production. It is a Hegelian dialectical contradiction of interpenetrated opposites not flat opposition. This means Marx’s categories are not empirical analytical distinctions of different things but sides of self-contradiction of the same thing. Such contradiction is not occasional but endemic, intrinsic and indeed constitutive. This also goes for socialist/communist ideology which Marx didn’t invent or correct or revise but critiqued specifically as bourgeois ideology e.g. based on the bourgeois labor theory of value etc. As Lenin said, what is required above all is more dialectics!
Dialectics of /what/ is the question here! You want an idealist dialectics based on historicist political interventions. Marx had a materialist dialectics of the realest categories he could identify via political economy. The Platypus society gets its name for something existing which is beyond a dialectics of pure human reasoning, yet for some reason you seem exceptionally opposed to that! Because these concepts of political economy are meant to represent material things, which are not necessarily subordinated to human reasoning, the two sides of the contradiction, the two opposites, are not necessarily symmetrical or some type of mirror reflection. You deliberately ignore the way that the economic categories have different meanings, which Marx took great pains to explicate, in order to do your idealist dialectics!
I just listened to his "Cutrone Zone" critique of Benjamin Studebaker on the grounds that BS is practically Burnhamite in thinking of politics as driven by intra-elite squabble, as opposed to bottom-up potential.
Is Cutrone's problem is that he's too populist, and this dovetails with defending Trump (though not Trump per se)? I've seen you criticize small business as worse than Big Business. Do you share a Burnhamite view?
I can't stay on top of the intricacies of Marxist theoretical battles, I confess. I'm entirely too petty bourgeois myself. But I'm fascinated by the nexus between elitist left and the Thiel-ian elitist right, ala Yarvin.
I don't believe in an elitist view of politics; you need to have an encounter with a popular base of support to make big changes. Cutrone's problem isn't elite vs popular, his problem is that he's tailing the politics of small business owners in a misguided view that will save liberal democracy from capitalism.
Hm. Do you think he's glomming on to small business' political views and then rationalizing that, or that his views remind you of the views of small biz folk (even if they couldn't articulate a tenth of what he has to say)?
I think they come to similar political positions for similar reasons actually, and probably have similar news feeds. If you ask a small biz ppl why they support trump, I think they'd probably same something like the democrats are violating his rights and destroying America's constitutional values or whatever. I think the only complicated part for Cutrone his explanation for why liberal democracy is good.
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.
——————————————————
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.
Two things: I think one reason Cutrone thinks what he does about trump is because he is getting information feeds and arguments from typical right partisan news feeds/media. Two, the reason I talk about social technologies like professional bureaucracy like that is because of this historical logic of the relative maximization of violence. Yes, class formations matter in terms of what types of technologies a society can use, but those contradictions can take quite some time to play out. The collapse of the USSR is very much the result of proletarian class formations being incompatible with process bureaucracy. In China, where they tried to get past professional bureaucracy, particularly in the cultural revolution, they found it impossible for the simple reason that there was no working mode of production to go with it. I said this in my recent cosmonaut letter. https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/07/letter-the-economics-of-feasible-degrowth/ a non-professional social technology of government will also require a working non-capitalist relations of production.
Good stuff. Chris has never worked a day in his life and it shows.
I don’t support Trump and Trumpism but criticize anti-Trump-ism, especially on the “Left.”
Althusser and Kalecki were not Marxists like Marx and Lenin. That doesn’t mean they weren’t right. But I’m trying to uphold an original historical Marxist perspective. I do so for remembering the lingering questions and problems raised by this history that tend to be avoided and forgotten by later thinkers.
I hope readers who are interested in Marxism will find my collected theoretical and historical writings in my book Marxism and Politics (Sublation, 2024) interesting food for thought.
Even if you disagree with Althusser and Kelecki, your interpretation of Marx's economic categories is untenable, and the way you deploy them is totally different from his method of argumentation. Same with the idea of the special group of armed men. Even your defense of liberal democratic rights and Bourgeois civil society is totally alien to Marx's analysis of the 2nd French Republic and Bonaparte.
Most readings of Marx are mistaken, committing category-errors and proceeding on false premises. For Marx the capitalist mode of production is the increasing contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of production and the industrial forces of production. It is a Hegelian dialectical contradiction of interpenetrated opposites not flat opposition. This means Marx’s categories are not empirical analytical distinctions of different things but sides of self-contradiction of the same thing. Such contradiction is not occasional but endemic, intrinsic and indeed constitutive. This also goes for socialist/communist ideology which Marx didn’t invent or correct or revise but critiqued specifically as bourgeois ideology e.g. based on the bourgeois labor theory of value etc. As Lenin said, what is required above all is more dialectics!
Dialectics of /what/ is the question here! You want an idealist dialectics based on historicist political interventions. Marx had a materialist dialectics of the realest categories he could identify via political economy. The Platypus society gets its name for something existing which is beyond a dialectics of pure human reasoning, yet for some reason you seem exceptionally opposed to that! Because these concepts of political economy are meant to represent material things, which are not necessarily subordinated to human reasoning, the two sides of the contradiction, the two opposites, are not necessarily symmetrical or some type of mirror reflection. You deliberately ignore the way that the economic categories have different meanings, which Marx took great pains to explicate, in order to do your idealist dialectics!
Marxist “materialism” is not empiricism.
I never claimed it was! But it is a realism.
I just listened to his "Cutrone Zone" critique of Benjamin Studebaker on the grounds that BS is practically Burnhamite in thinking of politics as driven by intra-elite squabble, as opposed to bottom-up potential.
Is Cutrone's problem is that he's too populist, and this dovetails with defending Trump (though not Trump per se)? I've seen you criticize small business as worse than Big Business. Do you share a Burnhamite view?
I can't stay on top of the intricacies of Marxist theoretical battles, I confess. I'm entirely too petty bourgeois myself. But I'm fascinated by the nexus between elitist left and the Thiel-ian elitist right, ala Yarvin.
I don't believe in an elitist view of politics; you need to have an encounter with a popular base of support to make big changes. Cutrone's problem isn't elite vs popular, his problem is that he's tailing the politics of small business owners in a misguided view that will save liberal democracy from capitalism.
Hm. Do you think he's glomming on to small business' political views and then rationalizing that, or that his views remind you of the views of small biz folk (even if they couldn't articulate a tenth of what he has to say)?
I think they come to similar political positions for similar reasons actually, and probably have similar news feeds. If you ask a small biz ppl why they support trump, I think they'd probably same something like the democrats are violating his rights and destroying America's constitutional values or whatever. I think the only complicated part for Cutrone his explanation for why liberal democracy is good.