Chris Cutone's response to CPGB on Platypus Convention

Chris Cutone posted a comment to a re-post I did of Mike McNair's excellent analysis of the Platypus Convention. I thought it deserved more than just "comment status" no matter my disagreements with Platypus. Jay.

Chris Cutrone has left a new comment on your post "Platypus's "conversation" - a Marxist View":

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/letters.php?issue_id=873#1002432

I am writing to respond to Mike Macnair’s critique (‘Divided by a common language’, June 30) of my article on ‘The philosophy of history’ (June 9). . . .



On ‘imperialism’ and ‘authoritarianism’, I was concerned to show their interrelated character, which I sketched only in very broad outline: the general historical trend of post-1848 Bonapartism, all the way up to the present. As Marx and Engels put it, Bonapartism expressed a situation in which the capitalists could no longer and the workers could not yet rule society (see Engels’ 1891 introduction to Marx’s The civil war in France). I agree with Mike Macnair that, for example, Bukharin’s explanation of imperialism’s effect on the socialist workers’ movement, the political compromise of the metropolitan workers with respect to their national states, is better than the idea that they were economically ‘bought off’ (I disagree, however, that the latter was Lenin’s and Trotsky’s essential perspective). I agree as well that the virtue of such an emphatically political explanation is that it can account for similar phenomena in the periphery.

But this raises the issue of what I have called ‘authoritarianism’ or willing support for the status quo and hostility to alternatives, and the subjectivity for doing so, again. Why are the workers more often conservative, even virulently and self-destructively so, than not? The explanation of (some) workers’ support for fascism by reference to their peripheral character (ie, the unemployed or ‘lumpenised’) is what indeed ‘dodges the issue’. While the SPD and KPD’s refusals to fight a civil war against fascism in Germany in 1918-21 and circa 1933 may have been of decisive, conjunctural importance, this itself is what requires explanation (it also leaves aside the Italian case). It cannot be laid simply on bad leadership - on the parties’ bad decisions - without reference to the workers’ fear, or lack of support for better action, which was broken, however briefly, in Germany in 1918-19, but precisely as a civil war among the workers. The contrast of 1918-19 with 1933 could not be clearer: as Adorno put it, 1919 already decided what came later (see Those twenties Columbia 1998).

The issue of Hegelianism is a difficult one: how to include the ‘subjective factor in history’. I think this turns on how one understands Marx’s critique of Hegel. I don’t think that Marx’s reference to the ‘real’ is in an empiricist sense, but rather in Hegel’s sense of the actuality of the rational in the real. The issue turns on the relation of essence and appearance, or, with what necessity things appear as they do. What is essential is what is practical, and what is practical is subjective as well as objective. Theoretical reflection on the subjective must use metaphysical categories that are not merely handy, but actually constitutive of social practices in which one is a subject. The commodity form is not a generalisation from experience.

All of this, however, is largely beside the point regarding Platypus. For the conversation we seek to host is not between ourselves and others, but much more widely on the avowed left, and among those with far greater experience than what is available among our own members. We serve only to facilitate, even if we have to elbow our way in, provocatively, to make the space for such conversation, otherwise foreclosed. We consider the need for such conversation to be more ideological than practical at present.

I am glad that comrade Macnair recognises that Platypus may “serve a useful anti-sectarian purpose in near-future politics. It is also possible that it serves a useful political purpose by hammering home the bankruptcy of both the ‘anti-imperialist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ left.” This is precisely what we intend, though I think it is potentially much more. If Platypus does successfully what Macnair thinks it might, I for one will be happy to allow the “guide to history” through which we understand our own efforts to be considered a ‘useful myth’.