Marx, optimism, progress and regress

[Christopher Cutrone]

I am writing to share some thoughts, coming out of a recent conversation between Richard, Ben B. and me, in postmortem of the summer reading group on Marx and Marxism.

The point of our readings this summer has been to emphasize the seminal character of Marx's own thought. In this sense, Platypus seeks to make the case that we still live today in Marx's own moment.

This raises the issue of what we in Platypus call the "2nd International radicalism" of Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky.

More changed in the world between 1848 and 1914, I would argue, than has changed from 1914 to the present. Yet still Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky thought that the most adequate and radically emancipatory critique of the modern society of capital that was available was Marx's circa 1848. Certainly, if they felt no reason to try to revise Marx, then why would we?

As Lenin put it in the reading we are doing at the end of the summer, his 1914 encyclopedia entry on Marx, that the crisis of Marxism circa the turn of the 20th century to 1914, saw two choices, "revisionism" and "orthodox (radicalism)" we might, at first glance, question Lenin's casual, simple identification of orthodoxy with radicalism. -- Certainly, an Eduard Bernstein-style "revisionist" would have argued that enough had changed between 1848 and 1900 or 1914 to have made "orthodoxy" (they would have called it the sectarian "dogmatism" of Luxemburg et al.) beside the point.

So our point is to question why, as Korsch put it in his 1923 essay on "Marxism and Philosophy," a "transformation" of Marxism, by Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, would have gone on under the "peculiar guise of a return to the original or pure Marxism" of Marx.

For this speaks to the essence of the Platypus project, which is our "hypothesis" (contra Badiou and Zizek's "communist hypothesis," our "Marxist hypothesis") that only a "return to the original or pure Marxism" (of not only Marx and Engels, but also Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, via Lukacs and Korch's attempted exegesis of this, followed by Benjamin and Adorno) can lead to an emancipatory consciousness of the present.

So, then the question is, in what ways do we still inhabit Marx's own moment? In what ways has less changed since 1914 than between 1848-1914, and in what ways have the changes from 1848 to the present not made the Marxism of 1848 and its aftermath irrelevant, but retained its relevance to the present?

This is how we read Marx and the Marxists.

-- Chris