Chris Cutrone is an Associate Professor Adjunct in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and instructor at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. He was a longtime lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the PhD degree in the Committee on the History of Culture and MA in Art History. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. His doctoral dissertation was on Adorno's Marxism.
The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.... more The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press. Book description: Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways. The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned. Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received? | Reviews: “The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.” — Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine | “Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized. If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions. Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication. This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.” — Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs | “Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.” — Todd Cronan, Nonsite | “The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.” — Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain | “A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.” — Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain | “Inspirational.” — Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.... more The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.
Book description:
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.
The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned.
Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received?
Reviews:
“The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.”
— Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine
“Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized.
“If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions.
“Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.’
“This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.”
— Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs
“Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.”
— Todd Cronan, Nonsite
“The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.”
— Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain
“A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.”
— Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain
“Inspirational.”
— Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occup... more The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the political discontents expressed by Bernie Sanders, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA et al, was tasked with the struggle for socialism in the core of global capitalism. It failed to even attempt this task.
In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation’s many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism.
A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anyone interested in a socialist politics of freedom.
Theodor W. Adorno's writings comprise an attempted recovery of Marx for a dialectic of 20th centu... more Theodor W. Adorno's writings comprise an attempted recovery of Marx for a dialectic of 20th century social and cultural forms. Through immanent critique of modern aesthetic, philosophical, political and psychological forms of social subjectivity and its antinomies, contradictions and discontents, including those of ostensible Marxism, the thought figures of Adorno's essays are modeled after and attempt to elaborate Marx's self-reflexive critique of the subjectivity of the commodity form. Adorno's critical theory considers modern aesthetic form as social form. Following Marx, Adorno's critique of modern social forms is concerned with their potential for emancipation as well as domination: the term "culture industry," for instance, is meant to grasp comprehensively the context for the critical social object and form of aesthetic subjectivity in common for practices of both "hermetic" art and "popular" culture, and is meant to characterize the condition and possibility for critical subjectivity itself, including Adorno's own. In Adorno's essays, objects of cultural criticism become "prismatic," illuminating the formation of subjectivity and providing moments for critical reflection and recognition. However, Adorno's works faced and sought to provoke recognition of the possibility and reality of social regression as well as regression in thinking. Coming after the collapse of 2nd International Social Democracy in 1914 and the failure of world revolution 1917-19, and inspired by Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch's thought from this period, Adorno developed a critique of 20th Century society that sustained awareness of the problematic of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky's Marxism. The coincidence of the later reception of Adorno's works with the emergence of social discontents, oppositions and transformations of the 1960s New Left and its aftermath, however, obscured Adorno's thought during two decades of "postmodernism," whose exhaustion opens possibilities for reconstruction of and development upon the coherence of Adorno's dialectic, as expression of the extended tasks and project of Marxism bequeathed by history to the present. (March 2013)
Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the begi... more Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.
This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.
An anthology of 50 articles from the Platypus Review, the monthly broadsheet newspaper of the Pla... more An anthology of 50 articles from the Platypus Review, the monthly broadsheet newspaper of the Platypus Affiliated Society, including authored articles, interviews and public forum transcripts, 17 written by Chris Cutrone.
Les origines politiques de la Theorie critique de l’Ecole de Francfort restent opaques pour plusi... more Les origines politiques de la Theorie critique de l’Ecole de Francfort restent opaques pour plusieurs raisons, le caractere taciturne des ecrits majeurs de ses figures n’etant pas la moindre. Une telle reticence se doit d’etre expliquee. Pourquoi Horkheimer et Adorno ont-ils pratique l’autocensure, et le cryptage de leurs idees ? Pourquoi se sont-ils remis a jeter des « bouteilles a la mer » sans destinataire defini ou immediat ? Pour Horkheimer, le danger consistait a parler comme un « oracl...
Presented on a panel discussion with Dennis Graemer (Association for the Design of History), Doug... more Presented on a panel discussion with Dennis Graemer (Association for the Design of History), Doug Lain (Zero Books) and Douglas Kellner (UCLA) at the Platypus Affiliated Society International Convention on Saturday, April 3, 2021.
Presented on a Platypus Affiliated Society on-line public forum panel discussion with Adam Sacks ... more Presented on a Platypus Affiliated Society on-line public forum panel discussion with Adam Sacks (Jacobin magazine contributor), Ben Lewis (Communist Party of Great Britain) and Jason Wright (Bolshevik Tendency) on Saturday September 5, 2020.
For me, the question of the legacy of Karl Kautsky’s Marxism is not as a Marxist, but rather as the Marxist. He was the theorist, not of capitalism or socialism, but of the working class’s struggle for socialism, the social and political movement and most of all the political party that issued from this movement and struggle. Kautsky articulated the historical and strategic perspective and the self-understanding of the proletarian socialist party. He helped formulate the political program of Marxism -- the Erfurt Programme in which the German Social-Democratic Party became officially Marxist -- and explained it with particular genius. He was not a theorist of German socialism but rather of the world-historic social and political task of socialism, for the entire Socialist International.
Presented at a Platypus teach-in on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 22, 2020. Video... more Presented at a Platypus teach-in on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 22, 2020. Video recording available online at: <https://youtu.be/01z8Mzz2IY4>.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF LENIN’S BIRTH, I would like to approach Lenin’s meaning today by critically examining an essay written by the liberal political philosopher Ralph Miliband on the occasion of Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970 — which was the year of my own birth.
The reason for using Miliband’s essay to frame my discussion of Lenin’s legacy is that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America magazine Jacobin republished Miliband, who is perhaps their most important theoretical inspiration, in 2018 as a belated treatment of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — or perhaps as a way of marking the centenary of the ill-fated German Revolution of 1918, which failed as a socialist revolution but is usually regarded as a successful democratic revolution, issuing in the Weimar Republic under the leadership of the SPD Social-Democratic Party of Germany. There is a wound in the apparent conflict between the desiderata of socialism and democracy, in which the Russian tradition associated with Lenin is opposed to and by the German tradition associated with social democracy, or, alternatively, “democratic socialism,” by contrast with the supposedly undemocratic socialism of Lenin, however justified or not by “Russian conditions.” The German model seems to stand for conditions more appropriate to advanced capitalist and liberal democratic countries.
Socialism arose, from the perspective of Marxism, from this constant self-contradiction, crisis, ... more Socialism arose, from the perspective of Marxism, from this constant self-contradiction, crisis, destruction, and demand for the reconstitution of the social value of labor. As such, socialism was an expression of capitalism, namely, an expression of the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production. As the advocacy of the social value of labor, socialism was an expression of the demands of the reconstitution of the bourgeois social rights of labor, namely, its social value.
The present is characterized not only by a political crisis of the global neoliberal order but al... more The present is characterized not only by a political crisis of the global neoliberal order but also by differing interpretations of the cause of this crisis: capitalism . If we are to interpret capitalism, we must also know how to change it.
Presented on a public panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, with speakers Dick Howard, Chris Nineham, Shane Mage and Leo Panitch, moderated by Clint Montgomery, May 23, 2020.
Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (C... more Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (CPUSA) and Bertell Ollman at Columbia University on February 22, 2020.
Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another ... more Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds 1910-30 (Part 1)” with Aglaya K. Glebova and chair Florian Grosser with discussant Monica C Bravo.
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of “revolutionary” art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotsky’s Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible “revolutionary culture” actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.
MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as “bourgeois ideology.” This meant, first and foremost, radical bo... more MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as “bourgeois ideology.” This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. There’s little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine “ideology.” It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)
The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.... more The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press. Book description: Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways. The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned. Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received? | Reviews: “The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.” — Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine | “Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized. If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions. Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication. This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.” — Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs | “Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.” — Todd Cronan, Nonsite | “The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.” — Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain | “A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.” — Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain | “Inspirational.” — Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.... more The first portion of Chris Cutrone's 2024 book Marxism and Politics published by Sublation Press.
Book description:
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.
The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned.
Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received?
Reviews:
“The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.”
— Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine
“Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized.
“If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions.
“Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.’
“This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.”
— Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs
“Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.”
— Todd Cronan, Nonsite
“The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.”
— Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain
“A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.”
— Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain
“Inspirational.”
— Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occup... more The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the political discontents expressed by Bernie Sanders, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA et al, was tasked with the struggle for socialism in the core of global capitalism. It failed to even attempt this task.
In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation’s many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism.
A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anyone interested in a socialist politics of freedom.
Theodor W. Adorno's writings comprise an attempted recovery of Marx for a dialectic of 20th centu... more Theodor W. Adorno's writings comprise an attempted recovery of Marx for a dialectic of 20th century social and cultural forms. Through immanent critique of modern aesthetic, philosophical, political and psychological forms of social subjectivity and its antinomies, contradictions and discontents, including those of ostensible Marxism, the thought figures of Adorno's essays are modeled after and attempt to elaborate Marx's self-reflexive critique of the subjectivity of the commodity form. Adorno's critical theory considers modern aesthetic form as social form. Following Marx, Adorno's critique of modern social forms is concerned with their potential for emancipation as well as domination: the term "culture industry," for instance, is meant to grasp comprehensively the context for the critical social object and form of aesthetic subjectivity in common for practices of both "hermetic" art and "popular" culture, and is meant to characterize the condition and possibility for critical subjectivity itself, including Adorno's own. In Adorno's essays, objects of cultural criticism become "prismatic," illuminating the formation of subjectivity and providing moments for critical reflection and recognition. However, Adorno's works faced and sought to provoke recognition of the possibility and reality of social regression as well as regression in thinking. Coming after the collapse of 2nd International Social Democracy in 1914 and the failure of world revolution 1917-19, and inspired by Georg Lukács and Karl Korsch's thought from this period, Adorno developed a critique of 20th Century society that sustained awareness of the problematic of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky's Marxism. The coincidence of the later reception of Adorno's works with the emergence of social discontents, oppositions and transformations of the 1960s New Left and its aftermath, however, obscured Adorno's thought during two decades of "postmodernism," whose exhaustion opens possibilities for reconstruction of and development upon the coherence of Adorno's dialectic, as expression of the extended tasks and project of Marxism bequeathed by history to the present. (March 2013)
Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the begi... more Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.
This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.
An anthology of 50 articles from the Platypus Review, the monthly broadsheet newspaper of the Pla... more An anthology of 50 articles from the Platypus Review, the monthly broadsheet newspaper of the Platypus Affiliated Society, including authored articles, interviews and public forum transcripts, 17 written by Chris Cutrone.
Les origines politiques de la Theorie critique de l’Ecole de Francfort restent opaques pour plusi... more Les origines politiques de la Theorie critique de l’Ecole de Francfort restent opaques pour plusieurs raisons, le caractere taciturne des ecrits majeurs de ses figures n’etant pas la moindre. Une telle reticence se doit d’etre expliquee. Pourquoi Horkheimer et Adorno ont-ils pratique l’autocensure, et le cryptage de leurs idees ? Pourquoi se sont-ils remis a jeter des « bouteilles a la mer » sans destinataire defini ou immediat ? Pour Horkheimer, le danger consistait a parler comme un « oracl...
Presented on a panel discussion with Dennis Graemer (Association for the Design of History), Doug... more Presented on a panel discussion with Dennis Graemer (Association for the Design of History), Doug Lain (Zero Books) and Douglas Kellner (UCLA) at the Platypus Affiliated Society International Convention on Saturday, April 3, 2021.
Presented on a Platypus Affiliated Society on-line public forum panel discussion with Adam Sacks ... more Presented on a Platypus Affiliated Society on-line public forum panel discussion with Adam Sacks (Jacobin magazine contributor), Ben Lewis (Communist Party of Great Britain) and Jason Wright (Bolshevik Tendency) on Saturday September 5, 2020.
For me, the question of the legacy of Karl Kautsky’s Marxism is not as a Marxist, but rather as the Marxist. He was the theorist, not of capitalism or socialism, but of the working class’s struggle for socialism, the social and political movement and most of all the political party that issued from this movement and struggle. Kautsky articulated the historical and strategic perspective and the self-understanding of the proletarian socialist party. He helped formulate the political program of Marxism -- the Erfurt Programme in which the German Social-Democratic Party became officially Marxist -- and explained it with particular genius. He was not a theorist of German socialism but rather of the world-historic social and political task of socialism, for the entire Socialist International.
Presented at a Platypus teach-in on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 22, 2020. Video... more Presented at a Platypus teach-in on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, April 22, 2020. Video recording available online at: <https://youtu.be/01z8Mzz2IY4>.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF LENIN’S BIRTH, I would like to approach Lenin’s meaning today by critically examining an essay written by the liberal political philosopher Ralph Miliband on the occasion of Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970 — which was the year of my own birth.
The reason for using Miliband’s essay to frame my discussion of Lenin’s legacy is that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America magazine Jacobin republished Miliband, who is perhaps their most important theoretical inspiration, in 2018 as a belated treatment of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — or perhaps as a way of marking the centenary of the ill-fated German Revolution of 1918, which failed as a socialist revolution but is usually regarded as a successful democratic revolution, issuing in the Weimar Republic under the leadership of the SPD Social-Democratic Party of Germany. There is a wound in the apparent conflict between the desiderata of socialism and democracy, in which the Russian tradition associated with Lenin is opposed to and by the German tradition associated with social democracy, or, alternatively, “democratic socialism,” by contrast with the supposedly undemocratic socialism of Lenin, however justified or not by “Russian conditions.” The German model seems to stand for conditions more appropriate to advanced capitalist and liberal democratic countries.
Socialism arose, from the perspective of Marxism, from this constant self-contradiction, crisis, ... more Socialism arose, from the perspective of Marxism, from this constant self-contradiction, crisis, destruction, and demand for the reconstitution of the social value of labor. As such, socialism was an expression of capitalism, namely, an expression of the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production. As the advocacy of the social value of labor, socialism was an expression of the demands of the reconstitution of the bourgeois social rights of labor, namely, its social value.
The present is characterized not only by a political crisis of the global neoliberal order but al... more The present is characterized not only by a political crisis of the global neoliberal order but also by differing interpretations of the cause of this crisis: capitalism . If we are to interpret capitalism, we must also know how to change it.
Presented on a public panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, with speakers Dick Howard, Chris Nineham, Shane Mage and Leo Panitch, moderated by Clint Montgomery, May 23, 2020.
Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (C... more Presented at a Platypus Affiliated Society public forum panel discussion with Norman Markowitz (CPUSA) and Bertell Ollman at Columbia University on February 22, 2020.
Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another ... more Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds 1910-30 (Part 1)” with Aglaya K. Glebova and chair Florian Grosser with discussant Monica C Bravo.
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of “revolutionary” art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotsky’s Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible “revolutionary culture” actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.
MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as “bourgeois ideology.” This meant, first and foremost, radical bo... more MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as “bourgeois ideology.” This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. There’s little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine “ideology.” It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)
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Book description:
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.
The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned.
Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received?
Reviews:
“The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.”
— Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine
“Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized.
“If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions.
“Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.’
“This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.”
— Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs
“Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.”
— Todd Cronan, Nonsite
“The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.”
— Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain
“A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.”
— Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain
“Inspirational.”
— Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation’s many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism.
A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anyone interested in a socialist politics of freedom.
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.
This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.
For me, the question of the legacy of Karl Kautsky’s Marxism is not as a Marxist, but rather as the Marxist. He was the theorist, not of capitalism or socialism, but of the working class’s struggle for socialism, the social and political movement and most of all the political party that issued from this movement and struggle. Kautsky articulated the historical and strategic perspective and the self-understanding of the proletarian socialist party. He helped formulate the political program of Marxism -- the Erfurt Programme in which the German Social-Democratic Party became officially Marxist -- and explained it with particular genius. He was not a theorist of German socialism but rather of the world-historic social and political task of socialism, for the entire Socialist International.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF LENIN’S BIRTH, I would like to approach Lenin’s meaning today by critically examining an essay written by the liberal political philosopher Ralph Miliband on the occasion of Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970 — which was the year of my own birth.
The reason for using Miliband’s essay to frame my discussion of Lenin’s legacy is that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America magazine Jacobin republished Miliband, who is perhaps their most important theoretical inspiration, in 2018 as a belated treatment of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — or perhaps as a way of marking the centenary of the ill-fated German Revolution of 1918, which failed as a socialist revolution but is usually regarded as a successful democratic revolution, issuing in the Weimar Republic under the leadership of the SPD Social-Democratic Party of Germany. There is a wound in the apparent conflict between the desiderata of socialism and democracy, in which the Russian tradition associated with Lenin is opposed to and by the German tradition associated with social democracy, or, alternatively, “democratic socialism,” by contrast with the supposedly undemocratic socialism of Lenin, however justified or not by “Russian conditions.” The German model seems to stand for conditions more appropriate to advanced capitalist and liberal democratic countries.
Presented on a public panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, with speakers Dick Howard, Chris Nineham, Shane Mage and Leo Panitch, moderated by Clint Montgomery, May 23, 2020.
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of “revolutionary” art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotsky’s Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible “revolutionary culture” actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.
Book description:
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.
The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned.
Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received?
Reviews:
“The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.”
— Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine
“Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized.
“If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions.
“Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.’
“This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.”
— Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs
“Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.”
— Todd Cronan, Nonsite
“The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.”
— Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain
“A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.”
— Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain
“Inspirational.”
— Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation’s many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism.
A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anyone interested in a socialist politics of freedom.
Edited by Chris Cutrone
Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.
This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.
For me, the question of the legacy of Karl Kautsky’s Marxism is not as a Marxist, but rather as the Marxist. He was the theorist, not of capitalism or socialism, but of the working class’s struggle for socialism, the social and political movement and most of all the political party that issued from this movement and struggle. Kautsky articulated the historical and strategic perspective and the self-understanding of the proletarian socialist party. He helped formulate the political program of Marxism -- the Erfurt Programme in which the German Social-Democratic Party became officially Marxist -- and explained it with particular genius. He was not a theorist of German socialism but rather of the world-historic social and political task of socialism, for the entire Socialist International.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF LENIN’S BIRTH, I would like to approach Lenin’s meaning today by critically examining an essay written by the liberal political philosopher Ralph Miliband on the occasion of Lenin’s 100th birthday in 1970 — which was the year of my own birth.
The reason for using Miliband’s essay to frame my discussion of Lenin’s legacy is that the DSA Democratic Socialists of America magazine Jacobin republished Miliband, who is perhaps their most important theoretical inspiration, in 2018 as a belated treatment of the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1917 — or perhaps as a way of marking the centenary of the ill-fated German Revolution of 1918, which failed as a socialist revolution but is usually regarded as a successful democratic revolution, issuing in the Weimar Republic under the leadership of the SPD Social-Democratic Party of Germany. There is a wound in the apparent conflict between the desiderata of socialism and democracy, in which the Russian tradition associated with Lenin is opposed to and by the German tradition associated with social democracy, or, alternatively, “democratic socialism,” by contrast with the supposedly undemocratic socialism of Lenin, however justified or not by “Russian conditions.” The German model seems to stand for conditions more appropriate to advanced capitalist and liberal democratic countries.
Presented on a public panel discussion hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society, with speakers Dick Howard, Chris Nineham, Shane Mage and Leo Panitch, moderated by Clint Montgomery, May 23, 2020.
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of “revolutionary” art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotsky’s Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible “revolutionary culture” actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.