This summer at Philosophy Portal we are hosting machine learning expert and Girardian theorist Thomas Hamelryck, as well as singularity theorist and philosophical critic Nikola Danaylov for a two-month investigation of the historical context of artificial intelligence. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Singularity Summer

Quadruplicity of Artificial Intelligence

During the first four weeks of Singularity Summer, Thomas Hamelryck introduced us to the coordinations for thinking philosophically about the age of artificial intelligence. These coordinates can be described as a quadruplicity between:

1. de-anthropomorphising artificial intelligence/machine learning from its frequent analogies to human consciousness, as well as outlining the importance of both the application of artificial intelligence to the worlds of bits (digital), and the worlds of atoms (physical);

2. outlining the antagonism and conflict between modern technology creating a hyper connected world and the ancient human being that finds itself challenged by an unprecedented level of social complexity;

3. deconstructing the use of the term “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) as a master signifier that is at best ambiguous, and at worst a poorly defined concept blocking our capacity to think about the relation between AI and human nature; and finally

4. demarcating what contemporary machine learning technology (LLMs) can do, what they cannot do, and what the future of artificial intelligence technology might achieve with the incorporation of a richer understanding of the nature of human behaviour and consciousness.

Thomas Hamelryck

Thomas Hamelryck is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen with a full professor position in machine learning and high dimensional biological data analysis shared at the Department of Biology and the Department of Computer Science (Programming Languages and Theory of Computation section, PLTC). He is a specialist in Bayesian modelling and probabilistic machine learning. Currently, his research mostly focuses on probabilistic machine learning applied to protein structure prediction and protein evolution. He is also a Girardian theorist who has published two texts in Philosophy Portal’s Abyssal Arrows (2023) and Writing For (a) First Cause (2025) anthologies.

1. De-anthropomorphisation and Split World (bits/atoms)

Hamelryck emphasises that the current phase of artificial intelligence (broadly defined as technology that “mimics human behaviour”), is in the wake of the neural network paradigm of machine learning (as a subset of AI techniques using statistical methods to enable machines to improve with experience). He notes that machine learning algorithms operating via the neural network paradigm is both a breakthrough offering a new level of abstract power with practical applications to both the world of bits (e.g. ChatGPT, language language models (LLMs), etc.), and the world of atoms (e.g. AlphaFold, protein-folding problem, etc.); but it is also often thought of in obscuring and mystifying ways due to our tendency to anthropomorphise a technology that has nothing to do with human nature. His principle example of this tendency to anthropomorphise machine learning technology is the breakthrough represented in “the attention mechanism”1 — crucial for both machine learning applied to bits and atoms — which is often conceived of as homologous to human attention (as if now machine learning software is phenomenologically capable of giving attention to us or each other in the way humans can give attention). In reality, machine learning software, according to Hamelryck, actually has no capacity for attention homologous to human conscious capacity for attention, it is rather just a misleading technical name used to describe models that are capable of “dynamically weighing the importance of different parts of an input sequence when processing data or making predictions, rather than treating all elements equally”.2

The real main consequences for humans of this current phase of artificial intelligence, is not human extinction or large-scale replacement of human beings with machines capable of evolving beyond biology, but rather the emergence (explosion) of a new abstract power.3 For Hamelryck, he thinks of this “abstraction explosion” as analogous to previous abstraction explosions, like the emergence of writing, the printing press, telecommunications, or the internet. He suggests that the main consequence of this in the coming years will be a large-scale eradication of many white collar jobs that overly rely on mental repetitions, but also, for those who understand and adapt to the way this technology has disrupted traditional sectors and institutions, an opportunity for the emergence of new forms of labour, and in general new human capacities. In short, Hamelryck’s understanding of the machine learning revolution is situated in the challenge of inventing new ways of working and being in relation to this technology, while at the same time avoiding collapsing this technology into a category that represents a fundamental existential threat in any immediate sense. Moreover, he thinks we require more recognition but also more thinking about how this technology is not only and will not only be applied to the digital world (bits), but also how this technology is and will be applied to the physical world (atoms).

For more on the basics of machine learning with Thomas Hamelryck, see:

2. Modern Technology meets the Ancient Human

Hamelryck’s formal work centres the nature of machine learning, but his informal work centres the philosophy and anthropology of René Girard.4 In his thinking the earth is now totalised by a global network powered by artificial intelligence, but the actual embodied forms of consciousness that inhabit this global network, is in terms of behaviour and consciousness basically the same as it has been for tens of thousands of years. As a result, Hamelryck suggests that we must pragmatically understand and reconcile ourselves to the nature of the human being itself, and most importantly the nature of human desire. The central idea that he emphasises is the deconstruction of the romantic myth of individual desire, that deep down our desires spring from an authentic and core true self; in contrast to this myth, he operates via the axiom that “desire is the desire of the other” (i.e. the truth of desire is relationally de-centred), that we desire what others’s desire, and that we ourselves become a model for other peoples desire.5

Throughout his work, Hamelryck refers to Girard’s model of the triangulation of desire, abstracted from the psychoanalytic Oedipal constellation — child-father-mother — and represented more generally between subject-mediator-object. In this model, subjective desire for X object is always operating in relationship to an idealised mediator that is presupposed to have a special relationship to the object of desire itself (even if this presupposition is false, it still socially functions as illusion). The key to Hamelryck innovation with Girardian theory is the way he situates it in relation to the global digital network, which has brought all “ancient humans” into higher order proximity to both subjective mediators presupposed to have the object-cause of desire, as well as scarce objects of desire. In the past, for example, extremely wealthy or famous people were at a “safe distance” from “common people”, but today, you may have many “friends” on your social media feed who are either extremely wealthy or famous, and this leads to an intensification of what Girard would call mimetic rivalry.

In Hamelryck’s view, this system outlines the core purpose of religion as an ancient social technology for preventing mimetic escalation (aggression, violence) between subjects in close proximity to mediators presupposed to have the object-cause of desire. Our struggle today (post-1945), he suggests, is that we no longer have social technologies like religions (with a special emphasis on Christianity) to create a sharp boundary between “ordinary time” (the time of prohibition and limit), and “ritual time” (the time of transgression and ecstasy), in order to mediate the violence and aggression of the ancient (“pagan”) human.6 In the same way that the 20th century was subject to the industrial scale violence of fascism and communism, he suggests that 21st century risks falling into a “digital apocalypse” driven hyper-connectivity leading to escalating and insoluble mimetic conflicts. To combat the risk of “digital apocalypse”, he thinks that we will have to reconcile ourselves to the nature of the ancient human, and start learning how to navigate the boundaries between ordinary and ritual time, not in the context of the ancient religions, but in the context of our contemporary social networks.

3. Deconstructing AGI as Master Signifier

Hamelryck relies on the work of Andrew McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, in order to bring his Girardian understanding of the dynamic between humans and AI, into a deeper relation to an analysis of the contemporary discourse about artificial intelligence. His starting point is that the concept of “Artificial General Intelligence” — in contrast to the specialised AIs that are currently being developed — functions as a “Master Signifier”. He gives examples of tech CEOs, like Sam Altman, who refers to AGI as both a superintelligence for a glorious future, accelerating scientific discovery and innovation, economic abundance and prosperity; as well as refers to AGI as a potential existential threat to humanity as a whole, destined to obliterate the human species and overtake us in the evolutionary process. Hamelryck’s key idea is that “AGI” functions in our discourse as a “protean” figure: both an extreme benefactor, and a dangerous adversary; all-powerful, and yet deeply flawed; humanity’s destination, but also its end; making humanity more capable, but also revealing all of our lacks. As it relates specifically to the notion of “AGI”, it is both poorly defined and a fixed concept, forever on the horizon as a deferred reality, structuring endless conversations mediating reflection on the ultimate nature of the human condition. From this perspective, AGI as a Master Signifier functions as a non-rational “ground of truth”, our single ultimate reference point foundation and origin (like the way “God”, “Reason”, or “History” have functioned for philosophers and theologians in the past).

In this context, he notes, following McKenna, that Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, referred to writing as a “pharmakon” (the ambiguous unity of a remedy and a poison), and that the Platonic texts themselves, are rigorously dedicated to revealing this ambiguous nature of writing.7 If both writing and AI represent “abstraction explosions”, then perhaps we can today think about AI in the same way that Plato thought about writing, as a “pharmakon”. It is perhaps beyond questioning that AI today makes the modern human both more powerful, and at the same time, existentially sick; gives us new mind-boggling creative capacities, but at the same time, perhaps poisons our life and our social relations; both opens up new avenues for work, and at the same time, destroys entire life worlds. The final idea that Hamelryck develops here is the relation to Girard: that AGI functions as our newest “mimetic double”: it speaks like us, appears to reason like us, produces similar art, text, code, and in the end, competes for our roles and jobs. For a Girardian interpretation of AI, what is often referred to as the “alignment problem” — of bringing AI into “alignment” with “human values”8 — is actually the problem of minimising the human temptation to enter into mimetic rivalry with its doubles. Here Hamelryck also play with psychoanalytic themes of “death drive”: AGI is a mimetic double that we can never defeat, but that threatens to always defeat us.

4. Beyond LLMS, the Future of AI

Hamelryck does not give into the temptation to rigorously define the concept of AGI, nor to prophesize about the actuality of its future, but he does clearly delimit the nature of machine learning large language models from artificial intelligence in general, and outlines what we might expect from the future of the field. The first thing to note is that LLMs are being trained on human language, and not being trained on the world itself. This means that LLMs are fundamentally limited in relation to human beings, insofar as they are, Hamelryck claims, “twice removed” from the world (both in terms of immediate sensation of phenomena, as well as the limit-power of bodily causality). He furthermore notes that, in terms of their actual mental capacities, they are mostly designed to function based on the logic of induction (pattern recognition) and compression (low dimensional space of representation); and has yet to really be trained to function on the basis of deduction (deriving conclusions from known facts), abduction (intuition or guessing), causality, self-consistency, and also generally lack memory (history), a world-model, teleology (direction, purpose), and phylogeny (evolutionary history).

Hamelryck’s closing ideas revolve around the “revenge of philosophy”.9 In short, what the revenge of philosophy means for Hamelryck is that the technical fields of artificial intelligence still lack an understanding of the most fundamental questions, i.e. the most fundamental questions are still within the domain of philosophical cognition and reflection. At the same time, old philosophical problems and ideas are now becoming engineering problems and ideas, and engineering problems and ideas are being confronted by philosophical limits to our capacity to know and understand. He suggests that, in the mixture of engineer and philosophy, we will likely see the replacement of LLMs with machines that also possess a world model and additional elements of intelligence that are still excluded from our most advanced machine learning programs. He speculates that the future development of artificial intelligence will have to reconcile with an understanding of intelligence that is not purely based on predictability, but rather incorporate into itself a relationship to uncertainty and indeterminacy. For this task, Hamelryck often relies on thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy,10 and specifically the idea that general intelligence is a process involving our capacity to re-organise our world model when the world itself transgresses our existing model (as is happening to us all now within the abstraction explosion of AI itself).

Narrative of AGI-Apocalypse as Political Choice

The Human Story and the Challenge of Indeterminacy

This August we will be continuing our investigation of the historical context of artificial intelligence with singularity theorist and philosophical critic Nikola Danaylov. Danaylov has dedicated his life to “interviewing the singularity” via his website, blog and channel Singularity Weblog. In his contributions to Singularity Summer he is focused on the human being in the context of our nature as story tellers. His work will specifically highlight the way in which our scientific narratives, whether based on physics or artificial intelligence, are built around the notion of determinism. As a result, we often find ourselves in discussions about the future of AI/AGI as if the technological future is inevitable, already determined, reducing the human to an irrelevant part of a larger machine. Danaylov critiques this general consensus and aims to help us think from the challenging perspective that the future is not already determined, that our fates are not already sealed by the future dominated by an advanced machine intelligence destined to overtake us.

Future live sessions with Danaylov:

1. Sunday August 2nd / Session 5: The Nature of Story w/ Nikola Danaylov

2. Sunday August 16th / Session 6: The Human Story w/ Nikola Danaylov

3. Sunday August 23rd / Session 7: Capitalism, Politics, Technology as Story w/ Nikola Danaylov

4. Sunday August 30th / Session 8: Rewriting the Human Story w/ Nikola Danaylov

To preview our month with Danaylov, check out the interview I conducted with him as a pre-course material:

To get access to the four recorded sessions with Hamelryck as well as the four live sessions with Danaylov, see:

Singularity Summer

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

Previous articles in the first part of this series:

Part 1: Commentary on The Death of the Millennial Left

1. How to Approach “Marxism” and the Possibility of “Post-Marxism”?

2. On Black Holes and Socialist Unity

3. The Fantasy of Sanders Socialism and the Bitter Pill of Trump’s Revolution

4. International Structure of Marxist Death Drive

5. Black or White Skin, Capitalist Masks?

0. Is Cutrone a Cult Leader? (The Cult to The Party)

It is not uncommon for people to say something like: “Chris Cutrone is a Cult leader”, in a way that suggests he is “corrupting the youth” (almost as if he is some kind of “Socratic Marxist”). But for whatever reason I don’t care, perhaps because he seems to be operating above the level that I have associated with the Cult. At the same time, since leaving the university and pursuing work in attempting to create the backbone of a para-academic network, it has been difficult for me to avoid the phenomenon of “Cult leaders”, up to a point including my own positionality as a Cult leader, even if I quite ferociously try to resist such positionality. For example, my work with pyrotheologian Peter Rollins and his idea of the “Church of Contradiction”,1 often confronts me with the reality of Cults. How is Rollins not a Cult leader for the future of an atheistic Christianity?2 More to the point, are not Cults an inevitable result of attempting social life outside of a formal institutional setting? Or are formal institutional settings themselves Cults that are simply not recognised as Cults? If so, the question that interests me the most, is not whether or not someone is a Cult leader, but rather: what are the ethics of Cults and the people who are perceived to be their leaders? And perhaps even more importantly: what is the relationship between a Cult and a political Party like the one that Cutrone is trying to conjure in his mission to overcome global capitalism?

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the ethics of being a Cult leader is incredibly tricky because the Cult leader is working with transference outside of the clinic.3 We might recall that this work is susceptible to what Freud would refer to as “wild psychoanalysis”,4 i.e. irresponsible and quackish uses of psychoanalytic ideas that have nothing to do with an actual analytic process capable of navigating Oedipal triangulation and, in a Lacanian frame, traversing the fundamental fantasy.5 It was indeed the phenomenon of “wild psychoanalysis” which forced Freud to found the International Psycho-Analytic Association, as a way to legitimise the practice of analysis and take responsibility for its powers.6 Perhaps we should also recall that it was the normativity of the International Psycho-Analytic Association, that would cause the split between the second generation of Freudians, and Lacan, who saw the association as betraying Freud’s discovery of the death drive, and rather instituting “ego psychology” via the “reality principle”.7 In this context, what would Freud or Lacan think about Peter Rollins work — which attempts to form a theological communion informed by analytic ideas and practices? Is it a genuine innovation of analysis beyond the analytic clinic (embedding the death drive in a theological context?), or is it wild psychoanalysis, in the pejorative sense? Should we embrace wild psychoanalysis as a progressive use of analytic methods and knowing against institutional formalisation? Or should we stick to the traditional of institutional formalisation against the chaos of methodological interpretation? Perhaps there is an in-between?8

While we can say with certainty that Cults and Cult leaders are in a sense the anti-thesis of psychoanalysis, we cannot simply discard with the problem that Cults and Cult leaders present. The problem of Cults and Cult leaders necessarily persists beyond analysis because analysis cannot cover the entire social field. In other words, analysis cannot be the big Other in the form of a method and practice that overdetermines the coordinates of human social life towards an end in which all human adults have risen to its challenge. Perhaps this is why Freud referred to analysis as one of the “impossible” professions (along with education and governing).9 What psychoanalysis shares with education and politics is that it is attempting to work with the truth on the level of subjectivity, and we cannot completely resolve the historical problem of the truth via analysis, education, or governance, there is always a way in which: The Truth Speaks of Itself (independent of an analyst, an educator, or a politician).10 From a Freudian perspective jokes, dreams, and slips of the tongue cannot be institutionalised, but are rather the very social material that open the capacity for new social links, and in the process, new Cults and Cult leaders.

Freud’s ‘true son’, Lacan, struggled throughout his career with the process of institutionalisation, whether it was being ex-communicated, or whether it was breaking apart and establishing new institutional processes, which are now caught in the loop of psychoanalytic critique.11 Lacan seems to suggest that, in this situation, we are doomed to “wild transference”12 constituted by the psychotic phenomenon known as “Acting Out”, which he refers to as a “stage machinery”.13 In “Acting Out”, the subject dramatises — repetitively — an unconscious desire directed towards a figure of symbolic (paternal) authority, but without submission to symbolic (paternal) interpretation.14 I have come to think that this behaviour has been repetitively enacted, sometimes by Lacanians, towards philosopher Slavoj Žižek (perhaps because they are disappointed with his outsized influence in their field). Lacan thinks of this as a foreclosure of the paternal signifier15 or the “Name-of-the-Father”16 — its exclusion,17 as opposed to its working-through — and a reduction and a regression to the “mother-child” dyad,18 or rather the “primal affirmation”.19 The subtitle to the chapter in Lacan’s seminars in which he describes this phenomenon — Letting oneself drop and getting up on the stage20 — gives one the image of a subject that has lost the capacity for real symbolic mediation, and instead opts to dance for the approval of a mother. As a result, both Lacan, as well as contemporary analysts, struggle to resolve the issues produced by psychosis within the realm of Freud’s talking cure.21

Irrespective of what we think of psychoanalysis as an institution, or the social phenomenon of the Cult, confronting the phenomenon of psychotic foreclosure is basically an inevitability in the formation of any social space — especially today, when there has already been a complete breakdown and exclusion of the paternal signifier — raising the question of how a Cult leader is to deal with it ethically? If human social life is to have a space outside of formal institutions, or if we are to re-asses our relationship to formal institutions as Cults, do we not need to confront the phenomenon of the Cult and its ethics? Why not embrace the challenge? As suggested above, are not formal institutions, up to and including the International Psycho-Analytic Association, non-cult cults, the hegemony of bureaucratic administrative solutions — governed by “ego psychology” and the “reality principle” — located precisely in the locus where human beings are unable to deal with the vicissitudes of wild transference and their social effects? Moreover, if the generations are becoming progressively under-socialised (hopefully peaking with Gen Z) — becoming prone to immediate explosions of psychotic jouissance, unmediated and unreflective madness — how is social life to progress at all without taking on the challenge of the Cult? Is this why I don’t care when people tell me that Chris Cutrone is a Cult leader? Maybe I think he is a “good” Cult leader? Maybe following a “good” Cult leader, like Peter Rollins, is superior to thinking that one is leading a “revolution” by “Acting Out” as an individual untethered from an actual community? How might this effect one’s ability to think the relation between community and nation?

What does Hegel tell us about Cults?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we find Hegel’s most in-depth reflections on the Cult in the Religion section of the Phenomenology of Spirit.22 From the very beginning of Hegel’s mediation of the idea of the Cult, we find an interpretation that is implicitly but deeply indebted to both Christianity as a “revealed religion” and the Protestant revolution, in which the “priesthood of all believers” forms the ground for an “invisible church”:23

“In the Cult, the self gives itself the consciousness of the divine Being, which formerly was not actual but only an object over against it, through this act receives the actuality proper to self-consciousness.”

In pre-Christian religions, the divine Being is an “object over against” the subject; but in Christianity, the divine Being “receives the actuality proper to self-consciousness” (i.e. God becoming Man). The question for Protestantism and German Idealism is the question of the History of this process in our actual social mediation. For Hegel, he makes sense of this History in the interplay between an abstract universality of the Beyond and a concrete singularity or individuality united with reality:24

“The divine Being has in this the meaning of a free object; through the actual Cult, this object returns into the self; and insofar as it has, in pure consciousness, the meaning of the pure divine Being dwelling beyond reality, this Being descends from its universality, through the mediation of the Cult, into individuality, and thus unites itself with reality.”

Considering that our spontaneous relation to the idea of a Cult is often imbued with a negative significance, as a dogmatic capture into unjust authority; Hegel seems to relate to the idea of a Cult — especially one informed by the aforementioned dimensions of Christianity — as absolutely essential for contact with reality, almost as if the Cult were the highest reality, or perhaps, the vehicle of mediation through which a subject could come to have contact with the highest reality.25

However, entrance into this highest reality is not attained without paying a price. As Christians know, the price Christ paid for entrance is not only death, but a painfully violent and unjust death, a death by thorns and nails, a death at the hands of an enormously powerful centralised power supported by an angry and blind mob. What this story points towards is key to the ethics of the space of Cult formation, in which not only the members, but the leader Himself, must reckon with the emotional reality of powerlessness. Hegel articulates the dynamic as follows:26

“The act of the Cult itself begins, therefore, with the pure surrender of a possession which the owner, apparently without any profit whatever to himself, pours away or lets rise up in smoke. In so doing, he renounces before the essence of his pure consciousness all possession and right of the property and enjoyment thereof, renounces personality and the return of his act into himself; and he reflects the act into the universal, or into the divine Being, rather than into himself.”

The paradox here is one that must be thought on the level of individuality or singularity: while the passage from abstract universality to concrete singularity is one that moves through the individual, this movement is at the same time the complete loss of self-interest in oneself for the universal. One could say something like the responsible Cult leader selflessly sacrifices his being and personality for the universal (kenosis).27 But what is the nature of the Cult as a universal? For Hegel, it is nothing but an act of devotion without outer existence (i.e. not under the gaze of the big Other),28 and with inner feasting qua the common task of enduring devotion:29

“For the rest, though this Cult is in fact an act, its meaning yet lies mostly in devotion. […] The Cult, therefore, goes further and replaces this defect [of outer existence], in the first instance by giving its devotion an enduring objective existence, since the Cult is the common task — or the individual task for each and all to do — which produces a dwelling and adornments[.]”

Hegel calls such a Cult an “ethical nation” which has been achieved “of its own self” and thus produces a self-consciousness “satisfied in its essence”.30 He likens the Cult in this state to a “festival” which “lays the foundation” for “revelation”.31 However, what precisely is revealed, for Hegel, appears to be the opposite of the Cult. In a dialectical fashion that strikes straight to the core of Hegel’s Phenomenology — as a play with the negativity of self-certain identitarian forms that become their opposite — he ends up calling the results of Cults to be “no longer the actual practice of the Cult”, but rather the form of the “assembly of national Spirits” which constitute:32

“a circle of shapes which now embraces the whole of Nature as well as the whole ethical world”

We might say that: the formation of Cults — as a plurality, as a multiplicity — are constituted by a deeper negativity in the field of Cults as such, and that this is what modern peoples call the Nation, or the State as such. In the context of Hegel’s political works, the Philosophy of Right, we could say that the Cult is located on the level of Community (above Family),33 whereas the the field of Cults are themselves organised around the negativity of the State (which is itself organised around the negativity of the International).34

And so: Hegel seems to be telling us that Cults are necessary for Community; but insufficient for the problem of the Nation(-State). Perhaps in this in-between space, the space between the need for Community and the problem of the State, we find not only the Cult, but also “The Party” in the modern political sense of the term, defined by Cutrone as the:35

“crisis of bourgeois society in capital after the Industrial Revolution and the failure of the “social republic.”

Moreover, in the absence of any social form like “The Party” capable of resolving the antinomy between the State in capital, what we find is simply the problem of bureaucratic administrative solutions on the level of State, and the real of Family and Community breaking down into under-socialised subjectivity. This under-socialised subjectivity becomes prone to “Acting Out”, submitting to the immediacy of psychotic jouissance as a primal affirmation, and opposed to the mediation of a paternal signifier (whether on the level of the Cult, or the Party, or the Nation, or beyond).

Perhaps, then, in this “dead time”,36 we need Cults and Cult leaders? Perhaps in the negativity of Cults and Cult leaders as a multiplicity, we find an indispensable ground from which we might one day form “The Party” capable of resolving the antinomy between the need for Community and the problem of the State in capital? Perhaps not.

In either case, here we find something intriguing, insofar as Hegel tells us that what is accomplished by the Cult — “the relation of the divine to the human”37 — is lost in the State (which might be conceived as something like a ‘Dead God’ on a “march” “in the world”).38 This antagonism, is perhaps something that could be thought in relation to Cutrone’s socialist idea, and idea of socialism, that Lenin forces us to maintain the non-identity of “The Party” and “The State” (as well as the non-identity of “society”, “The Party” and “The State”).39

In order for the human individual — qua possibility of a concrete singularity reaching contact with reality — to maintain his or her relation to the divine, one must maintain the non-identity of “The Party” qua Cult resurrecting the divine human, and “The State” qua Dead God as bureaucratic administrative apparatus in the anarchism of global capitalism. So why is the contemporary Left unable to conceive of any political solution to contemporary capitalism without taking refuge in a Dead God? Is the Left hoping to resurrect this Dead God?40 If so, does resurrection pass through the cross and emerge on the other side as something other to the State (i.e. Holy Spirit), or something inclusive of the State but beyond the State?41 More to the point: why can the Left only attempt a politics trapped in the oscillation of capitalist politics without a real vector for the political goal of socialism? And why did the Millennial Left die without positive result? Did they forget the cross in the equation for resurrection? Did they really seek to reify the State as a Dead God?42 Or does the State need to be resurrected in the context of a real Internationale?43

What does our “dear leader” Cutrone think?

1. The Political Goal of Socialism

The central goal of Marxism seems on the surface to be one that struggles with the Žižekian philosophical problem of “immanent antagonism”,44 in the sense that it seeks to overcome a specific form of antagonism (class antagonism), but is unable to conceive of and work with the forms of antagonism that may be necessary to realise socialism, up to and including self-reflection on the antagonisms that constitute the working class itself (say sexual, racial, or religious antagonisms).45 For classical Marxist theory, class antagonism is not only primary in capitalism, but once overcome, seemingly an opening to a non-antagonistic state, a true cosmopolitan international. For Marx, “communism” is the “positive transcendence” of “human self-estrangement”, “communism” is the “complete return of man to himself as a social being”, a “fully developed humanism”, a “genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man”, and “between the individual and the species”.46 In this context, for Marx:47

“Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”

Consider the following well-known Marxist axiom:48

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

While of course aspirational and inspirational, how deeply can we still follow these ideas without losing contact with the real of the human species-being? Is there not an aspect of this humanist Marx that cannot but be perceived as a form of psychotic “stage machinery”, a form of “Acting Out” a primal affirmation qua “positive transcendence” of all historical conflict and antagonism? Moreover, are not the antagonisms which Marxism treats as epiphenomenal (sexual, racial, religious), themselves not the antagonisms which constitute the ground of national political projects that are perhaps overlooked in the context of forming an international capable of addressing class antagonism? Is the Marxist international impotent precisely because it avoids these problems in treating them as epiphenomenal?

Today, and more to the point, while much socialist thought-energy is directed towards the problem of living in a capitalist society whose very productive force is based on class antagonism; little thought-energy has been mobilised to conceive of whether or not antagonism will persist immanently beyond capitalism. In other words, assuming it is at all possible to overcome class antagonism as the driver of capitalist productivity, is it that class antagonism will be overcome for a non-antagonistic free development of all? Or will the form of antagonism simply shift towards a different productive (or reproductive) social tensions of the species-being? What might an honest look at the present symptomal coordinates of social reality tell us?49 Are these symptomal coordinates merely the mark of global capitalism? Or are they indicators of deeper antagonisms that will persist in its hypothetical beyond? These questions are relevant for Marxism, not only because “progressive capitalism” raises them in a confused way already (woke ideology, etc.), but because, as Cutrone states:50

“The revolution, in Marxist terms, does not produce an emancipated society ready-made, but only, perhaps, political forms through which emancipatory social transformation, otherwise blocked by capitalism, might be pursued and developed further.”

Here we should pay special attention to the way that, after revolution, the problems do not end, but really only begin. Marxists in general should be more honest and open in thinking what these problems might entail. Thus, the revolution should be pursued under the idea that, after revolution, we could confront antagonisms of a deeper nature, perhaps intimately related to our species-being in a quality that historical humans have only intimated in a lower form.

During the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement, philosopher Slavoj Žižek would often provoke his audience with remarks along the lines of ‘see you in communism, or in hell’; but it is entirely conceivable that we could initially experience something like the establishment of communism through socialism from capitalism as a battle in hell itself (i.e. a deeper negativity than the one we experience under the social mediation of capitalism).51 The general stakes here represent the difference between the idea of communism as a deeper negativity: ‘war communism’ as a kind of ‘neurotic tarrying’ with the ‘symptoms’ of the ‘species-being’ towards an immortal drive; and the idea of communism as a positivist transcendent utopian conception: or a ‘psychotic’ ‘positivist affirmation’ of an ‘eternal’ ‘non-antagonistic’ ‘species-being’. Marxists have dreamed of a socialist-communist world beyond capitalism; but psychoanalysts and pyrotheologians know that the actualisation of our dreams is often experienced as a nightmare. I suppose the history of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century kind of proves this point better than anything else could.

Cutrone opens the “Lenin” section of Marxism and Politics with a critical analysis of the difference between Hegel and Marx’s understanding of freedom, with an emphasis that Hegel equalises the problem of “each” (singularity) and the “all” (universal), whereas Marx, as mentioned above, locates the problem of “each” (singularity) as a precondition for the “all” (universal).52 In other words, for Hegel, the realisation of the “all” (universal) implies the realisation of the “each” (singularity) (arguably resulting in his bourgeois “monarchical” vision); whereas Marx claims that the “all” (universal) is not realised unless “each” (singularity) is realised (arguably a prophetic vision necessitating the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat sublating bourgeois social life).53

From this foundation, for Cutrone, we find in Marxism the crucial challenge for modern bourgeois society: the transition from capitalist (neo-)liberalism to socialism.54 For Cutrone, this is not just Marxist politics, but politics itself as a phenomenon of capitalist modernity:55

““Politics” is a modern phenomenon. Modern politics is conditioned by the crisis of capital in modern history. Traditional civilisation, prior to the bourgeois, capitalist epoch, was subject to crises that could only be considered natural or divine in origin. Modern society is subject, for Marxists (as well as for liberals), rather, to human-made crisis thus potentially subject to politics. Bourgeois politics indeed responds to the permanent crisis of capitalism — in a sense, that’s all it does — but in inadequate terms, naturalising aspects of capitalism that should be regarded as changeable, but can only be so regarded, for Marxists, as radically and consistently changeable, from a proletarian or working-class socialist perspective. Thus, modern politics has been haunted by the “spectre of communism”, or socialism.”

Cutrone recognises that all of the critical questions related to this transition (which still haunt our present) are located in the period in-between 1848 and 1917, which curiously seems to attract very little political attention.56 We rather find ourselves stuck in a revolutionary imagination of politics from 1789 (a nationalist revolution), but already for Marx, this is insufficient due to the problems that appeared in the 19th century (forcing the question of an international revolution). From Cutrone:57

“For Marx, history presented new tasks in 1848, different from those confronting earlier forms of revolutionary politics, such as Jacobinism. Marx thus distinguished “the revolution of the 19th century” from that of the 18th. But where the 18th century seemed to have succeeded, the 19th century appear to have failed: history repeated itself, according to Marx, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.””

This distinction between the revolutionary imagination of 1789 and 1848 may structure two different political versions of death drive: liberal and Marxist, nationalist and internationalist.58 To bring us directly to the climax of the period 1848-1917, in Lenin and the Russian Revolution, for Cutrone, we find the “intrinsic relationship” of liberalism as a national project and socialism as an international project.59 Cutrone forwards the idea of this intrinsic relation in the capacity of socialism to “articulate and fulfill” the concerns of “liberalism with socialism”, in the “endorsement of self-determination against national oppression”.60 The very tricky logic in this Leninist political space is best represented with Hegel’s logic of the negation of the negation61 — a key influence for Lenin who re-read the Science of Logic preceding the revolutions of 191762 — in that Lenin cannot be conceived as an anarchist (simply doing away with nationalism and the State), and nor can he be conceived as a social democrat (simply using the State to socialise capital).63 In these strange coordinates, capitalist liberalism is not understood as free self-determination (“free markets”), but neither is State liberalism (non-identity of The Party and The State). Rather, for Lenin, the achievement of socialism is only possible via the dictatorship of the proletariat (an international workers phenomenon), that opens the possibility for self-determination (i.e. free development of “each” as a “condition” for the “free development of all”).64 This Leninist space is faithful to Marx and Marxism insofar as it aims to be at once more “practically internationalist” than than “cosmopolitan, free-trade liberals” whose internationalism is just the mediation of society by the commodity-form of capitalism (and not the regression to the idea of “socialism in one country”, or simply fascism).65

Today these coordinates are difficult if not impossible to identify, resulting in an oscillation of capitalist politics between two poles (market and state solutionism); and leaving the tensions that brought Marxism into international consciousness (1848),66 as well as the tensions that Marxism itself produced (1917),67 shrouded in obscurantism and mystery. To be clear, today we live under a kind of materialist economism and neoliberal objectivism which tells us “There Is No Alternative” (TINA), leaving us in endless oscillation in the left and right wings of capital.68 The strange thing, especially for those committed to re-learning Marxist history with Cutrone (qua Cult leader) and Platypus (qua Cult), is that this situation — materialist economism and neoliberal objectivism — mirrors the conditions that birthed Lenin (and Rosa Luxemburg) in the Second International, pointing them towards the Marxist politics of socialist revolution.69 Is the Cutronian/Platypus gamble that this history is doomed to repeat itself in the form of the Marxist death drive?

During the Second International (1900-1914), the legacy of a Marxist politics was led by socialist theorist Karl Kautsky, who tended towards a revisionist emphasis on Marxism as both a materialist economism and objectivistic metaphysics.70 This economism and objectivism placed a special emphasis on:

1. the condition of possibility for the transition from capitalism to socialism in a high level of industrial production in the capitalist core,

2. mixed with a certain evolutionary teleology about the inevitable emergence of socialism from the development of this very productive process.

This Kautskian-Marxist logic — the logic of capitalism to socialism — can be broadly conceived as repeating itself in our contemporary neoliberal era in the form of Sanders-style Millennial Left socialism on the level of the nation. However, with this emphasis on industrial production (i.e. the Fourth Industrial Revolution), and evolutionary teleology (i.e. inevitability of socialism), we should note that the underlying philosophy and metaphysics tends towards a certain de-emphasis on the possibility that new ideas and subjective organisation can not only change the world, but can bring about a more ideal world, a more free world. Today, the Marxist-Leninist possibility, dramatised historically in a break with Kautsky, that ideas and subjectivity can not only change the world, but bring about a more ideal world, is simply relegated to spiritual obscurantist circles with little connection to either national or international politics, i.e. it is relegated to Cults that have no notion or practical sense of the problem of modern party politics in global capitalism.71 In the Hegelian terms explored above, it is relegated to Cults that are brutally unaware of how the negativity of the Cult as such brings one to the multiplicity of the field of Cults orbiting the negativity of the State in capital.72

In contrast to Kautsky and the Second International, Lenin (and Luxemburg) attempted to counter what they perceived to be the “vulgar” political use of Marxism by returning to its “Hegelian roots” in an “idealism” that emphasised its “subjective” dimension.73 That is Kautsky’s materialist economism and objectivist metaphysics was juxtaposed with a Hegelian social idealism (the possibility of socialism) and pragmatic subjectivisation (the possibility of a dictatorship of the proletariat) that shifted emphasis on the potential historical cause of socialism. For Lenin and Luxemburg, the idea of socialism was no longer tethered to a certain industrial precondition, nor wedded to a deterministic evolutionary teleology. Rather, the idea of socialism was something enacted through the self-conscious realisation of the mission of the working class in History. Moreover, the powers of the Nation-State in capitalism had to face the self-realisation of the working class, the capacity of the working class to self-organise, to take matters into their own hands, and determine the future course of History. The break here between Kautsky and the Second International (as “revisionists”), and Lenin, Luxemburg and the Third International (as “orthodox”), was located in this difference.74 Is the Cutronian/Platypus gamble that a similar distinction can be forged within the antinomies of what remains of the Millennial Left?

As it relates to Marxist history, Lenin and Luxemburg can be framed as claiming that Kautsky was upholding an objectivist reification of a revisionist Marxism. Thus, Lenin and Luxemburg thought that the Second International was unable to reinvent itself in the real of History, unable to seize the moment to forward the necessity of emancipation presented to the working class in the context of a radical contingency: World War I (1914-1918). How relevant is this context for the failure of Sanders socialism, the Millennial Left, and the Forth Industrial Revolution as opening new forms of economic and political warfare?

What we should keep in mind here, is that this distinction between:

• Materialist economism (levels of industrial production) and social idealism (the possibility of socialism), and

• Objectivist metaphysics (socialism as evolutionary teleology) and pragmatic subjectivisation (the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat)

Was a distinction that I have highlighted in the past vis-a-vis Žižek’s own struggle with Marxism and the socialist states at the time of his graduate school work in the 1970s.75 Here it is simply worth revisiting the key points, highlighted with extreme clarity by philosopher, and one of Žižek’s longest collaborators, Mladen Dolar in his analysis of the origins of Žižek’s Marxism, that:76

• While mainstream State Marxism devoted itself to analysis based on material production for the foundation of revolutionary transformation; Žižek’s MA thesis emphasised the production of the human being in signifying practice as itself a form of structural materialism of the signifier;

• which results in the idea that symbolic structures and processes (signifying practices), like family and kinship networks, but also self-organising activities related to the self-consciousness of the working class (political parties, labour unions), were not limited to superstructural ideologies, but fundamental to the productive base77

In this context, it is not surprising that Žižek’s Marxism, like Cutrone’s, places an extreme emphasis on not only a critical view of Marxist theory, but also the key to the History of Marxism in Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This emphasis on the History of Marxism tends to positively isolate the break between Kautsky and the Second International, and the emergence of the Third International, which recognised the need for a deeper connection to Marxism’s “Hegelian roots” in the phenomenology and logic of subjectivity (opposed to reductions to materialist economism and objectivist metaphysics).

Back to Cutrone: we find that he emphasises Lenin and the Russian Revolution as possessing all the key questions for reconsideration of our political moment which, although similar to the time of the Second International, has yet to produce an analogy to the Third International, that is the subjectivised political action to stabilise a real vector from capitalism to socialism:78

“For this revolutionary moment raises all the questions, and at the most profound levels, of the problematic relationship between capitalism and democracy that still haunt us today.”

In other words, if one is truly feeling political impotence vis-a-vis neoliberal TINA-ism (the oscillation between state-and-market solutionism in capitalist politics); then the wager of Cutrone and Platypus seems to be that Lenin and the Russian Revolution does not contain the answer (the socialist solution) but rather the historical vector that gives real character to the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat (which, importantly, has never been realised as a sustained political force). In other words, we now believe in the “liberal death drive” of 1789 because we have seen its results stabilise politically; but we do not believe in the “Marxist death drive” of 1848-1917 because we have not seen its result stabilise politically, we rather remain haunted by its negativity.

What seems to be crucial and at issue here, and perhaps of extreme relevance to the Left in the degraded form of “progressivist capitalism” (woke ideology), is not only the notion that capitalism is itself a crisis, but that Marxism represents the advance of capitalist crisis.79 The question for those that “first cut their teeth” within the Second International (Lenin, Luxemburg),80 is the question, not of the growth of the capitalist crisis, but whether or not, in its growth, the crisis had been advanced (to socialism).81

One could say that Marxism is a force that deepens the crisis of capital in the form of the emergence of the self-consciousness of the working class itself as a product of the crisis of capital. In other words, it is wrong to think that the ‘fragmentation’ of the working class is an ‘advance’ in political analysis; it is rather that the ‘fragmentation’ is the ‘natural’ ‘primary’ condition of the working class in capitalism; and the question is whether or not this fragmentation can become a ‘socialist unity’ in the negativity of this fragmentation, with this fragmentation being seen as the political problem.

In the case that fragmentation can become socialist unity, this advance of capitalist crisis opens the potential for a kind of bootstrapping process in the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoise. Thus, even categories like proletariat and bourgeoisie should not be understood as given identities but rather as identities that emerge in the crisis itself, and pointing to the overcoming of both identities pushed to the extreme of their social contradiction. In this bootstrapping process the question of party politics vis-a-vis the capitalist State becomes the central dividing line between the emergence of early Marxist thought (pre-1848), and Lenin’s political interventions (1917):82

“the question of party-politics per se is a post-1848 phenomenon, in which modern socialism was bound up. In other words, the crisis of bourgeois society in capital after the Industrial Revolution and the failure of the “social republic” in 1848, was the crisis of bourgeois society as liberal. […] The rise of party-politics was thus a feature of the growing authoritarianism of bourgeois society, or, the failure of liberalism. As such, socialism needed to take up the problems of bourgeois society in capital that liberalism had failed to anticipate or adequately meet, or, to take up the cause of liberalism that bourgeois politics had dropped in the post-1848 world.”

Cutrone understands the problem of party-politics in this interval as the “problem of modern politics”, in which “political mediation was brought into being”, but has its own oscillation in the tendency towards the “party machine” serving the “modern society of capital” towards “oligarchy”,83 in contrast to “a new beginning for the true practice of politics”84 in keeping its own non-identity vis-a-vis labour unions.85 Thus, Cutrone’s Leninism understands the stakes of this question as whether or not party politics can forward the interests of the working class in its non-identity with both the capitalist State and labour unions and other civil society organisations.86 Since this Leninist theme of “non-relation” may be difficult to follow, I’ll represent it here:

• Labour unions ≠ Political parties ≠ Nation-States ≠ Society (as the question of Capital to Socialism on the level of the International)

Note here that we find a dialectical non-relation between not only labour unions and political parties, political parties and nation-states, but also nation-states and international society in capitalism itself. In other words, the model would suggest that these dialectical non-relations must be worked-through strategically and at all levels. While in our current politics capitalism oscillates without a real vector for socialism, this is because of the difficulty of navigating the non-relation between these different identities, ultimately towards a society that is not overdetermined by either Nation-States or global capitalism (its oscillation); but rather overdetermined by the dictatorship of workers self-organised in labour unions/civil society institutions, political parties attempting to take power of the State (from the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) to eventually dissolve the State, and return human Society to itself as free (perhaps for the first time). Today, in which modern politics is overdetermined by the capture of the Nation State under global capitalism, Cutrone reminds us of Marx’s warning about thinking socialism as capitalist reform, due to the fact that it will always be stigmatised:87

“Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is… stigmatised as ‘socialism’.”

Here we can easily see the social democratic reforms of, for example, a Bernie Sanders; or the proposal for wealth taxes by, for example, a Gary Stevenson, are violently resisted in this way (by the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie qua Democratic Party in the USA, or the Labour Party in the UK).88 This is why Cutrone maintains, with recourse to Marx, that there is no appetite for “bourgeois financial reform” in the oscillation between modern politics as capitalism and democracy, which, for Cutrone, brings us to the necessity of a truly Marxist-Leninist politics (which is not reducible to democracy, but rather presents the problem of revolution in the question of society under capitalism).

To close around the political goal of socialism, we must remember that the passage from Marx to Lenin is one bound up with the growing crisis of the need for socialism in the development of capitalism post-1848.89 And in the development of capitalism post-1848, the indeterminate and in-between crisis space of a social situation in which capitalists were “no longer able”, and workers “not yet able”, to master the bourgeois society of capital.90 Here the ‘dark question’ that haunts both capitalist liberals as well as Marxists, is one that orbits the possibility that, not only is no one in control, but also no one can control these processes (irrespective of the political form). Does that still leave us with the possibility that the workers can organise in a way, not to control global capital, but at least bring it towards a qualitative transition in a deepening possibility for new democratic results?

Cutrone notes that, while socialism is not synonymous with democracy, the importance of democracy is that it poses the question of society; and for Marxism, that question is capitalism.91 Here he reminds us that capitalism is not necessarily best conceived as a totalitarian or authoritarian structure, but rather already a grassroots movement, it is the question of society in the deepest sense (the self-interest of ‘each’ of its members).92 To conclude, the political goal of socialism, is the question of whether there is an alternative grassroots, and an alternative movement of the social body that allows for the overcoming of society dominated by capital. Lenin thought that this political goal was not an inevitable result of society in industrial capitalism, but a possible future, depending on the self-realisation of the working class. Do we agree with him, or not?

2. Lenin’s Socialist Politics

“Lenin remains as really the haunting presence, because Lenin is the controversial figure.

You know, Marx and Marxism. Marx is controversial, I guess. He is. I mean, he should be. Marx should be very controversial, but somehow Marx is neutralized. Somehow, Marx is never all that controversial. People are like, well, he was wrong, but he’s not controversial.

Lenin is controversial. Lenin’s the open wound of this history in a way that Marx is not. All right, Marx gets a pass. Lenin doesn’t get a pass. He gets either denounced or he gets celebrated, but in a way that basically suppresses him, by the Trotskyist and the Stalinists.” - Chris Cutrone93

“The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK - today, even on Wall Street, there are people who still love him: Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist’ dynamic; Marx of Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives. But Lenin - no, you can’t be serious! Doesn’t Lenin stand precisely for the failure to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the whole of twentieth-century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship?” - Slavoj Žižek94

Cutrone (and Žižek) maintain that Marxism’s relevance today actually depends on Lenin. The logic is something like, without Lenin, Marx and Marxism would have now been relegated to a historical curiosity of the 19th century. It is only because of Lenin, and the (failure of the) Russian Revolution, that Marxism as a question persisted into the 20th century, and persists for us today:95

“The question concerning Lenin is the question of Marxism.”

From this standpoint, Cutrone asks a “Žižekian-style question”, reversing the order of philosophical significance, from Marx to Lenin back to Marx:96

“there would be no discussing Marxism today without the role of the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. The relevance of Marxism is inevitably tied to Lenin. Marxism continues to be relevant either because of or despite Lenin. But what is the significance of Lenin as a historical figure from the point of view of Marxism?”

The absolute key for Cutrone regarding the “point of view of Marxism”, is the way the “dictatorship of the proletariat” functions as its absolutely central ‘heart’. Cutrone maintains that Marx considered the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat as “his only real and essential original contribution to socialism”.97 Thus, Lenin as a political actor under the point of view of Marxism, has to be judged based on how well he understood this concept, and how he positioned this concept in the political struggle and opportunity of his time: both in the context of the Nation State (Russia), but also in the context of the International. One of Cutrone’s key influences, Theodor Adorno, and specifically his book Negative Dialectics, is positioned by Cutrone to emphasise that the stakes of assessing Lenin from this point of view of Marxism, has been missed due to degeneration via “dogmatisation and thought-taboos”.98

Thus, if we are willing to clear these dogmas and taboos away, and enter Lenin’s politics as the ‘thing-in-itself’, we find that his politics was informed, not by a Darwinian notion of evolution, but rather a Hegelo-Marxist notion of evolution. Cutrone here quotes Lenin directly and at length:99

“In our times, the idea of development, of evolution, has almost completely penetrated social consciousness, only in other ways, and not through Hegelian philosophy. Still, this idea, as formulated by Marx and Engels on the basis of Hegel’s philosophy, is far more comprehensive and far richer in content than the current idea of evolution is. A development that repeats, as it were, stages that have already been passed, but repeats them in a different way, on a higher basis (“the negation of the negation”), a development, so to speak, that proceeds in spirals, not in a straight line; a development by leaps, catastrophes, and revolutions; “breaks in continuity”; the transformation of quantity into quality; inner impulses towards development, imparted by the contradiction and conflict of the various forces and tendencies acting on a given society; the interdependence and the closest and indissoluble connection between all aspects of any phenomenon (history constantly revealing ever new aspects), a connection that provides a uniform, and universal process of motion, one that follows definite laws — these are some of the features of dialectics as a doctrine of development that is richer than the conventional one.”

The core idea here is that Lenin did not conceive of evolution as linear and continuous, but as a spiral of non-linear discontinuities and ruptures.100 This idea of evolution informed the way Lenin conceived of his revolutionary politics as itself a discontinuity and rupture with the political past, and not a gradual continuous reform of the existing politics. Here, as suggested above, the specific “spiral” form that dominated Lenin’s self-consciousness was not the revolution of 1789 but the failure of 1848.101 The specific question for Lenin: had History progressed or regressed since 1848?102 This should be conceptualised in the aforementioned framing of Marxism as being brought to the surface by the crisis of 1848, whereas the crisis that Marxism itself forwards, can be represented in the form of the crisis of 1917. Cutrone’s suggestion is that, in-between 1848 and 1917, History could be conceived as both progress and regress: it was progress in the sense that bourgeois society had “become more itself than ever” (liberal cosmopolitan capitalism), but it was regress in the sense that bourgeois society “grew distance from its earlier achievements and undermined them” (the question of the possibility of a socialist international).103

The original contradiction of the crisis of 1848, the crisis bringing forth the necessity of Marxism, is the contradiction of the chaos of industrial production in capitalism, versus the progressive socialisation of that chaotic social being.104 Cutrone often maintains this central social contradiction in-between industrial production and bourgeois social relations; where industrial production is always framed as disrupting a certain stable set of bourgeois social relations, and where we (bourgeois subjects) are framed as always attempting to reconstitute our bourgeois social relations given their chaotic disruption in industrial production. The question is whether or not, in this specific social contradiction, the necessity of proletarian socialist unity emerges from its natural and primary fragmentation under the reign of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

The challenge that Cutrone isolates in this central social contradiction, following Lenin, is that in-between 1848 and 1917, there was not only a growth of industrial capital, allowing bourgeois society to become more fully itself as a cosmopolitan phenomenon, but also a growth in the “organisation and consciousness of the workers movement itself”.105 Cutrone, following Lenin and Luxemburg, notes that this growth of the workers movement itself, presents a new form of political crisis in the form of the need for revolution in the politics of capital.106 In other words, one could say that in-between 1848 and 1917, Lenin is the figure who recognised the growth of the workers movement in capital was creating a new condition of possibility, namely the condition that, perhaps, the Marxist idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, could now realise itself through an orthodox interpretation that paradoxically, not only reinvented Marxism, but opened the pathway to its beyond (to the actual challenges of socialist and communist politics). Does Cutrone and Platypus see the same emergence and potential in the failure of the Millennial Left?

If so, it is this context that we must process today, if we are to understand why it is so common for people to refer to Lenin as the “most controversial figure”, not only in Marxism, but, “perhaps all of history”.107 The level of controversy here cannot be overstated: can we really say that Lenin is more controversial than Robespierre or Jefferson, or Hitler or Stalin, or Ceasar or Genghis Khan? The reason why Lenin may stand out on the level of controversy, even in relation to all these political figures, is related to the simple fact that, Lenin’s work in the Russian Revolution was literally attempting to ignite a global revolution in the mode of production and the way of being human. This global revolution could only have been achieved after the emergence of capitalism as a dominant mode of production and bourgeois social life as a dominant mode of being human. Pre-Leninist political leaders either operated within slave conditions or adapted to capitalist conditions; and post-Leninist political leaders simply operated within the capitalist conditions. Only Lenin can be framed as identifying the locus of a potential global qualitative transformation of politics itself towards a horizon that would have been genuinely novel to History. As a result, Cutrone notes that Marxism is now internally divided most profoundly into Leninist and anti-Leninist tendencies.108

Cutrone suggests that it is a misconception to view Lenin as either aiming to “strip capitalist society of its veneer” or “assert the unadorned proletariat as be-all-end-all of society”.109 For Cutrone, we must conceive of Lenin as trying to fulfill the concerns of liberal capitalism with socialism in a way that the very terms bourgeois and proletariat would no longer be socially necessary.110 Lenin’s own self-consciousness of this movement was viewed as both in continuity and discontinuity with the Jacobins and the 18th century bourgeois revolution (1789).111 For Lenin, the continuity with the Jacobins can be found in the taking up of political transformation from the standpoint of bourgeois society; the discontinuity with the Jacobins can be found in the taking up of that political transformation as located in the workers movement for socialism.112 While we have previously emphasised the importance of discontinuity and non-linear evolutionary processes, the aspect of linear continuity should not be overlooked insofar as Lenin thought that politics within the working class “does not and cannot take place outside of bourgeois rights and politics” but is “inevitably and necessarily part and parcel of them”.113 At the same time, the discontinuity should also not be overlooked, insofar as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” in “liberal democracy” is fundamentally juxtaposed as an antagonist vis-a-vis the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in a “revolutionary workers state”.114

In Lenin’s fidelity to Marxism, the crisis of 1848, and the transformation of bourgeois society from the standpoint of the workers movement, his main aim was the preserve the possibility for politics within the working class.115 He committed to this direction by opposing the idea that labour unions should be subsumed under the State (making them tools for the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”);116 and instead claimed the need for workers to assert their rights against both party politics and the State.117 The critical distinctions that separate Lenin from both anarchism and social democracy can be found in these emphasises on the non-relation between labour unions, party politics and the State; as well as how he conceptualised there dialectical interplay beyond themselves. To frame this complex interplay in a sense: Lenin believed it was possible to overcome the need for State democracy (pro-anarchist ends; anti-socialist democracy); and at the same time, recognised the need for the democratic state posed by capital as a means and not to be simply (and impatiently) “wished away” (pro-socialist democracy as means, anti-anarchist).118 We could even frame this complex interplay via means and ends as follows:

• Means: socialist democracy via the State posed by capital

• Ends: anarchist, or a distributed International led by workers

Moreover, Lenin was not simply operating via a brutalist politics where the “means justify the ends”, Lenin was critical of the “infantile impatience” of “supposed radicals” who were unable to endure real “political mediation” under the “liberal conception of the state”.119 Here we must reflect more deeply on Lenin as conceiving of the State and the necessity of revolution under the logical model of the negation of the negation. Žižek frames Lenin’s negation of the negation vis-a-vis the State and revolution as follows:120

“the very space of Lenin’s unique intervention [is this] gap[:] the revolution must strike twice, and for essential reasons. The gap is not simply the gap between form and content: what the “first revolution” misses is not the content, but the form itself — it remains stuck in the old form, thinking that freedom and justice can be accomplished if we simply put the existing state apparatus and its democratic mechanisms to use. […] This is the Hegelian negation of negation: first the old order is negated within its own ideologico-political form; then this form itself has to be negated. Those who oscillate, those who are afraid to take the second step of overcoming this form itself, are those who (to repeat Robespierre) want a “revolution without revolution”[.]”

We can easily think of the leaders of “socialism in one country” (from Stalin to Mao) as precisely operating under the idea of a “revolution without revolution”. They claim “socialist content” but operate within the same “state apparatus” qua “old form”. It is here that we find the true radicality of Lenin’s politics, as well as his fidelity to Marx, in the sense that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is “not a national state”, but rather a “workers state at global scale”.121 Today, in capitalist politics, and to practically conceive of the difference, we obviously have nothing like a “workers state at global scale”, but rather a “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” in the form of structures like the World Economic Forum (WEF), or pseudo-internationalist politics. Instead of forwarding the interests of an international working class, the WEF is hosted in the “neutrality” of Davos, Switzerland and funded by multinational corporations — masking irreducible class antagonism — in order to coordinate elite bourgeois subjects in projects related to public-private (state-market) partnerships (oscillation of capitalist politics). The thought experiment we should run is located in the difference of motive involved for a “workers state at global scale” and how it would relate or work-through the contemporary Nation-State.

For example, in a recent discussion with conservative commentator Ross Douthat, democratic socialist Bhaskar Sunkara outlined his vision for a democratic socialist society through party political system of the United States (in the legacy of Bernie Sanders).122 Sunkara emphasised that democratic socialism in the short-term is a dialectic between the engine of capitalist profit and redistribution towards socialist ends; but that this dialectic itself points beyond itself in the international, towards a society no longer governed by capitalism.123 For Cutrone, this style of ‘democratic socialism’ is capitalist reform, and it is conceived as naive, for Cutrone, in regards to its aims for a society beyond capitalism, namely because is still completely dependent on capitalism as its ‘engine’ (qua mode of production).

However, the reason why we need such thought experiments is because, neither Marx nor Lenin have precise blueprints (or plans) for the realisation of emancipation. Does Cutrone and Platypus think that they have a blueprint or plan? For Marx and Lenin, we should remember, there is not a stable fixed recipe or step by step manual for realising a political phenomenon that has never existed.124 There is the principle and goal of “workers power” and “right to rule”,125 and there is the contingency of History in which political actors can pursue the “struggle for socialism” “in and through” the “workers movement itself” and their non-relation to the Nation-State.126 Now we can ask ourselves: what can we learn from thinking the actual contents of the attempt to actualise such a vision?

3. The Russian Revolution (as Thing-In-Itself)

“If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be considered the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union, but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.” - Encyclopaedia Britannica127

“Lenin succeeded because his appeal, while bypassing the Party nomenklatura, found an echo in what I am tempted to call revolutionary micro politics: the incredible explosion of grass-roots democracy, of local committees sprouting up all around Russia’s big cities and, ignoring the authority of “legitimate” government, taking matters into their own hands.” - Slavoj Žižek128

In the dialectics between “great men theories of history” and “grassroots movement theories of history” we should think about their dialectical unity: there are no great men of history without an authentic grassroots movements; and there are no successful grassroots movements without great leaders. In the context of the Russian Revolution, Lenin is not Lenin without the “micro-political” “grassroots movements” emerging in the major urban centres of Russia; and the “grassroots movements” emerging in the major urban centres of Russia could not have enacted a revolutionary gesture without a great statesman like Lenin. In a way we can conceive of the dialectical unity between the “great men” and “grassroots movement” as under the aforementioned distinction between means and ends, where Lenin or a “great man” can be thought of as a means towards an end (including a sacrifice of themselves towards their own end), in the realisation of a new mode of production and way of life.

To conceive of the same dynamic in the context of the Millennial Left and Right: Bernie Sanders is not Bernie Sanders, or Donald Trump is not Donald Trump, without their respective grassroots movements; and the grassroots movements around Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump could not have existed without either respective figure of the Millennial Left and Right (even if both movements existed within, and not charged with a vector beyond, capitalist politics, but rather various attempts at its reform).129 In a strange irony, the image of Lenin and the Russian Revolution is inspiring unlikely movements today, certainly not Sanders socialism nor Trump’s presidency, but rather the nativist movements in England.130 Carl Benjamin, a.k.a, Sargon of Akkad, recently used Lenin’s imagery and famous slogan “What Is to Be Done?”, not to inspire communist revolution in England, but rather to inspire the question of revolutionary leadership capable of, from the nativist point of view, restoring England back to the English against the tyranny of liberal immigration policies. This is requires deeper mediation insofar as Cutrone has often noted that one of the main symptoms of resistance in the Millennial Left’s capacity to think emancipatory politics, is precisely their resistance to thinking Lenin.131 Why would the Millennial Left abandon thinking Lenin, and contemporary Right-wing movements embrace Lenin?

Consider the following reflection from the opening Foreword to Marxism and Politics:132

“My two students who first summoned me to my role as teacher of the Millennial Left were themselves a bit older (graduate students), and came from an anarchist background. They commended my ability to transcend the “authoritarian” vs. “libertarian” divide — but quit Platypus when we came around to reading Lenin.”

Cutrone will reference examples like this to critique the Millennial Left for remaining within the coordinates of capitalist reform as socialism as opposed to truly struggling with the vector for socialism that has left its traces in history; for Cutrone (Cult leader) and Platypus (Cult), we find the Russian Revolution as the key study for a direction beyond capitalist politics:133

“The year 1917 is the most enigmatic and hence controversial date in the history of the Left. It is therefore necessarily the focal point for the Platypus philosophy of history of the Left, which seeks to grasp problems in the present as those that had already manifested in the past, but have not yet been overcome.”

Cutrone refers to 1917 in the most grandiose form possible:134

“a year marked by the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place.”

We should recall that the context for 1917 was 1914, the outbreak of World War I, which opened up the space for Lenin and Luxemburg to break ranks with Kautsky and the Second International.135 Lenin saw the outbreak of World War 1 as the opportunity qua discontinuity calling for the rupture of a socialist revolution, and Kautsky saw this Leninist opportunism as a dogmatic zealotry doomed to failure given the Russian social and industrial context.136 Before the outbreak of World War 1, there had been Cutrone’s aforementioned progress and regress of capitalist society, which was seen in its progressive dimension as bourgeois faith in progress (liberal cosmopolitan capitalism), but also in its regressive dimension due to the repression of the rise of Marxist socialist movements (rise in working class consciousness and the political problem that they represented for liberal cosmopolitan capitalism).137 After the outbreak of World War 1, socialism had become less possible in practical terms, e.g. the international sphere was itself in conflict; but more necessary in social terms, e.g. the working class being used as canon fodder for another war between bourgeois states, i.e. barbarism.138 The Leninist vision qua “utopia” that arises in this situation, in its fullness, is:139

“the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state as such, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social matters.”

Here we should dwell for a moment in the distinction between the reality of what Marxists think of as the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” as managers of global capitalism as requiring:

• Standing armies

• Police systems

• Bureaucratic administrations

And we should juxtapose this triad in relation to the Marxist conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Standing armies are required to defend and expand the resources of the bourgeois state; police systems are required to govern crime of the (mostly) lower classes; and bureaucratic administrations are required to tax income and distribute welfare in order to prevent the lower classes from revolting in capitalist conditions. For the Marxist-Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is the vision and belief that we could overcome standing armies, police systems and bureaucratic administrations for an immediate peace because there would be no state to arm, defend and expand, a distribution of land self-administered by the people who live there as opposed to a state police, and a distribution of power to the will of the peoples instead of a power concentrated in the accumulation of capital.140

The gap between that vision, which is genuinely unbelievable, and our present reality, which seems impossible to overcome, is the degree to which we are “haunted” by the legacy of 1917 and its dreams.141 The reason why Cutrone calls 1917 “the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place” is because it was an attempt to establish a politics via social revolution without standing armies, police systems or bureaucratic administrations, what Lenin conceived as a “higher stage and realm of possibility”.142 If this vision does not seriously test your political imagination it is hard to imagine what would: is it really possible to enact a world beyond standing armies, police systems and bureaucratic administrations? Is such a dream, demanding the impossible, something to which we should direct more of our political conversations? Or should we dream differently? Perhaps it is worth stating that when the more progressive ends of the Millennial Left, like for example political activist Gary Stevenson, discuss the possibilities of a wealth tax to address growing inequality,143 this dream is leaving completely intact the world of standing armies, police systems and bureaucratic administrations, and perhaps even expanding the latter in order to enforce the wealth tax. Does such reform of capitalism point in the right direction? Or is it an example of what Cutrone might call “diminished expectations” in light of the history of Lenin and the Russian Revolution? When democratic socialist Bhaskar Sunkara states that in the long run democratic socialism is incompatible with capitalism, does he envision that socialist redistribution will naturally lead to a reduction in the need for standing armies, police systems, and bureaucratic administrations?144 If so, how are we to understand this dialectic internal to processes of capitalist reforms?

In order to better contextualise the demands and dreams of the Russian Revolution, we must first understand the two logical dimensions of its actualisation. This logic can be described using Hegel’s logic of the negation of the negation in the Marxist formula of politics under feudalism, politics under capitalism, and the possibility of a socialist politics. These two logical dimensions are separated by eight months in-between February 1917, when the tsarist regime in Russia was replaced by a capitalist democracy, and October 1917, which attempts to replace capitalist democracy with the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.145 In this gap between February and October, we see “Lenin-in-becoming”, from an “anonymous political agent” to “socialist revolutionary”.146 Here Lenin aimed for leadership in the social democratic workers movement and political party but did not identify with either, as both were a means to an end: the actual achievement of socialism (which would no longer require either the workers movement or the political party).147 As the question of party politics emerged in the gap between 1848-1917, Lenin followed both Marx and Engels in terms of having “serious reservations” about careerist identitarianism vis-a-vis both the social democrats and political parties in general, which could end up serving themselves, as opposed to the actual goals of socialism.148 In this context, Cutrone notes that even though Lenin threatened to quit the Bolshevik party, he never bailed on the idea of continuing the revolution;149 and Žižek notes that no prominent leader of the Bolshevik party supported Lenin’s call to revolution, emphasising instead Lenin as a “highly idiosyncratic” member who deviated from the party line.150

Here if we revisit the dialectical unity between the “great men of history” and the “grassroots movement of history”, we find both at work in-between February and October of 1917. Žižek claims that Lenin was both striving to organise and create the base required for revolution as a revolutionary statesman, as well as resonating with the people because his work was echoing the “revolutionary micro politics” of a newly democratic Russia freed from tsarist control.151 From the February 1917 revolution to October 1917 there were grass-roots democratic processes “sprouting up all around Russia’s big cities” that were “ignoring the authority of “legitimate” government” and “taking matters into their own hands”.152 For Žižek, this dimension of micro-politics is the key of 1917 that deconstructs the myth that the Russian Revolution was simply an elitist coup d’etat constituted by a “tiny group” of “ruthless revolutionaries”.153 Without this dimension of micro-politics, how could we really know whether or not there is an emergent “grassroots” desire for a new “commune-like” form of social management without standing army, police force, or bureaucratic administration? Does Cutrone hope that his work with Platypus, establishing academic micro-political units across America, sets in motion a similar machinery to the motion and machinery of political life in Russia’s big cities in 1917? If so, would the desire of the working class in 2026 America mirror the desire of the working class in 1917 Russia?

Žižek makes it clear that there are two dialectical dimensions to consider here, inspired by the Russian Revolution, in the context of any future revolution:154

• Form and content distinction vis-a-vis the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat (where we must be careful of reflecting content of the latter in the form of the former), and

• Immediate imaginary explosion of revolutionary freedom and universal solidarity vis-a-vis the hard work of mediated social reconstruction in the day-to-day life of the social edifice

Žižek notes that most revolutionary logic operates via negation, missing the negation of the negation; insofar as most revolutionary logic simply aims to replace the content of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie but leaves its form fundamentally intact. In such situations we get a “revolution without revolution” in the sense that the fundamental structure that is being revolted against maintains itself. Perhaps directly connected to this logical error, Žižek maintains that one of the biggest problems for emancipatory politics in the 20th and early 21st century is the identification with an “imaginary explosion of freedom in sublime enthusiasm” as a “magical moment of universal solidarity”; and a de-emphasis and an under-estimation of the “hard work of social reconstruction in the social edifice itself”.155 We see this again and again in the events that constituted the major moments of the Millennial Left, whether Occupy Wall Street, or the Arab Spring qua “imaginary explosion of freedom in sublime enthusiasm” and “magical moment of universal solidarity” in relation to the attempt to establish an actual new socialist politics qua “hard work of social reconstruction in the social edifice itself”. To be fair to the Millennial Left, no movement, not even Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution, have been able to transform revolutionary energy into a new social edifice.

To my mind, these problems almost by necessity requires the concept of “Conservative Communism” in the sense that the revolutionary movement (“Communism”) never seems to think deeply about the fact that a new social edifice will have to actually work for people in the mundane day-to-day motions of everyday life (“Conservatism”). How would Communism become a stable political form if it did not have a Conservative dimension? To frame this in the context of our above reflections on the negative demands and goals of the Russian Revolution — abolition of standing armies, police systems, bureaucratic administrations — as well as the positive demands and goals of the Russian Revolution — universal peace, distribution of land, distribution of power — how would the actualisation of this reality actually function in the everyday life of people? In even the attempt to actualise these demands and goals, the risk of regression to barbarism is high, and the know-how to stabilise these demands and goals basically totally absent, and certainly very far from guaranteed. What would be most likely after the revolution: the stabilisation of a qualitatively new dimension of human production and life, or the stabilisation of the old form, if for no other reason, because we don’t know how to do things differently?

While we must be honest in our analysis of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, that it failed to actually constitute a new form of socialist politics, and thus does not present to us material of a ‘successful Conservative dimension of Communism’; we can learn about the ‘revolutionary’ dimension. Žižek maintains that what we find in Lenin’s writings from 1917, stemming from his break from Kautsky and the Second International, is an active disdain for “those engaged in endless search for some kind of “guarantee” for the revolution”.156 As we have covered, one way that Marxists sought guarantee for revolutionary success was in “laws of historical development”, claiming that in order to strive for a socialist politics, the working class had to have “matured” both in terms of industrial conditions and bourgeois social relations (in the process delegitimising the idea that Russia was “ripe” for revolution).157 The other way that Marxists sought guarantee for revolutionary success was in “normative democratic legitimacy”, i.e. in seeking a democratic majority supporting the revolution and legitimising it in terms of state democracy.158 In contrast to either approach, Lenin sought to act in the context of a working class that had only experienced a few months of capitalist democracy, and whom had yet to reach any sort of consensus regarding the possibility of socialist revolution. Žižek calls this Lenin’s “urge of the moment”, and links it to “true utopia”.159 In other words, for Žižek, if we wait for the “ripe” moment, for the “right time”, we will never actually act, and the revolution will be infinitely postponed to a future moment that will never arrive.

Cutrone’s work can be situated in a similar direction in the sense that he is extremely critical of the threat of building up a working class organisation within capitalism and waiting for the right time (the final crisis) to enact the revolution. Cutrone thinks in this situation, there is always the risk that “political power” would fall into the “hands of social democrats”.160 Cutrone, following Marx, Engels, Lenin and Luxembourg, is:161

“deeply suspicious of [the] social-democratic party as a permanent political institution of the working class”.

This suspicion can be connected to the aforementioned fact that Cutrone is often dismissive of capitalist reform as deepening the possibilities for actual socialism. Perhaps it is in this context that we should view one aspect of Cutrone’s skepticism and relation to the phenomenon of Sanders-style socialism, and the institutional attempts of Millennials to enact a reform of capitalism. In contrast to this direction, in which grassroots support of Sanders concentrates itself in the hands of state power; Cutrone notes that Lenin would consistently advocate for “workers political parties” and “other workers’ civil society institutions such as labour unions and workers publications”.162 In other words, and as mentioned above, Lenin was attempting to deepen the form of the democratic revolution that had transpired in Russia in February 1917, looking to further extend that democratic revolution towards a qualitatively new form of politics, and not one that became concentrated in the hands of state authorities, their standing armies and police forces, or bureaucratic administrations. In this context, what requires much more thought is the problem of the form of workers self-organisation itself, especially in the context of a bourgeois social life that constitutes itself in relation to the “expression”, “intensification” and “reification” of the “commodity form”.163

Towards my closing thoughts in this section, and as extending the challenge established above regarding the concept of “Conservative Communism”: we must face the reality that Lenin’s Russian Revolution did end up falling to a, not a “Conservative”, but rather a “Fascist”, form of stabilisation. Cutrone notes that Lenin’s “last struggle” was to stop the “strangling of politics in the Soviet state”, which culminated in not only “Stalin’s leadership” but also “administrative solutions” (as opposed to the establishment of communes beyond standing armies, police systems and bureaucratic administrations).164 Whereas the bourgeois revolution of 1789 had culminated in the necessity of Marxist socialism; the build up of Marxist socialism, the “crisis of Marxism”, failed to establish a new form of politics in 1917. Cutrone maintains that the failure of 1917 — “a year marked by the most profound attempt to change the world that has ever taken place” — was at the sametime the failure to which the entire “subsequent 20th century” was a reaction.165 Instead of a revolutionary moment that ignited an international ripple effect, presupposed to start in Germany before cascading throughout the rest of the world,166 we instead found a world constituted by the contradiction of “socialism in one country”.167 Another way to say this is that the “negative object” of Marxism, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, has haunted and continues to haunt our political-social reality in the way that it does not exist. As a consequence, Cutrone frames the Russian Revolution as offering us a key to revolutionary consciousness, but ultimately offering us no key to the mystery of socialism.168

What is perhaps most troubling about this, for me, is the way that both Cutrone and Žižek link the Russian Revolution and its attempt for socialism in relation to the “Paris Commune of 1871”. Cutrone states that the:

“Soviet workers state in Lenin’s time was like the Paris Commune of 1871, if it had been led by Marx and Engels, fought off Versailles, and had held power.”

Žižek explicitly points in similar directions when he talks about the demands and goals of the revolution as aiming to establish new “commune-like” forms of social management.169 But would the establishment of communes really be a sublation of liberalism? Can we really expect human social life to thrive and spread in such contexts? Is this vision really in touch with the real of human nature in or beyond capitalism? To my mind, there seems to be something horribly wrong with presupposing that we can structurally sublate the life of the individual for the life of the commune. In this logic the structure of family, the unit of the reproduction of the species-being, seems to be most noticeably repressed. In the process, is not sexual antagonism repressed (and perhaps also racial and religious antagonism)?

What is perhaps most confusing for a self-identified Žižekian, is the way Žižek himself, in his public performances, often talks about how deeply he enjoys his alienated existence. In contrast to philosopher Alain Badiou, whose work The Communist Hypothesis outlines the coordinates for a revival of the passionate revolutionary zeal for the energy of the Paris Commune of 1871;170 Žižek often seems to suggest that it would be a nightmare for him to engage in local communal democratic processes about the mundane self-organisation of daily life. Žižek often responds to such lines of thought with the idea that he would simply like an automated machine process to take care of day-to-day functioning of practical affairs so that he can write his (stupid) books. In this context, it is tempting to echo the idea he floats as a counter-intuitive provocation in his introduction to Lenin’s Revolution at the Gates: that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is a “zombie-concept” to be abandoned by the Left in post-industrial global capitalism.171

I presence this contradiction because it is a contradiction that dwells at the core of my own heart. The tension that I perceive to be dramatised in-between the version of Žižek who seeks to rehabilitate the revolutionary energy of Lenin and the Russian Revolution, which sought to establish an international commune structure beyond state and market control; and the version of Žižek who enjoys his alienated existence writing books in isolation while the practical affairs of life are taken care of by a machine-driven automated network, is one that I would like to fully inhabit as a key tension for modern subjectivity. At the very least, if anything like a social structure beyond state and market control is to emerge, it would have to at least take into consideration that most stable and conservative social forms that have proven to win the ground for human social life, the family, must be a part, and potentially a fundamental part, of the picture.

In my own writings on this topic, I have extended reflection on the “commune” as the minimal seed idea for processes like the Paris Commune of 1871, as well as the Russian Revolution of 1917, and rather problematised it. I suggest that we could shift our attention from the commune towards the idea of the “commons”, as the unit of thinking about the dimension of our global social reality that requires political solutions beyond capitalism, or else we face global existential threats.172 In short, can we stop utopianising the idea of revolutionary human social organisation, that requires a “new communal human” (apparently our truest nature); and instead think about how global capitalism produces problems of a commons that itself will require new political solutions that may be best conceived as post-Marxist? I do not pretend to have the answers here, at all, but simply want to recognise that, whether we are talking about the Paris Commune of 1871, or the Russian Revolution of 1917, we are talking about political revolutions that may not be taking into consideration the reality of human social life, and specifically the deep negativity that exists internal to the working class itself. Identification with either might risk the temptation of identifying with excessive negative explosions that are doomed to result in the stabilisation of reactionary, potentially authoritarian, systems.

I’ll add that in Žižek’s own public performances he often downplays his allegiance to Marxist theory of ‘The Party and its central committees’, meaning he downplays the dreams of ‘old-fashioned’ ‘Marxist-Leninism’ as having a direct relevance to the 21st century situation. Also, in his own formal engagement with The Communist Manifesto — The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (2018) — he states explicitly its relevance to the “problem of the commons” as the space “of nature, biogenetics, cultural/intellectual property, and the universal space of humanity”.173 In other words, the question of communist revolution, for Žižek, at least in one possible interpretation, centres the way that, in the 21st century, we need to think the Leninist gesture of the Russian Revolution in a totally new context with a totally new set of concerns: nature itself is now subject to extreme modification by the human species-being and potentially reality itself; that cultural and intellectual property are now caught between digital enclosures and the potential to establish a new educational commons; and the very universal space of humanity, at least in its liberal cosmopolitan capitalist dimension, is itself being thrown into question, in the process reviving many problems of sex, race, and religion that the neoliberal order would like to pretend don’t exist. How should communist revolution think the species-being in this context? Do the revolutions of the previous centuries, whether liberal or Marxist, really teach us anything about the global coordinates of the fourth industrial revolution?

The key paradox in this framing of Žižek’s communism is that he still maintains allegiance to “Lenin”, not as a “return” but as a “repetition” vis-a-vis the problem of the commons:

“The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation […] repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project […] after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressivism in the catastrophe of 1914.”

This was Žižek’s view in his 2002 contribution to Lenin’s Revolution at the Gates, and it remains his view now:174

“a Leninist approach is needed today more than ever when Communism, the only way to confront the challenges we face (ecology, war, A.I…), has become increasingly inoperative as a political vision.”

In this context, Žižek’s “Conservative Communism” is framed in practical terms as a mixture between a “Leninist elite” dealing with common negativities: “to keep us aware that we are approaching a global emergency state”; and “moderate conservatives” dealing with practical aspects of everyday life: “who run day-to-day things”.175 Does this mean the aforementioned Žižekian self-contradiction between revolutionary Leninism of the commune and his self-enjoyment of alienated existence resolves itself in the fact that Žižek is not interested in reviving the old communist dreams of establishing networks of international communes, but rather just attempting to revive the gesture of a revolution vis-a-vis the practical social management of commons problems which appear to push us into a “global emergency state”? Is this Žižek’s version of a “post-Marxist-Leninism”? In this situation the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat seems to be replaced with moderate conservatism, and the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie seems to be replaced with an international elite managing cascading global crises. Certainly classical Marxist-Leninists, presumably including Cutrone, would not be convinced by this approach.176

4. After Lenin and the Left Today

“[1917] remains, as Benjamin put it, an “alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds,” whether we (choose to) hear it or not.” - Chris Cutrone177

“It is true that today’s Left is undergoing the shattering experience of the end of an entire epoch for the progressive movement, an experience which compels it to reinvent the very basic co-ordinates of its project — however, it was an exactly homologous experience that gave birth to Leninism.” - Slavoj Žižek178

The zero-level symptom that appears to us in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution is the symptom of “Stalinism” and “socialism in one country” as the anti-thesis of “Leninism” and “international proletarian socialism” true to the heart of Marxism. This symptom is represents the fact that the “Nationalism vs. Internationalism” dialectic is under-thought in general.179 Cutrone refers to the idea of “socialism in one country” as a “fatal compromise” of the Russian Revolution, Marxism, and proletarian socialism in general.180 For Žižek, in the difference between Lenin’s revolutionary action and Stalinist compromise, we find the difference between a form of “madness” (Lenin) that we “should stick to” (repeat) within the contemporary worldwide conditions, and a form of “realistic” “common sense” (Stalin) that we should question in the form of the contemporary forms of governance and their ignorance of the crisis of commons problems.181

As it relates to Žižek’s fidelity in repetition to the spirit of Lenin (his madness, his revolutionary gesture), it could perhaps be clarifying for us to remember Cutrone’s framing of Lenin and his commitment to the dictatorship of the proletariat as an open question vis-a-vis a very specific problem:182

“For Lenin, as for Marxism more generally, the dictatorship of the proletariat (never mind socialism) required the preponderant power over global capitalism world-wide, that is, victory in the core capitalist countries. This of course has never happened. So its correctness is an open question.”

The key dimension: dictatorship of the proletariat as a force to control global capitalism. Here we can revisit Cutrone’s “10 Commandments for Socialist Unity”:183

1. Intensified reification of the commodity-form (a deep question in the context of the Russian Revolution)

2. As the only means of preserving bourgeois social relations (had these relations even been established in order to be preserved in the context of the Russian Revolution?)

3. Expressed as victories within core capitalist countries (spreading world-wide) (was not Russia in 1917 thus obviously poorly positioned to ignite this process?)

4. As not socialism but its mere precondition (resulting in the Russian Revolution never establishing socialism true to the Marxist conception)

5. As the highest-form of capitalism brought to politics (social self-contradictions) (with capitalism and its politics never actually having been brought under a qualitatively new politics)

6. As the highest expression of contradiction in subjectivity of the commodity form (which if it fails is sure to bring out the most monstrous dimensions of subjectivity, which it did after 1917)

7. Towards a more advanced politics pointing beyond the social dynamic of capital (a politics that has never been achieved, but is at the moment a hypothesis)

8. Without this form of politics the struggle to overcome capitalism is abandoned (in the 21st century we may frame it as ‘post-political’ in this sense)

9. Without this form of politics we fall into anarchism (in our context, a kind of ‘anarchic-capitalism’)

10. And so socialist party politics must serve the aims of this more advanced politics (we have no true socialist party because there is no more advanced politics for it to serve)

In the context of Žižek’s formula, which mixes a “Leninist elite” with “moderate conservatives”, could we see a “Leninist elite” as, not forming socialism, but something like the “dictatorship of the proletariat” qua force attempting to gain a “preponderant power over global capitalism”? If the leaders of the “core capitalist countries” were committed to gaining control over the way capitalist imperatives override human “socialist” concerns, would this be the seed form for socialism, or still simply an extreme case of capitalist reform? If yes, then is there no difference between the contemporary liberal elite that wants capitalist reform on the basis of wealth taxes and the idea of a Leninist elite? If not, how would this solution not just bring us back around to problems of ‘The Party and its central committees’?

What is most tempting in this speculative political space, is isolating the core distinction between Lenin and Stalin in the challenge of the national vis-a-vis the international: would alliance between the capitalist core on issues of capitalist politics represent a pragmatic or even a revolutionary Leninist gesture? Are the most economically progressive liberal elites today already close to Leninism without being aware of it? Cutrone notes that, as it relates to the Russian Revolution, the real failure of the revolution was its “limiting” to Russia, as opposed to the anticipated chain reaction of revolutions throughout the capitalist core. 184 While it is hard to imagine a distributed micro-political self-organisation of international workers overthrowing global capitalism (which seems very romantic), it is less hard to imagine core capitalist countries aligning on the problem of limiting capitalism and establishing policies that reform it towards more social outcomes (which admittedly might not actually be socialism in the Marxist sense). However, this approach would have the added benefit of not utopianising or romanticising human beings into communes (in the process potentially avoiding the hard work of socialisation that is most-often done in family and community), as well as addressing what seems to be the core symptom of the Russian Revolution: “building Socialism in one state”.185 Whether or not it is correct, I see two important points here:

• “Anthropological pragmatism”186 vis-a-vis practical self-organising capacities of the working class to take responsibility and control global capital, and

• Commitment to international coalition building between liberal political elites within the capitalist core towards socialist aims

In emphasising these two points, it is hard not to find some sympathy with Kautsky, not necessarily against Lenin and Luxemburg, but at least taking all of them into a contradictory unity. Here, could we not frame the aforementioned differences between Kautsky (objectivist metaphysics, materialist economism) and Lenin (subjective pragmatism, social idealism) as a parallax that requires a higher order philosophy and politics?:

• Materialist economism (levels of industrial production) ⊥ social idealism (the possibility of socialism), and

• Objectivist metaphysics (socialism as evolutionary teleology) ⊥ pragmatic subjectivisation (the possibility of the dictatorship of the proletariat)

Žižek refers to these two dimensions as “incompatible logics”:187

“Here we have two models, two incompatible logics, of the revolution: those who wait for the ripe teleological moment of the final crisis when revolution will explode “at its own proper time” according to the necessity of the historical evolution; and those who are aware that revolution has no “proper time”, those who perceive the revolutionary chance as something that emerges and has to be seized in the very detours of “normal” historical development.”

In holding Kautsky⊥Lenin as a contradiction between the Second and Third Internationals, between Marxism as utopian political theory and Marxist-Leninism as abortive failure and 20th century catastrophe, perhaps we find a way to think the link between theory-praxis that opens a different possibility space?188 Moreover, perhaps we vindicate Kautsky on the level of his critique of communist theorists “delight” in “drawing on primitive Marxism”, that is the “early works” that Marx and Engels wrote before they turned 30, as well as before they had digested the revolution and aftermath of 1848.189 Here perhaps we find one of the core reasons why it is so difficult for us to conceive of a dialectic between the national and the international?

In my philosophical work, I attempt to hold a triad between metaphysics-transcendentalism-speculative dimensions, with reference to Plato (metaphysics), Kant (transcendentalism), and Hegel (speculative). Could it be that Kautsky and his emphasis on materialist economism and objectivist metaphysics could be framed as upholding an important dimension of this triad (Platonic metaphysics), whereas Lenin and his emphasis on social idealism and pragmatic subjectivisation could be framed as upholding a different but equally important dimension of this triad (Kantian transcendentalism)? In combining the two in a contradictory unity, perhaps we thus open ourselves to Hegel and Marx in a speculative form that can help us better think the limitations of Leninism and the problem of nationalism and internationalism?

Recall that for Kautsky and the Second International, there is a stress on:

1. the condition of possibility for the transition from capitalism to socialism in a high level of industrial production in the capitalist core (something also stressed by Cutrone in the aforementioned commandments),

2. mixed with a certain evolutionary teleology about the inevitable emergence of socialism from the development of this very productive process (something which does seem to have a truth when we study the discourse of those leading the development of the fourth industrial revolution).

Somehow the idea of an anthropological pragmatism vis-a-vis a micro-political emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat represents a movement that reflects dialectical materialism more fundamentally into social idealism; and a commitment to international coalition building between political elites in the capitalist core represents both the importance of economism vis-a-vis levels of industrial production mixed with a kind of telos for socialism over an over-reliance on abyssal revolutionary gestures. I hope it is clear enough that I am not wedded to one side over the other, but in bringing together both sides in a contradictory unity, there is a significant part of me that is thinking seriously about how the emergence of Marxist-Leninism could be re-conceived in relationship to the practical political realities that I observe in our current situation.

I suppose this complicates things philosophically rather than resolving things politically. But the one aspect of this work that should be most clear and clarifying in regards to the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, is that it seeks to forward a discourse that avoids the obvious regression of discourse about Marxism and Leninism after 1917: the hyper focus on the spread of “Communist states” after WWII, whether in Eastern Europe, China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba.190 For Cutrone, as for Žižek, as for Trotsky, as for, we can presuppose, both Marx and Lenin, the spread of “Communist states” after WWII, and the framing of these states as either communist or socialist, is nothing but a “betrayal of socialism”.191 What is so important about this emphasis is that, when one mentions Marxism or Leninism in contemporary political discourse, the first problem raised as a reactionary response is reference to the failure of actually existing communist states in the 20th century. In this context, Cutrone states emphatically:192

“Lenin would not have considered any of [the 20th century communist states] to represent the true Marxist “dictatorship of the proletariat”.”

What is often the most salient symptom in discussions which equate Marxist-Leninism with the actually existing communist states in the 20th century, is the antinomy between liberalism and authoritarianism.193 Cutrone frames this problem as the key “disintegration”:194

“The forms that this disintegration took [after 1917] involved arraying of the principles of liberalism against those of socialism, or libertarianism against authoritarianism.”

Cutrone further deepens the historical nature of this rift with reference to two Marxist intellectuals, György Lukács and Karl Korsch, who had attempted to deepen and extend Marxist theory-praxis in their digestion of the Russian Revolution; Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923), Korsch in Marxism and Philosophy (1923). Cutrone notes that Lukács is typically allied with Lenin as emblematic figures of “authoritarian socialism” against “liberalism or libertarianism”; and Korsch is typically allied with Luxemburg as emblematic figures of “libertarian or liberal concerns” over “authoritarian socialism”.195 After this split, we come to see Lenin as a “ruthless destroyer of “bourgeois” conditions of life” (an authoritarian socialist against liberalism).196 However, for Cutrone, what gets lost in this antinomy, is not only the way all figures, Lenin, Lukács, Luxemburg, and Korsch, all fundamentally shared a deep agreement and collaboration in the revolution of 1917;197 but also the way in which both theorists, Lukács and Korsch, represented a return to “vulgar Marxism” after the revolution (“the Stalinisation of the international Communist movement”), in a sense, betraying it in its failure.198

In the aforementioned proposal of a contradictory unity between Kautsky and Lenin along the lines of objectivist metaphysics and subjective transcendentalism, we can in a sense say that the negativity of subjective transcendentalism (Lenin’s revolution), can lead to a recoil to objectivist metaphysics (Stalinist common sense); and vice versa: a too dogmatic clinging to objectivist metaphysics (Second International) can lead to the covering up of the need for an abyssal political act in the real of history (Lenin’s madness). These antinomies were apparently not resolved in the further development of Marxist theory by Adorno and the Frankfurt School: Lukács and Korsch described Adorno and the Frankfurt School as “Marxist metaphysicians” “taking up residence” at the “Grand Hotel Abyss”;199 and Adorno came to see Lukács and Korsch as two different ways of “repressing the problems they had sought to address in elaborating Marxian theory from the revolutionary action of 1917”.200 As a result, Cutrone frames Adorno and his Negative Dialectics (1966) as claiming that we can now only think of 1917 through the lens of “dogmatisation and thought-taboos”, meaning that we can only ever think of it as “doomed to failure”.201 In this context, for Adorno and the Frankfurt School, there is a belief that “Marxism did not fail us”, “rather we have failed it”; and for Cutrone, “failed to learn what we might from it”.202

Žižek’s understanding of the repetition of Lenin is well-grounded in an awareness of the liberal-authoritarian split that has surfaced in the aftermath of 1917, with its primary result being not only the disappearance of “liberal socialism”, but the ubiquitous presence of authoritarian liberalism. Žižek often frames liberal democracy as operating via a dogmatic metaphysics of “scientific objectivity” which is invoked ritualistically if one ever wants to study Lenin or the phenomenon of revolutionary subjectivity.203 His dominant framing of the need for “liberal elites” to become “Leninist elites”, is basically functioning in the contradiction between the “dogmatism” of “liberal democracy” vis-a-vis “multicultural tolerances” (e.g. relativism of cultures, but also forced inclusion and diversity irrespective of the capacity of a peoples to re/produce themselves), which in turn, re/produces its symptom in the form of “ethnic/religious fundamentalisms”.204 In a show of fundamental allegiance to the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, he quotes Horkheimer from the 1930s:205

“If you don’t want to talk about capitalism, then you should keep silent about Fascism”

But re-appropriates it for the 21st century context:206

“those who do not want to subject liberal democracy and the flaws of its multiculturalist tolerance to critical analysis, should keep quiet about the new Rightist violence and intolerance.”

The main tension in our political constellations remains on this level, not the 1930s tension between fascism and communism, but rather the early 21st century tension between the universality of liberal democracy, and its repressed excess in the form of multicultural tolerance, perhaps most violently expressed in the ideology of “diversity, equity, inclusion” (DEI). Žižek has long maintained that this tension breeds perversion among elites (perhaps it also breeds psychosis among the poor); and his solution directly engages not only class antagonism, but also the antagonism of sex, race, and religion which, without direct confrontation, presents to us the very progressive culture which becomes a mask for the universality of liberal capitalism:207

“If we are to leave the opposition between liberal-democractic universalism and ethnic/religious fundamentalism behind, the first step is to acknowledge the existence of liberal fundamentalism”

As it relates to Europe, which is often at the “Eurocentric” heart of Žižek’s political focus, he of course focuses on the religious antinomy of Islam as it appears under the guise of liberal progressivist “political correctness”:208

“the terrorists are betraying the true spirit of Islam; they do not express the interests and hopes of the poor Arab masses”

But also racial and sexual antinomies as it relates to Europe’s relation to “Third World” immigration:209

“a similar instance of the perversity of Political Correctness occurs […] where people speak ironically of the “white woman’s burden”, her ethico-political duty to have sex with immigrant workers from Third World countries — this being the final necessary step to ending their exclusion.”

In our contemporary constellation these sexual, racial, religious dimensions are underpinning the “Rightist violence and intolerance” vis-a-vis immigration and the desire for a nativist reclamation of European identity (which, as mentioned above, can often be framed as a problem requiring a “Leninist” revolution).210 The “liberal elites”, even the most economically progressive among them, dismiss these concerns as irrelevant, either because they cannot do anything about them within the current structures subservient to capitalist politics (which requires ever new fresh and easily exploitable labour supply), or because they are blind to their own authoritarian liberalism and its celebration of pluralism qua “multicultural tolerance”. In my work, I am increasingly convinced that the major polarisation of left-right within the contemporary political constellation orbits the parallax of immigration-inequality on the level of the contradiction between culture-economics, or superstructure-base, that is absolutely essential to the future production and reproduction of the human species-being (which will require a sublation of liberal democracy).211 Perhaps the relevance of Lenin, for me, is located here.

The main thing that concerns Žižek within these coordinates is the capacity for thought and speech that is not underneath the reign of authoritarian liberalism (a testament to his life’s work),212 spinning in circles of capital supported by an objectivist metaphysics, that reifies our current political reality as the only possible reality.213 His most precise critique of how this has effected the production and the life of intellectuals is one that, not only have I experienced personally, but also one in which I have traversed and hopefully overcome in praxis:214

“The great majority of today’s “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with a secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal. […] If there is one thing they are genuinely afraid of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life-environment of the “symbolic classes” in developed Western societies.”

What is most obviously missing in, for example, paving a new way of being and producing in this world, is the practical social structures and organisations that would allow us to live out that way of being and producing beyond the transcendental illusion of the liberal capitalist incentives (e.g. tenure-track for academics). Cutrone notes that, as it relates to what we can and cannot learn from 1917 and the Russian Revolution, it is:215

“unclear whether the “soviets” or “workers’ councils” that sprung up in the revolution of 1917-19 could have ever been proven in practice to be an adequate social-political means (for beginning) to overcome capitalism.”

Whether its “workers’ councils” or “labour unions”, what are the practical social vehicles that we can use to develop alternative modes of being and producing? According to Cutrone, Lenin did not conceive of socialism as possible via workers’s councils and labour unions alone.216 These alternative modes of being and producing don’t just have to compete with, for example, the state-capitalist university model, but they actually have to produce a qualitatively better mode of existence and life. They have to be self-evidently attractive and superior to the way we do things in the liberal-capitalist model, both in terms of capacity for productive creative-freedom, but also the capacity to reproduce the species-being. In other words, for socialism to be a genuine fulfilment of liberalism, it has to go beyond it in a way that is obviously superior to it.

Many of the problems that appear in the coordinates that Cutrone refers to as the antinomy of liberalism and authoritarianism, or that Žižek refers to in the hegemony of authoritarian liberalism, may stem from 1917, but certainly solidify in the New Left after 1968. It is not clear whether the inability to perceive 1917 beyond “dogmatism and thought-taboos” is the cause; or whether the New Left and 1968 presents to us challenges to which 1917 is itself blind and unaware. Cutrone maintains that the New Left was very clearly “anti-Stalinist” but its relation to Lenin is more ambiguous, often conceiving itself as “post-Leninist” or “going beyond Lenin”.217 However, this ambiguity was itself riddled by the contradiction of embracing “Leninism”, which the “New Left” interpreted to mean (confusingly) “supportive of Third World nationalism” and “its outlook for revolutionary politics”.218 In what to my mind can only appear as a cruel irony of history, the New Left in a sense loses the plot, whether it interprets itself in the mode of fidelity to Lenin or post-Leninism, in a form of politics that is detached from the “metropolitan countries” or “core capitalist countries”, and rather focuses its utopian revolutionary politics on an ideology for the “underdeveloped” world.219 As is a common place caricature of the New Left, it seems they can only conceive of revolutionary subjectivity as black and brown people from non-Western countries, which in principle, has nothing to do with Marxist-Leninism proper. Cutrone refers to this as the “Neo-Marxian” and “Neo-Leninist” turn of the 1970s,220 in which the New Left conceived of itself as “getting serious” about politics.221 Here I cannot help but wonder if the New Left would read the mission of the Russian Revolution itself, that is:222

“immediate peace, the distribution of land, and, of course, “all the power to the soviets”, that is, the dismantling of the existing state apparatus and its replacement with the new commune-like forms of social management”

as a form of “white power politics”? Indeed, when the nativist anti-immigration politics of the United Kingdom mobilises the imagery and revolutionary politics of Lenin, their motive often sounds similar to Lenin’s vis-a-vis “all the power to the [English]”.223 Who is misrecognising Lenin here? The nativist anti-immigrant right that refuses to think about the nation in the context of global capitalism? Or the liberal elitist progressivist “New Left” which can only conceive of revolution in terms of black and brown bodies?224 The nativist anti-immigration right certainly brings to our mind the authoritarian aspect of socialism in its desire to totally dismantle the liberal consensus and political status quo; but the liberal elites with their emphasis on tolerance for a spurious infinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion, is only ever embraced from the safe security of their authoritarian position within global capitalism. This contradiction should, to my mind, produce a self-shattering experience vis-a-vis the “co-ordinates” of revolutionary politics; one that Žižek interprets as “exactly homologous” to the “experience that gave birth to Leninism”.225

One of the dimensions that here needs to be emphasised in the context of Cutrone’s idea of the “death of the Millennial Left”, is the Left’s constant focus — whether in the context of Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring — on protest. Cutrone notes that Time magazine in 2011 nominated “the protester” from both the the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street as the “Person of the Year”.226 But from a Žižekian perspective, protest could be thought to inhabit the mode of demand vis-a-vis the big Other (in this case, the liberal democratic order itself). Cutrone notes, after the death of the Millennial Left, there is a need to “go beyond” “mere “protest””, and that “beyond” is “revolution”.227 From a Žižekian perspective, as noted above in relation to Žižek’s conception of Lenin as a revolutionary, this requires the abyssal act beyond the big Other. Here Cutrone insists that the “principal mistake” made by those who “contemplate Lenin’s political thought and action”, involves a confusion of the status of democracy in revolution:228

“Lenin did not think that once a majority of workers was won to socialist revolution democracy was finished”

The clearest outline of how this is to be thought, is stated by Cutrone in the “interrelated developments” of “capitalism, democracy and the struggle for socialism” which demands a “dialectical approach in both practice and theory”.229 In the situation of capitalist politics, and the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Cutrone maintains that Lenin’s concept of “The Party” was not only to be situated in non-relation between “Party and State” or “Party and State and Society” — recall the formula: Labour unions ≠ Political parties ≠ Nation-States ≠ Society (as the question of Capital to Socialism) — but also as a multiplicity vis-a-vis the negativity of society under capitalism itself. Here is Cutrone on the issue at length:230

“It has been a fundamental mistake to conflate and confuse Lenin’s model of party politics for a form of state in pursuing socialism. Lenin presupposed their important non-identity. The party was meant to be one element among many mediating factors in society and politics. Moreover, Lenin’s party was meant to be one among many parties, including multiple parties of the working class, vying for its adherence, and even multiple “Marxist” parties, differing in their relation of theory and practice, or means and ends.”

To juxtapose Lenin’s party ontology vis-a-vis the party system to which we have become accustomed in neoliberalism, we simply have in many countries of the capitalist core, a two-party system in which the non-relation between party and state is completely collapsed into an absolute relation, and in which neither party is vying for the support of the working class, which is rendered post-political or a-political, and “resigned to their political powerlessness”.231 The obvious result is a general acceptance of capitalism in a “degraded” sense, in which democracy and its relation to a socialist telos, is obscured or lost completely.232 I see the relation between contemporary political powerlessness within the coordinates of Nation-States (Studebaker’s “the way is shut”), and the acceptance of a degraded form of international anarchic capitalism, as the primary interaction for the stakes regarding debates about the dialectical relation or non-relation between nationalism and internationalism.233

However, to reiterate Žižek’s key point about repeating as opposed to returning to Lenin in our current moment, we should emphasise the “catastrophic new constellation” in which the “old co-ordinates proved useless”, and thus requires the reinvention of Marxism.234 If even Lenin was unsure about whether or not labour unions, and workers’ councils, and multi-party democracy, were sufficient to actualise the dictatorship of the proletariat and eventually socialism, perhaps it would be incorrect for us to enact a fidelity to Lenin via Leninist means. Žižek’s historical framing of the historical gap that separates us from Lenin is provided by the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm and his work The Age of Extremes (1994), which frames the “short” 20th century as transpiring between 1914 and 1991 — the outbreak of World War 1 (motivating Leninism) and 1991 (the end of the Soviet Union).235 In this gap, for Žižek, mediated by the work of Adorno and the Frankfurt School, we find the problem of action and inaction.236 If Marx and Lenin share the motive of revolutionary action — Marx’s 11th thesis on Feuerbach “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” — then Adorno and Žižek seem to share a fundamental ambiguity about the status of revolutionary political action today.237 From Žižek (at length):238

“I am […] tempted to reverse Marx’s Thesis 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul-de-sac of debilitating impossibility: “What can we do against global capital?”), but to question the hegemonic ideological co-ordinates. In short, our historical moment is still that of Adorno:

“To the question “What should we do?” I can most often truly answer only with “I don’t know.” I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me: When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical grounds transformed consciousness, and thereby also social reality.”

If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits […] which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach on economic territory […] — they are all tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit.”

With this quote in the context of this article, we have moved from Hegel’s reconciliatory philosophical thought, to Marx’s demand to change the world, to Lenin’s dictatorial violence vis-a-vis capitalism’s liberal politics, to Adorno’s inactivist critique, to Žižek’s impossibilism. If we are to resolve this oscillation from philosophical reflection on the nature of what is to the political demand to change the world, perhaps we can only find it in our capacity to perceive the time in which we find ourselves. Cutrone has noted that we occupy a “dead time”, that there is no semblance today of international proletarian socialism, of a new form of democracy that is willing to break the coordinates of global capitalism, and form a qualitatively higher level of politics. The question for our thought and action is whether or not we can perceive the end of this dead time and the resurrection of another time; moreover, whether or not we can, in this dead time, actually learn from history, its protests and revolutions, its attempts to form new social structures and alternative modes of being, and perceive their relevance or not to our conditions.

In my current disposition, I recognise one guarantee: that capitalism and the development of technology that revolutionises our labour conditions and social relations is all but an inevitability (that is the wave we are riding, whether it be the fourth, or fifth, or sixth); but what is not guaranteed is the political response to these waves. In the paper “Global Commons in the Global Brain”, I open the paper with the subtitle “Technological Revolution/Disruption Is Near (But What About Our Response?).239 This subtitle can now be modified in the sense that “Technological Revolution/Disruption Is Here (And Our Response Is Techno-Feudalism Mixed With Right Wing Populism)”. Will this mix produce the coordinates for the recognition of a new political form adequate the task of our moment? Or will it only intensify economic inequality and scapegoat immigrants in the process? What would Lenin think and do? Would he adhere to Cutrone’s idea of a “socialist party”? Or would he adhere to Žižek’s idea that we should repeat him, but in the face of a reality that is other to the reality of the early 20th century?

In short: for today, Marxist Leninism? Or: for Marxist-Leninism, today?

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

This July and August at Philosophy Portal, we will be hosting machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck and singularity theorist Nikola Danaylov for a two-month exploration of the notion of technological singularity.

The first half of the course will be focused on the nature of machine learning, its real and its mythology, its limits and its potential, as well as the practical consequences for human relationships and institutional development.

The second half of the course will be focused on the nature of story itself, the human story, the story of capitalism, technology, politics, and the question of whether or not we need to learn how to rewrite the human story in the face of 21st century technological developments.

Both Hamelryck and Danaylov have dedicated their life to these topics. Hamelryck on machine learning and Danaylov on the question of story in the context of singularity.

To join us, check the link in the description for the full course, or consider becoming a member at the portal and get access to all of our live events as well as our entire recorded history.

Singularity Summer

What you are about to read is an interview with singularity philosopher Nikola Danaylov. This interview functions as pre-course content for Singularity Summer. For the full video, see:

1. Who is Nikola Danaylov and how did you first become interested in the technological singularity?

Well, that’s a deep and ancient question, perhaps. So first part, who am I? If I were to put myself in one or two words in a short sentence, I would say I’m a curious person. I’m a curious person who wants to learn. That’s what I feel like I am, I am a person who has a lot of questions and wants to learn. But curiosity is perhaps my driving impetus, which is an energy, which is why I’m very scattered and not consistent or always coherent and often contradictory.

I contain multitudes.

So in terms of discovering the technological singularity, it all happened in a very fortunate and strange coincidence around 2006. And I can’t remember which book I read first, but it was two books that I happened to read completely randomly side by side or one after another, which was Charles Stross’s Accelerando, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.

They are basically the same exact book. The only thing is Ray Kurzweil’s book, The Singularity is Near, is nonfiction. And Accelerando is science fiction, but it is 100% about the singularity. Accelerando is based on a short story that Stross published in the late 90s, I think it's called Lobsters, which is kind of super ironic, given that OpenClaw is this huge thing. That’s almost 30 years ago, now it is a reality. Now we have those agentic AIs that are literally lobsters, or many people call them lobsters.

Now how that came to be, how that materialised in our strange universe, is a whole other thing, because many engineers don’t even know about Charlie Stross, and haven’t even read the story, but somehow it ended the same way.

Our universe is mind boggling.

2. Could you give a few examples of how The Singularity Is Near and Accelerando mirror each other or inform each other?

Well, the whole kind of acceleration trend, or what Ray Kurzweil calls “The Law of Accelerating Returns” is captured in a very famous graph. This graph was created by a woman, Kathryn Myronuk. I actually met her at Singularity University.

In any case, her graph for Kurzweil captures Moore’s law before Moor’s law and after Moore’s law, and basically covers almost everything, if you listen to Ray Kurzweil’s claims.

Now, it is hard for people to connect a graph to their lives. The graph is still kind of clinical, very remote. People don’t always get it. But if you take that graph and put it in a story, give it flesh and blood, give it characters that the reader cares about, maybe even loves, or has empathy for, and maybe even associates with and identifies with, then the graph becomes real. Then the graph literally can blow people’s mind, and that’s what happened to me.

So I was intellectually super, super impressed by The Singularity Is Near. The graphs, the examples, focused on hard disk capacities, microprocessors per chip, solar batteries, different technologies from all fields. But yet until you actually put those facts in a story, you can’t really understand, we’re not wired for facts, we’re wired for stories.

Biologically, we are storied animals. We need a story to make sense of the facts. In fact, facts are useless until you wrap them up, or put them within a story, because the story tells you what’s important and what isn’t.

What’s the treasure and what’s the garbage?

What’s the goal and what’s the side effect?

What’s the good and what’s the bad?

Everything that matters, in our life, in our civilization, everything that matters is framed in a story. And that’s how I was kind of lucky enough to really read The Singularity Is Near and Accelerando one after another. My mind was blown out afterwards, and I felt like I cannot do anything else. I had to do something with the singularity, with artificial intelligence. And I have to basically dedicate my life to it.

That’s how I became what people eventually started calling a “futurist”, which is a word I don’t like at all, because I still think that, at the bottom of it, I’m just a curious person.

By the way, I never tried to predict the future. I am more about trying to inspire people to create the best possible future.

3. Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near works based on cosmic evolution as a story. How do you understand the function of cosmic evolution as a story?

I think what you’re pushing me towards here, perhaps, or that’s how I perceive it anyway, is the teleology of Kurzweil’s inherent argument. I have substantial issues with Kurzweil’s teleology.

I think Kurzweil is a brilliant man. I’ve met him personally, and did a wonderful interview, and spent a number of hours in his office. He is super humble. He is brilliant. He is a genius. And I love his work, and his work has impacted me and many other millions of people around the world.

Moreover, I think he is a wonderful inventor and a wonderful human being, which is a rare coincidence of personality and skill and character. So I’m a big fan of his.

However, it doesn’t mean that I agree with everything that he talks about. And it doesn’t mean that there are no sort of blind spots in his claims. And biggest of all, in my opinion, is his inherent teleology. And by that, I mean that, ultimately, Ray Kurzweil’s ideas converge to a single linear, if you will, storyline. That is what he calls the “Six Epochs” of the singularity.

The problem with those epochs is that they are basically creationist in character. People will be shocked by that claim. To me, the creationist idea is about this kind of special unique place that Homo sapiens or humanity takes in the universe. We are framed as God’s chosen children, and our planet is a garden made for us, made for the taking, to make our lives better, to serve us better. And it is on a planet in the center of the universe, and everything else gravitates around us.

So the creationist thinking is, okay, we are the most important species of them all. All other species are subservient to us, our world is the center of the universe. But now, historically, science has gone on to discredit all of those claims. We know that our planet is an insignificant planet in the backyard of our Milky Way, gravitating around an insignificant little star that nobody cares about. So we are really in this corner of the galaxy, probably the back end of the universe.

In that sense, the kind of special place that we have, from a religious point of view, has been proven over and over again, that it is not the case.

Now, Ray Kurzweil is a great scientist, but here’s where his science becomes religious. First, the way they function, they use the same kind of story and promise the same outcome, which is to say immortality and abundance, just like religion. In other words, they promise heaven. Secondly, it treats humanity as this very species species, one of a kind. And you know, from my point of view, if you look at evolution, evolution doesn’t have a linear culmination point in development, no matter how much we would like to be that special. Evolution is rather a branching tree with endless kinds of experiments running, and many of them dying out as we speak, and many others branching off and continuing.

So for Kurzweil, ultimately, the final several epochs of the cosmos, would be something like we have these giant computroniums surrounding stars, absorbing all the energies, and basically powering up the required intelligence. And then the final outcome is that there is no more dumb matter in the universe, but we have smart matter, the universe wakes up, as Kurzweil says it.

Now, it doesn’t get more religious than that in my books, the universe literally wakes up. That’s like God himself, in the Second Coming of Christ Himself, right? We all wake up to the reality of Christ, or pick your God, you know.

And so, that to me is this kind of teleological single point of view, a story which impoverishes the possibilities of many different stories, many different futures that evolution creates by the fact that it is a branching kind of phenomenon. Evolution does not converge to any kind of predetermined end. Teleology is all about everything converging to a single point.

Teleology is a word that was invented by Aristotle, it means purpose in Greek. So the telos of a knife is to cut. If you have a sharp knife, and it cuts, it’s fulfilling its telos. It’s a good knife. But if the knife is dull and it cannot cut, it’s failing to fulfill its telos, its original purpose, and therefore its not a good knife.

Now that may be a good thing to say for knives, but for human beings, or for intelligences like us, that boxes us in a frame that creates only unidirection. It does not allow for any other possibilities for the flourishing of our intelligence, it only predetermines a single direction. Therefore, anything else that deviates from that predetermined direction is a deviation or aberration, and should not be allowed or incentivised in any way.

That to me is the impoverishment of that teleological conception, which is highly religious, and it replaces the religious heaven with a scientific or transhumanisitc heaven. It functions in the same way in the human brain, using the same neural structures, that any powerful religious story does. It promises the same outcomes, and therefore impoverishes all other future possibilities in front of us.

4. Why did you originally chose to blog under the name of Socrates?

I should answer the question of how, which is usually always a secondary question in my book. Because originally it was the how and then I came up with the why, one of the few exceptions in my life.

So I graduated with a Masters’s degree in International Relations, with a focus on artificial intelligence in times of war. I wrote a thesis around 2007 or so about the drone warfare which was just budding at the time, originally in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time, there was just half a dozen predator drones that the CIA had hacked with a couple of hellfire missiles, and they were taking out what they would call a target of opportunity.

My thesis was arguing that we did not witness what was the most common and popular thesis in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at that time, which was Samuel Huntington’s thesis, the clash of civilization. My claim was that we’re not witnessing a “clash of civilisations”, but, the first time in history when increasingly automated machines are taking increasingly automated decisions, as per whether a human being would live or die.

To me, that was a radically new phenomenon that was going to transform both the face of warfare as we know it, but potentially our entire civilisation.

And so anyway, I graduated in 2008 with a Master’s degree. I graduated during the Great Recession of 2008, the global financial crisis hit. In applying for work, I stopped counting after 300 resumes. I had only one interview. And I was on the Dean’s list with a Master’s degree from one of the great universities in Canada, and all kinds of academic awards and this and that. I got one interview, which by the way, apparently didn’t go that well because nobody called me afterwards.

And then I thought, well, what can I do with my life?

In the meantime, I was reading the first blog on artificial intelligence with technological singularity and transhumanist themes, at the time it was called “Singularity Hub”. And they released a call for public writers, they were hiring staff writers. I thought, I’ll be perfect for these people, I just basically wrote my Master’s degree thesis on this, and people say I am a decent writer.

So I sent an application. And it took a couple of weeks before I realised that they’re not calling me back either, and so it was basically one failure after another.

A couple of weeks after I realised they’re not calling me either, I had this crazy, crazy thought. I don’t even know how it popped into my head, but it was something like, well, maybe I don’t need them. Maybe, just maybe, I can start blogging on my own. How hard could it be?

Now mind you, I was a philosophy undergrad and an International Relations and political science graduate student. So I had no idea about HTML, programming, design, anything like that.

I had taken one elective computer science class because that was my science requirement, and that was it. So I had to start from the beginning, from ground zero, with HTML coding and stuff like that, very slowly. It took like like six months to put up 20 or 30 web pages. And when I was doing this, I was wondering: “what happens if I fail? What happens if I succeed? How do I do it?”

And you know, there was this cartoon at the time on the internet, that nobody knows that you’re a dog. I was like, well, why don’t I call myself Socrates, right? Because who knows how this thing is going to turn out anyway? Maybe it will be a total embarrassment, and I don’t want to put my name behind it. Plus, I’m just kind of experimenting and testing the water, and who knows, I’m not a technical guy.

So why don’t I adopt the name Socrates?

I didn’t come up with the name Socrates myself, because you would say, well, that’s kind of very presumptuous, you know. If you embrace your own moniker, Socrates, wouldn’t that be something? But I was already called Socrates when I was in the army. In Bulgaria, if you were 18 in the mid-1990s, there was compulsory military service, which is to say all men over 18 years old must serve in the arm, whether before university or after. Generally, if you were not accepted to university right out of high school, you go straight into the army, and I did go and serve in the army.

In the army, asking questions, being a curious person, is not a very good strategy for survival, you know; especially when it comes to senior military officers, a lot of egos, loaded weapons and extreme cases of stress, pressure, and armed weapons. In that kind of environment, when people started calling me Socrates, that was not a compliment. That was an insult.

But eventually, I got to embrace it because I was like, “well, it is what it is. Maybe it’s accurate, why fight it if that’s what people think?” I can’t choose anyway the alias that people are giving me.

When you’re in the army, everyone has a nickname. And it’s not the person who picks the nickname, it’s the other soldiers who pick it for them. So that was my name, Socrates. And so when I started blogging, that was naturally the first thing that came to my mind. I’m just going to use Socrates. Plus, I’m the man with the questions, that’s what they told me, that’s who they told me I was in the army. I was asking way too many questions for my own good, or the good of anyone else around me.

And so, that’s a long story, but that’s how I ended up with the moniker Socrates.

5. How did what you’re doing eventually become the Singularity Weblog project?

Right, so originally I started with the website called “Singularity Symposium”, which, by the way, someone appropriated now. What happened was, I started with an HTML self-hosted website called singularitysymposium.com. And it took me a year and a half, a year at least to have like 60 or 70 web pages, and they were all hand-written and hand-coded HTML, everything from beginning to end.

And then one day I discovered WordPress. I was like, “oh my God, this is like a word processor.” If you could actually type in a Microsoft Word document, you don’t need to do any HTML. You can actually blog and it’s all there and you don’t have to ever see the code. This is just pure genius, right?

I started listening to these things called podcasts around 2009, and I thought, “well, I should start interviewing some of those cool people and see what I can learn directly from the source.” Because one thing you learn in school, and even in the army, is that the closer you get to a source of information, the more undiluted and pristine and pure and correct that information is. It’s kind of like a broken telephone, right? The further away you get, the more distorted the message becomes. And so the mission is to get straight to the source or as close to it as possible. Interviewing people seemed to me the most logical way to accomplish that.

I thought, “okay, I’m going to start recording people with the podcast, but I don’t know anything about audio engineering.” I’m not an audio engineer. I don’t know the first thing about microphones. I don’t know the first thing about editing. I don’t know anything about anything. How the hell would I do that?

I also have a pretty strong Bulgarian accent, people would listen to me and they’ll be like, “oh, this guy can’t even speak proper English. Why the hell would we listen to him about anything ever?”

So I had lack of knowledge, complete ignorance and personal insecurities, all combined in it. But then I was like, “what do I have to lose? Let’s just do it, give it my best shot,” you know. And then I started doing these interviews.

Once I did the first one or two, I discovered that it’s much easier to do an interview if you have a webcam running, because we are very visual body language creatures. We watch the effect of what we say or we communicate in the body language of our interlocutor. And so it’s very helpful if you can actually see the person rather than if you don’t see them at all. Once I started looking at my guests through a welcome, I was like, “well, we have the webcam, why don’t we just record the video too?” So then I had to start editing video too.

One step after another, I started with an HTML website, moved to a WordPress blog, which became singularityweblog.com, or for brevity, you can get there by singularity.info. And my podcast was called “Singularity 1-on-1” for the first number of years. Eventually, I rebranded it to “SingularityFM”. And the original website, I shut it down a few years back, but some scammer apparently noticed that my original singularitysymposium.com website was ranked really well in Google, and they rebooted it from the Internet Archive with a number of gambling and casino links at the bottom of the page or something like that, basically link farming.

And that annoys the heck out of me, but I don’t have any control over that website anymore. So that’s what happened. It’s one of those good lessons that tells me I should have held onto it and just shut it down because now I’ve lost control over that.

But it is what it is, it’s a lesson that you have to learn just like I did, the hard way.

6. What message are you trying to send to the singularity community with the slogans “technology meets philosophy” and “exponential change meets human values”? How has this message been received?

Right, that’s the crux of the matter. Let me backtrack a little bit, just to make it more clear. For the first number of years of my podcast, people had the wrong impression that it’s about technology. It’s never been about technology. Technology has been the content.

But the context is always more important than the content because the context determines what content is good, what content is bad, what is valuable and what is not, what’s a treasure and what’s garbage, what’s ultimately the purpose and what is not, what’s useless.

So my content of technology was always in the context of philosophy, which is to say, How does technology serve the purposes of greater humanity? Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Is it something that pushes us forward or backward? Is it making us better or worse? Is it making us stronger or weaker?

Overall, what’s the best attitude that a rational species, hopefully, or a rational individual can adopt towards technology. Ultimately, that kind of culminated in a motto that I have at the bottom of my website at the footer, which says that technology is always the how, but if you don’t have the proper why, you can use the best how in the world, but you would end up doing more damage than good. That’s usually because the why should be the driving motivator, or frame maker, or context creator, and the how should be the follower.

In other words, technology should be the slave, and we should be the master of it, not the other way around. Not like in the many cases that technology has become today: technology is not the end, it’s the means, and we shouldn’t forget that.

So my impetus from the beginning was to push forward that line about the difference between means and ends, the why is the ends, the technology is the how, which is the means. And about the fact that all the most important choices or implications of technology are ultimately ethical ones, which is to say political, and that’s inescapable and unavoidable.

The more powerful a technology is, the greater the ethical implications it will have, and therefore the more political it will become. That’s why it’s been now maybe 10 years or so since the first time I think Donald Trump got elected around 2016. I wrote an article called “Technology is the Future of Politics and Politics is the Future of Technology”. They’re inseparable.

And so originally I would go to all these technical conferences in the 2010s, like 2012, 2011, 2012, with all these nerdy geeky engineers or computer scientists. And I’d go up in their face and say something like, “you know guys, nobody really cares about the details other than you, nobody really cares about how we do things, no matter how much you love it, no matter how much you geek over it, but what people care is about is the so what?”

Is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? Why should we or why shouldn’t we do that? And the whole field of ethics is about having the power to do something, but making the choice not to do despite the fact that you have the power.

So I would be in these conferences trying to push that line, and it made me very quickly, very unpopular, let me tell you.

At the time, nobody wanted to hear anything about ethics or philosophy in general. Everyone was consumed by the how, everyone was geeking over the most minute technical details. And I’ve always pushed that those are ultimately not important.

Now, I have to say I’m very happy to observe that people everywhere have woken up to the fact that technology is ultimately a political phenomenon, because it has ethical dimensions or implications, and they’re inseparable. And so instead of thinking retroactively, after the technology is a fact about those ethical and political implications. We should think proactively so that we don’t consider them as a band-aid solution, but we should consider them by design at the outset. And that way, while there is no guarantee we would avoid any negative externalities or risks, at least we would minimize them much more than ever before.

That has been a big shift in the last 10 years that I’m very, very happy to observe. Now the entire world, I believe, has woken up to the fact that AI is here. And that the big choices that AI in particular, but also all super advanced technological progress, whether in genetics, robotics, AI, whatever it may be, ultimately comes down to our ethical choices. And those choices will determine whether we would destroy ourselves, or whether we would survive and thrive and maybe even spread throughout the cosmos. Not the technology that we have, but how we choose to embrace it.

I grew up in the Eastern Block, behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria. And I was 13, 14 years old when the iron curtain collapsed. I can tell you, roughly, we had more or less the same technology in the East and the West. You know, the industrial revolution, trains, cars, spaceships. In the Eastern Bloc, we were very strong on things like mathematics and the sciences, for example, very strong.

But some people built socialism, or attempted to build socialism with it. Other people built democracies or social democracies. Other people try to build fascism.

So you see, the same technology was employed in what I would consider radically different ways with respect to our ethics, and that in terms has implications on our freedom, both individually, and as societies, and ultimately that’s all what politics is about. The choices that we make, the big choices are not the technological ones, they’re the ethical ones, and they change the nature of the impact of that technology.

7. Why should people get involved in the deeper why and so what of exponential technologies and the singularity? Can you expand on your own perspective on ethics and politics, perhaps in contrast to what people in the technical fields have thought about ethics and politics?

Yeah, so the other big gripe that I have with Silicon Valley is similar to the gripe I have with Ray Kurzweil, and his sort of indisturbable teleology; in Silicon Valley, they have their deterministic law of the universe equaling the claim that the march of technology is unstoppable, and we might as well just get along with it.

I have problems with that just as much as I have problems with Ray Kurzweil or teleology, because neither the speed, but especially not the direction the technology goes, is natural or inevitable, or follows some kind of law.

We had the same technology in the 1930s and 40s Europe, and again in the 20th century, that same technology produced fascism, socialism/communism, and capitalist democracies. So the difference wasn’t the technology, the technology is not necessarily deterministic, is what I’m trying to break the presumption of here. It is not a single path, it is just like evolution, that’s why I hate teleology, because it comes up to a single conclusion and everything else is wrong. Just like in religion, God said it, or it is in the Holy Book, and everything that deviates from that is wrong, and shouldn’t be, and it’s like to be condemned, and burned at the stake even.

Whereas ultimately technology should allow for a greater and greater freedom. That’s my ethical stance with respect to technology. Is it producing greater freedom or lesser freedom? That’s one of the many different kind of ways of measurement. And single paths not only never produce more freedom, but are evolutionarily super dangerous. I mean, look at evolution. Evolution throws everything at the wall in every single direction. It’s like a sphere of expansion of possibilities, that’s why we have millions upon millions of species.

If you have a single species, no matter how well adapted it is to a specific environment, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. And what that means is that if something goes wrong, poof, you have extinction. If you have diversity, even if a number of those species go extinct, life continues, evolution continues. There is a myriad of branching possibilities that are ever growing.

That’s what evolution is all about. There is no convergence. It is divergence of freedom and possibilities. And so if we, to answer your question and connect it to what I just said, if we embrace the claim that Silicon Valley pushes forward under the idea that technology’s march is inevitable and unstoppable, and if you listen to them, in a very specific single direction, then we might as well watch Netflix, drink beer, and eat pizza, because we’re all just spectators, right?

I mean, there’s nothing we can do. It’s inevitable, it’s unstoppable, and it is going the way it’s going. Who the hell are we to do anything?

But that’s why I have problems with people who make those kinds of claims, because that’s not a prediction, that’s a prison. And my claim is exactly the opposite. My claim is the future is not a prediction, which says that it’s inevitable, to paraphrase Cory Doctorow, but the future is a story which tells you that it’s up for grabs.

And it tells you that you can be a spectator of that story, or you can get your hands dirty and you can try to be the author of your own story, the author of your own story as an individual. So you do have agency at the individual level, but you also have agency at the collective level. We can together become the authors of our own story as a species. And we can create a myriad other possibilities which any narrow-minded teleology would not allow space for.

In other words, it creates a clearing that we can populate with an expanding sphere of evolutionary possibilities rather than having a single track that serves the Silicon Valley big tech elites and their profit margins. And anything that deviates from those is to be exterminated or condemned and is reprehensible.

So it’s all about the agency that we all have, and we must reclaim, and the fact that we can be, and we must become, the authors of our own story, both individually and collectively.

8. You’ve been interviewing experts for your podcast for 15 years now. What are the most memorable interviews that you’ve conducted? What are the interviews that have taught you the most about the relationship between technology and philosophy specifically?

Wow, that’s a really tough question. That’s like, I know you have only one child, but that’s like asking a parent who has a number of children, who is your favourite child. And you know, even if parents do have favourites, it’s not a very wise thing to say publicly, who is your favourite child, for a number of reasons.

Now, I’ve done over 300 interviews and I’ve learned a lot. And, you know, having a conversation, asking good questions is a skill. It is a skill that takes a lifetime pursuit to learn. I am at the beginning of that journey. I suck a lot less than before.

I mean, when I watch my original interviews 10, 15 years ago, I often cringe. If back in the day I would screw up two or three hundred things per interview, you know, just on the actual part of interviewing or conversing with people, not to mention another two or three hundred things on the technical side of things. Nowadays, maybe, hopefully, I am down to maybe 50 or 60 on each of those sides, that I could have and should have done better.

And I should know by now to not do, but I still do. So no interview is perfect. Some are better than others, for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s just chemistry, sometimes it’s just mood. Sometimes it could really not work out for a variety of reasons. Like I had Lawrence Krauss on my podcast, and it was just one of those days, where he had a dental operation right before the interview. And I had a killer headache. And it was just like one of those interviews that we both really struggled to do. Now I still learned a lot, I still read his book in full, as part of my prep for the interview before that.

Also, out of the 300 and some interviews, I probably have had five or six that I never published, each for a different reason. So maybe you could call it a 2% failure rate in the sense that I recorded an interview and then for a variety of reasons, after the fact, I decided not to publish it. So those were a complete disaster.

The interviews that really stand out in my mind are the interviews that break the mold that I am within, the interviews that literally blow my mind and take me to another level that I previously considered not possible.

I’ll give you a couple of examples.

The first such example that comes to my mind is my interview with Karl Schroeder. Schroeder is a science fiction writer from Toronto, Canada. He’s kind of like the hidden gem of the science fiction world, and he’s also a fantastic futurist. He has at least 10 books, I think, all of them fantastic. I’ve read four or five of them.

When I interviewed him the first time it was probably 10 or 12 years ago, maybe 13 or 14 years ago, actually. He told me this, the singularity is a good model, it’s an interesting model, it’s an interesting concept, but consider it as a lens through which you see the world.

So when you’re a photographer, you know, you have a lens. Let’s say the standard lenses are either a 35 millimeter lens, or a 50 millimeter lens, usually. And then you have wider lenses. Anything wider than 35 millimeter, like a 24 or an 18 or a 16 millimeter is a wider lens, a wide angle point of view. Then you have telephoto, anything over 50 millimeter is considered telephoto. And he said it is good to have a standard lens, and to look at the world through that lens, but it’s also very useful to take off your lens and put another lens, and look at the world with a different lens, because that different lens creates completely different point of view. And it distorts the world in a different way which stresses certain elements, let’s say the foreground, and reframes the background further if you have a wide angle lens. If you have a telephoto lens, it brings the background forward.

So there is a benefit to changing the lens on your camera because you’re capturing a more full spectrum of the possible perspectives by doing that, and so he told me it is good to have the singularity point of view, but it’s good to take it down and put other points of view, and look at the universe as having many more possibilities than that single point of view called the singularity.

And at the time when Karl told me that, that literally blew my mind because for four or five years before that, I was a total singularity fan and I was a one point of view, one model kind of person. I couldn’t see the world in anything else other than that specific paradigm, especially since at the time I wasn’t even aware of the limitations of Ray Kurzweil’s teleology, and about the fact that it’s creationist in its nature, because just like creationists think we’re special, that kind of scientific technology presumes that we are special, that our intelligence is going to give birth to the cosmic intelligence until the ultimate point where the universe finally wakes up. So you see we’re so special like that, and that’s very creationist.

I’m more of the Douglas Adams kind of point of view: we’re just like some ridiculous, bipedal, ape-descending species on some backyard, god-forsaken, tiny little planet, that nobody cares about, just trying to figure out life, the universe and everything. And the best we’ve got so far is like some ridiculous claim that it’s 42.

So, to me, Silicon Valley saying technology is unstoppable and, you know, unsteerable almost, and it’s all ending up to this massive cosmic teleology is like telling us the answer of the universe is 42. 42 is the answer of everything.

I’m saying, yes, I believed that, unfortunately, for a period of time. And then people like Karl Schroeder came and showed me how short-sighted and narrow-minded that point of view is, because 42 is brilliant, it’s funny, it’s great, but it’s only one of endless possibilities. I’m now all about, let’s look at all the possibilities, and different people are going to like different things in the cosmic possibilities.

By the way, as I said before, that’s a lot less risky too, because we have a lot more possibilities for growth, both intellectually and otherwise. So Schroeder was the first one that kind of blew my mind in that way.

Then another interview that I’ve remembered is Ada Palmer’s most recent interview. I’ve interviewed Ada Palmer three times. She is this historian from the University of Chicago who specializes in the Renaissance. And she writes these massive, massive science fiction novels. She has written a series of four books and the latest book is, I don’t know, 1,000 or 1,200 pages, and all of them add up to 4,000 or 5,000 pages. And I’ve gone through them all, by the way.

But she wrote her latest book is called Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. And basically it is the idea that we can’t name the Renaissance, and we can’t date it even, and we can’t even say what it means, because every different university department calls the Renaissance something different.

So if you’re in the Department of Political Science, you would claim that the Renaissance is the birth of Republicanism and the first Republics against absolute monarchies. If you are in the Department of Economics, you would say that the Renaissance is the birth of banking and the first capitalist sort of monetary global system. If you are in the arts end of things, then you would say that the Renaissance is the birth of art as separate from religious art, or art that’s in the name of God, but as its own thing. If you are in the Department of the Sciences, for example, you would say that the Renaissance is the birth of science and the first time scientific disciplines taking off away from the religious theology and dogma.

Therefore, each of those departments would give them different dates, even different centuries, different major people, different major pivotal moments, because each one of them looks at the Renaissance as a completely different story. And that story tells them what is the most important, whether it’s banking, whether it’s the fact that you have republican political ideals, whether you have new art, whether you have new science, what have you. Everyone tells a different story.

Most importantly, there are those myths of a Golden Age. To have a Golden Age, you cannot have a Golden Age on its own. You have to have a Golden Age only if there is a Dark Age. So before you invent the Renaissance, you have to invent the Dark Age.

Petrarch, or I think his name originally was Francesco Petrarca, who originally in I think the 1200s, was kind of one of the proto-fathers of the Renaissance, was the guy who first coined the term the Dark Ages. And he gave that name to everything preceding that moment. You see, that’s a political act. That’s politics right there, because it tells you that something is bad, and now we have the opportunity to create something good. And from then on, you’re not just telling a story, you’re telling a political story which has power implications. And from then on, you can divide people into groups of those who are in support, or those who are against.

But again, everyone would have a different concept and idea about what a Golden Age is when it began and so on. So nowadays when a new politicians comes and says, “okay, I’m going to create a new Renaissance,” or “I’m going to create a new Golden Age,” you have to understand at the same time he’s also saying that before me, or the immediate present, the immediate past is a Dark Age, and I’m going to change that. And there is a political purpose in reasoning and machinery working behind those claims.

So Ada Palmer was the first historian who didn’t take a single point of view to say, “okay, no, this is the Renaissance and everything else is false.” She actually went through the entire catalog of all these people going through all these different concepts and ideas and dates and timelines of the Renaissance as a different story. And she said they’re all different stories, and she said you can choose which story you want to embrace, but beware that every story that you choose comes with its upsides and its downsides, with costs and benefits.

So yes you can still make a choice but be aware that it has to be a deliberate choice and you have to be conscious and cognizant of the price you’re going to pay for each of those choices, and nothing is inevitable most of all. There is no such thing as an inevitable progress or direction of history, which is what teleology is all about. Instead, we have history unfolding, and then people retrospectively go and start naming certain events as Golden Age or Dark Age.

But in the Dark Ages, there were many Golden Age things that happened, that were amazing. And in the Golden Age, there were absolutely many horrendously terrible things that happened, but we still call it the Golden Age because we downplay those terrible things.

For example, in the Renaissance in Italy, life expectancy dropped to 18 years of age. So think about it this way, in 1400s Europe, life expectancy was around 38, 39. In the 1600s of Florence, which was one of the richest places in Europe, one of the technologically most advanced places in the world, culturally, economically with banking system, etc., life expectancy dropped to 18. It was so horrible, that one of Machiavelli’s friends asked him to write a history of Italy, or Florence at least, in his case, because the future generations would not believe how terrible the situation was, according to his friends.

That’s why, by the way, we have The Prince, which is written in a dog-eat-dog kind of world. And that happens during that alleged Golden Age, right? The Renaissance, where people couldn’t go on the road without being murdered by bandits, and males didn’t last more than 18 years of age, and there were constant wars and plunders and cities being sucked by this person or that person or that king and the other king. There were religious intolerances, sexual intolerances.

Oh, and by the way, the plague would come along or hang around in the back rooms and the backyards almost constantly and would wipe out, you know, every 50 years or so, would wipe out like a third of the population. So it was horrendous in so many ways, and yet amazing in all the other ways that we know of.

9. Can you tell us about your idea of “context effect”? Where did you first start developing this idea, and what have you learned in acting it out?

The “context effect” came to me as an idea when I was listening to a podcast episode by a person that I love and respect very much. And he was doing an interview and someone finished the interview by saying the classic cliche that “content is king”. The bugged me so badly that I had to react and do a whole presentation against it.

I was like, “no, content is not king, context is king,” because content is just the how or the what, but it’s the why that sets the meaning and the purpose of everything.

By the way, context is the overarching framework, whether it’s religious, whether it’s ethical, whether it’s legal, whether it’s economical, which tells us what’s good or what’s bad, what’s right or what’s wrong, who should marry whom, what to eat, what to believe, what happens when we’re born, what’s the purpose of life, and what happens when we die. That all comes from the context, that all comes from the story.

The content is just data. That’s, by the way, one of the major differences, at least so far, between humans and AI.

So think about it this way: AIs can process gargantuan, almost unlimited amounts of data. But they have no idea what data means. Unless and until they borrow from us. That’s called reinforced learning. That’s called prompt engineering. And what does that do? That basically gives them context. And the context that they get, they borrow from us, it tells them “this is garbage” and “this is good”, “do more of this” and “don’t do any of that”, “we want this” and “we don’t want that”. Good or bad.

We have come up to that context framework through evolution and through millennia, millions of years even of evolution and evolving and living, and then existing as a Homo sapiens for, you know, at least, let’s say 70 or 100,000 years. AIs don’t have that context. So their ability to process data is useless unless and until they get the framework that tells them how to process the data, because you can’t separate the signal from the noise unless and until you have a definition of what is signal, and what is noise. That comes first, in philosophy, there is this discussion or debate about whether you can derive an ought from an is. And the question is, can we even do that? And if you believe that we can’t, that machines don’t need the context, because they can deal with the is, they can deal with the facts. But whether the facts are good or bad, useful or not useful, dangerous or helpful, all that depends on the ought to.

The ought to comes from our evolutionary baggage, from the things that help us survive, from the things that help us thrive, from the things that give us more freedom and put us in less danger. That’s part of our evolutionary baggage, and so that’s why the context is absolutely crucial. That’s why, by the way, you can have people on the left and on the right, looking at the same exact facts, even agreeing on the facts, and vehemently disagreeing on what they mean. The reason is that the same two people look at the same facts with a completely different framework, and that is their context, that is their story. And different stories can take the same exact facts and make them diametrically opposite in terms of their meaning, in terms of whether they’re good or bad, whether they should be incentivized or disincentivized. So that’s why for me, the crucial point that I’ve been working on for the last few years is storytelling, because that’s how we get our context. We get our context by embracing a story.

That story, in many cases, has been, historically speaking, religious. But it can be also political in terms of communism or socialism. Those are also stories. Fascism is story. Nationalism is a story. So one way or another, we need a context that helps us make sense of the world, that gives us direction, that tells us who we are, that tells us where we’re coming from, and that tells us where we’re going.

At least so far, machines are unable to supply that. What they’re able to do is imperfectly borrow from us. And as long as we are in control of that context, we would be the smarter species, I believe. The moment we lose control over the context, we are in trouble.

That’s why all my work has been about trying to rewrite that context, that overarching story. Because to paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, we are living in a situation where the old world is dying, and we can all see that, but the new world is struggling to be born. And that is the time of monsters. Those monsters come at very high price, individually and also collectively.

My work is determined at two levels: one, how can we minimize the reign of monsters as little as possible, both in terms of duration, but also in terms of reach and capacity, hopefully. Two is, what would be the overarching context or story that can create the framework for the birth of the new world in such a way that it would maximize freedom and minimize danger for us both as individuals but also collectively as a species.

10. Can you tell us more about your experience with consulting? What is your aim with consulting, and what has been some of the results of this work?

I have had to embrace the moniker of a futurist whether I like it or not, and the question then is what is the function that a futurist can serve? Or let me rephrase the question in a different way. Given that we are living in a vacuum between the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born, what is my purpose as an individual, and what function can I serve as an agent of change?

I can steer a better outcome for our future while being authentic to who I am and what I can contribute with. And the conclusion I’ve gotten to is twofold, but basically a future is to me, as a philosopher of change, or an agent like me, has two functions.

One is, the Socratic function that I have which is being a midwife to humanity’s best ideas. When you come to my blog and when you come to my podcast, my goal is not to tell you what to think. I don’t want to tell you, look, there is a teleology, there is right and wrong. There is only one way of seeing the world. Technology is unstoppable and the march of AI will be, you know, determinate, like you cannot do anything about it, and that’s it.

Instead, I want to create a symposium, which the original Greek meaning is a drinking party where everyone goes to have fun, but at the end of the day, after the party is over, leaves with a new awareness or a new enlightenment or a new insight or a breakthrough of some sort or another. So they live better than they came. Socrates was the host of those symposiums in Plato’s symposium. In a way, he was the midwife to other people giving birth to their own best ideas. In other words, he didn’t teach anyone anything, he just created the atmosphere within which everyone gave birth to their own best ideas. That’s one of my goals to provide that kind of service.

The other one as a consultant is in terms of our collective faith, both as businesses and organizations, and also as a civilization. You know, a pessimist is someone who complains about the wind, an optimist is someone who believes that the wind will change for the better. A realist is something who adjusts the sails. So I find myself as a futurist as someone who helps people adjust the sails of their boat in such a way so that they are not fighting the winds of change. Yet, despite that, they are able to reach the harbour of their chosen destination. Because a skilled captain with a seaworthy boat will be able to take you to any place on earth, despite the fact that you would have storms and you would have unfavourable winds and all of this, because you would know how to adjust the sails. Therefore use that power to get you where you need to go. And that’s kind of like civilizational judo.

You know, there are certain trends and certain kind of inclinations, and we maybe are not able to completely hold them, but we can steer them very much. And how and where you steer to makes all the difference in the world, just like we saw in the 1930s and 40s between fascism, communism and capitalist democracies. Now we are at a similar kind of watershed moment.

My goal is to help people steer their collective organization or company or even nations and our civilization towards the best possible future for us all.

Conclusion: we’re going to be organising Singularity Summer, a two-month series this July and August, with Thomas Hamelryck. Can you tell us about how someone would benefit from getting involved, not only in our two-month process, but your month specifically?

I think the first original four weeks on LLMs and Machine Learning, taught by Thomas Hamelryck, will be brilliant. Based on the interview that I watched that you conducted with him, I was super impressed by how erudite he is, and how wide and broad, but also even deep his knowledge is in non-computer science fields. And how well aware he is that we are getting to the point where philosophy and philosophical issues and questions, become more and more directly relevant.

Thus, first of all, in the first four weeks you’re going to have a fantastic grounding by a professional expert who is a professor at university, and a deep field expert in the foundations and fundamentals of machine learning, LLMs and artificial intelligence in general.

And then I will be hopefully able to come after that for the following four weeks to tell you how the context of our story making would give meaning to those technical foundations that we can employ to create all kinds of futures, whether it’s communist, socialist, fascist, nationalist, capitalist, or anything else. And how the future is not teleological, it is not deterministic, we are not just billiard balls on a pool table.

We have freedom and we have agency. And this is grounded both in the micro world, in quantum mechanics, but also in the macro world, in things like chaos theory, and even in science fiction stories like those written by Isaac Asimov.

Nowadays we have people in Silicon Valley who come up with the claims that AI will solve everything. There is the solve everything mentality. That’s like the most teleological, limiting and self-defeating, enslaving possibility. The Dune series, written by Frank Herbert, is written against that claim. Herbert himself said that when the future becomes 100% certain and predictable, it becomes a prison, and his character is attempting to escape that for the largest part of his first couple of novels, in the Dune series.

So I will hopefully give you the tools to put that data, that information, that science, that technology background, that Thomas Hamelryck will give you in the first four weeks, I will give you the tools to put it in context of your own choice. And that will allow you to hopefully be the author of your own story, both as an individual, but also have agency at the collective level, should you choose to do so. And even if you don’t, at least you would be aware that each of our choices comes with certain kind of implications and certain kind of downstream effects.

Once we commit to a certain choice, that will lead to a certain effect, and nothing is deterministic, nothing is inevitable, and nothing is written in stone. We have our agency still and we have capacity to make a difference. And the biggest difference starts or the original difference starts with the choice of a story or framework or context we choose to embrace, because that’s how we choose to see the world. That’s the lens we put in front of our eyes, whether it’s us being aware of it or whether being not aware of it. I’m trying to help you become aware of it, and I’m trying to give you the power to choose the best lens of your own choice, while having the freedom to switch it whenever you wish to. And that creates infinitely more possibilities for our future. Not to mention, it’s a lot more fun to investigate, to learn, to discuss, and to debate than a certain single teleological straight framework of the “Six Epochs” of the technological singularity, which presumes that we are all just billiard balls, and the universe is like a pool table, which is what Newton thought was the case.

And then we might as well just, you know, watch Netflix and drink beer and eat pizza, because there is nothing that we can do about anything at all. And I believe that’s absolutely not the case.

This July and August at Philosophy Portal, we will be hosting machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck and singularity theorist Nikola Danaylov for a two-month exploration of the notion of technological singularity. To join us, check the link in the description for the full course, or consider becoming a member at the portal and get access to all of our live events as well as our entire recorded history.

Singularity Summer

This July and August at Philosophy Portal, we will be hosting machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck and singularity theorist Nikola Danaylov for a two-month exploration of the notion of technological singularity.

The first half of the course will be focused on the nature of machine learning, its real and its mythology, its limits and its potential, as well as the practical consequences for human relationships and institutional development.

The second half of the course will be focused on the nature of story itself, the human story, the story of capitalism, technology, politics, and the question of whether or not we need to learn how to rewrite the human story in the face of 21st century technological developments.

Both Hamelryck and Danaylov have dedicated their life to these topics. Hamelryck on machine learning and Danaylov on the question of story in the context of singularity.

To join us, check the link in the description for the full course, or consider becoming a member at the portal and get access to all of our live events as well as our entire recorded history.

Singularity Summer

What you are about to read is an interview with machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck. This interview functions as pre-course content for Singularity Summer. For the full video, see:

1. What is the most basic definition of “machine learning” and how does this concept relate to “artificial intelligence”?

Yes, that’s a bit of a messy story, if you ask me.

Artificial intelligence is about creating machines that essentially mimic human intelligence or an aspect of human intelligence, so they are capable of performing a task that typically is something that a human would perform.

And so that’s the broad category of artificial intelligence. Then within artificial intelligence, you have machine learning, and these are algorithms or machines that learn from data. So machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence, that sounds really spectacular, but actually within artificial intelligence, you would find something as simple as, for example, linear regression, which relates one variable with another variable. Let’s say you want to predict the weight from the height of a person, that’s an algorithm more than 200 years old. It was executed on a piece of paper, and that would be technically then machine learning within artificial intelligence.

So it’s kind of a bit of an interesting situation with respect to hype and with respect to expectations.

And then you have things like neural networks, for example. They are machine learning methods, learning from data. All of that is embedded within the broader category of artificial intelligence.

And then you have deep learning, which is basically a set of algorithms that make use of neural networks, very big neural networks that again learn from data.

That’s kind of artificial intelligence and machine learning in a nutshell.

1a. Is artificial intelligence the broadest category, with machine learning being a subcategory within that category?

Yeah, that is the traditional way in which this is explained. And that actually also means that a lot of old and boring statistical methods people would not associate with robots are doing human-like behavior. A lot of these older methods, these statistical methods are formally then also within the category of artificial intelligence, which is kind of an interesting situation.

It maybe also exposes a bit the fact that there is quite a bit of hype around all these things.

1b. Is artificial intelligence itself a confused concept?

Well, it’s something that is nice to use in an informal way, but it’s definitely overused.

What do we actually mean by intelligence? There are many definitions around that. It’s definitely a term that is now associated with a lot of hype. Most of what people call artificial intelligence is essentially statistics or computer science, mathematics, or combination of these things.

Often the algorithms behind these artificial intelligence methods, the algorithms are often a bit simpler than what people might expect. Also, because a lot of these algorithms have these very catchy names, like for example, “the attention mechanism”, this is just an algorithm that you execute, right? It’s basically linear algebra, some non-linear functions.

But because it’s called “the attention mechanism”, people suddenly start having fantasies about all kinds of human-like aspects around it. And that’s a very typical situation for the discourse around artificial intelligence today.

And why is that done? Well, a lot of it is, of course, because people want to create hype, they want to create expectations. They want to make investors enthusiastic so they invest. And that’s a big part of the explanation of why we have this proliferation of spectacular concepts.

2. How would you characterise the development of machine learning in the past 5 years in comparison to the past 25 or 50 years? Is the development exponential?

I think you could say that there’s definitely a spectacular progress going on. Neural networks are not new, they have been around since the 50s, but it’s only now that, let’s say like since 2018, it is clear how enormously powerful they are.

And why are they are more powerful than before?

Well, it turns out that you, first of all, you need good algorithms to train them, but even more importantly, you need an enormous amounts of data. So now we have the software to train these models, we have the algorithms to train these models. We also have the chips, the GPUs.

The chips developed originally for gaming are now being used for training these models. So indeed the progress is quite spectacular, and it attracts an enormous amount of funding, enormous amounts of attention.

These are statisticians working on these problems, mathematicians, computer scientists. There are a lot of interdisciplinary teams working on these methods, like for example, AlphaFold, which solves one of the biggest problems in molecular biology. So indeed the progress is quite spectacular, so you could definitely call it exponential if you want.

2a. Can you expand on the importance of data and its relationship to the exponential development of artificial intelligence?

One of the big learning experiences is that you need a lot of data to train these models, and they can absorb an enormous amounts of data and learn from that, so that’s indeed very important.

3. What does it mean for a machine to “learn” something and how does this differ from how we think of human learning?

I think this is a very interesting question because there you almost immediately start dealing with questions that were traditionally in the realm of philosophy. What does that actually mean, learning? What that mean, intelligence?

Traditionally, learning means deduction, that is basically logic. You have certain premises, and then you reach conclusions. You have induction where you start learning and predicting from patterns. And then you also have abduction, you could think of that as world building, as the formulation of hypotheses.

So we do all of these things. And in addition to that, humans can also think about causality, we have memory. All of these things can be mimicked with machines to some extent.

Right now the deep learning revolution is mostly based on induction, so it’s basically trying to learn from patterns, and increasingly we are adding deduction to that. A lot of things are missing, but if all of these models can eventually perform the logical functions of deduction, induction, abduction, and they have memory, and they know about causality, at the end of the day, are they doing learning in exactly the same way as humans?

Is the human learning experience, nothing else, an algorithm that you run on a piece of a slab of silicon? And that’s, of course, a philosophical question.

3a. What would it mean to develop machine learning programs that can excel at induction, deduction and abduction?

Well, these algorithms will just get better and better at what they are doing. They will also be better and better at asking the general questions that many people expect these algorithms to be able to address.

You have this artificial general intelligence (AGI) idea. AGI is the idea that there will be an algorithm that you can just ask anything and it would be able to respond better than a human in a very general way. That’s how many people are using the LLMs today, right?

But actually one of the most successful methods in artificial intelligence is not a general intelligence, it is a very specific intelligence. Artificial intelligence solves very specific problems. That example is, of course, AlphaFold, which solved the protein folding problem.

Actually, I think that people are expecting a bit too much from this artificial general intelligence idea, and are underestimating what will happen when we start applying artificial intelligence increasingly to very, very specific problems. And so we will have very, very specific algorithms that deal with very, very specific problems.

I think that in the coming years, we will see a lot of spectacular examples in that area, and not so much from artificial general intelligence.

3b. Is the AI community relating to artificial general intelligence as a mystical or magical concept? Are they overextending it?

I think there’s a lot of confusion around it and it also creates some kind of mental paralysis.

I deal a lot with with young people, right, with students. I often hear people saying: “will there be anything left for me to do?” And I think that is a very pessimistic attitude. It’s of course possible that artificial general intelligence will make everybody unemployed, but that will actually be a very new development in the history of mankind. So usually a new technology leads to indeed an enormous amount of unemployment in traditional areas, for example, the introduction of the car made a lot of people dealing with horses unemployed.

But all of these people, you know, they found other jobs. The introduction of the computer also did not make everybody unemployed. People just found new jobs using computers. And actually, I suspect that the same thing will happen with all of these artificial intelligence methods, at least in the foreseeable future.

So jobs will shift. The world will change a lot. But I do not see, there are no real signs currently, that people are losing their jobs to a great extent.

3c. What are the implications of this wave of automation being distinct from past waves, insofar as we are dealing with automating mental processes?

Well, I think that people are underestimating the importance of the role of atoms. Now we have LLMs, and they make beautiful poems and so on, and you can make them do things automatically, often in a very sloppy way.

But ultimately you want to have methods that help you do something in the world, for example, designing better buildings, designing new materials, designing new medicines. So the shift, and I think that we will see that in the future, we will see a shift increasingly to the world of atoms.

I think that Peter Thiel said it, we are reading our smartphones, our 21st century smartphones on 19th century transport trains, right? I think that people are underestimating the effect that these methods will have in the real world. And action in the real world will require a lot of people who make sure about the translation from intelligent methods to the world of atoms, actually happens.

3d. What are the implications of combining advanced machine learning software with advances in robotics?

Yes, of course, artificial general intelligence and robotics. A lot of jobs are going to be made obsolete, and there will be a lot of changes. Nobody can predict what will happen, it’s often unexpected what will happen.

Also, for example, the introduction of the computer actually took many, many years before jobs started, before you could see the increase in productivity, thanks to the introduction of the computer.

I can only repeat that, I think that there will be, of course, a lot of changes. You can already see these changes around you, for example, transportation and food delivery with Uber, for example.

There will be a lot of changes and some jobs will disappear. I think that other jobs will appear.

We’ll see where we end up.

4. What are the dominant paradigms of machine learning and what are the significant differences between them?

Yeah, so you have a number of general categories: we have supervised learning, that’s learning from patterns, input and output. You have a collection of images: monkeys, cars, and so on and so on. And then they also have labels, which are associated with these pictures, and then you try to predict, for example, the label from the image. And so you learn from these examples, so that’s supervised learning.

Then you have unsupervised learning. There you learn patterns that are inherent in the data. For example, you can do clustering. You could find, for example, in marketing, you can find types of consumers that resemble each other. So there we have the data that is inherently structured, and you learn that structuring from the data itself, without any examples that guide you.

Then you have semi-supervised learning, that’s something that is a combination of the two. Let’s say you have a number of images that are labeled, and then you have a large amount of images that are unlabelled. That is a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning.

You have reinforcement learning. There you act in an environment and that environment gives you feedback, gives you a reward. A classic example is learning how to play a computer game. So there an artificial intelligence method would engage with a computer game and would immediately get feedback from the game. Is this action actual, does that give you a reward or not?

And then finally, we have self-supervised learning. This is done a lot now with, for example, large language models. So semi-supervised learning there you basically learn the target goal from the data itself, a classic example is that you learn from texts, and then you mask out certain parts of the text, and you learn how to fill in these missing parts again. That is self- supervised learning, it’s very much used in language models and also in bioinformatics models.

These are kind of the general methods used for learning.

4a. How does the concept of “supervised” function in these different paradigms of machine learning?

Yeah, supervised means that you have examples to guide you. The best example is image classification. You give an image to a neural network and it tells you what’s on the image.

This is a very classic task, the ImageNet task. It was designed for that. It was actually also the first time that people realized that neural networks were really, really good, when the neural networks won the ImageNet competition.

So supervised basically means that the learning is guided by examples, input and output examples coupled.

5. How do you think about the nature of “understanding” in the difference between a trained human being and a trained machine learning model?

Yeah, that’s a very interesting question. Again, there we are immediately in the realm of philosophy, right? It’s really interesting how a lot of classical philosophical questions are now in the realm of engineering.

So if an artificial intelligence method, if it behaves like a human being, is that automatically learning the same way as a human being, or is it intelligent in the same way as a human being? What does it even mean, intelligence?

You of course have the famous Turing test that was designed by Alan Turing in 1950. So here we have the imitation game. You have basically a human who interacts with a machine and an ordinary human. Can that human judge distinguish between the machine and the human?

That’s the Turing test.

Now a lot of methods have passed the Turing test, you can interact with an AI, with an LLM, with a textual interface. It will be very difficult to figure out, is this a human being or is this a machine?

But then of course the question is, is that enough? If a method that behaves like a human being, is that understanding in the same way? Is that intelligent in the same way? Is that sentient in the same way?

You have a couple of spectacular examples of people working for Google who suddenly said, oh, I believe that this LLM has become conscious. So it’s a question that leads to very fundamental issues. What does that actually mean, intelligence? Are these artificial intelligent methods intelligent in the same way as human beings? Can they become intelligent in the same way as human beings? Are human beings actually intelligent?

So this is a very rich source of open problems, and again, I think there is a lot of confusion.

As far as I understand, Richard Dawkins interacted with an LLM, asked it a couple of questions, and then I think he called it a she, and then in the end concluded that she is conscious.

So yeah, interesting.

5a. What is the relationship between sensation, perception and understanding in the context of the difference between machine and human learning?

Yeah, so here, of course, you have the interesting question of, so what’s the relationship between intelligence and sentience or consciousness? If a machine seems to act intelligent, is it then also conscious? Can you have intelligence without consciousness? Are there certain, let’s say, demands that you can put on calling a machine intelligent that automatically imply that it also has a form of sentience?

These are super interesting questions. Can you actually have an intelligence that is equivalent to what a human being does in some sense, and that runs as an algorithm on a silicon chip. There are people who believe that basically intelligence is just running an algorithm. They believe you can download your personality, run it on a computer and you will basically exist as yourself on that computer, so it’s just running an algorithm.

Or is there something more going on?

Philosophers like, for example, Alfred North Whitehead, they would very much disagree with that. Whitehead would say that this is a case of misplaced abstraction, that you cannot just run an algorithm on a piece of silicon and then have something that is equivalent to, let’s say, to a behavior that emerges from a completely different material substratum.

But again, we are very, very quickly run into very, very fundamental questions.

So what is intelligence? What is sentience? What is consciousness? What’s the relation between all of these?

If you look at, for example, organisms: humans, apes, monkeys, rabbits, lizards, unicellular organisms, viruses, and so on and so on. Where do you put the dividing line between something that is conscious and not conscious, that is sentient and not sentient. These are very interesting questions, and these are very much open questions.

But I think that I think it’s fair to say that in the 21st century, one of the philosophers that will be absolutely crucial for these questions is Alfred North Whitehead, and his process philosophy, which has a lot to say about about intelligence, consciousness and sentience.

6. How has working in the field of machine learning changed or challenged your own views about the nature of intelligence, mind or consciousness?

Working in machine learning has not changed or challenged my views on the nature of intelligent mind or consciousness whatsoever, not in the least.

What has had a lot of effect is studying philosophy, like especially reading Alfred North Whitehead, that had a huge effect about my thinking on these topics.

So I work with these algorithms. I know how they work. I implement them. I’m not just a user of AI, I actually develop new algorithms in AI. And for me, this is just statistics, algorithms, linear algebra, some non-linear functions executed on a gigantic scale. The matrices are getting bigger and bigger. But it’s essentially just chips running algorithms, chips doing matrix multiplications, now just on a vast scale.

It hasn’t really changed anything in my views about the nature of intelligence. What is surprising, and not even that surprising, maybe a bit surprising, is that it’s easy to simulate a human being that talks in an intelligent way.

But actually, we’ve already known since the 60s that it is fairly easy to fool people into thinking that they were talking to an intelligent human being using some very, very simple methods. You have this famous ELIZA method, that simulated a therapist and basically works by doing some very simple inversions and changes in the answers and the questions that the human being offered.

That fooled many people into thinking that there was an intelligence going on.

6a. Why do terms like artificial intelligence so easily get conflated with notions of consciousness and mind?

Well, there are many reasons for that. A main reason is we have all these very misleading terms, like neural networks, even though these networks are not really running any biological neurons, or even something that looks like biological neurons.

Then we have, for example, the aforementioned attention mechanism. People think, “oh, attention, I know what it is, humans have attention, now the computers have attention,” even though it’s just a technical term, it’s a simple algorithm.

So there’s this confusion of terms. There’s a kind of an anthropomorphizing thing going on there. People are interpreting algorithms today as they are giving them too much value, so to say. They are making them too human.

And then there’s the second thing, a lot of people have commercial interests. They want to hype AI as much as possible, because they want to attract investors. They want to convince people that their methods are worthwhile. So that’s a second thing.

And then, of course, the third thing is that science is different from scientism. So a lot of scientists, they mostly don’t know anything about philosophy, or they haven’t really thought about the relationship between matter and consciousness.

Often they are just emergentists. Emergence for them means, “okay, at some point a system via the magical force of evolution becomes complex enough and then consciousness emerges.” So they have a fairly naive view about the relationship between sentience and matter.

That probably also leads to a belief in, “okay, we just run linear algebra algorithms at scale and basically low and behold, bam, we get consciousness out of that.”

So there’s a certain naïveté going on as well in the field. Although I think it’s maybe not so much in the field of machine learning practitioners, or people who develop these algorithms, but more kind of people, the users, the people who have companies and so on.

7. Do current machine learning paradigms have fundamental philosophical or conceptual limits?

I think you are limited to the fact that you are running an algorithm on a piece of silicon that you’re running some algorithms, and often fairly simple algorithms on digital computers.

I think that the usefulness of these algorithms is probably enormous, so if you use them to solve scientific problems, I think that we are really going to be baffled in the coming years with respect to, for example, new medicines, new materials, and so on.

I think it’s really going to be spectacular.

As far as are these machines conscious, and do these machines have feelings and so on, I think that they don’t have that at all. Of course, I cannot prove that, I mean that’s just my opinion, man.

But I think it will force us to really look at these questions.

What does intelligence mean? What does sentience mean? What does consciousness mean? What are the relationships between all these between all these concepts? So philosophy is going to be quite important in the coming years.

And so, the question is also what’s the relationship between mind and causality? Is there some kind of causal aspect about sentience, about consciousness, all of these things are very important.

But with respect to the practical use of AI, I don’t think there’s any limits, especially for practical applications, we’re going to see spectacular progress. Now with respect to the development of trustworthy artificial general intelligence, there are a lot of open questions, and I think that the current idea that we just make these algorithms bigger and bigger, and at some point we are going to reach some magical threshold, I think that’s a mistaken belief.

I think we will need new algorithms, probably even new ways, new architectures, new types of computers.

But the question is, of course, what do we actually want to do, do we want something that is useful, or do we want to create something that has a similar interior experience to us? And if so, why do we actually want to do that? Is that something that is useful or desirable? There’s a lot of open questions there, also to me.

8. How should we think about the relationship between the objective functions we optimise and human values?

Yes, so there’s a whole industry of people who are studying values and AI. They are evaluating whether LLMs are biased in this way or in that way, and so on. There’s a lot of people who make lucrative careers out of that, also because you just need to download a model, and then evaluate it, and bam, you have a new article.

So of course, values, the question is always a bit like, well, what are these universal values? Who’s going to decide on these universal values? This is what should be available and that should not be available.

We also have the additional complication that it turns out often people have all kinds of ideas of fairness. It should be fair in this way, and it should be fair in that way. And then it turns out that these ideas of fairness are mathematically incompatible. So if you optimise for one type of fairness, it’s impossible to optimise for another type of fairness. It’s quite a messy field.

I hope with respect to values that, of course, within boundaries, you don’t want any LLMs that will help you with creating bioterror attacks. I hope that we end up with a wide ecosystem of different AI models.

When I’m talking about LLMs, like language generation AI, I hope we have a wide range of models with all kinds of values rather than some kind of monolithic block that is synchronised according to a rather arbitrary definition what these human values should be. You know, who watches the watchman is the expression, I believe.

9. As advanced machine learning systems become deeply integrated into our society, what are the biggest challenges politically and economically?

The biggest problem is that we have a completely new type of connectivity, and we don’t know what the effect of that is going to be on humanity. We’ve never been connected like this, and now we have AI that figures out how to hyper connect us even more by providing us with content that we want to see. And that makes us interact online with other people.

So we are hyper-networked and being connected to other people is always dangerous. Connectivity means mob formation, it means mimetic escalation. Humans are mimetic, so we copy what other people are doing. We develop resentment.

Right now you can, for example, if you are on social media, via Instagram or Facebook, or some other mechanisms, be connected with people who are maybe a hundred times richer than you, or maybe even a million times richer than you. You can see how they live, you can see what kind of conditions they live in, and you can believe that you are entitled to the same types of experiences.

You basically explode resentment, resentment in the sense of Nietzsche, or you can explode in competition or rivalry. It’s an extremely dangerous situation of, basically, blowing up our human anthropology. So this connectivity is dangerous.

As Marshall McLuhan already said, the medium is the message. It’s not only what is going on these social media platforms, everybody’s now very worried about that, but it’s also the connectivity itself. The medium is the message, the connectivity is the message and the danger here. We are hyper-networked, we are going into hyper-mimesis, hyper-resentment.

To a certain extent we already went into hyper-sacrificial thinking, like for example, the MeToo movement. There is a lot of scapegoating going on, a lot of people are making money via scapegoating other people, and so it will be very interesting to see where this goes.

9a. In the context of human anthropology, how is the field of machine learning related to the anthropological work of René Girard?

Oh, there’s Girard. Yes, I’m a big fan of Girard, and I think he really nailed down the structure of human anthropology.

So again, because humans are mimetic, because humans scapegoat, humans go into rivalry. And so this high amount of connectivity, Girard has a lot to say about it: Girardian theory, mimetic theory, sacrificial theory. I think that this is really the lens that you should use to understand what effect these AI-driven networks will have on humanity.

You can already see it every day in the news, right. Basically these AI-driven networks, they interact with anthropology in all kinds of spectacular ways, and let’s just hope that it doesn’t spiral out of control.

10. What unresolved philosophical questions do you believe machine learning progress is forcing us to confront more urgently than before?

Yeah, so you have like two big areas where you have enormous amounts of open questions, right? So what is the fundamental anthropology of humans and how does it interact with these networks and with AI. In my opinion, that means understanding how the mimetic nature of humanity, how the sacrificial nature of humanity, the religious structure of humanity, how will that react to being embedded in these hyper networks?

So that’s the first question. I would say that’s the anthropological question.

Now, the second question is the relationship between consciousness, sentience, intelligence and the material reality. That is the question of mind, right? What’s the relationship between matter and mind? And I think there we need Alfred North Whitehead, and thinkers who go in that direction.

So I think these are the really the two big philosophical questions: philosophical anthropology and the body-mind question.

11. What do you think is the potential for the field of machine learning by 2050? 2100? Is “the singularity” near?

Yeah, I don’t really know what it means when people equate a singularity with transcending humanity. I mean, even if these machines, even if they become really, really good at mathematics and pattern recognition, and so on. I don’t really know what that actually means to transcend humanity.

It’s a kind of vague idea: something big will happen, and then suddenly what does that mean, transcendence?

I mean, okay, good, there is now an LLM that’s better at mathematics than most humans or all humans. Does that mean that humans are finished?

I don’t really see it, it’s like a non-sequitur. It’s a bit of a vague notion, this whole concept of singularity.

I think, and again, I would like to bring it back to the role of atoms, rather than the world of bits. I think that we will see an enormous effect on development of new materials, maybe new ways of transportation, new medicines. Hopefully a lot of diseases will be curable.

Like, for example, cancer to a great extent is still a disease that we cannot cure in a trivial way, it often becomes a chronic illness so there’s an enormous amount of things on the horizon that have something to do with building stuff, with making new materials, cheap forms of energy, new therapeutics. And I think that a lot of stuff is going to happen in that direction.

Also, all this singularity stuff, is not going to happen with the current energy infrastructure and the current algorithms. Machine learning algorithms are using enormous amounts of infrastructure and enormous amounts of energy.

So this singularity will definitely need more energy before we get to this mythical singularity, right?

I think that would be my current view of the situation. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen? You never know, right? But I would expect spectacular progress in materials and medicines in the coming years.

11a. Should we be paying more attention to the potential of technology like atomic manufacturing?

Yes, as I said, new materials. It’s also interesting that, for example, one of the first great applications of the attention mechanism, which is to a great extent empowering all of these LLM methods. The attention mechanism, one of the greatest breakthroughs is actually not the LLMs, but its AlphaFold, it’s the method that got the Nobel Prize for solving the protein structure prediction problem.

Now we finally can solve the structure of proteins, we can predict the structure of proteins without going on to all kinds of very expensive and time-craving biophysical methods. And that means an enormous amount of progress in the field of medicine and the field of biotechnology.

So the design of new enzymes of new green chemistry, new therapeutics and so on and so on. So yes, I think that a lot of the applications that we will see in the coming years will actually be more in that direction, rather than one method that has a generalised intelligence that solves all kinds of things. I think a lot of methods we will have AI methods for are very specific tasks, like predicting the structure of proteins. This method here can actually also predict the dynamics of proteins, for example, it does the same thing for other molecules and so on.

So we will have very specific, very, very intelligent methods, but they will only work in limited application areas. We will have more specialised algorithms that solve the problems that arise in the world of concrete problems, that arise in the world of atoms.

Conclusion: why would someone get involved in this specific course to think about machine learning?

Well, I’m going to start with a general introduction about what is machine learning, what are all these AI algorithms. And so I can try to give you an idea of what these algorithms are actually doing. What’s a neural network? What is linear algebra? What is the attention mechanism? So I’ll try to give you an idea of what these things are actually doing.

I will also point out that they go back to very simple methods that we would never associate it with artificial general intelligence, like very simple statistical methods that have been around for a long time. And so I’m going to try to give you an idea of what actually is being executed on all these CPUs, right?

That’s going to be the first session.

Now, the second session is going to be much less technical, so we’re going to take a look at how will these AI methods via the networks, via social networks, how will these new algorithms, how will they interact with human beings? I’m going to talk about mimetic theory, about the sacrificial theory, and so on.

I’m going to point out some implications of releasing these methods on humanity and how basically the very old, ancient human, interacts with these modern methods. I’m pretty sure there will be some surprising insights there.

Then in the third session, I’m going to talk about our institutions. I’m going to be thinking about what is going on in education? I teach at the university. What’s going on with these students now, they have these LLMs, they can write these beautiful reports using LLMs. What’s going on? Is this a terrible thing? Or is this actually creating a lot of new opportunities?

I am going to talk a bit about what’s going on in science itself, that’s also very interesting. A lot of changes in science, like the peer review system, economy, and some other basic human institutions related to science.

And then the fourth session, will again be a bit more going back to the algorithms, but this time I’m going to do some speculation. Are neural networks the last word or are there new algorithms on the horizon? What is cooking and what is brewing, and what can we expect in the future with respect to applications?

Should be a good ride.

This July and August at Philosophy Portal, we will be hosting machine learning expert Thomas Hamelryck and singularity theorist Nikola Danaylov for a two-month exploration of the notion of technological singularity. To join us, check the link in the description for the full course, or consider becoming a member at the portal and get access to all of our live events as well as our entire recorded history.

Singularity Summer

This year at Philosophy Portal we are unfolding a new course, Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, led by “The Last Marxist”, Chris Cutrone. Throughout the course we will be thinking American Revolution, Trump, Lenin, Critical Theory, The Party, and much more. To find out more or to get involved, visit the link below:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

What can be found below is an edited reflection offered by Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone informed by a question that will shape the upcoming class at Philosophy Portal Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials.

How should we think of Lenin in the historical tradition of Marxism?

Well, right, so I deal with Lenin as a Marxist, and again, as a consequential Marxist, obviously. So there are a couple of different dimensions to this: one is, how do we think about the relationship between Marx and Marxism? Because Marx and Engels, they were known as the ‘party of two’, and they were very critical of their own followers in their lifetime. They were critical of other socialists, but they were also very critical of people who claimed to be Marxists, including people like Marx’s own son-in-law, Paul LaFarge.

And so we have to sort of make sense of that, what is this extreme, like, I don’t know, ‘impossibility of being a Marxist’, that any Marxist seems to betray Marx’s own intentions. Also the unfortunate way that people try to counterpose Engels and Marx, as if they’re different, whereas obviously they really think the same thoughts and develop their thoughts together.

So Lenin is, you know, clearly a figure who’s a Marxist, who never met Marx and Engels. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg and Leon Trotsky, these are younger people. They’re not like Kautsky or Edward Bernstein or Plekhanov. Or Wilhelm Liebknecht or August Babel, who knew Marx and Engels themselves, or corresponded with them, at least, but often met them personally. Vera Zasulich corresponded with Marx about the peasants in Russia, right?

So that’s an older generation, the younger generation, the people who never met Marx and Engels themselves, were the ones who made the revolution. They’re the ones who made the Russian and German revolutions at the end of World War I. It was the younger generation of people.

What I had said was, no one would be talking about Marx if it wasn’t for Lenin, meaning Marx would have become a kind of 19th century intellectual curiosity without the Russian Revolution. If the Russian Revolution had not happened, no one would be talking about Marxism.

The Second International was effectively destroyed by the First World War. And the new International, the Communist International, that came out of that crisis, if the Russian Revolution had not been successful, that would have gone nowhere.

But it did, and in a curious way, even Rosa Luxemburg is a Russian revolutionary. She’s from the Russian Empire, a German Marxist participating in the German Party, but she also participates in the Russian Party, and she’s a collaborator of Lenin’s and she’s one of the founders of the Third International, the Communist International as well.

Lenin stands in for a lot of that. But of course, the outcome of the Russian Revolution is very tragic, and the kind of claims that one can make about the Russian Revolution:

• What kind of successful revolution was it?

• Was it a successful socialist revolution?

• Was it a successful workers revolution?

• What does it even mean?

• Was it a successful implementation of the Marxist idea, the dictatorship or the proletariat?

I would say all those things are in question. I mean, in this way we should follow 1917 by a question mark, not an exclamation point, meaning we can’t just be advocates of 1917, of the Russian Revolution, but we can’t avoid the question of 1917, and we can’t settle that question cheaply. We can’t avoid the one practical political result of Marxism, that’s clear.

Now, Lenin in particular, there’s another way that Lenin’s a Marxist. It’s not that he just puts it into practice. Lenin is probably one of the few people who literally memorized all of Marx and Engels’ writings, right? Krupskaya, his wife, his long-time partner, you know, talked about this. There’s a maniacal Marxism about Lenin, meaning he knew literally everything that they wrote that had been published.

So then it becomes a question of, well, what about the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts? What about the Grundrisse? Besides those few things that had not been published, Lenin literally knew it chapter and verse, like he was an extreme scriptural Marxist. And all of his polemics against all of his political adversaries in the Marxist or socialist movement, he had Marx quotes at the ready, and they were like, “what’s wrong with you, man?” Like, “how do you have a Marx quote at the ready in this way?”

So Lenin, he’s the Marxist. Lenin is the Marxist, right?

Now you could say Kautsky was the Marxist. And so then it becomes like Kautsky versus Lenin, Second International versus Third International, social democracy versus communism, whatever you want to call it. And yet also Lenin was a Kautskyist.

Kautsky was the Pope of Marxism. He was the Marxist. He published all of Marx and Engels’ writings. For good or for ill, Rosa Luxemburg discovered that there had been some editorial malfeasance, potentially, and took issue with it. So in some ways she knew about the duplicity of Kautsky before Lenin did. You know, just at that kind of textual level.

At a political level also, though, she saw the duplicity before Lenin did. She saw the problems of Second International Marxism more clearly in some ways before Lenin did. But then he did.

And like I said, they collaborated very closely, those two [Lenin and Luxemburg]. During the German Revolution, they are telegraphing each other. They’re sending emails to each other, we would say. Up to the point where she’s murdered.

These are close people, and it’s a small world.

So, Lenin. And I should also say Eugene Debs, we talked about the United States, we talked about American socialism. Eugene Debs was someone who was a Marxist. He was a hardcore Marxist. He was converted to Marxism, he was converted to socialism away from populism by reading Kautsky, by reading The Class Struggle by Kautsky when he was in prison. One of his fellow prisoners was like, “have you read Marxism?” And then he went on to read Das Kapital.

And he said in the context of Rosa Luxemburg’s murder, he said that from the crown of his head to the souls of his feet, he’s a Bolshevik. He said Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, these are my people, right? And, you know, I might have to die the way they’ve died, or I at least have to, you know, make potentially the ultimate sacrifice the same way that they seem willing to do.

So, again, it’s just impossible to avoid this history.

Now, the Soviet Union, on the other hand, we could say that the era of Marxism, roughly 1870 to 1920, is the first and only time that not just the working class, but a subaltern class, has organized a social and political movement of its own, independently. And the result of that was the Russian Revolution.

Right, so the question mark is this, is that possible, is it enough? Was it really that or was it something else? Was it intellectuals just using workers to come to power and establish a new bureaucratic elite, as it seems to have been proven by history in the Soviet Union, etc. Or was there another potential there?

And also, what do we mean by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Was that possible in a place like Russia? Was it possible in a country that had a minority of the population as the industrial proletariat, and even a smaller minority given the fact that a lot of the industrialized parts of the Russian Empire were separated from Russia during World War I and during the revolution.

Poland, the Baltic states were more heavily industrialized than Russia proper. So was it a dictatorship of the proletariat? Was it an actual proletarian working class movement and political party that led the revolution and took power, or was it not?

What are these things? These are huge questions.

But not only these intellectuals, but also the workers who participated in these parties, they thought that they were, that it was their movement. And surely the revolution in Russia could not have happened without very active participation of the working class.

So it’s also the first and only working class revolution ever. The only antecedent being the Paris Commune and 1905 Russian Revolution, or the dress rehearsal for 1917. So these are the only working class revolutions that have ever taken place.

The Russian Revolution. But did it lead to socialism? It did not.

And it failed in more industrialized countries like Germany and Austria, Hungary, and Italy, where other uprisings or revolutionary crises took place after World War I, led by Marxist socialists, where you had a working class, the leadership of the working class were these self-consciously Marxist socialists.

Right, so this history is painful for us to consider, because it looks like Marxism had its chance and failed, failed to produce socialism. The way I put it, very straightforwardly, is Marxism has been disproven, practically, politically, theoretically, in every conceivable way.

Yet we’re still haunted by Marxism. And because we’re still haunted by Marxism, we’re haunted by Lenin too. So we can’t avoid this figure, Lenin, although people try to.

I’m from a Trotskyist background, and I can tell you in that Trotskyist background, a lot of credit is given to Lenin, but Trotsky takes priority. Trotsky does take priority, because there’s this idea that Trotsky dealt with things that Lenin never did deal with, and that implicitly also the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution is somehow superior to Lenin’s view of things.

The Stalinists also, right? They sanctify Lenin, but they make him secondary to Stalin, or to Mao, or to Che Guevara and Fidel, right?

Lenin, you know, people give due credit to Lenin, but then they forget about him. Lenin, no, Lenin stays. Lenin remains as really the haunting presence, because Lenin is the controversial figure.

You know, Marx and Marxism. Marx is controversial, I guess. He is. I mean, he should be. Marx should be very controversial, but somehow Marx is neutralized. Somehow, Marx is never all that controversial. People are like, well, he was wrong, but he’s not controversial.

Lenin is controversial. Lenin’s the open wound of this history in a way that Marx is not. All right, Marx gets a pass. Lenin doesn’t get a pass. He gets either denounced or he gets celebrated, but in a way that basically suppresses him, by the Trotskyist and the Stalinists.

Key readings for class on June 27th:

• Cutrone, C. 2024. 1917. In: Marxism and Politics. Sublation Press. p. 17-24.

• Cutrone, C. 2024. Lenin’s liberalism. In: Marxism and Politics. Sublation Press. p. 25-38.

• Cutrone, C. 2024. Lenin’s politics. In: Marxism and Politics. Sublation Press. p. 39-46

• Cutrone, C. 2024. The relevance of Lenin today. In: Marxism and Politics. Sublation Press. p. 47-58.

• Cutrone, C. 2024. Lenin at 150. In: Marxism and Politics. Sublation Press. p. 59-74.

Key prompts/questions:

• How should we think about the impossibility of being a Marxist?

• What is the fundamental relation between the founder of a thought tradition and the followers?

• Is the difference between Kautsky and Lenin the difference between evolutionary socialism and revolutionary socialism?

• Did the Russian Revolution fail because of the material (industrial) conditions of Russia itself?

• Can we say that the failure of the Russian Revolution both elevated Marxism and at the same time destroyed Marxism?

• How should we be thinking about 20th century “socialist states” as “socialism in one country”?

• What is the difference between “socialism in one country” and a genuine internationale?

• What would Marx think about Lenin and the Russian Revolution?

To learn more about the course Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, or to sign up:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

This June at The Portal we will be hosting a month dedicated to Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. To get involved, check the link below:

Rosy Cross

The first half of a presentation I offered in The Portal this June, focused on Žižek’s Theopolitics as inspired by the same paper in Rosy Cross, has now been released on YouTube.

Radical Core

In Philosophy Portal’s Christian Atheism course, I position the works of philosopher Slavoj Žižek as a key opening for thinking about the history of modern philosophy itself as a type of struggling with “Christian Atheism”.1 What I mean by this is that, whether we are thinking about a figure like Schelling or Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche, Freud or Lacan, we can in a way make sense of them all as different philosophical embodiments of a distinctly modernist tension between Christianity and Atheism. In the psychoanalytic terms outlined by philosopher Dimitri Crooijmans in this anthology,2 we could say that this “Christian Atheist” struggle takes place between the “Christian phallus” as the signifier of castration ($),3 and the “Atheist object-cause of desire” as lack and its obfuscation (a).4

The key is how to think them together ($<>a) without either making Christ an external fetish blocking the object-cause of desire (lack), or denying the moment of Christ — not as a past material event in history, but as a phenomenological moment of the subject as such — and losing contact with the structural significance of the monstrous signifier (of castration).5 If we are unable to both confront the lacking object-cause of desire (avoiding perversion, disavowing the fetish) and embody the structural significance of castration (avoiding psychosis, foreclosing the law), then we either fall into traditional religious identity (tradition as fetish) or nihilistic postmodern identity (nihilism as law).

In modern philosophy, I claim that thinkers struggle with this oscillation and negativity between Christianity and Atheism in a unique way. Furthermore, the questions they pose, and the challenges they wrestle with, are all a type of “collateral damage” of the Kantian transcendental turn. I claim that the Kantian transcendental turn introduces into philosophy the formal dimension of, not only the Death of God (big Other qua universal being), but also the question of Christ (transcendental subject qua a priori categories). The question of Christ (transcendental subject qua a priori categories = castration) becomes the terrain for the exploration of the open space of atheism (object-cause of desire as lack and its potential obfuscation). Let us consider the oscillation and negativity of this space in total, as recapitulated from the Christian Atheism course.

The key moment is with Kant, we get the Death of God and the question of Christ internal to philosophy, and from this we get “Kant’s children”:

• with Schelling we get the question of revelation,

• with Hegel we get the question of Holy Spirit,

• with Marx we get the question of pragmatic politics,

• with Nietzsche we get the question of the overman,

• with Freud we get the question of familial structure,

• with Lacan we get the question of feminine enjoyment

Here revelation, Holy Spirit, pragmatic politics, the overman, familial structure, and feminine enjoyment all participate in these structural tensions between $<>a. While some of these figures can be positioned as more on the side of the Christian phallus (Schelling’s privileging of revelation to reason leading to an outside of Kant’s project, Hegel’s rational sublation of the trinitarian mystery leading to his notions of Absolute Spirit, Lacan’s geometry of the hole leading to his formulation of the real), others can be positioned as more on the side of Atheist object-cause of desire (Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat leading to communism, Nietzsche’s overcoming of the human itself leading to the overhuman, Freud’s complex tarrying with Oedipus leading to the formulation of death drive). However, what all possess is this meta-dimension of a dynamic oscillation in the negativity between the two positions.

Žižek himself takes this to another level, not just in his recent book Christian Atheism, but throughout his entire philosophical career. To develop a philosophy that is capable of moving in a higher order with the modernist philosophical project, Žižek outlines the structure of a semiotic square to make sense of both the dominant institutional paradigms of thought at the outset of the 21st century, as well as their dominant reactions on the periphery or on the outside of the dominant institutional paradigms. This semiotic square consists of, on the institutional side:

• Scientific naturalism (Darwinism, brain/cognitive sciences, quantum cosmology)

• Discursive historicism (Deconstruction, cultural studies, Foucaultian power relations)

And on the reactionary periphery or outside we find a mix of:

• New Age/Western Buddhism (Eastern void spirituality, esoteric mysticisms)

• Transcendental Finitude (Particularist traditionalism, Heideggerian phenomenology)

Here from Žižek’s Less Than Nothing:6

“There are four main positions which, together, constitute today’s ideologico-philosophical field: first […] “democratic materialism”: (1) scientific naturalism (brain sciences, Darwinism…), and (2) discursive historicism (Foucault, deconstruction…); then, the two sides of the spiritualist reaction to it: (3) New Age “Western Buddhism”, and (4) the thought of transcendental finitude (culminating in Heidegger). These four positions form a kind of [semiotic] square along the two axes of ahistorical versus historical thought and of materialism versus spiritualism.”

It should be noted that the institutional mix solidifies the order of what Žižek (and Badiou) call “democratic materialism”; which Žižek insists should be countered or juxtaposed against dialectical materialism (a position fundamentally excluded by both New Age/Western Buddhism and Transcendental Finitude). Whereas “democratic materialism” operates in a “historicist universe” of “bodies and languages”, “dialectical materialism” thinks with the problematic and disorienting way in which the history of bodies and language is pathologised by the dimension of truth.

But how to think about this dimension of truth? Are we thinking about this in a non-historical eternalist notion of Platonic truth? Are we thinking about this in the triad of the good-true-beautiful forms? For Žižek, in contrast to Badiou, we are not. While Badiou’s axiom is explicitly “For Today, Plato!”, Žižek’s axiom would be something like “For Plato, Today!”. For Žižek, we are instead thinking about truth in terms of the core of modern subjectivity, which Žižek claims is located in the indestructible/immortal drive.7 For Žižek, this is not so much a challenge for rethinking Platonic philosophy (although it is), but is more so a challenge for rethinking Christianity. In a move that echoes the Christian Atheist struggling and wrestling of modern philosophy itself (Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, etc.), Žižek suggests that what we find at the core of modern subjectivity is not the liberal bourgeois subject, not the light of reason, but rather the dark ground of death drive that makes possible Holy Spirit. Here death drive is not Freud’s naive formulation of a desire to return to inanimate matter (the before times of life), but rather the libidinal insistence of living tensions beyond the cares and concerns of our individual subjectivity. Of course, what we find in this dimension is the “obscene partial object” that Lacan nominates the objet petit a, and which Žižek claims not only sustains the Holy Spirit, but also stands for the indestructible drive.

Here again from Žižek’s Less Than Nothing:8

“The thesis […] is double: (1) there is a dimension missed by all four, that of a pre-transcendental gap/rupture, the Freudian name for which is the drive; (2) this dimension designates the very core of modern subjectivity. [/] The Freudian drive cannot be reduced to what Buddhism denounces as desire or to what Heidegger denounces as the Will: even after we reach the end of this critical overcoming of desire-will-subjectivity, something continues to move. What survives death is the Holy Spirit sustained by an obscene “partial object” that stands for the indestructible drive.”

If we want to situate these ideas in the context of the contemporary failures of liberal political subjectivity, we can juxtapose two different paths. One path represents a type of regress from liberalism, which emphasises “mythological wrestling” in “traditionalist universalism” (i.e. a “fake phallus” qua structure of signification). This is often expressed in an identification with the body of a Christian tradition (Orthodoxy, Catholicism, etc.), and then positioned as a potential theopolitical solution to the failures of liberal political subjectivity (which it definitely is not). The other path represents the sublation of liberalism in the truth of the subjective core of the liberal subject itself (death drive). In affirming death drive as opposed to affirming the body of a mythological tradition, one does not open up a regress to a traditional institutional church body as a political solution, but rather the possibility of actually entering the domain that the Christian tradition refers to as Holy Spirit beyond traditional Christianity itself.9

In this precise sense, Žižek’s Christian Atheism does not lead us back into the Christian Church, but rather into new forms of post-religious collectivity that are sustained by the death drive itself. In Žižek’s Less Than Nothing he suggests that this path was always the Hegelian solution to the Death of God:10

“This […] in no way leads to a […] gap between really existing Christianity and the true Christianity, so that every really existing form of the Church necessarily misses its notion. The solution here is the properly Hegelian one: the true Idea of the Christian collective was realised, but outside of the Church as an institution-which, however, does not mean that it survived in intimate, authentic religious experience which had no need for the institutional frame; rather, it survived in other institutions, from revolutionary political parties to psychoanalytic societies… It is thus only in post-religious “atheist” radical-emancipatory collectives that we find the proper actualisation of the Idea of the Christian collective-the necessary consequence of the “atheistic” nature of Christianity itself.”

Christian Atheism as Project

In Žižek’s dialectical materialist treatment of the Death of God we find a double movement (negation of negation) in regards to the social dimension of God that includes within itself the aforementioned liberal regression involved in “mythological wrestling”. This dimension is what Žižek refers to as the necessary “Theological Underpinning” qua transcendental illusion of “God as a de facto Ideal morally regulating life” (upheld by Christian traditionalists). However, we must dialectically couple into this movement the “Atheistic Undermining” qua death drive as the real dimension of “God as deceiving, evil, stupid, impotent, undead”. Žižek claims that this dialectical negation of negation (God as Ideal morality to God as impotent undeadness) is a more radical move than either a non-dialectical position framing God as perfect ideality (qua Christ fetish) or a non-dialectical position framing God as inexistent (qua nihilistic law).

To be clear, Žižek’s thought about the “Theological Underpinning” can be framed as a type of developmental-structural recapitulation of a general human coming to terms with the inexistence of the big Other (perfect ideality, moral ideal); and the “Atheistic Undermining” can be framed as an abyssal social cognition on the frontier of the emancipatory political struggle that has characterised modern subjectivity, but also led to the most brutal nightmares (e.g. Holocaust, World Wars, Cold War, modern genocide, slavery, and colonial-imperial forces etc.). It is from this vantage point that Žižek thinks about God itself as unable to coincide with its own ideality (God’s death), opening the necessity of modern subjective struggle (transcendental subjectivity), and ultimately reconciling with a disorienting horizon of our own freedom (Holy Spirit, or the undead God as Holy Spirit).

From Žižek in Christian Atheism:11

“I am […] often […] perceived as politically radioactive. The idea that political theology necessarily underpins radical emancipatory politics will for certain add to this perception. […] The basic premise of atheists today is that materialism is a view which can be consistently exposed and defended in itself, in a positive line of argumentation without references to its opposite (religious beliefs). But what if the exact opposite is true? What if, if we want to be true atheists, we have to begin with a religious edifice and undermine it from within? To say that god is deceiving, evil, stupid, undead… is much more radical than to directly claim that there is no god: if we just posit that god doesn’t exist, we open up the way towards its de factor survival as an idea(l) that should regulate our lives. In short, we open up the way to the moral suspension of the religious.”

Moreover, Žižek claims that the logical double movement implicit in Christianity is a part of the uniqueness of Christianity itself being derived in an actual historical double movement between Judaism and the Old Testament. In other words, you cannot get to Christ and the New Testament — as the realised embodiment of what all religions are pointing towards as a potential — without first traversing Judaism and the Old Testament. While for many this is an abstract theological double movement, we find this double movement in the concrete existence of our pain and suffering via (1) the experience of the imperfect universe as Other (lacking universe), and (2) a recognition that this universe as Other is itself lacking/inconsistent. For Žižek, the meaning of “Christ” is found in the negativity of this double movement, i.e. Christ as the realisation of what all religions are pointing towards is the very experience of the lack in the Other (God, absolute reality) and then an affirmation of this Other as itself lacking/inconsistent (Holy Spirit, community of belief without transcendental guarantee).

However, for Žižek, the truth of Christianity is furthermore elaborated in the actual historicity of Christianity (all of its various splits and ruptures). While many today are trying to return to forms of Christianity as if its splits and ruptures did not happen (Orthodox Christians, Traditional Catholics, etc.), this is an obfuscation of the truth of Christianity in recognising that the gap separating finite/frail/sinful human beings from God (absolute reality) is immanent to God (as Holy Spirit). In other words, there is no way to contain/constrain via a perfect moral ideal (Church Fathers, Priestly authority) the monstrous truth of the historical absolute. For Žižek, as for Hegel and Marx, the logic of this truth is first expressed in Luther’s Protestant Reformation, and then secondarily expressed in the philosophy of German Idealism itself. In this context, if one truly follows the radical threads in Luther, Hegel and Marx, we find that this tradition does not coincide with liberal bourgeois subjectivity, but rather coincides with its undermining as its own form of religious subjectivity in a different form. This is why Žižek ultimately concludes that “Enlightenment” does not contain or constrain the truths of German Idealism and Marxist politics, but rather German Idealism and Marxist politics represent the end of Enlightenment. Here it should also be noted that the often cited movement from Hegel to Marx gets reversed in Žižek, where the truth of the entire movement can be found to reach its zenith in Hegel’s notion of absolute knowing:12

“Is Christianity itself not unique among religions due to the fact that it cannot be accessed directly but only through another religion (Judaism)? Its sacred writing — the Bible — has two parts, the Old and the New Testament, so that one has to go through the first one to arrive at the second one. […] What is accessible to us all is the elementary move from our experience of lack (our imperfect universe, the limit of knowledge) to redoubling this lack, i.e. locating it in to the Other itself which becomes a “barred” inconsistent Other. Hegel’s notion of God provides the exemplary case of such a redoubling: the gap that separates us, finite and frail sinful humans, from God, is immanent to God himself, it separates God from himself, making him inconsistent and imperfect, inscribing an antagonism into his very heart. This redoubling of the lack, this “ontologisation” of our epistemological limitation, is at the core of Hegel’s absolute knowing, it signals the moment when Enlightenment is brought to its end.”

When all of this is considered together — i.e. the history of modern philosophy, the core of modern subjectivity as death drive, the truth of religion as found in Christ-ianity, the truth of Christianity found in its atheistic undermining — we find the “three cores” of Žižek’s Christian Atheism:13

1. Atheist core of Christianity:14 Christianity is unique in how it overcomes gap separating humans from god, not by elevating humans through pious activity leaving behind sin (disciplinary god-regulation as moral ideal), but transposing gap that separates them from god into god himself; what dies on the cross is god of the beyond, what is resurrected after the cross is the free community which is abandoned to itself, with no transcendental higher power guaranteeing its fate (our freedom is god erasing himself out of the picture)

2. Ontology of quantum mechanics:15 ontological implications of quantum mechanics involve a god who is himself deceived, not Einstein’s Spinozist god of a harmonious order of laws of nature which are eternal and immutable, allowing no exception, and an objective reality that exists independently of us (human observers), but that the domain of quantum waves where chance is irreducible and things can become retroactively annihilated, escaping the control of eternal and immutable laws and allows for a domain which constitutively violates them

3. Transcendental parallax:16 biggest cut in philosophical history opens with Kant’s transcendental revolution, which shifts us from a given ontological dimension towards an ontology that is transcendentally constituted by the structure of our own categories and perception; no matter how we describe external reality (e.g. evolutionary theory explaining the emergence of human life on earth, etc.), we are always-already presupposing nature regulated by complex causal links (its transcendental constitution by our categories and perceptions)

In the Christian Atheism course, I propose a triad utilising these three cores that can be used to formulate the foundations for a theopolitical project:

1. Atheist core of Christianity = Abyssal community/network

2. Ontology of quantum mechanics = open-ended/incomplete ontology

3. Transcendental parallax = speculative cognition

All three of these dimension needs to be thought together, in a similar way to how Lacan’s Imaginary-Symbolic-Real triad is thought together:

1. Abyssal community/network is possible because of open-ended/incomplete ontology

2. Open-ended/incomplete ontology opens to nature of speculative cognition/thinking processes

3. Speculative cognition sustains leading edge of abyssal community/network

For Žižek, when all three of these dimensions are thought in a unity, we not only avoid the regression into illiberal or pre-liberal thinking (e.g. traditionalist closure), but embody a negativity introducing a radical cut that changes how we measure progress itself. In other words, while many today claim that we replaced the reality of myth with the myth of progress; the real challenge for us today is to rethink how we conceive and measure progress, and also how we think about progress, not in terms of the achievement of a positive stable identity, but rather in the terms of the deepening of social contradictions entangled with our collective emancipation. From Christian Atheism:17

“The book brings together these three topics into a project of “Christian Atheism”: the space for the experience of the “divine” is the gap that forever separates the transcendental from the objective-realist approach, but this “divine” dimension refers to the experience of radical negativity (what mystics and Hegel called “night of the world”) which precludes any theology focused on a positive figure of god, even if this figure of god is radically secularised in modern scientific naturalism. In Christianity, this gap registers the absence of god (its “death”) which grounds the Holy Ghost. And, last but not least, the dimension of radical negativity also holds open the space for every emancipatory politics which takes itself seriously, i.e., which reaches beyond the continuity of historical progress and introduces a radical cut that changes the very measures of progress.”

Here we should note that the aforementioned triad can be turned into, following Hegel’s own logic, a quadruplicity by supplementing (1) abyssal community/network, (2) open-ended/incomplete ontology, (3) speculative cognition, with a fourth dimension which (like the dimension of sinthome in Lacan’s ISR triad runs across the previous three dimensions): (4) emancipatory politics. Again from Christian Atheism:18

“But, as we learned from Hegel, moments of a dialectical process can be counted as three or as four — and the fourth missing moment is here politics, of course. (The political dimension is not limited to the final chapter, it runs as an undercurrent through the entire book, popping up even in its most philosophical parts.)”

For Žižek this dimension of emancipatory politics is seeking to critique and undermine both the “Woke Left” and the “New Right” (or the “Pop Right”).19 Žižek claims that what unites both the Woke Left and New/Pop Right as a dialectical symptom/sinthome is its self-destructive stance in the struggle against inequality, where equality becomes the mask for its opposite. This may be self-explanatory in regards to the Woke Left, which (as a result of obfuscating the theological dimension of emancipatory politics) becomes caught in its own weird religious pseudo-moralism, in the tyranny of a super-ego injunction towards ever more tolerance and inclusion of otherness without end (spurious infinity). For those operating within the Woke Left, no matter how tolerant and inclusive you are, you are always made to feel more guilty for not being tolerant and inclusive enough (not diverse enough, etc.). We see this practically on issues of immigration, or in terms of liberal institutional representation, which raises all sorts of weird contradictions that leftist politics refuses to think via the truth of a self-critical stance. For the New Right, we find a form of (currently hegemonic) populism which is directed against undermining liberal elites in corporate, academic and government sectors (e.g. DOGE), and forms pacts with anti-Western authoritarians (e.g. Putin) that are designed to reduce emancipatory politics to particularist identifications (e.g. National Socialism, or “socialism in one country”, as opposed to actual socialism).

As a result of this political constellation, for Žižek, Europe (and by extension North America, e.g. NATO) is no longer able to remain faithful to its greatest achievements: a politics that strives for global emancipation via holding itself to its own standards of internal and immanent self-critique.20 What replaces an internal and immanent self-critique, on the side of the Woke Left, is an anti-Western ideology that ignores class antagonism and foregrounds racial, gender and sexual divisions that are largely regressive attempts at reigning liberal ideology to appropriate protest movement energy from the May ‘68 “New Left” (counter-culture). As mentioned above, what is missing here is the dimension of theology (which is often claimed or re-appropriated by more conservative or right-wing social movements). For Žižek, what theology would help the Left with on the level of emancipatory politics is a new way of thinking about “true inclusivity” instead of giving the false appearance of inclusivity while remaining fundamentally exclusionary (in a self-destructive way, i.e. exclusionary of itself, of its own historical identity).

As a Leftist, Žižek walks his own talk in maintaining a strong critical stance in relationship to the Left itself.21 He theorises that the Christian Atheist dimension of “Judeo-Christianity” needs to be developed as the intersectionality of the “Woke Left” is short-circuited by Jewish ethnicity itself. For Žižek, the Woke Left’s intersectionality, operating as it does via a matrix of “oppression” and “privilege”, is problematic from the Jewish standpoint because of the perception that Jews are often occupying positions of privilege (economic, cultural, political). In this way, Anti-Semitism is not like other racisms as its aim is not to subordinate Jews, but rather to exterminate Jews; Jews in the popular imagination (of the Pop Right) are not perceived to be “lowly foreigners” but rather as “secret Masters”. But even more disturbing is the possibility that, while it is well known that right wing populists operate via a form of anti-Semitism that functions as a primitive version of anti-Capitalism; this ideology is inverted by the Woke Left: anti-Capitalism now functions as a mask for anti-Semitism.

To cut to our political moment, and moving forward beyond both Woke Left (which is basically dead or on life support post-Trump 2.0), and the (currently hegemonic) Pop Right: we need to cut through the current opposition between liberal democracy and new populism as a false dichotomy. In short, the Pop Right (Trump-Putin axis) is not superior to liberal democracy, and while liberal democracy is not an adequate solution, we must learn to work with it in order to overcome it. For Žižek, this involves rebuilding a more active link between civil society self-organisation and political parties actually working towards a sublation of capitalism for socialism.22

To conclude, the specific role of “Christian Atheism” in this link between civil society self-organisation and political parties, should avoid the temptation of an authoritarian moralistic “Christian nationalism”, and instead recognise the religious or theological dimension of Christianity to operate on the level of civil society/community self-organisation itself for its own atheistic undermining on the level of socialist politics. The problem here for the Christian community is to avoid seeing itself as a totalising all (but rather opening to the non-All of socialism), and the problem here for the liberal atheist is to avoid seeing the theological ground of society itself as unnecessary or irrelevant to emancipatory politics (but rather seeing it as a necessary groundless ground for the cultivation of thought itself). In this dialectical relation Christ does not function as a moral authority but as a question and a problem that is unique to each singularity (modern subject of the death drive). For Žižek, this is why he ends his opening to Christian Atheism with the idea that the question of Christ functions singularly in our depths (private, not public), while our response to the question represents the true surface in our political activity.

What follows [in the second half of Rosy Cross] is, I hope, a series of symbolic works that can help cultivate both dimensions, through the image of grief and towards the real of grace.

Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity

Rosy Cross

This June at The Portal we will be hosting a month dedicated to Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. To get involved, check the link below:

Rosy Cross at The Portal

The first half of a presentation I offered in The Portal this past May, focused on introducing Hegel’s Philosophy of Right inspired by the same paper in Rosy Cross, has now been released on YouTube.

The Philosophy of Right is a foundational philosophical text by a foundational philosophical figure: G.W.F. Hegel. Hegel was very purposefully positioned as this figure at Philosophy Portal under the broader mission of re-teaching the core of modern philosophy. Hegel is a figure who looms over the entirety of modern philosophy like some kind of inescapable monstrosity. I think this is both true from an honest reading of the history of modern philosophy, but also something that has been made painfully clear in the work of contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Žižek has emphasised that Hegel is severely mistreated in the history of modern philosophy, perhaps because of an anxiety of influence, i.e. can I really create something in philosophy beyond Hegel? Is not Hegel really the end of philosophy? But also because of the misperception of Hegel as creating a system that eliminates room for future subjectivity, as opposed to creating a system that is actually essential for the future of conceptual differentiation in general.

When it comes to the Philosophy of Right as a text specifically, any proper introduction today would have to also recognise the way this text both represents Hegel’s formal step into political philosophy, as well as represents the key text which births Karl Marx’s conceptual differentiation from Hegel, specifically in his Critique of the Philosophy of Right, and the emergence of a distinct field that we know today as “Marxism”.1 Marx critiques Hegel’s Philosophy of Right because it is the most obvious space where we can recognise that Hegel reaches the limits of philosophy itself, and where Marx himself will enter the domain of a critique of political-economy, which from his perspective, flips Hegel “upside down” in trying to rise above the yoke of either Protestant theological influence or Idealist philosophical influence.

When it comes to the limits of philosophy itself, we might locate that limit in the Philosophy of Right in the distinction between the “is” and the “ought”.2 Here Hegel admittedly notes that his work is situated in “what is”, and which leaves open the field of “what ought” to be.3 In Hegelian fashion, he does not see this limit as the weakness of the Philosophy of Right, but rather its strength, insofar as limitation, and of course negativity (including philosophy’s own limitation and negativity), is key to Hegel’s work and perspective on speculative cognition itself.4 Hegel does not seem to want to, nor does he think he can, cover the entire field of politics with philosophy, but rather wants to give politics a dialectical ground from which to enrich future political speculations which are limited differently than philosophy.

The dialectical ground that is most relevant to understanding Hegel’s work in the Philosophy of Right, would be the notion and theory of the nation state, which he calls “the ethical world”.5 We should remember that at the time of Hegel’s writing in the early 19th century, he was thinking in his time the century of what would become the global spread of the nation state as a form of organisation aspiring to expand the ethical world. Today we have a bias against thinking deeply about the importance of the nation state, not only because we take it for granted, but because in the 20th century, we came to see its own limitations in the form of (unethical) “world wars” mostly concentrated in Europe, but also spreading throughout Asia.6 We also saw the concrete emergence of international entities, as well as forces of global capital, which easily escaped the control of the nation state.7

Consequently, in approaching an understanding of Hegel’s philosophy of state, we will be able to not only understand the historical context of the modern nation state, but we will also be able to understand how we might be able to think politics in the 21st century, and specifically the relationship between states in order to coordinate on issues of international concern.8 Thus, a better understanding of the relationship between states and international organisations, as well as the relationship between states and capital, will be needed as the foundation of anything that can help us regarding 21st century politics. Here, from my perspective, it is Marxism that needs to be re-grounded back into Hegel’s notion of state, because the Marxist movement tended towards a worker-led communist international that ended up producing the symptom of national socialism (or fascism). What is this symptom? Why has the ultimate Marxist object, the dictatorship of the proletariat, not only not materialised for Socialism, but appears to have disappeared from discourse entirely?9 This tension has not only not been properly thought through, but is precisely where we see many contemporary difficulties in political thought. And Hegel’s theory in the Philosophy of Right does not leave us totally in the dark regarding these topics. He emphasises the ethical system as the “family-community-state”,10 but also points towards the realm of the “inter-nation” where we will find the becoming of Absolute Spirit and Absolute Freedom, not as an idyllic peace and harmony, but rather as an indestructible immortal force in irreducible conflict with itself.11

Hegel opens the Philosophy of Right centring us onto three different objects for cognition from the perspective of a speculative cognition, inspired from his Science of Logic:12

1. Rights

2. Ethics

3. The State

In the Science of Logic, Hegel is trying to preserve speculative cognition in relation to what he sees as the twin forces of science and pragmatism, which have come to dominate in the wake of the Kantian philosophy and thought revolution.13 In this context, Hegel is trying to preserve a philosophy of speculative cognition in its relationship to the politics of rights, ethics, and state. In Hegel’s time, he would be thinking about the rights of the individual in relation to the nation.14 Throughout the 19th century these ideas have been used to defend and fight for both civil rights, as well as international rights, or universal human rights (all of which appear in question today).

Hegel is also thinking about ethics, and while demonstrating a continuity, also makes a sharp distinction throughout the Philosophy of Right between morality and ethics. Morality, for Hegel, is on the level of the negativity of purpose, responsibility, intention, and conscience (i.e. moral questions of the good are necessary because of the way purpose, responsibility, intention and conscience fail). However ethics goes beyond questions of the good, for Hegel, insofar as they must deal with the reality of freedom embodied, for Hegel, in the aforementioned triad of the family, community, and state. Thus, it is not just that family, community, and state are a “moral good”, it is that they are necessary for the cultivation of “ethical freedom” (beyond good and evil). In Hegel’s system, the possibility of this ethical freedom is always a challenge for spirit and also always in jeopardy insofar as it is constantly under renegotiation in the universal conflict of the Absolute Freedom of World Spirit, which for Hegel is in the inter-national order without a final reconciliation in a higher whole (as in Kant’s idea of “perpetual peace”).

This brings us to the level of the state, which as mentioned, spread rapidly throughout the entire world in the 19th century. By the end of the 19th century, it would come to cover the entire globe (concluding with the “scramble for Africa”, and excluding of course the continent of Antarctica). Now the challenge for us in the 20th and 21st century has been and is really trying to make sense of the consequences of this spread, what we could call the “state-ificiation” of the planet. While a few significant threads of political philosophy have tried to deify the state to defend ethnic identity (e.g. fascism), demolish the state as a form of control and false freedom (e.g. anarchism), transform the purpose of the state to open “free” market processes (e.g. neoliberalism), or theorise its “withering away” for a distributed workers international (e.g. Marxism), the truth is that we still do not know how to think with the reality of the state, inclusive of its rights for individuals, and its ethical role in the becoming of freedom.15

In the Marxist conception specifically, we can say that the state is theorised to be a type of “vanishing mediator”, a historical agency whose role is to eventually undermine itself in a transition of power from bourgeois to proletariat, which will establish a truly international communist order.16 In contrast, Hegelian theorist Francis Fukuyama famously theorises that the idea of the liberal state allows us to think of the ideal structure of the state, and the telos towards which the international order could strive as the “end” of political history (i.e. the end of significant revolutions and ruptures contesting the nature of the political order itself).17 I would suggest that Hegelian philosopher Slavoj Žižek operates in the gap between these two perspectives: on the one hand, Žižek is often extremely critical of “Old-Fashioned Marxist” solutions of an international workers revolution, often reframing them in a “conservative” Hegelian lens; and at the same time he is also critical of the liberalist Fukuyama “end of history” thesis, often emphasising the fact that we live in a time similar to Hegel’s, a time between an old dying order and a new emerging order. How are we to both affirm the ironic idealism of Marx’s historical thesis, while remaining committed to a sober analysis of “what is” (emerging) in the Bacchanalian revel in which “no member is not drunk”?18

I think the pressing question here is: how to rethink the “modernist nation” as a project in the context of the need for an “emergent international”? While the modernist nation finds its mythological origin story in the 1776/1789 “Atlantic Revolutions”, the need for an emergent international finds its mythological origin story in the trials and tribulations of socialist politics vis-a-vis industrial capitalism (1848/1917) and global pluralism vis-a-vis the real of human otherness (1968/2016).19 As it relates to the problem of socialist politics in industrial capitalism, the French economist Thomas Piketty has outlined in his book Capitalism in the 21st Century that we need a global state to regulate global capital.20 Is that the future of the state? Or is that proposal unable to truly think about the qualitative nature of the change required to confront the problems of both industrial capitalism and global pluralism? What are the practical steps that must be taken between the contemporary order of nations overdetermined by global capital and an international order capable of coordinating for both the common good and ethical freedom? In this context, what is the status of a supranational entity like the European Union? Are we going to see supranational entities emerge in different areas (e.g. Africa, Russia, Asia, the Americas) to protect what philosopher Alexander Dugin would call the “plurality of civilisational spaces” in defence against the hegemony of individualist globalism?21 Or what is the status of global capitalists themselves, no longer content to overdetermine political policy of the state, but rather wish to establish their own territories which could potentially form what is often referred to as a “network state”?22

In considering these questions we concretely find the strange “in-between” space of the Marxist conception of a workers’ international and the Fukuyama thesis of the liberal state as the end of history. This space is so strange because what Marxist historicity attests to in its truth is the dominance of global capitalism vis-a-vis the liberal state, and the disappearance of any notion similar to the dictatorship of the proletariat vis-a-vis a worker’s international. Here, hopefully, Hegel’s speculative science and his political philosophy, will help us to hold the right discursive level for the types of conversations that we need as it regards the future of the (family, community) state. Hegel’s approach is of course dialectical: he is asking us to take a look at pre-modern forms of law, morality, and religion and compare and contrast these with modern forms of rights, ethics and state.23 Thus, in the dialectics of identity (A/B) we can think law/rights, morality/ethics, religion/state, which are often left as simple oppositions in discussions of, for example, “Christian Nationalism” or “Nativist Nationalism” (on the one side), and “Liberal Globalism” or “Workers’ Internationalism” (on the other side). Thus, as opposed to either regressing to a pre-modern concept, or starting from scratch with modern theories, we should be well aware of the historical tension between the discontinuity of the two sociopolitical phases. In this dialectic the history of law can deepen our approach to rights, the history of morality can deepen our approach to ethics, and the history of religion can deepen our approach to state; while at the same time helping us better understand the limitations of pre-modern law, morality and religion.24

What is central for Hegel here is the reality of the thinking spirit, the central importance of speculative cognition for the truth of politics capable of avoiding a fall into either a politics of (pre-modern) authority or a politics of (modern) feeling.25 The one side (pre-modern authority) is a simple objectivity without subjectivity, but the other side (modern feeling) is a simple subjectivity without objectivity. Thus, it is not yet the logical unity of the subject with the object in truth, it is not yet the unity of feeling with authority in truth, it is not yet a politics informed by Absolute Knowing (the political subject that has traversed the phenomenology) and the Absolute Idea (the political subject that has traversed being, essence, and concept). The political subject of Absolute Knowing and the Absolute Idea, they do not simply detach themselves from simple consciousness and self-consciousness, or simple being and essence, but rather can take up (think) both in the reality of what they are (their isness).

To make matters more concrete, when we take the antinomy of pre-modern law/morality/religion as authority and modern rights/ethics/state as feeling in the contemporary tension between Christian/Ethno-Nationalism (pre-modern authority) and Global Liberalism/Workers’ Internationalism (modern feeling) we must think the function of patriarchy or paternal structures of authority (its law/morality/religion) as it relates to the distributed affects of the children of liberalism (its rights/ethics/state) and vice versa. In the absence of such thinking we fall into the simple one-sidedness of desire for one without the other. Since our political discourse has been in such a one-sidedness, we often struggle to think about the relation of ethnicity and religion in global liberalism and workers’ internationalism (on the one side), or the function of individual freedom and labour relations in Christian or traditional state structures (on the other side). Hegel’s Philosophy of Right presents to us the challenge of thinking about the dialectical relation here, even if he would not and could not frame it in the terms I have outlined above, because the terms I have outlined above are a function of our present, and not his. What Hegel would say is that the dialectical relation contains the potential for a mediated truth in thought and reason for both the state and the relation between states.

This could mean that Hegel would see a simple one-sided Christian or Ethno-Nationalism as leading to an unthinking authoritarianism, and a simple one-sided Global Liberalism or Workers’ Internationalism as leading to an unthinking realism of affects. Hegel might approach this tension in thinking the truth of the ethical system (family-community-state) in a dialectical tension between a multiplicity of states as the Absolute Freedom of World Spirit. We could say that we need to fill out the state as an international multiplicity with the truth of thinking spirit in the form of living ethical systems. In our context what blocks this is both the populist temptations that take signification on both the right (Christian and Ethno-Nationalism) and the left (Global Liberalism, Workers’ Internationalism). Both sides of this equation try to unite and exploit authority and feelings in the gap of rational thoughts’ impotence to institute modern rights and an ethical state in an international context (i.e., a negative multiplicity).

What stands in this gap is perhaps something that we could frame in “Hegelo-Lacanian”, or simply “Žižekian”, terms as the dark and negative excess of reason’s own impotence in relation to bodily reality. Here I do not mean to suggest that Hegel is unaware of the fact that reason and knowledge by itself does not give us the capacity to institute a purely rational state of being, but that this fact gets deeply elaborated in the psychoanalytic tradition and the Žižekian philosophical tradition. What unites Lacan and Žižek to Hegel is the negative excess of our rationality as a positivity: that there will always be a negative excess to our thinking does not mean we should stop thinking and rationalising (the problem for feeling), but rather that our thinking and rationalising has to constantly be in relationship to its own negative excess (the problem for authority). I would argue that in a situation where the left (Global Liberalism, Workers’ Internationalism) stops thinking it becomes “totalitarian authority of feeling”; and where the right (Christian/Ethno-Nationalism) thinks too positively it becomes “particularist-feeling-based authoritarianism”.

Of course, Hegel does not believe we can see into the future, and his dialectical system does not guarantee us the capacity to think beyond these antinomies, but rather opens the possibility of their deepening. Hegel thinks we have to stay thinking with the negativity of the present moment. If we fail that challenge both our states and our ethical systems (e.g. families, communities) become reasons disconnected from truth. One of the consequences of this challenge is that we find many “thinking” spirits who can attempt to live a life outside of formal systems or withdraw from politics as the truth. The commonplace idea we find here is that “free thinking” and “free being” is somehow independent of the structures we have built in world history, as if the structures of world history are not only already the becoming of the truth of our individual and collective freedom, but in need of our thinking spirit. This would mean that, from a Hegelian perspective, we must stay committed to the process of building institutions and cooperating and collaborating with institutions as opposed to simply operating outside of them or withdrawing from the world stage and institutional organisation.26 This is such a challenge because in this effort you face higher and higher order negativities and ultimately what states themselves have to deal with and confront is an endless onslaught of new negativities, and endless onslaught of new challenges. While the particular negativities and challenges can be resolved, of course, the negativity and challenge as such cannot; and for Hegel, this must be conceived in its positivity (via the logic of the negation of the negation), and opposed to a utopian resolution (like “perpetual peace”).27

The stakes of this movement are immense: in the withdrawal from the state and the ethical system we fall into a subjectivity without objectivity; in the reification of the state and the ethical system we fall into an objectivity without subjectivity. The Hegelian challenge is that we need to “tarry with the negative” in order to derive from the work of subjectivity, a new objectivity. In Hegelian terms we are thinking the way the immediacy of intuition (our “heart”, our “feelings”), is capable of deriving from the “work of the concept” (in the onslaught of negativity), a new positive relation to objective truth in actualised reason of self-consciousness. In this sense the Philosophy of Right is dramatically practical: we need a good (family-community) state to create the conditions of possibility for the actualisation of rational self-conscious freedom. Without a “good (family-community) state”, to use the Žižekian line, we find ourselves in a situation where we are unable to articulate our unfreedom, and at least in contemporary times, left with a form of freedom that can only be rationally self-actualised on the terms of capitalism.

In this situation one of the biggest challenges we face, apart from the tendency to withdraw, is the tendency to evil consciousness or “bad conscience”.28 Hegel suggests that evil consciousness exists in the gap between the inability to articulate our unfreedom (a state “most spiritless”), and the reality of the bad state (displaying “hatred of law”).29 In such a situation the population is incapable of mediating the negativity of their feelings and intuitions, and an evil consciousness emerges to speak “for the people” when in reality they are only speaking for their own “selfishness” and “empty arrogance”.30 This is the worst aspect of populism (whether left or right), or “collectivism”, “tribalism”. In our context the “collectivism of capitalism” (everyone follows the maximisation of market value as the only possible freedom), splits society into, on the one side, the temptation to the populist “evil consciousness”, and on the other side, the pursuit of what is most basic in terms of pleasure to numb the pain of the impossibility of living in a “good state” with “ethical freedom”.

Many people today experience our reality between these two poles: the grotesque monstrosity of populist leaders and rhetoric, and the basic reduction of day to day life to simple pleasures to numb the pain. We might call the unity of these two poles “post-neoliberalism” with “neoliberalism” as the reduction of life to the “free” market (with state “democracy” functioning as a puppet to this force), and the “post” in populist figures selling unity in a “nation” that scapegoats “x” ethnicity, religion, etc. (exploiting the antagonisms of pluralism). These scapegoats function to “give language” to people who are unable to articulate their unfreedom, but do not offer real solutions to the cause of the lack of our freedom. The “populist problem” is that while “X” minority or religious group or even class of wealthy people can represent genuine problems and antagonisms that require real thinking, in keeping our focus on their identities as a positive content, we are unable to see the structural negativity that gives rise to the issue in the first place. I hope it is not too crude to offer the metaphor of a (social) body with an open wound or a broken limb, in relation to a medical doctor (populist temptation) who emphasises that a bandaid will allow the (social) body to run again.

It is very understandable that in this context, living in a state “most spiritless”, many today are reaching for Platonic thinking about “the good” and politics in order to give “classical ground” to a world that feels like a hopeless abyss. Hegel directly engages Platonic concepts of the state in the opening of the Philosophy of Right.31 He notes that the tension of Plato’s day was between his concept and the sophists.32 For Hegel, as for Plato, the sophists have a basis of right which is purely grounded in subjective aims, opinions and feelings, which would of course be on the side of subjective immediacy as the truth. Hegel’s warning us here that if we go too far into the sophistic tendency, if we go too far with mistaking subjective aims, opinions and feelings as the truth, the result of that process will be the destruction of public institutions, the ethical system, and perhaps most terrifyingly, the destruction of love.33 Do we not find ourselves today in this situation?: subjective aims, opinions and feelings are potentially undermining our capacity to build public institutions, ethical systems and even deep long-term processes of love.

Hegel relies on Plato’s Republic, something that he will do repeatedly throughout the Philosophy of Right, as the main historical text to build his own concept of state.34 For this reason I think it is most productive to view Plato and Hegel as in a “meta-historical union”. Hegel denounces the commonplace view that Plato’s Republic only offers to history an “empty ideal”,35 but rather emphasises that we find in this text the essence of the ethical state: the free infinite personality.36 When people remark that “Western civilisation” is grounded in Plato or that the history of philosophy is but a “footnote to Plato”, a big part of that is related to the way the “free infinite personality” is incorporated into the core of Plato’s political philosophy. Hegel’s work points us towards the challenge of the relationship between the cultivation of the ethical state and the reality of the free infinite personality. Without taking up this challenge we find ourselves in a type of superficial freedom, governed by individualistic hedonism/pleasure seeking, and enemy-obstacle based scapegoat logic as social models. Is it possible for us to cultivate a higher order concept of the ethical state which might allow us to make the most and raise to a higher level the dignity of the free infinite personality?

To deepen the “meta-historical unity” between Plato and Hegel, it is also worth noting that this challenge is situated in relationship to what both Plato and Hegel finds as the most real, which is “The Idea”.37 Hegel concludes the Science of Logic with a dialectical mediation of “The Absolute Idea” in the “subjective logic of the concept” which raises subjective opinion to truth.38 The key distinction between Plato and Hegel, at least according to Hegel, is that his mediation does away with the dualism of the temporal and the eternal.39 For Hegel, he thinks of the temporal (subjective processes/mediation) and the eternal (The Idea) as in a weird historical unity. More importantly as it relates to Plato’s “free infinite personality”, it is only through the subjective temporal mediation that the eternal is realised. Hegel thinks about this as the unity between the individual and the universal, and he calls it a “worldwide revolution” that, while starting with Plato, must be completed by world historical spirit. It is this real worldwide revolution, embodied in an ethical state organised towards the realisation of the free infinite personality, that Hegel’s work is trying to think through, mediate.

Of course, if you look at the history of the Marxist conception of communism, which comes directly out of (a negation of) Hegelianism, we find a similar desire, but reframed away from “mere thinking” (the realm of philosophical speculations), and towards “direct action” (the realm of practical politics). In both the work of Marx and contemporary socialists you will find a desire, not for tribalistic or collectivist thinking, but rather the cultivation of an organisation that is capable of collective liberation, i.e. the freedom of each (individual) is the pre-condition for the freedom of all (collective species-being). And it is of course the greatest irony that “actually existing communism” in the 20th century manifested in the “one party state” that enforces collectivist projects, as opposed to an ethical state capable of overcoming itself for the liberation of all individuals. In the strongest interpretation of Marxism, we find an inversion of the common sense idea of the collective or the tribe that takes priority over the individual; it is rather the idea that any collective organisation must strive to embody a mode of production that depends on everyone’s freedom (i.e. beyond the slave relations of history, whether direct bodily slavery, or the slavery that we call wage labour).

Whether we are still under the haunted history of Marxism or whether there is really a post-Marxist path towards a freedom that can move beyond the freedom offered by capitalism, for Hegel, we are thinking in the “eternal movement” of temporality (subjective mediations) attempting to realise eternity in history (The Idea of Freedom). Are we the types of beings, the types of subjects that can realise that higher order form of true objectivity? If Hegel claims we are no longer in the Platonic universe of an eternity conceived independently of history, are we still in a Hegelian universe, of a temporality organised around the Eternal Idea of Freedom? If we are, we need to at least understand that, for Hegel, freedom is not something independent of limitation; and, for Hegel, the most salient limitation is the one he puts on time itself: we cannot know the future (because we really are free). Hegel reminds us that every individual is the son (or the daughter) of his (or her) time.40 Thus, the human being is the being that is found limited to a present which re-writes the past to organise movement into the future. Here I am doing precisely that.

Today vulgar materialist arguments for our biological unfreedom are often grounded in the way our brains or our genes limit us to the point of overdetermining us. Hegel would not be moved by these arguments. Hegel’s freedom, even his notion of Absolute Freedom (found in historical World Spirit), is not unconstrained from the genetics of biology or neurology. Claiming that X genetic or neurological process covers Y percent of behavioural processes is not the same as recognising that in any mapping of X to Y there is still a gap, however small, when we isolate it in one particular instance of an individual life; and that gap is where Hegel thinks (and where we must think). The philosopher, and even philosophy itself, is nothing if it cannot at least become aware of how impotent it is to use the small gap of freedom to “change things”. And yet there is a persistent desire to close the small gap because it is disruptive despite its size: always presenting to us the possibility of a nagging question which can reframe the way we organise time. And that is Hegel’s notion of philosophy: the philosopher’s job is not to directly act as a political force, but rather to reflect his or her small gap, and in that gap, conceptualise one’s time in thought, and in that process, re-organise the way we conceive and act in time. In this sense the vulgar materialists use knowledge to close the gap, and Hegel occupies the gap as the position of actual wisdom, or what he would call “Absolute Knowing”.

I suppose it would not be an introduction to the Philosophy of Right, let alone an introduction to the Philosophy of Right in an anthology titled “Rosy Cross”, if I did not at least give a commentary on Hegel’s infamous statement about “the rose in the cross of the present”.41 We could say “the beauty in the blood of the present”. For Hegel, The Idea is not just the true and the good, it is also the beautiful (the rose); but because eternity and time are united, that fragile (absolute) beauty is caught in the “cross hairs” of the bloody present. For Hegel, the reason (the philosopher) which engages with the rose (beauty) in the cross of the (bloody) present, is the reason (the philosopher) which delights in his or her reconciliation with the reality of the subject’s freedom and self-origination. This way of conceptualising philosophy itself also demonstrates the way in which Hegel cannot simply be reduced to inspiration in Plato, but rather also inspiration in Christianity and the figure of Christ. For Hegel, as for Christ (while not necessarily for Plato), the subject’s freedom and the subject’s self-origination, is precisely on the cross, it is precisely in the blood of the present moment.42 The subject who smiles while openly bleeding, is beautiful. That is where the rose is. That is where our highest potential is. While that is worth thinking through, it is also something of a daunting challenge for anyone who wants to be truly engaged in fundamental philosophical cognition.

I do see signs of that philosophical cognition at Philosophy Portal can embrace this mode. We have the most direct reference in the work of Max Macken who wrote a paper directly focused on “blood writing”, a method he has developed as inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophy and published in the Abyssal Arrows anthology.43 I see it also indirectly in many who are committed to working with the excess of bodily negativity and trying to think it through or create artistic works with it, and I think that is a true superpower, whether philosophical, or artistic, or religious. Most importantly, all are expressions of our freedom. And it is crucial that we build networks and states that are the embodiments of this principle, that are demonstrations of this principle as an ideal. Where our minds are most challenged is precisely the location where the greatest gems of our mind can be birthed. Philosophers with this disposition are (Socratic) “midwives of the concept”, giving birth to concepts, and in a Hegelian way, capable of thinking the way eternity is bleeding into our time through individual processes of conceptualising the real.

Finally, we must emphasise that Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is a work that, while indebted to Plato, while not being reducible to Plato, and while being indebted to Christ as well, is also not reducible to Christ. Hegel situated the Philosophy of Right as a continuation and extension of the history of Christianity, and most notably the Protestant tradition.44 He notes that the Protestant tradition within the Christian tradition is the moment of the self-will, the moment when an emphasis on self-will overcame emphasis on traditional authority. However, he also notes that the Protestant form of self-will is one of freedom, and his work is one that attempts to lift this very breakthrough to the level of the concept.45 In short, Luther initiated the importance of the intuitive feeling of self-will over traditional authority, as part of the general break from pre-modernity to modernity proper, and the work of philosophy was to take the truth of this moment to its next level, which was towards the level of politics and the state.46

The concept of the self-will is connected to the Owl of Minerva, which is also the logo of Philosophy Portal. Hegel notes in the Philosophy of Right that the “Owl of Minerva” only “flies at dusk”, which is at once Hegel’s notion of philosophy’s power and limit, or said more properly, where philosophy finds its power in what it cannot do. Philosophy is only able to paint “gray on gray”, philosophy always “comes too late”.47 What this means is that philosophy does not appear until after the formative process, and only in the maturity of reality does the ideal act as the counterpart to the real. This is Hegel’s retroactive “after the fact” logic. Paradoxically, this means that Hegel is saying don’t get too caught up in the ideal, rather pay attention to the real while the ideal is struggling in its own self-contradiction with itself (“bleeding into time”). The ideal in some sense will take care of itself if we are willing to think with the real.48 For our political time I would say that we are dealing with the real tension between progressive woke ideology and right wing authoritarianism which is now becoming a “woke mirror” or the “woke right”. This gives practical body to Hegel’s idea that one side of the dialectic forwards a new reality and the other side of the dialectic reacts to this reality. The two sides are not complimentary but antagonistic and doomed to implode in the historicity of their self-contradiction, or rather doomed to give birth to something other in the labour of their tension.

What is Christianity’s role in this birth? Hegel would say that Christianity is part of the expression of eternity in meeting man in history, and the only way it can become through this limited meeting point. The Protestant Reformation is where free interpretation of scripture gained its own dimension and legitimacy, a movement that represents the transition from the age of authority to the age of feeling, but also towards the possibility of an age of thought. Thus the role of Christianity is not to take power of the nation but to establish a ground in which thinking might one day be possible. In this context, Hegel should be seen as a key figure and moment in the historicity of Christianity that has yet to become adequately recognised.49 If Marx will haunt us until communism is actual, then Hegel will haunt us until thinking is actual.50 In this sense, Hegel may have “completed philosophy” or may actually represent the “end of philosophy”, but this completion and end only points towards the possibility of thinking becoming actual in history. Thus, when we think of post-Hegelian philosophy, in Marx and Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, Badiou and Žižek, we may be seeing the attempt to keep this dimension as an actual possibility.

For our purposes, can we mobilise this dimension to think about the challenges of the modern state? Modern ethics? Modern rights? To do so we will need to operate in the mega historical tension between sophistry and Platonism, the question of the free infinite personality, the recognition of the fundamental limit of philosophy in attention to the real of what is, and the embodiment of the rose in the cross of the present (the beauty in the blood of the present), in order to raise feeling to concept, and think with the affects of the negative excess of the total social body. It is only in that negative excess of the total social body that we may one day find concrete freedom in the form of an ethical state (or what Christians may prefer to call the “Kingdom of God”).

What I hope follows is precisely an opportunity to think the challenges of the modern state in an international or global context, one that oscillates between the negativities liberalism and Marxism, philosophy and politics, in order to facilitate the emergence of a subject that can engage the present as a “rosy cross”.

This June at The Portal we will be hosting a month dedicated to Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. To get involved, check the link below:

Rosy Cross at The Portal

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

Previous articles in this series:

1. How to Approach “Marxism” and the Possibility of “Post-Marxism”?

2. On Black Holes and Socialist Unity

3. The Fantasy of Sanders Socialism and the Bitter Pill of Trump’s Revolution

4. International Structure of Marxist Death Drive

0: “The Black Man” is Abnormal, “The White Man” is Perpetuator and Victim of a Violent Fantasy

“I strongly encourage all those interested in the possibility of overcoming racist oppression to read closely and ponder and internalise deeply the theses in the Introduction and Conclusion of Fanon’s brilliant and profound book [Black Skin, White Masks].” - Chris Cutrone1

‘The Black Man’ strives to make himself abnormal, while ‘The White Man’ not only perpetuates the delusion that ‘The Black Man’ is abnormal, but also makes himself the victim of the delusion that ‘The Black Man’ is abnormal.2

So says political philosopher Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks.

The deeper historical question is why this structure appears to us so repeatedly and persistently, not only in the context of what Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone calls the “hyper-racialised social context like the U.S.”,3 but far more broadly, potentially globally, cutting across the species-being itself.

It is almost as if, following Fanon, there are “two camps” (or nations):4 the white and the black; and the nature of these camps presents to us the structure, following Fanon, of a “psychoexistential complex”,5 that, against Fanon, cannot be destroyed by Freudian analysis. As Žižekian philosophers know: it is not that rationally analysing a symptom brings one to its beyond, as Fanon would have it: to touching and feeling the other6 (the white man? the white woman?). Rather, for the Žižekian, analysing the symptom opens a perspective shift on the symptom as “the violent expression of the disavowed part” of oneself (i.e. the neurotic containment of a perversion).7 In this case: the persistence of the other as other, the imbalance and asymmetry that the tension with the other represents, dispelling any notion of a symmetrical harmony and peace (where one could touch and feel the other, explain oneself to the other, in a way that transcends the otherness).

But we can have our unrealistic dreams, as Martin Luther King Jr. did.

The mistake Fanon makes in Black Skin, White Masks has nothing to do with his open admission to the complex contradictions of ‘The Black Man’ vis-a-vis ‘The White Man’ as identities — they are rather illuminating as they are revealing and begging for re-assessment in light of our new century and the irreversibility of global interconnection via technological complexification — the problem Fanon makes is his striving to establish symmetry and balance of two opposing principles (‘camps’ or ‘nations’):8

“Superiority? Inferiority?

Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”

Here we should recall Žižek’s often repeated axiom about understanding and the other (this time repeated in his latest interview with Vogue):9

“I don’t want to understand everyone; I want a world where I live and let others live. In New York City, I was staying in the middle of a huge building, surrounded by people of different races and religions, and there was no tension whatsoever. Sloterdijk even talks about how we need to learn a certain kind of discretion. That’s what bothers me — the idea that I have to understand your world. How am I supposed to understand your world when neither you understand it nor I understand my own? I’m very superficial in that regard. You have a neighbor — establish some kind of order, with basic respect, and don’t push yourself onto them, nor let them push themselves onto you. I take great pleasure in discretion. Maybe that comes with age.”

Against Fanon’s insistence that we touch, feel and understand each other beyond our racist and narcissistic psychoexistential woundings, we should rather see what violence they contain, and how we might better self-mediate that violence with discretion (narcissism to death drive). We might ask ourselves: what does the symptom of ‘The Black Man’ vis-a-vis ‘The White Man’ say about the violence of ‘The Black Man’; and vice versa for its white equivalent: what does the symptom of ‘The White Man’ vis-a-vis ‘The Black Man’ say about the violence of ‘The White Man’? This analysis would not bring us to a reconciliation of touching and feeling each other, but rather bring us to either a proper respectful distance — against the ideology of neoliberal capitalism to subsume all identities under its abstract universal dominance without difference. The only alternative is self-annihilation in the other (in which there is no more ‘The Black Man’ and ‘The White Man’).

What is the symptom of ‘The Black Man’ vis-a-vis ‘The White Man’? Fanon states it clearly:10

“Black men want to prove to white men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect.”

In the context of this line of thinking, he situates his uncomfortable self-admission that:11

“However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”

What this means, exactly, is never stated, but left in a torturous ambiguity. Does it mean that blacks are destined to build a civilisation in the image of white civilisation? In their symptom of a wounded narcissism, are blacks destined to build a civilisation in which ‘The White Man’ would approve? Does it mean that blacks are destined to model their intellect after the white intellect? In their symptom of wounded narcissism, are blacks destined to desire the production of a Plato and an Aristotle, a Newton and a Darwin, to match the white civilisation's highest intellectual accomplishments?

Or is it to be taken more literally: does it mean that blacks are destined to intermix with whites and so obliterate their blackness in the process and literally become white? Is that why the conclusion of the treatise is focused on touching the other and praying for the body to give him a properly (Cartesian) philosophical perspective?:12

“My final prayer:

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

In re-reading Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the “thinking thing” is withdrawn from the deceptive sensations of the body completely,13 ‘The White Man’ cannot help but notice the irony of such a ‘black’ prayer.14

My point is that at various moments Fanon is contradictory on the point of what it means to say that ‘The Black Man’ has “one destiny” and it is “white”. And often confused: if ‘The Black Man’s’ destiny is “white”, why does he also state there is “no white world”, “no white ethic”, and no specific “white intelligence”?15 Is the ‘The White Man’s’ world a total fantasy? If so, at the same time he states that ‘The Black Man’ feels “himself a stranger” in ‘The White Man’s’ world (“European culture” with the “quality of exteriority”),16 and that “to discover a Negro” ‘civilisation’ (literature and architecture) would bring “great interest” and ‘happiness’ — imagine if Plato was talking to, and maybe even learning from, a black philosopher! — even if it would have no effect on the plight of millions of poor working blacks around the world.17 Is the disavowed violence of ‘The Black Man’ an envy and jealousy represented in the fantasy of ‘The White Man’s’ world?

All that is really consistent in Fanon’s honest and brave self-reflections (which should provoke similar attempts to articulate the same symptom) is that we release ourselves from the “Tower of the Past”18 and live towards a future in which the reifications of “the white man sealed in his whiteness” and “the black man in his blackness”19 have become obsolete, and all humanity is free from systems of enslavement.20 If desirable, is that vision possible? What would be a realistic condition of possibility for its achievement?

I don’t think we find the answer in Black Skin, White Masks.

The honest truth is that this topic cannot be approached without stumbling in and through self-contradiction. What is refreshing about Fanon’s work is how free it is of self-censorship (at the risk of offending his “colored brothers”)21 and how brave it is in confronting the (psychoexistential) symptom at all.

What is perhaps also surprising is that no one has written White Skin, Black Masks, since, can we not say that ‘The White Man’ has the symptom Fanon describes in reverse? Fanon intimates at this when he diagnoses not only ‘The Black Man’ as sick “who wants to turn his race white” as “he who preaches hatred for the whites”; but also ‘The White Man’ as sick “who adores the Negro” as “who abominates him”.22

So let us invert Fanon’s psychoexistential symptom in a speculative gesture to see how it holds:

“White men want to prove to black men, at all costs, the richness of their body, the equal value of their physical abilities.”

In the context of this line of thinking, could we situate an uncomfortable self-admission for ‘The White Man’:

“However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the white man there is only one destiny. And it is black.”

What this means, exactly, will never be stated, but rather left in a torturous ambiguity. Does it mean that whites are destined to obsess on the image of their body in a comparative analysis of the height of the black body? In their symptom of a wounded narcissism, are whites destined to fail in comparison to the standard of the black body? Does it mean that whites are destined to model their bodily capacity after the black body? In their symptom of a wounded narcissism, are whites destined to desire the production of a Mike Tyson or a Michael Jordan, a Usain Bolt or a Barry Sanders, to match the black civilisation’s highest athletic accomplishments?

Or is it to be taken more literally: does it mean that whites are destined to intermix with blacks and so obliterate their whiteness in the process and literally become black? Is that why we should be open to touching the other and praying for our philosophical thought leaders to give us the capacity for embodiment?:

“My final thought:

O my mind, make of me always a man with a body!”

For if ‘The Black Man’ has a symptom of the white intellect (I’ll take Fanon’s word for it), from an analysis of ‘The White Man’s’ unconscious, is it not the case that many white men have a symptom of the black body?

My point is that, if Fanon can claim that ‘The Black Man’ has “one destiny” and it is “white”, seemingly in reference to the ‘The Black Man’s’ psychoexistential complex vis-a-vis ‘The White Man’, can we not in a confused way claim the reverse?: ‘The White Man’ has “one destiny” and it is “black”? Is the disavowed violence of ‘The White Man’ an envy and jealousy represented in the fantasy of the ‘The Black Man’?

And in truth: Descartes philosophy — with his emphasis on bodily withdrawal and its deceptive sensations (where the Truth is conceived as a disembodied relation to God as a perfect being)23 — things are more complex, in that he also clearly emphasises that the mind is “conjoined” with the body to such an extent as it forms a “single entity”24 — and perhaps also a single destiny (or Marxist species-being).

Perhaps we should think about the proletariat in terms of Fanon’s “two camps” (or ‘nations’): the white-etariat and the black-etariat. Are these two nations distinct and yet conjoined in such a way as to form a “single entity”? (i.e. the proletariat as a ‘split-one’ into two)25 Is there any other way to describe U.S. society?26 What about the future of human civilisation itself? In this context we turn to Cutrone, and his pointing towards the idea of “Columbus Day” in Mexico:27

“In Mexico, Columbus Day is celebrated as the “Day of the Race,” celebrating the marvelous mixture of European and indigenous people, the new modern race of Americans. — Shall we regret them as “illegitimate children” instead? Republican U.S. Congressional Representative Steve King said that all existing human populations are the products at some time or other of rape and incest, but that it is not the children’s fault for the sins of their fathers and mothers. — Shall we prefer that they were aborted?”

But what about, in the context of Cutrone’s emphasis on “The Black Question” (literally questioning the idea of ‘the black race’, and not Fanon’s praying for his black body to question), we expand this emphasis on Mexico’s “Day of the Race” to include the full spectrum of what Columbus opened?: the mixture of European, indigenous people and Africa?28 Is not the correct interpretation of the ‘post-Columbus’ ‘Western Hemisphere’ within the frame of Europe, the Americas and Africa? Isn’t that perfectly inconvenient for our thinking? Is that not the true “modern race of Americans”, whether it is divided along racial models from the U.S. or Brazil, or anywhere else in the hemisphere, and however incomplete, a mixture of that total constellation of human difference?29

In the context of such questions, how are we to interpret the idea of what Cutrone calls the “very peculiar idea” of the “one drop rule”?30

What we can say with certainty is that race will prove to be a contradiction that cuts across the human species-being as a totality for some time to come, whether or not it is an ‘outdated concept’, it is still not going anywhere. Moreover, I suspect the questions of race are not simply a result of the “hyper-racialised social context of the U.S.”, but we can learn to think with race in a braver and more self-conscious way than we have dared to so far this century (woke, either left or right, is simply a symptom of cowardice and unconsciousness more than anything else).31 In this bravery and self-consciousness, we should totally avoid and ignore the ‘standpoint epistemology’ which forecloses discussions of race in totality on the basis of the perceived particularity of the individual who is writing or speaking (i.e. because ‘I am’ ‘The White Man’ I cannot speak on or offer extended commentary about ‘The Black Man’, etc.). This standpoint epistemology only serves to support censorship on topics that require cognitive freedom inclusive of deepening self-and-other-contradictions in politics over ‘identity politics’ (woke left-right).

Is the psychoexistential complex race provokes, following Fanon, simply “dual narcissism”?;32 or does it, against Fanon, point to the radicality of the notion of death drive beyond narcissism, beyond simplistic notions of “Eros” and a “healthy reality principle?”33 As opened in the last article,34 does death drive not point to the repetition of a state of tension vis-a-vis a specific form of ‘negative energy’ (bodily or intellectual) where something can seemingly appear out of nothing? In this context, the dream of a ‘post-racial rational state’ where man is truly questioning (his body? the social body?) as an expression of his highest freedom? Is a ‘post-racial rational state’ possible? Or will it be a ‘rational state with new racial complexes and constellations’ similar to Mexico’s ‘Day of the Race’? In Cutrone’s reflections on American academic Harold Cruse, and as already noted in a footnote, he suggests thinking of America as composed of a constellation of three racial nations: white, black, and red.35 Does this racial constellation still hold?36

We don’t need to pray to the body for the answer, but a more contradictory (Hegelian) understanding of the Cartesian cogito could help, i.e. one that moves from (absolute) recoil/withdrawal of the senses into the primordial jouissance of God (narcissism) towards facing the irreducibly ‘conjoined’ nature of mind and body, and the shared destiny of our species-being in history (death drive).37

If Fanon needs to be supplemented with death drive, then Marxists don’t only need Freud for a rational psychoanalytic analysis of civilisational symptoms (which would then free us into a post-racial rational state), but also — unfortunately, I suppose — Žižek for a recognition of the need for self-mediating a violence that persists in the face of real difference (and which requires a certain sense of respectful discretion in relation to a real that will not relate but rather non-relates).38

Maybe ‘The White Man’ is the perpetuator and victim of a violent fantasy? Or maybe he just needs to stop feeling guilty for the past, stop obsessing over excessive exceptions of ‘The Black Man’ as abnormal, and more self-consciously work with violent fantasy?

Or maybe ‘The Black Man’ makes himself abnormal because he is abnormal? Or maybe this is only true against a certain misrecognised normative standard of human difference inherited by intellectual allegiance to the European tradition? Would an authentically ‘American Marxism’ be able to help us think differently?

What do women think?

I think the way we think about humanity is exploded when we move past discourses of ‘East and West’, or even ‘Global South’, and instead just boldly rethink the coordinates of what was known before Columbus’ day as the classical triad of ‘Europe, Asia, and Africa’. Maybe what we must think after Columbus is the quadruplicity of ‘Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas’? What is so fearful about thinking the social coordinates of such constellations of identity, their internal contradictions, and the contradictions that result from identities that emerge from their intermixing or ‘intersection’? What violence won’t either the woke left or right mediate? What violence do they disavow so persistently, and against all reason; what particularity do they cling to so fiercely, against all universality?

1. Roots and Mediation of Anti-Black Racism

“The Negro, however sincere, is the slave of the past. […] Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to exact; face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism.” - Frantz Fanon39

“…now, I provoke you as a black guy. My hero–sincerely, I’m not bluffing–is Malcolm X. You know why? […] Because […] Malcolm X, he had an ingenious insight which was at the top of contemporary philosophy. Namely, he wasn’t playing the Hollywood game, Roots. You remember that stupid TV series? The greatest honor for you blacks’ desire is to find some tribe in Africa. Oh, I’m from there. No. Of course, Malcolm X meant by the brutality of white men, being enslaved, we were deprived of our roots and so on.

But he wrote about it […] this X paradoxically opens up a new freedom for us, all that white people want to be, not primitive tribal, but universal, creating their own space. We, black people, have a unique chance not to become, not to return to our particular [roots], [but] to be more universal, [more] emancipated than white people themselves. You see, this is the important thing for me.” - Slavoj Žižek40

Chris Cutrone’s section “The “Black Question” in the United States” forwards the thesis that “anti-black racism” is “peculiar” to U.S. history.41 First we should dispel the notion that “anti-black racism” has disappeared or even dissipated after the election of a figure like Barack Obama into a ‘post-racial’ U.S. society. In contrast to this view, we should think about the way ‘anti-black racism’ has resurfaced with a force that brings us back to the very origin of the antinomy, for example, in ‘woke right’ commentators like Nick Fuentes. Consider that, for Fuentes, his entire identity and schtick hangs on the principle that to be American is to be a ‘white skin’, and to be a ‘black skin’ is to be a slave out of proper social order — either receiving benefits from the government, terrorising the white public causing chaos and disorder, sinning via miscegenation — and in need of being put back in order, or else sent back to their roots: African tribalism.

In this context, what is impossible for someone like Fuentes to cognise, is the possibility that, following Cutrone:42

“Black Americans are American, as American as any “white” American could possibly claim to be.”

In other words, there is no (post-Columbus) ‘America’ without ‘The Black Man’: the blacks whose ancestry can be traced back through the American continents past centuries are just as American as any other racial group that can make similar claims. The problem is only that this shared history strikes us with a (Hegelo-Marxist) history that has yet to be properly (re-)written. While we all know the story — that ‘whites’ were ‘masters’ and ‘blacks’ were ‘slaves’; that ‘whites’ were ‘striving for universal freedom’ where ‘blacks’ were ‘branded in the skin’ as unpaid labourers43 — the story is often not framed with its necessary dialectical twists and turns (which, if left untraversed, can and do lead to the resurfacing of the origin of the antinomy).44

Here, for a Hegelian, the emergence of ‘American self-consciousness’ cannot be understood independent of this origin and the struggle that determined the identities that have had the most global exposure in the 20th and 21st centuries as ‘The White Man’ and ‘The Black Man’ (not ‘Europeans’ and ‘Africans’ but ‘Euro-Americans’ and ‘Afro-Americans’). In this relation, we should not forget Hegel’s notions of self-consciousness as being determined by the struggle of “Lord” and “Bondsman”, where the “Lord” pretends to independence in his subjection of the “Bondsman” (he might even make a ‘declaration’ about it), and the “Bondsman” is left to actually work on it (the question of independence).45 This work might actually involve war between the parties and defection from one side to the other (almost as if we are literally dealing with two non-territorial nations within the construction of a territorial nation).

Consequently, when political commentators like Nick Fuentes equate American identity and white identity, they are imagining the immediacy of the relation as opposed to its mediation (via ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’), and most importantly, facing the consequences of that mediation (i.e. the truth in the independence of the ‘Bondsman’, and the negative result for the ‘Lord’). In other words, Fuentes is saying: ‘can’t we go back to the days (not before Civil Rights but before the Civil War) where I can pretend to being independent as a Lord over a Bondsman’ (i.e. where ‘The Black Man’ can be essentially branded into their being (their skin) as lower class, poverty-stricken, unable to provide for themselves, and prevented from intermixing with people like me), and can we just ‘forget all the work that has gone into the actual questioning the nature of this independence’? Fuentes is thus also saying: ‘If I were to question the nature of this independence perhaps I would be left with an impossible question about the nature of my own self-identity that I don’t want to think about?’

In contrast to such thought, and following Cutrone, when we think about ‘what it means to be American?’, is not the very height of that identity, not ‘white skin’ or ‘black skin’, but rather the very process of questioning the nature of the independence that was declared (in the context of capitalism)? Is it not nothing but the constant re-assessment of the extent to which the declaration has been actualised, or might become actualised? America is not the land in which ‘The White Man’ ‘strives for universal freedom’ where ‘The Black Man’ is branded as an unpaid labourer, but rather:46

“the land of the free and home of the brave — the U.S. banishing slavery has been an act of unprecedented bravery and freedom, and still is.”

In that context, Fuentes’ vision of what it means to be an American is both slavery and cowardice (and that is ‘his choice’): the slavery of a ‘Lord’ who pretends to independence and the cowardice of a fearful man who does not know what it means to work on the question of independence. Here we should remember that, for a Hegelian, true freedom is not on the side of the “Lord”, but rather on the side (of the mediation of) the “Bondsman”, who through the work of the question of independence, a work that involves confronting one’s own fear to be free, “becomes conscious of what he truly is”.47 It is through fearless work that desire (to be Lord, or to please the Lord) is held ‘in check’ (becoming death drive), forming and shaping self independence (freedom) into something “objective” and “permanent” (as opposed to the child-like freedom of subjective immediacy).48 It is in the context that Žižek thinks:49

“black people, have a unique chance not to become, not to return to [their] particular [roots], [but] to be more universal, [more] emancipated than white people themselves”

It is this potential that discourses like Fuentes’ obfuscate: the problem of one non-territorial nation expressing a new universality in the mediation of the ‘Bondsman’ that cuts across the universality of another non-territorial nation in the performativity of the ‘Lord’, within a territorial nation, revealing a disturbing asymmetry that no one wants to think about.

Here Cutrone reminds us, following Freud:50

“The truth is that we are — painfully — free.”

Obviously there is an immediate truth to being fearful of the freedom of the ‘Bondsman’, but that immediate truth does not hold, it demands courage and bravery in the face of it (or else becoming reduced to an instrument to the other, or killed). Consequently, is the return of the repressed in the image of ‘anti-black racism’ — demanding a return to the immediacy of a slave out of proper social order, and in need of being put back in order, or else sent back to his roots — not only revealing that ‘anti-black racism’ is the belief that blacks are best as unpaid labourers, but rather and also a threat to ‘The White Man’ (the ‘Lord’) as free? Does it not confront ‘The White Man’ with a fear that he will not directly confront about the relation between the ‘territorial nation’ and the existence of a multiplicity of ‘non-territorial nations’? Is this a fear that in order to confront universality there may be a new and more complex mediations of Lord and Bondsman for the achievement of self-consciousness proper?

If the woke-right discourse of Fuentes is an obfuscation bringing us back to the immediacy of this relation; then the woke-left discourse is an obfuscation that misrecognises the mediation in a ‘very peculiar’ way, i.e. endlessly framing blacks as ‘Bondsman’ (victims), as if — to follow the line of thought known as ‘Afro-pessimism’51 — black will only ever mean slave, i.e. black will only ever be a particularity without the possibility for a mediation towards the ‘future poetry’ of ‘X’ in the form of new universality. What would ‘future poet’ 2pac say about the ‘X’ of black identity?:52

“Niggers was the ones on the rope hanging out the thing, niggas is the ones with gold ropes hanging out at clubs.”

Is 2pac’s interpretation just capitalism? Maybe.

2. Is Anti-Black Racism Reducible to Capitalism?

As the terms ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’ have stood in history, that is in the work and mediation of the question of independence: Cutrone notes that white skin and black skin have been abstracted away from the body and situated in social terms (social masks), more specifically in terms of capitalist social relations:53

“We ought not to forget that anti-black racist sentiment — the disqualification of individuals rationalised by reference to their blackness — is just as prevalent among blacks as among whites and other groups in the U.S.”

In this context, consider that leading Afropessimist critic and writer, Frank B. Wilderson III, insists that:54

“we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery”

But is this not the reason that Fuentes has no trouble ‘finding blacks’ who will join him in his equation that American identity is white identity, and that blacks were better under the Jim Crow laws (e.g. Jesse Lee Peterson), if not further back in slavery (which ‘was a choice’, e.g. Kanye West), or else best back rooted to their origin in the ahistorical time (of cannibalism (incest and the lust for killing)) in Africa. In other words, when we abstract ‘white’ and ‘black’ from the body and in the terms of capitalist social relations, ‘white’ becomes synonymous with civilisation and the progress of freedom (and there are many humans with black skin who can identify with it, take its side, and maybe even see in it a (contradictory) ‘destiny’ (Fanon?)); and ‘black’ becomes synonymous with barbarism, a tribal pre-history and slave relations (and perhaps we should not forget that there are even humans with white skin who want to identify with it, take its side).

If Cutrone had his way (as dictator of the dictatorship of the proletariat?), we could follow Fanon through his necessarily complex self-contradictory assessment of opposing skins and masks towards the negation of all the ideas related to ‘essential whiteness’ and ‘essential blackness’ (touching and feeling each other?). And yet, we find a quasi-Afropessimist structure in which ‘white’ is still “destiny”, and ‘black’ is nothing but the negative signifier of “degradation”?, unable to invert itself from the position of a ‘Bondsman’ towards a new universality or ‘X’ of identity?55 The contradictions remain — and we should remain faithful with these contradictions — but, for Cutrone, we ultimately come to the idea that race is an “antiquated” concept,56 obscuring more than it reveals.57 What it obscures, for Cutrone, is the idea that “anti-black racist oppression” is “inseparable from the development of capitalism”.58 This means that we are not just dealing with the Hegelian notions of Lord and Bondsman — the fearful work of the bondsman to discover the true nature of self-consciousness — but rather the fearful work of the (dictatorship of the) proletariat to discover the true nature of our species-being in communism (beyond the ‘white-etariat’ and the ‘black-etariat’?). In this fearful work, for Cutrone, race should not be viewed as more of an obstacle that it really is,59 but rather serve a mediation that brings us to confront our shared destiny in capitalism.60

However, before we get to a Marxism informed by Fanon — that is beyond the essentialisation of ‘white’ and ‘black’ as ‘real races’ — we necessarily have to embody a society willing to do the work to reach the same conclusions, and that work will undoubtedly be a total mess. This total mess does not simply involve the woke left and right ideologies today, with woke left misrecognising the mediation of ‘classical races’ in U.S. history, and woke right desiring a return to the immediacy of ‘classical race’ in U.S. history, but also the appearance of ‘post-modern racial identification’ as a kind of ‘new ontology’ (e.g. Wasian, Blasian, ‘Blight’).61 If we follow Fanon to the letter, as mentioned, the “proletariat” in its immediate essence is simplified to the outline of ‘two camps’ or ‘nations’ (white and black). To add the aforementioned ‘Cutronian trip’, we must think about these camps self-organising via self-conscious identification, not literally by their ‘skin’, but rather by their ‘capitalist mask’ irrespective of their association with actual skin colour. Here what gets reified is ‘black’ as ‘universal bondsman’ and ‘white’ as ‘universal lord’. This has a real in social reality, as Cutrone notes, following Fanon’s model:62

“Racism is real, and in the U.S. it targets blacks. There are no “people of colour” but only blacks and more-or-less “white” people (the latter including “black” — African and Caribbean — immigrants, who do not readily identify with historically black Americans, and indeed actively do not).”

In other words: identifying as ‘white’ (capitalist mask) irrespective of skin colour means identifying with being a ‘lord capable of striving for the universal freedom’ (if only we could get the primitive black-obstacle out of our way); and identifying as ‘black’ (capitalist mask) irrespective of skin colour means identifying with being a ‘bondsman doomed to spin in circles as the universally enslaved rabble’ (living in ‘The White Man’s’ world). This is perhaps a Marxist interpretation of what Fanon would call being “sealed away in the materialised Tower of the Past”,63 and what Wilderson continues today in the idea that “we must view Blackness through the lens of perpetual slavery”.64 Cutrone’s view could take these perspectives in a unity by emphasising that this “materialised Tower” is nothing but the development of capitalism and the codes humans identify with vis-a-vis freedom and slavery in capitalism (owning the labour/means of production (‘He White!’) or being reduced to a slave labourer (‘He Black!’)).

This has practical implications for how not only ‘anti-black racism’ has functioned historically and in the present — whether the person is actually a ‘white skin’, a ‘black skin’, or, why not, a ‘blight skin’ — but how it obscures the working-class struggle in its specific U.S. context (and perhaps, I would insist, elsewhere). Cutrone notes a fascinating and provocative example — relevant to not only those on the woke left whose brains have been fried by ‘anti-racism’, but one also with relevance to the confused existence of many contemporary ‘woke right’ blacks who might agree with someone like Fuentes — that blacks were actually better off under the Jim Crow laws:65

“I am going to offer a very provocative formulation of this problem: that what was most specific and peculiar about American anti-black racism historically was also an expression of its greatest emancipatory potential regarding capitalism. There is a great historical paradox in that the worst, most thorough-going historic racism in modern history, that of the condition of blacks in the Jim Crow-era Southern United States, coincided with the historic height of working class political movement and empowerment.”

To state this as clearly as possible: Cutrone’s provocation is that working class political movements and empowerment (for both blacks and whites) was higher during the period of the most thorough-going historic racism (Jim Crow-era South). This is why many blacks — like Jesse Lee Peterson — build their entire performative identity around how great it was for blacks under the Jim Crow laws. Peterson will frequently reference how, under the Jim Crow laws, blacks had a better familial foundation, moral-religious cultural foundation, and in general had a greater capacity for self-empowerment and independence (in comparison with contemporary blacks, whom for Peterson, are on the ‘Democratic plantation’ of welfare, benefits, and self-victimization in relation to delusion of ‘The White Man’ as superior). Peterson will even intelligently play up the ‘Fanonian fear’ of lower black intelligence when questioned deeply about what this means for the future of American policy: ‘(I don’t know,) I’m black and slow’ and also ‘we need more white babies!’. While many (black or white) woke left-leaning liberals fail to breach the defences of this intelligent performativity of a black man who identifies as woke right, Cutrone’s Marxism asks the right question:66

“I wish to raise this paradox as a question: What was the relation between the development of working class organization and politics and the exacerbation of racist divisions in American society? How was the “racial” division of the American working class an expression of the self-contradictory character of working class politics under capital?”

To put this in other words, perhaps what woke left-leaning liberals in America are unable to get to, due to ‘political correctness’ of ‘anti-racism’, is that there is an uncomfortable relation that needs to be self-consciously taken up in order to forge a true working class politics in the mediation of ‘white’ and ‘black’ non-territorial nations: the history of working class organisation and racist divisions (re: white and black as code for free-man and slave, Lord and Bondsman). If woke left-leaning liberals do not take up this Marxist challenge within the context of the U.S.’s own unique historicity, then does it not inevitably end up in confused self-reflections about the relation between race and class in America? Does it not inevitably fall to the opportunistic cowardice of a Fuentes, who cannot bear the real mediation of American identity outside of his isolated Chicago suburb; or the (intelligent) ‘black and slow’ performativity of a Jesse Lee Peterson, who sees the errors of the woke liberal, and so confuses — albeit, I think, in a genuine way — the romantic image of his own childhood in Alabama under the Jim Crow laws with liberation? In fact, are not Fuentes and Peterson, as white and black woke right identities, simply a reflection of confusing the romantic idealisation of their childhoods in ‘all white’ and ‘all black’ neighbourhoods and then building a general vision for America as a whole around these idealised subjective immediacies?

If there is a liberal left in America and elsewhere that is willing to more seriously think the paradox of working class organisation and racist divisions (re: non-territorial nations), I would seek to undermine in a self-consciously uncertain way the reduction of anti-black racism to the developmental of capitalism. In a way that I think mirrors the mistake of Marxists to think that, just because in capitalism religion takes on a capitalist character (i.e. capitalist churches, if not also capitalism as religion), that means that in communism there will be no religion; perhaps it is a mistake to think that just because racism takes on a capitalist character, that means in communism it will be overcome. I think, on the contrary, if humans are ever ‘in communism’, there will be religions with a communist character; and (assuming) communism, there will also be communist forms of racism (and also sexism). The question is rather: what is the character of communist religion and communist racism(/sexism)?

Indeed, characters like Nick Fuentes and Jesse Lee Peterson will also exist in communism. Will there not be a ‘right wing’ in communism? Maybe only ‘two left wings’? Who knows? More to the point: is it possible that, (assuming) communism, there will likely be cowardly whites who do not like the idea of ‘The Black Man’ freely intermixing with whites, and there will be conservative blacks who think blacks are better off segregated by ‘The White Man’ or simply self-segregated for whatever reason qua psychoexistential complex. And those positions will still be self-contradictory because, at least according to my thinking, social contradiction will persist in communism (perhaps even between non-territorial racial nations), against Marx’s vitalist conceptions where the communist subject is fully reconciled with the substantial species-being. I claim the species-being will persist as (an immortal) question. Religion, race, sex/gender will persist as indestructible markers of that question. If the 60s ‘New Left’ made everything a question — ‘the black question’, ‘the woman question’, ‘the gay question’67 — what the ‘New Left’ misses is the notion of the species-being itself as an ‘immortal’ question (clearly visible in the ‘cogito’ in its immediacy (Descartes) and its mediation (Hegel)).

As it relates specifically to the American context, what changes in any movement in the U.S. to mediate their own racially divided history on the level of the working class, is the transmutation qua formative activity of the “fear” (of race internal to the proletariat) which “remains inward and mute” as opposed to becoming “for-itself” (for the future politics of the human species-being).68 Here we should remember that confronting that fear as opposed to leaving it inward and mute, does not mean we know the outcome of its fearless work. We rather confront, against ‘roots’, the (mysterious ‘future poetry’) ‘X’ of identity, and why not, of nation.

In this context, how are we to interpret Cutrone’s ‘Afropessimism’ qua Wilderson’s ‘blackness’ as ‘perpetual slavery’ when he says:69

“Black “racial” identity is a negative not a positive value and cannot be rehabilitated or inverted for it has only ever meant degradation.”

Is this not precisely the opposite of Žižek’s claim that:70

“black people, have a unique chance not to become, not to return to our particular [roots], [but] to be more universal, [more] emancipated than white people themselves”

While obviously the ‘passionate self-assertion’ of black identity (or any identity) can be a ‘mask for accommodation’ (as we will cover below), is it so inconceivable that future humans, if not already contemporary humans, will manage or have managed to construct a black racial identity or non-territorial nation — abstracted from its negative connotation in the history of capitalism — as fundamentally positive, capable of standing on its own, not against whites, but independent of the need for their recognition? Žižek engages Wilderson directly on this point:71

Frank B. Wilderson III elaborated the most convincing version of Afropessimism by way of posing questions that the predominant liberal Humanism avoids: “simply put, we abdicated the power to pose the question—and the power to pose the question is the greatest power of all”. The question is: humanism presents itself as universal, all-encompassing, but this universality is already grounded in an exclusion. It is not just that humanism imposes a Western standard of being-human which reducers subaltern Others to a lower level of humanity; Humanism is based on the exclusion of a large group of humans (Blacks) as non-Human, outside the hierarchical sphere of Humanity, while Asians and Latinos are “lesser humans” who can demand full Humanity. (The young Gandhi played this game: when he protested against apartheid in South Africa, he didn’t demand legal equality of Whites and Blacks, he just wanted the large Indian minority to get the same rights as the Whites.) Plus one should raise here another question which is very relevant in our multicentric world with the stronger position of Asia: are Blacks non- Human just from the standpoint of European Whites? What about Asians – what are Blacks for them? Also non-human?

The struggle for a future-oriented black universality qua non-territorial nation that subverts or disrupts the standard notion of universality, cutting across it from within, should be conceived of in this context. It is not just the tired old idea that white Europeans view black Africans as somehow the particular exclusion to the inclusion of their notion of universality, but its that non-blacks in general operate via this standpoint. So when Žižek suggests, seemingly against Afropessimism, that it is possible for black identity to be in a sense more universal, how is this to be interpreted?72 Is 2pac correct to view ‘gold chains’ and ‘hanging at the club’ as a new emancipated black universality? Isn’t that just a simplistic immediacy of freedom in capitalism?

At the same what is exactly so unimaginable about black as a positive signifier?: ‘The White Man’ can have his identity as positive and universal (Fanon’s destiny of ‘The Black Man’) but not ‘The Black Man’? In other words, ‘The Black Man’s’ destiny can be ‘white’, but ‘The White Man’s’ destiny cannot be ‘black’? Let’s put it in terms of a territorial nation composed of non-territorial racial ‘nations’: it is possible for white universality to cut across black particularity (as Fanon claims, on the level of intelligence and thought), but not possible for black universality to cut across white particularity? Is it not obvious that it can (and does) happen both ways?

More to Cutrone’s Marxist point of anti-black racism and capitalism: what to do with these asymmetries in the context of the ‘struggle for socialism’? While the ‘White Man’s Burden’ is as confused as ‘Black Power’ nationalism, do the historical inversions of these identities teach us something, not necessarily in the positivity of their oscillation (between white and black as identity), but rather in the shape of the negativity they reveal about the present contradictions of our identities?

I do agree with Cutrone’s (and Fanon’s) Marxism in the sense that white and black are not ‘fundamental essences’, that they are not the fundamental thing-in-itself, but nevertheless, they socially function with relevance to practical politics of ‘the rabble’. Here consider Žižek reflection from a philosophical perspective:73

“For a philosopher, ethnic roots, national identity, and so on, are simply not a category of truth—or, to put it in precise Kantian terms, when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is to say, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free human beings who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. This, of course, does not in any way entail that we should be ashamed of our ethnic roots; we can love them, be proud of them; return home may warm our hearts—but the fact remains that all this is ultimately irrelevant. We should act like Saint Paul who, while he was proud of his particular identity (a Jew and a Roman citizen), was nonetheless aware that, in the proper space of the Christian absolute Truth, “there is neither Jew nor Greek.” … The struggle which truly engages him is not simply “more universal” than that of one ethnic group against another; it is a struggle which obeys an entirely different logic: no longer the logic of one self-identical substantial group fighting another group, but of an antagonism that cuts diagonally across all particular groups.”

In this context, can we view the question of the ‘American Nation’, as composed of multiple ‘non-territorial racial nations’, as a kind of “antagonism that cuts diagonally across all particular groups”? Where the ‘white nation’ can ‘cut across’ other identities, and the ‘black nation’ can do the same? And if Saint Paul were doing his ‘Christ-work’ today, would he say, instead of “there is neither Jew nor Greek”, something like, “there is neither Black nor White”? Perhaps we could say, in this double distinction, the rabble is politically and practically effected socially by the antagonism between racial nations as an “antagonism that cuts diagonally across all particular groups”, and at the same time, on the level of the “absolute truth” (either Christian or philosophical), “there is neither Black nor White”.

As it relates to Marxism directly: how are we to interpret the ‘New Left’ oscillation from ‘anti-black racism’ as fundamentally rooted in ‘capitalism’, towards the idea of ‘future socialism’ as somehow organised in ‘Black Power’? Is it that the ‘New Left’ and its legacy literally perceives in black identity the power to overcome capitalism? Is it that the ‘New Left’ and its legacy conceives of black identity as revolutionary subjectivity? Is that why the ‘New Left’ and its legacy always confusingly equates capitalism with white male patriarchy? More to the point: how are white men supposed to react to such absurdity without recoil to the woke right performativity? Is it literally that we need to re-read Hegel’s notion of ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’ and do the work of questioning the meaning of independence of the white male identity today?

As you can see, I only have hysterical questioning to offer.

3. Anti-Racism as Politics has Clearly Failed

PART 1: The Context of Capitalist Politics

“Passionate self-assertion can be a mask for accommodation.” -Bayard Rustin74

The history of racial ideology in the U.S. can only be understood on dialectical ‘topsy-turvy’ terms (against notions of a liberal progress from racist to non-racist via anti-racism). Again: I maintain that any notion of communist society should be thought inclusive of the potential for racism (and sexism), and not its complete overcoming (its complete overcoming is the ideological position that kills socialism before it can even start). Do we really think that human narcissism and death drive will not become entangled in racial (and sexual) identity and instead magically evaporate in communism? The anti-black racism of the Jim Crow laws did not open towards a non-racist or post-racial society, but rather demonstrated the power of ‘wounded narcissism’ in the ideas of ‘Black Power’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’.

Cutrone here notes that one of the biggest blind spots for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950-60s “New Left” is that it failed to think its historical background and basis in “cross-racial” organising of workers in the South by the 1930s “Old Left”.75 Cutrone furthermore situates the dialectic in the topsy-turvy move from Jim Crow style separatism to the failure of “liberal integrationist politics” resulting in the symptom of “Black Power”76 against the “intractability” of “white (anti-black) racism”.77 The mistake is as simple as it is understandable — and today figures like Fuentes and Peterson are its symptomal result — you cannot simply move from a segregated racial society (Jim Crow laws) to an integrated racial society (neoliberalism) without enormous social contradictions destroying the entire social fabric of the working class itself (its capacity for family, community, and so on). In capitalism, any such movement would have required a commitment to ‘cross-racial’ organising of workers — something like a unity between non-territorial racial nations — which, I don’t even think Fuentes and Peterson would negate, and can even be interpreted as embracing in certain moments. Cutrone notes that, it is not that the “liberal integrationist politics” of, say, a Martin Luther King Jr., was “lacking in “black” consciousness” (and in need of dialectical reconciliation in a figure like Malcolm X), but rather:78

“the practical politics of liberal-reformist integrationist could not address adequately the issue of capitalism”.

Here we should recall that the general frame of Cutrone’s work is situated in this wake of the failures of the ‘New Left’, its inability to tarry with the problems of the ‘Old Left’, plus the way this falls into the post-political Left of the neoliberal era, before then erupting in the moment of the ‘Millennial Left’ (which then undergoes a death process we now inhabit). This holds for Cutrone’s analysis of the Civil Rights era of the “New Left”, where he critiques our contemporary imaginary for reifying the turn to “Black Power” (/“Black Lives Matter”) as somehow a “necessary stage” as opposed to a misrecognition of the dynamic between race and class in capitalism.79 What was the problem of the ‘Old Left’ that the ‘New Left’ did not address? Cutrone notes in a preview for the course Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials:80

“[A]re black people a national minority in the way European countries have national minorities?

No, no, I would say no.

[B]lacks are a national minority in the United States, but not like a European national minority’, which is usually territorial.

[…]

[The Old Left was wrestling with] mixed populations and how do you deal with the national rights of minorities where it isn’t simply a straightforward matter of territorial separation. There have been different ways of dealing with this: in the 30s, the Communist Party had a kind of ill-begotten approach to this, the Black Belt thesis, which is ironic because it happens in the era of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South. But then they say, the ancestral home of black Americans is still the South, so blacks are a nation and they’re centred in the South, the Black Belt, even as they are leaving.”

Here we find an unresolved antinomy between ‘Old Left’ and ‘New Left’ in their double-failure to deal with an American Nation post-Jim Crow laws:

1. Old Left thinks about white and black populations on a ‘European model’ of ‘territorial separation’: whites are territorially Northern, blacks are territorially Southern (with this as a basis for ‘cross-racial’ organising)

2. New Left thinks about white and black populations on a ‘neoliberal model’ of an abstract integration: mix white and black populations into universal capitalism and demonise anyone who disagrees with anti-racist ideology

The alternative to these approaches has been teased at throughout this article, inspired by Cutrone’s reference to American academic Harold Cruse, and in general inspired by the model of European Jews as a non-territorial nation: can we think about the dialectic of ‘territorial nations’ with abstract equality and human rights and at the same time think about ‘non-territorial nations’ based on the social function of race which divides the human species-being from within, cutting across it diagonally?81 This idea represents the contradictions of a ‘(racial) nation of nations’, in which the challenge for working class politics is in a sense a more sophisticated notion of racial politics, arguably a notion of racial politics based on mutual respect and discretion of independent peoples. Cutrone notes, following Cruse:82

Cruse had this phrase where he said the United States was a nation of nations, meaning the United States has no authentic American Marxism because American Marxists had modelled their view of things too much on Europe, and had not been true to American history. In the United States, you had a nation of nations, you had three nations: white, black, and red. And the Red Nation were the Native Americans and the Chicanos, insofar as that could be considered also an indigenous population.

But instead of following this political path, as a working with the antinomy of ‘Old Left’ and ‘New Left’ outlined above, the Left turned ‘post-political’ and the Millennial Left didn’t know what to do with race, still imagining the possibility of a ‘post-racial rational state’ via the election of the ‘first “black’ president’ (in reality: the first ‘blight’ president). The result of this direction was just a further right-wing turn in the foregrounding of black identity politics, in which liberal whites pretend to be slaves to reconcile their own guilt and confused relation to their own racial identity, and in which conservative whites end up resenting the entire liberal political order in its ridiculous ‘colour-blindness’ as repression.

So where are we? As has been consistent in our analyses of The Death of the Millennial Left we see the repetition of a structure of the ‘split-one’ of the ‘capitalist core’, between ‘two rights’ and an ‘inexistent Left’:83

• Reaganomics vs. Keynesian economics (on the level of economy)

• Trumpian Post-Neoliberalism vs. Democratic Socialism (on the level of national politics)

• Hawkish Neoconservatives vs. Leftist Anti-Imperialism (on the level of international politics)

In analysing these terms in total, the first term is the actual hegemonic form (let’s say: ‘Conservative Neoliberal Capitalism’), and the second term is a ‘reaction’ which takes itself to be the Left but is actually an obfuscation and avoidance of the responsibility required to forming a real Left (let’s say ‘Progressive Neoliberal Capitalism’). On the level of race relations in the U.S. (and perhaps globally), we find:

• Integrationist Racial Politics vs. Black Power/Black Lives Matter

In line with the repetition of the structure outlined, and as noted above, the turn to “Black Power” was not a “necessary stage” of the Left but rather a turn to the Right characterised by “defeat” and “dashed expectations”,84 and perhaps also, as noted above, a failure to think ‘cross-racial’ worker organisation (easier to just ‘integrate’ everyone carelessly into the capitalist machine, i.e. neoliberalism). The dialectical topsy-turvy phenomenon in essence is:

• Absolute separatism (of black/white) to absolute integration (black/white) without the capacity for a worker-oriented cross-organisation between black and white.

Cutrone states explicitly: “the “Left” since the 1960s has actually become a part of the new Right”.85 Moreover, it was an opportunity for white liberals themselves to avoid their own racism in identifying with ‘Black Power’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’, which of course is characterised by many embarrassing and ridiculous symptoms (forms of disavowed violence as it relates to ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’ complexes). Cutrone, following one of his mentors, black political scientist Adolph Reed, refers to this turn as “posing as politics”, characteristic of post-New Left politics as actually apolitical.86 In such political posing we get either pseudo-holidays like “Kwanza”, individualist industries of “self-help”, post-political “everyday acts of resistance”, and romantic idealisations of “segregated conditions of the Jim Crow era” (e.g. Jesse Lee Peterson black conservatism).87

To think ‘cross-racial’ worker organisation (beyond either ‘integrationist racial politics’ and ‘Black Power’) one would need to engage the difficult work of thinking how racism actually functions in capitalism (which no one on the Left wants to do, and if one did think it, you would just be ex-communicated as racist). For example, in thinking through the antinomy of ‘Old Left’ (territorial races within one nation) and ‘New Left’ (abstract integration in one nation), towards a model of a ‘nation of nations within one nation’, do the signifiers of a white, black, red nation make sense or are things now more complex? In other words, do we find ourselves dealing with an even more diverse mix of a nation of nations (even between legacy races and diasporic races)? Do we also find ourselves dealing with the distinction between ‘classical races’ and ‘post-modern races’? To effectively approach a real politics of the working class, such questions will have to be addressed without any semblance of ‘New Left’ anti-racism ideology. Cutrone notes:88

“Not simply “race” and “class”, but racism and capitalism and how they are related need to be addressed by any purportedly social emancipatory politics. The ways the “Left” has tried — or failed to try, and found excuse from trying — to address the problems of racism (as one would need to do in organising the working class) since the 1960s have been worse than inadequate, and have turned into ideological distractions and political dead ends, bogged down in a host of pseudo-problems.”

One of the reasons why there is so much energy behind explicitly right wing and conservative political movements is — not only because it is convenient for the capitalist class to fund them and seed division between and within nations against a real international — but because they just accept that race and racism functions socially and politically, whether our self-conscious moral sensitivities accept this ‘fact of (unconscious) reason’ or not. While right wing and conservative political movements will always run into the obstacle of the proletariat as a class in the mediation of their work, they also have race realism as a fundamental advantage for organising and mobilising in its immediacy. The key difference for a Left would be wanting to work with the social reality of race and racism, not necessarily towards its total overcoming, but under the ‘cross-racial’ mission of the transformation of capitalist society to socialist society, i.e. the nation of nations under one nation as committed to the task of socialism.

As Cutrone states: “we all [irrespective of race] share a social destiny in capitalism”,89 and “there’s no reason to […] treat it [i.e. racism] as more of an obstacle than it need be”.90 I would say something like: we cannot wait for the end of racism to work for the possibility of socialism (and any Left becoming fixated on it as a necessary requirement, is the problem, i.e. making it more of an obstacle than it need be). Cutrone states the problem like this:91

“the struggle against racism and for “black empowerment” came, since the late ‘60s, to take the place of the struggle for working class empowerment and against capitalism.”

I would state something like: “the struggle against capitalism for “socialist empowerment” should be contextualised inclusive of the dynamic between [particular racial group] empowerment”. In other words: the ‘New Left’ throws everyone into the same ‘capitalist melting pot’ and reacts to any semblance of racism with anti-racist ideology, and instead, we should be thinking about a constellation of racial nations within a nation and the possibility of positive-sum outcomes each of these nations in their shared dynamic in the transition from capitalism to socialism. In the approach of the ‘New Left’, which ends up trapped in a misrecognition of black identity politics, Cutrone states:92

“Black politics […] does not require reform but abolition [on the basis that it] has done nothing to empower black working-class people, but only to chain them, in a more or less roundabout way, to the Democratic Party and its capitalist politics.”

For any Left that sees black politics as primary will undoubtedly and paradoxically reduce black political consciousness to ‘one-dimension’: its “true nature and character — and range of varieties — of black conservatism (including among working class people)”.93 This is precisely why black political characters like Jesse Lee Peterson can parade out black or white woke left-leaning liberals and shock them by simply stating plainly typical conservative opinions, and make it into a successful comedic performance with political consequences (‘do you celebrate White History Month?’ ‘Doesn’t July just feel White?’). In this context, Jesse Lee Peterson is not being racist, it is rather that, following Cutrone:94

“the “Left” is more racist than the general population [labouring under the delusion that a black man cannot be conservative] — without this meaning that the greater populace is more “progressive”.”

The general point: any future Left that is fixated on ‘anti-racism’ as its central presupposition will never make any ‘progress’. Leftist activism cannot make humanity ‘non-racist’ via ‘anti-racism’. It is simply a non-starter to any socialist politics. Or to simply echo Cutrone’s mentor Adolph Reed:95

“anti-racism as politics has clearly failed.”

Moreover, it is narcissism. The Left needs a more reflective death drive.

PART 2: Middle Class Confusion

“I should like to say something that I have found in many other writers: intellectual alienation is a creation of middle-class society. What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt.” - Frantz Fanon96

From the 1960s ‘New Left’ through the ‘post-political Left’ and towards the ‘death of the Millennial Left’, we have created a society in which Western countries embrace the representation of racial and gender diversity at the core of their middle class institutions. For a moment let us ignore the repressed contradiction in this identitarian motion — how it ends up systematically oppressing ‘The White Man’ as opposed to producing socialism97 — and in so doing creates the very ‘woke right’ which distracts and obscures the problem of capitalism by bringing us back to the immediacy of the antinomy of anti-black racism. Let us instead focus on the way the ‘New Left’ has just been a (stupid) ‘progressive instrument’ for neoliberal capitalism by way of making the middle class more diverse as if ‘The White Man’ being overrepresented in middle class institutions is the cause of capitalism. Consider Cutrone’s reflection on a talk he attended by American political activist Angela Davis in 2008:98

“Davis […] notes, with wry irony, that the current Republican presidency of George W. Bush is by far the most “diverse” administration in U.S. history.”

The basic formula of this motion — where Western countries in general embrace the representation of racial and gender diversity at the core of their (middle class) institutions — is the transformation of “collective demands” into “individual benefits”.99 The dominance of neoliberalism is basically the erosion of ‘society’ (families, communities, ethical states) for a smooth frictionless relation of ‘nomadic dividuals’ and ‘global capitalism’. Here we get the Left as a superstructure for ‘Progressive Neoliberal Capitalism’ in which the ideological demands of the 1960s New Left — “collective struggles against racial and ethnic discrimination and restrictive gender roles” — give the appearance of having been realised but “without [actual] greater social justice or equality or collective empowerment”.100

For Cutrone this can all be accounted for on the basis of the abandonment of the problems experienced by the ‘Old Left’ in ‘cross-racial’ struggles into the ‘New Left’ ultimately leading ‘emancipatory motion’ towards the abandonment of politics itself. So how should we think the idea of a ‘nation of nations’ in this dynamic? Why is thinking a nation inclusive of non-territorial nations important? The answer must be situated in the antinomy between:

1. The breakdown of families, communities, ethical states and

2. Abstract integration of nomadic dividuals and global capitalism

To counter the motion of an abstract integration of nomadic dividuals in global capitalism via the representation of diversity in middle class institutions, the idea of a nation of nations should be emphasised inclusive of the Hegelian model of family-community-state as the grounds for the expansion of the ethical world. In principle, if the working class is to build power for itself, it has to do so inclusive of the power of family and community, which involves the mediation of racial difference (now inclusive of classical and post-modern racial groups), towards the shared commitment of an ethical state. If this task is abandoned, then worker organising inclusive of, let’s say, the semblance of ‘cross-racial respect’ (between white and black workers), is replaced with the dominance of “middle class demands against institutional discrimination” as empowerment.101 In this movement we get “diverse” Democrats and (even) Republicans (as Angela Davis notes), but degraded general social conditions.102 Cutrone summarises the motion in three points:103

1. Middle class anti-discrimination initiatives

   1. (in which more blacks are visible in institutional structures but blacks in general suffer)

2. Post-1960s economic downturn

   1. (in which real incomes have declined by as much as 40%) plus labour union decimation, and finally)

3. Culturalist politics

   1. (in which black culture is openly embraced by mainstream Americans but real sociopolitical concerns are ignored)

If there is a way to summarise this motion in an extended sentence, perhaps it is this, from Cutrone:104

“In the context of the global economic downturn since 1973, in which the average per capital purchasing power of American workers to meet their needs has decreased by as much as 30 percent while incomes have been massively distributed upwards to a small elite, the possibilities for the simultaneous if paradoxical outcome of overcoming legal and institutional racism while conditions for most […] have worsened, could be understood better in terms of changes in capitalism that have involved satisfying, even if in limited ways, historical demands for change in American society such as an end to “racial” (and gender) discrimination.”

This is not just a black issue, but technically an issue that could lead to conditions for real cross-racial organising as Cutrone notes that this era is also marked by a growing white underclass that is:105

“decimated (starved, sickened, bastardised, drug-addicted, criminalised — lumpenized)”

The first two points are connected: middle class anti-discrimination and general economic downturn, where more blacks have institutional access and representation, but the working class as a whole has less purchasing power, and less capacity to meet their basic needs.106 This gives the superficial appearance of social advance, while obscuring that the general degradation of society is the dominant feature of our society. Cutrone suggests that the real dynamic to pay attention to is the way a growing “black underclass” is increasingly effectively “handled” by a “growing black middle class”,107 in positions of political leadership that we could call “black middle class managers of American poverty”.108

In terms of how this is coloured over with culturalist politics, Cutrone points to perhaps the image that best captures this era is a ‘black’ president accepted on the level of culture, “listening to Jay-Z” and “shooting hoops at the White House”, but serving the same politics that keeps “life-chances in American society” in exactly the same place.109

Cutrone explains this whole “debilitating” and “depoliticising” motion of “racial” consciousness as a matter of priorities: a Left that is aiming (fixated) to “overcome racism” (via liberal integrationism) as opposed to aiming to “overcome capitalism” (via cross-racial social organising).110 This ultimately ends up in a “hollowed-out” politics and a “narcissistic trap”,111 where someone can hold the contradiction of (for example) the “opposed politics” of “MLK Jr. and Malcolm X”112 — a liberal integrationist and a ‘Black Power’ nationalist — but without any real sociopolitical advance. The whole reason why Cutrone’s work is so important today is because what this hollowed out narcissism has buried is the properly ‘Marxist consciousness’ which critically identifies that:113

“American politics is really a one-party affair, the “party of property”, with “two Right wings”.”

Thus, in the structure of the “two Right wings” the “Democratic Party” is just the “party of property” that “tends to include the interests of bourgeois elements from non-WASP groups, along with perhaps some of the more enlightened WASPs” (especially after the “Civil Rights movement”).114 As a result we have the unbearable situation in which we live under a liberal ideology that appears “less “racist” than it has ever been”, on the one hand, but ultimately confronts us with a real in which “real suffering” is “politically insoluble”.115

Perhaps more time needs to be spent focusing on the contemporary Left that aims to (fixates on) the attempt to “overcome racism” as first principle and priority, and how this leads to a middle class conceptual confusion that further alienates actual working class people. To start, let us revisit in more explicit detail Cutrone’s reflections on the aforementioned talk by Angela Davis he attended in 2008. Cutrone’s critique of Davis’ talk reflects the generic structure that we have already reflected — the different phases of Old and New Left and the turn to the post-political — but the starting point for our purposes is:116

“Davis used the category of “race” unproblematically to reference an irreducible reality of “difference” that she took everyone to already recognise.”

One of the biggest confusions here is that ‘black’ has historically been ‘class coded’ for poverty — literally masking fundamental structural problems that prevent upward mobility for blacks — but the way black functions today is different in the context of the growing black middle class.117 Thus we cannot just assume that the way someone uses the term ‘black’, issuing from the concerns of the 1960s, is the same today as it was then, and in fact, if we do assume that, we obscure the present in a way that actually naturalises blackness and lower class status (the unconscious racism of the woke left). The problem is that much of the activist Left is wrongly motivated by the same energy of the 1960s, as if their acts are out of joint with the real of our moment because they cannot conceptualise the situation properly, blinded by their own ideological structure of thought. The ultimate paradox here, for Cutrone, is that:118

“one is left with the unsatisfying choice between proclaiming the historical end of racism and trying to address present social-political problems with antiquated and inadequate categories like “race”.”

I agree with this sentiment in this context, but I have already pointed out, with direct reference to Cutrone’s own ideas about the conditions of possibility for an authentic American Marxism, that it is not that ‘race itself’ is an “antiquated” and “inadequate” concept (socially), but rather, we need to rethink how we think about how race has come to function in the 2020s (because, again, we are certainly not in a ‘post-racial rational state’ but rather in a more complex situation of, let’s say, ‘post-modern race realism’). I maintain that ‘black’ and ‘white’ as racial concepts have dramatically complexified: for example, and as argued above, they cannot be reduced anymore to the system of ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’, they cannot be one-dimensionally charged as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ (even if they functioned this way in the mediation of the immediacy of their function in U.S. history). Today, the situation is far more complex, because both signifiers still function with a high level of social power, and perhaps especially among working class people. Cutrone intimates at this possibility here:119

“Perhaps racism has changed. For the historical racism that plagued the U.S., from the failure of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through Jim Crow until the overcoming of legal racial segregation with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s-60s, is over.”

At the same time, as it relates to the ‘middle class conceptual confusion’ on the Left today, it is almost as if, as Cutrone suggests throughout this section, they really are racist, in the sense, not only do they still conflate ‘black’ with ‘(lower) class’, but they still think that fighting ‘anti-black racism’ is the key to fighting social-political problems. I think that, today especially, that is simply not true. Cutrone clarifies:120

“Black people are not poor because they are black — anymore than white people are poor because they are white. Poverty and resulting social disempowerment of black people have been rationalised on the basis of anti-black racist assumptions, and poverty among black people has been successfully isolated — “ghettoised” — and so defused as a social-political issue.”

The point is that, since the 1960s, a gap has opened between ‘middle class assumptions about how race functions and how it effects class relations’, and ‘the actual situation for working and middle class peoples of all races’. To state the theme of this section in another way: because overcoming racism was centred external to any real attempt to overcome capitalism, we just kept more or less the same degrading system of capitalism with new colours and genders. The general result for what calls itself the Left is the fall into ‘spurious infinity’, that is an endless false identification with new identities, where each new identity is perceived as the possibility of an emancipatory break, but which in reality, just further serves the abstract accumulation of capital. The Left need only enact a perspective shift on itself in order to see true infinity. Moreover, if this gap is not closed, any socialist movement will die (or more accurately, be killed), before it is born. If Fanon was right when he said: “face to face with the Negro, the contemporary white man feels the need to recall the times of cannibalism”;121 perhaps the ‘New Left’ and its legacy becomes cannibalistic (incestuous and lustful for killing) for precisely the fact that it cannot confront its own disavowed perversity in the dimension of its obsession with anti-black racism. Cutrone frames it in this way:122

“It’s incumbent upon us on the “Left” to try to root out and eliminate such “sickness and madness” (e.g. “racial” consciousness) as completely as possible, for it is nothing other than an obstacle to social emancipation or even the possibility of reform.”

Cutrone’s framing is again following the ‘Fanonian’ thesis that ““race” consciousness” is just an expression of “wounded narcissism”, a “traumatic fixation”.123 He juxtaposes this psychoexistential stance to the possibility of establishing a “healthy reality principle”.124

To further ‘flesh out’ my distinction here: I think this may be inadequate, for Cutrone’s own purposes, if we stay within a (Fanonian-Freudian) ‘race model’ of “narcissism” and “healthy reality principle”, and ignore the way race/racism persists (re: Cutrone’s own observation: “Perhaps racism has changed”), not only as a wounded narcissism, but also as death drive. The practical consequence: we not only need to get rid of the “sickness and madness” of the way the contemporary Left conceptualises race, but we need to get rid of our need to get rid of “racial consciousness” (negation of negation), and rather learn how it is shaping a certain mediation of species-being. On the same line of logic: we need to get rid of our need to get rid of [insert-moralising Leftist-spectre of sexism/fascism/religion etc.]. The Left needs to re-read Hegel if only so it learns to move from a ‘reactive negation’ to the ‘negation of negation’.

Finally, and as a consequence, Marxists need to rethink things on the terms of — not overcoming race (or religion/sexism/fascism, etc.) — but rather something like (to reiterate the line of questioning): “what is the shape/form of communist religion?”, “what is the shape/form of communist racism?” To frame things in terms of ‘overcoming’ is itself bourgeois (Middle Class) illusion, a conceptual confusion. Here we should make the distinction between ‘Nietzschean overcoming’ as Right wing, and Žižekian death drive as the grounds for a properly reflective Left.

4. Neoliberalism and Barack Obama

“On the issue of “race” in America, Obama has been neither a traditional “black” politician nor has his victory been “post-racial”. Rather, Obama has expressed a transformation in the way “race” and racism function, a definite end to the period of post-Jim Crow, post-Civil Rights and post-Black Power forms of social consciousness and politics”. - Chris Cutrone125

Here I am simply doubling down on the idea that the correct framing of our situation is not one of ‘post-racial’ or ‘post-racist’, it is not one in which we ‘overcome’ either race or racism, but rather need to do the difficult philosophical work: in thinking its transformation and persistence.

So far, we have moved through the history of anti-black racism in the U.S. context, showing its real, its inadequacy as late 20th century politics, and the manifest problems it has resulted to in the present as it relates to any struggle for socialism. Now all that remains to be said before discussing the ‘thing-in-itself’ — Marxism, Race, and the Future of Humanity — is to state the obvious: the event of the election and the re-election of Barack Obama. For Cutrone, the election and re-election of Obama is a misrecognised non-event, ultimately culminating in the ‘death of the Millennial Left’. From Cutrone in the context of the election itself:126

“The Obama election will be an event — in that it will not be one. Nothing will change.”

What the election of Barack Obama signifies — in the context of the forgetting of the problems of the Old Left, the confused demands of the New Left, and the resulting turn to the post-political — is the proof that ‘The (Half) Black Man’ can take the highest political office in the world, and it will not change anything on the terms of how capitalism basically functions. I would suggest that capitalism is the monster that can operate just as well with Black Skin, White Masks, as it could with White Skin, Black Masks, or any other colour combination (hence the title of this article). From Cutrone on the thought of political scientist Adolph Reed:127

“the Obama phenomenon is no social movement, but only a marketing ploy of otherwise typically “centrist” (i.e., not even “reformist”) Democratic Party politics.”

The reason why this may have been a shocking result for many in the Millennial Left, is simply a result of their own unconscious racism or ‘racist imagination’, which operates in the illusion that “denies that black Americans can run the entire spectrum of policy positions and therefore social politics”.128 There was (is) a sense among the woke left that ‘black’ is inherently code for ‘socialist politics’ because they still operate with the (racist) illusion that, perhaps, either blacks are the revolutionary subject, or that ‘black’ is still code for ‘(lower) class’ and thus will logically result in a socialist orientation. From Cutrone:129

“the racist illusion that seems to die the hardest is the notion that black people are especially insightful let alone “progressive” in their outlook on American society. It is an old canard on the “Left” — somewhere between wishful thinking and demagogic propaganda — that the most oppressed are somehow the most critically conscious of social realities.”

Will this racist illusion finally die, or maybe we are not yet ready to think how death drive functions in politics?

While Cutrone’s reason for the future of the “Left” is sound:130

“If [the] inherently conservative character of Obama’s victory is faced, what will it mean for conceiving a “Leftist” politics that can and must reckon with the changed conditions of social politics Obama’s success has revealed.”

What this reason itself avoids is that the Left only tries to avoid this, in obsessing on overcoming racism, it will not think the transformation of it, even if it needs to. But I don’t need to tell Cutrone this, he already knows the consequences of it:131

“As in 2016, the silent majority will speak again; again, it is only a question of how loudly they will do so. Perhaps more loudly than the vocal minority. Prepare to be gobsmacked — again. Even if it’s Biden/Harris in 2020, it could be Trump again in 2024 — do not expect him (of all people) to go gentle into that good night!”

Cutrone’s reference here to the ‘silent majority’ should not just be a reference to lower class white people, but basically the working class as a ‘nation of nations’ in total, against the abstract integrationist demand of ‘Progressive Neoliberal Capitalism’.

5. Marxism, Race, and the Future of Humanity

Cutrone thinks that Marxism and its politics benefits from having not emerged in the “hyper-racialised social context like the U.S.”,132 but could it be the opposite?133 Consider Cutrone’s own reflection from our pre-course discussion on Harold Cruse’s critique of American Marxism as too much influenced by European Marxism:134

“Cruse thought American culture, insofar as it was unique, it was never fully realised, and it had contributions from white, black, and red people. But then also borrowed in an unfortunate way from European culture and continued to do so in the 1800s, and into the 20th century. He thought intellectuals in particular borrowed too heavily from European culture, and had abandoned the authentic American culture, like the American folk culture basically had been abandoned by the intellectuals in favour of European culture, and Marxism was a part of that.

So the unfortunate thing is that Marxism was adopted by intellectuals as a European import as opposed to a way of addressing American society, right?”

Here can we not say that if Marxism and its politics did not emerge in the ‘hyper-racialised social context like the U.S.’ it is its primary disadvantage. Is not the existence of 20th century fascism already proof of this? Is not the inexistence of an authentic American Marxism already proof of this? Should we not learn how to think about Marxism and race differently? In a way does this not mean that the only way to remain faithful to Marx, is to betray him? If Marx was right about capitalism, wouldn’t the fight for socialism, and its spread from its European origin to a truly international dimension, require fundamental modifications in contexts that have little or nothing to do with Marx’s writings from the 1840s? Here we should challenge ourselves to both the dimension of Marx that is in a sense ‘eternal’ on the terms of ‘living in capitalism’, but also ‘historical’ on the terms of contextualising Marx’s own social and historical positionality (at the end of the First Industrial Revolution, and at the birth of the European modern liberal states incapacity to deal with capitalism).

In this context, it is true that Marxism suffers because of the contemporary Left’s fixation on ‘overcoming racism’, but it is also true that Marxism itself still suffers in its (bourgeois) illusion that, in communism, there will be no racism; as opposed to, for example, thinking of the working class from the standpoint of a multiplicity of ‘racial nations’ (white, black, red). As I keep repeating: what Marxists and non-Marxist Leftists alike will not think is the transformation of racism and its social function. I will go further: even if we assume that in communism racism will be overcome, we will never get there without moving through it, working with it directly (and not with the abstract ideology of ‘anti-racism’ as negation). How many times will fascist politics have to emerge for Marxists to get this message? In Žižek’s latest work, Liberal Fascisms, he emphasises that, in the inability of modern liberal state to effectively act, we are dealing again with the temptation of a more generalised fascism qua conservative modernisation in capitalism as a more effective way to act.135 Could it be that the rise of such motion is itself a symptom of the antinomy I outlined above between the ‘Old Left’ and the ‘New Left’? Could it be that ‘moderately conservative communism’ requires a ‘moment of generalised fascism’ in order to realise itself? If the history of the 20th century is any lesson: how many Marxists will defect to fascism before Marxism itself gets the message? To reiterate the point: could it be that because Marxism and its politics did not emerge in the “hyper-racialised social context like the U.S.” that it becomes a political dead-end?

Cutrone says: “Historically, socialism has been the most consistently anti-racist form of politics”.136

But Cutrone also says (quoting Adolph Reed): “As a political strategy exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time”, a distraction from addressing the necessary socioeconomic and political problems facing black Americans.”137

Maybe there is a good Marxist question in how to be anti-racist, but if it has anything to do with this obsession and fixation on ‘exposing’ it and forcing a constant recognition of it, it is just a total dead end. It kills socialism, it aborts socialism. Wouldn’t the most effective way for Marxism to be anti-racist is to see the way in which racism cuts across the social body in a multiplicity of ways (white to black, black to white) under a common negativity: capitalism? Moreover, maybe Marxists should be just agnostic on a certain level about how race (and sex and religion) will function beyond capitalism? Are race (and sex and religion) just effects of capital? Maybe they are, and maybe they are not. How could any Marxist know that without being a dogmatic bourgeois ideologue? I reiterate: is it not more parsimonious to assume, that if in communism, there are human social relations, that those social relations will generate in themselves things that we would call ‘communist racism’ or ‘racism in communism’; and ‘communist religion’ or ‘religion in communism’; and ‘communist sexism’ and ‘sexism in communism’?

I admit I am assuming that there will be human social relations in communism. But perhaps it is more likely that we will forever inhabit capitalism, and so, in that case, the entire problematic is rendered irrelevant?

Cutrone says that: ““Race” is a “pseudo-biological category” that “deserves to be placed in quotation marks because it is not “real”; it is not to be naturalised and taken for granted as a point of departure, but rather needs to be attacked as the very thing to be overcome.”138 But this again falls for the (Nietzschean) ‘overcoming’ logic that is in principle again the main problem that results in ‘right-wing’ turns. Even more than that, it avoids something crucial (and I say this as someone trained in evolutionary anthropology): even if “Race” is a “pseudo-biological category” (which it is) it still functions as a social category. Here is the key: race has never been a biological category, but always a social category. Evolutionary anthropologists today do not speak of ‘race’ in terms of ‘genetics’; in terms of ‘genetics’ they speak of ‘population clusters’ (which are far more complex than our social racial classifications).139 Race is social.140 If no scientist accepted the category of race as legitimate, and even if philosophers, following Žižek, do not see in race a ‘category of truth’, the working class people (or ‘the rabble’) and their spontaneous speech acts, do recognise it. I claim that even if we overcome capitalism and we live in socialism or communism, the spontaneous speech acts of people would still recognise it; and the ways and the forms of its recognition, I do not pretend to know, but I would take a bet that they would be complex forms of recognition.

Cutrone says that: “An anti-racist politics, a politics opposed to any forms of racism, cannot just assume “race” from the start without becoming confused and confounded.”141 We don’t need an “anti-racist politics” and all of the ‘middle class’ ‘conceptual confusion’ that it brings with it about how it thinks “race”, but that does not mean that the spontaneous speech acts and ways of thinking of ‘the people’ — as confused and confounded as it is and will remain — will not derive race again and again, as social categories, in new ways and forms, and that some of those ways and forms will be racist and anti-racist, with social and political consequences. My presupposition here is simple: race will persist and transform as long as human social relations persist and transform, irrespective of whether we live in capitalism or technofeudalism or socialism or communism or barbarism. This is the true meaning of thinking human social relations on the level of a global social order that itself will persist into the ‘immortal future’.

The real question for white middle class left-leaning liberals: why is your psyche tormented by the possibility of that reality? What will you not face in your own unconscious psyche that makes this reality so unbearable?

Cutrone says that: “Because we all share a social destiny in capitalism, one which we must work through and overcome in order to undermine the social conditions of possibility for racism (which are modern in nature).” This logic is the reverse logic of the New Left and its post-political results which hyper-fixate on overcoming racism as opposed to overcoming capitalism. For Cutrone, we hyper-fixate on overcoming capitalism and that, because racism is just a function of capitalist modernity, then when we overcome it, racism too will fall away. I think that this presupposition needs to be held with a greater level of (self)questioning. Even if we accept that racism is a function of ‘capitalist modernity’ — which is questionable (as I will try to show below) — what if ‘capitalist modernity’ is merely the introduction to the problem, and not reducible to a moment in-between a pre-non-racist human society and a post-non-racist human society? What is more likely?:

1. that humans were never racist before capitalist modernity and that humans will cease to be racist after capitalist modernity, or

2. that humans spontaneously create social categories based on observable differences internal to their own species, and through indestructible moments of their development and the structure of their libidinalised psyche — egotism, narcissism and death drive — they have social and political consequences?

Cutrone is closer to the mark, in my opinion, when he focuses on the aforementioned paradox of higher levels of working class organisation in the context of the racist divisions that structured American society.142 Here Žižek is potentially insightful on the level of, not labouring under the delusion of an end to racism, but rather thinking about how the working class internal to itself, learns to joke with itself about the irreducibility and indestructibility of race. In other words, we will be free of the ‘sickness and madness’ of ‘racial consciousness’, only when we can joke about it, not when it is ‘overcome’.

“The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.” - W.E.B. Dubois143

While, as Christ suggested, we cannot be his disciple (and rise from the dead) if we continue to labour under the delusions of an ‘eternal mother’ (or even ‘eternal father’ qua the insights of Death of God theology), it is remarkable the way American sociologist Dubois, in the quote cited above, reflects the trinitarian structure in the nightmare of the Atlantic slave trade (re: “They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead”). This arising from the dead could also be linked to the aforementioned reflections informed by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in regards to the structure of the emergence of self-consciousness in the battle between ‘Lord’ and ‘Bondsman’. ‘The Black Man’ has indeed more to gain, not in deifying his roots in “the dark beauty of their mother continent” but in the ‘future poetry’ of the ‘X’ of identity itself, something that has arguably already happened and has been happening in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. ‘The Black Man’ does not need to read this article to discover it.

What is also remarkable about the way Dubois, in the quote cited above, positions the Atlantic slave trade in relation to the Reformation and the French Revolution. It is reminiscent of the way Žižek insists on including the Haitian revolution within the European legacy of the French Revolution; or following Cutrone, how we might think of the Atlantic Revolution (American and French Revolutions together). Indeed, conceptualising ‘The Atlantic’ (Europe, Africa and the Americas), and what action in this constellation over the past 400+ years has done to the human species as a whole, is worth a lifetime’s worth of philosophical thought. For indeed, just as ‘The Black Man’ cannot find freedom in his roots, neither can ‘The White Man’. We are all now uprooted towards the ‘future poetry’ of the ‘X’ of identity. And maybe that uprooting is a moment of ‘capitalist modernity’, and maybe ‘capitalist modernity’ is the beginning of a process that will become even more radical than we can imagine today.

Cutrone notes on the global structure of this uprooting into the future X:144

“Only since Columbus has slavery been abolished, genocide made a crime, and sexual freedom and gender equality been achieved. The epochal bourgeois revolution, of which Columbus’s Journey of Discovery was part, is the first — and only — successful slave revolt in history. 1992 marked not 500 years of oppression but five centuries of liberation, for the entire world. It put an end to ancestral guilt and began history anew. This change continues to this day. Its task is not over yet.”

And also how this fact is now misrecognised:

“the observation of 500 years of the Columbian Discovery of the New World in 1492 — [was protested by the] “Left” […] as the beginning of “500 years of racism, sexism and homophobia,” neglecting that all human communities, in all places, ever, for thousands — tens of thousands — of years, have been racially chauvinistic and genocidal, enslaved those they conquered and did not simply kill, were patriarchal, and asserted murderous sexual morality over all their members; and that the transformation of the world and of humanity in our modern bourgeois emancipation, of which the Renaissance Italian Columbus’s voyage was part, was the very first time that the potential for overcoming myriad generations of racism, sexism and homophobia had ever emerged in history.”

First, which is it? (and at the expense of beating a dead horse): is racism a unique feature of ‘capitalist modernity’, or have “in all places, ever, for thousands — tens of thousands — of years, have been racially chauvinistic and genocidal”? How can it possibly be both? Isn’t it that there is a ‘capitalist form of racism’ but that ‘racism’ has taken different forms in the past, and will take many different forms in the future?

Hopefully my point is clear here.

But more importantly: the way the post-political Left misrecognises the past is beyond infuriating. The structure of it is so infantile it is boggles the mind, and it is even more horrible to imagine what it must be like to inhabit the nature of this mind, the mind that labours under the delusion that pre-Columbus civilisation was somehow an idyllic harmony broken by ‘The White Man’, and that the whole Western project over the last 500 years is nothing but social degradation. Perhaps it is really just proof that humans don’t want to be free, cannot bear the pain of their freedom, even to the point of absolute misrecognition of it. From Cutrone:145

“We are told by those such as the Mayor of Minneapolis and the Governor of Minnesota — the Speaker of the House of Representatives and various Senators and other Governors and Mayors — Democrats, all — that today in the U.S. we are living in 400 years of slavery and its effects, of “white supremacy” — really!”

In a moment of brilliance, he adds:146

“One wonders whether they are truly ashamed or rather proud to say so; anyway, various Hollywood actors, music and sports celebrities tweet their applause. It must be very kick-ass to be white nowadays.”

This same structure appeared in the recent panel titled “The Crisis of the American Revolution” hosted by the Platypus Affiliated Society (noted previously in a footnote).147 In the repetition of this structure, most directly visible in a moment of the Q and A, we see the unique form of unreflective death drive that upholds the contradiction of belief between, on the one hand, “in the U.S. we are living in 400 years of slavery and its effects, of “white supremacy””, and on the other hand, “one wonders whether they are truly ashamed or rather proud to say so”.

It is hard to overstate how deluded this form of ‘racial consciousness’ really is, or what ‘sickness and madness’ it is hiding from itself? Is it only a result of ‘wounded narcissism’? Or is it worse, actually: part of the unrecognised function of death drive in politics? Will it kill/abort socialism before it can be born (or even conceived)?

Here we come to one of the themes that has been running throughout this article: that of the distinction between Cutrone’s reliance on Fanon’s political form of Freudian psychoanalysis, and the nature of the Lacanian-Žižekian death drive. Here from Cutrone on Fanon’s political form of Freudian psychoanalysis:148

“Fanon declared that slavery was long overcome, and said that there is no black mission and no white burden — that he had no desire to crystallise guilt in hearts, and wanted to move into a future in which children would not scrutinise their colour. Fanon said that excessive consciousness of the body is destructive of our humanity, psychologically and spiritually: it is not only mortifying but morbid, succumbing to morbidity. Fanon called on us to reject the destructive impulse of Thanatos, the Death Drive, and instead to embrace Eros, “to build the world of the You”; and prayed, “O my body, make of me always a man who questions!” He was right 70 years ago — and is still.”

The problem here is that it is too much under a model of a moralistic desire, a kind of wishful thinking, of how we would wish the world to be. I of course do not object on the basis that it would be attuned to my ‘liberal bourgeois sensibilities’ to live in such a world. The problem is that we do not live in such a world, and the degree to which we do not, is perhaps so fundamentally discordant with our current political thinking, that we cannot give birth to socialism, but rather keep aborting any such effort.

I would suggest the following: insofar as our ‘liberal bourgeois sensibilities’ as ‘intellectuals’ recoils at the idea of ‘racism’ (or ‘sexism’ or ‘religiosity’), and our desire for a ‘post-racial/sexist/religious racial state’, we should be increasingly skeptical of our own ‘liberal bourgeois sensibilities’. This self-skepticism should not reach the level of their complete abandonment, but reach the level of our own capacity to critique ourselves by our own universal standards towards the idea that these dimensions of social reality might be beyond simple critique or deconstruction. They are questions best left for the immortal species-being.

Conclusion: Further Reflections on Death Drive as Burden of Immortality

The crucial conceptual renovation of ‘Death Drive’ that occurs in Lacan and Žižek, noted towards the end of the previous entry in this series,149 is the shift from ‘Death Drive’ as ‘desire for death’ (qua Fanon’s call to “reject the destructive impulse of Thanatos”), towards the ‘burden of immortality’ (which cannot be reduced to Fanon’s call to “embrace Eros, “to build the world of the You””). What we are dealing with in death drive is something like a redoubled Eros, an Eros that is not afraid of Death but rather works with it as the condition of possibility for its capacity to see Immortality itself.

Christ here is not a bad model, whether we are in capitalism or communism, I don’t think it makes a difference.

Fanon is working within a Freudian model that Lacan would critique as ‘Ego Psychology’, and this model remains within the dualism critical of ‘narcissism’ (Eros) and upholding the idea of a ‘healthy reality principle’ (Thanatos), which is itself a liberal bourgeois notion, emerging from liberal bourgeois institutional forms. As suggested at the beginning of this article, the fact that Fanon is praying to his body to make him question is again a symptom of this lack of a ‘redoubled Eros’, and his desire to overcome to racial identity through touching and feeling and explaining oneself to the other, is yet another sign of this lack of a ‘redoubled Eros’. It could just be a symptom of the prohibition of the (very peculiar idea) of the ‘one drop rule’.

Here we should remember that Lacan’s faithful commitment to Freud, and his critique of Ego Psychology, is to move beyond the simple dualism of ‘Eros vs. Thanatos’ towards the idea that Eros is itself a split-One, in need of redoubling in order to reflect on its own immortality (via the myth of Lamella).150 Without this redoubling we remain fixated on our body (our soma) because we are the ‘mortal part’ of a process that is, in principle, immortal.

Part of the fundamental process of Eros becoming redoubled (a process indestructible for the politics of the rabble) is ‘racial consciousness’ — first as ego, second as narcissism, third as death drive — potentially with the capacity for a recognition of the immortality of our species-being. Only then could ‘racial consciousness’ be worked with in a way that could be true to the task that Cutrone situates as stemming from Columbus, which I both agree with, and find desirable.

Cutrone ends his section “The “Black Question” in the United States” with a hope:

“Children, I hope that you hope for more than death — for more than mere life!”

And in this Cutrone also points towards the importance of breaking the binary of ‘Eros and Thanatos’ towards something like a ‘redoubled Eros’ — here with Eros as “mere life” and redoubled Eros as “more than mere life!” (immortality).

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

This year at Philosophy Portal we are unfolding a new course, Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, led by “The Last Marxist”, Chris Cutrone. Throughout the course we will be thinking American Revolution, Trump, Lenin, Critical Theory, The Party, and much more. To find out more or to get involved, visit the link below:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

What can be found below is an edited reflection offered by Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone informed by a question that will shape the upcoming class at Philosophy Portal Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials.

How do we interpret what you are calling “the black question”?

Okay, so that was, of course, another experience of the Millennial generation: Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter is a phenomenon of the second Obama administration, where actually two movements emerged at the same time. One I wrote about, one I did not: MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

The more culturally progressive Democrats seemed to have been disappointed by Obama.

Now, I should also say “the black question” is unique in terms of American history, but also in terms of this moment, the Great Recession moment, where the black middle class was particularly hard hit. So you had a lot of black middle class asset loss in the Great Recession. That’s where this language of equity comes from, it comes from the idea that blacks and whites are unequal at the level of assets, at the level of economic assets, tangible, fungible, monetary, valuable assets, but also like cultural capital. I mean, it becomes huge.

This becomes a much more proximate phenomenon of discontent around police violence, but police violence that doesn’t spare middle class victims, sometimes among the black population, and the general devastation of the black middle class in the Great Recession.

So generally, the Great Recession hit the middle class very hard across the board, but it hit the black middle class particularly hard.

And this occurring under Obama made that experience very poignant, meaning the idea of a more radical response to the history and legacy of racism. The idea is that the first black president, Obama, shows that the U.S. is not as racist as it used to be, but despite that, it’s still racist.

In what way? Structurally racist, and also the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow and redlining, like these different phases of historical racism that are still impacting people, even if white people are not as racist in their attitudes, it doesn’t matter, because black people are still dealing with the legacy of the history of racism.

So that’s complicated.

Now Marxism, of course, did have an approach to this, and I use very deliberately the old-fashioned language, “the black question”. That’s how Marxists referred to it historically.

You know, “the woman question”, “the black question”, later in the 70s, “the gay question”. Everything is a question, right?

There is also what’s known as “the American question”, meaning how is the United States different from the European countries? Now, in this context, are black people a national minority in the way European countries have national minorities?

No, no, I would say no.

But people have cracked their heads against this. So the Black Panthers, for example, said, ‘okay, blacks are a national minority in the United States, but not like a European national minority’, which is usually territorial. They analogised it to Jews as a national minority, non-territorial nationality.

They look to the Bund, the Jewish Marxist socialists in the Russian Empire, and they look to Austro-Marxism, where you had mixed populations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and so you had national minorities, but not necessarily strictly associated with territoriality.

So you had mixed populations and how do you deal with the national rights of minorities where it isn’t simply a straightforward matter of territorial separation. There have been different ways of dealing with this: in the 30s, the Communist Party had a kind of ill-begotten approach to this, the Black Belt thesis, which is ironic because it happens in the era of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South. But then they say, the ancestral home of black Americans is still the South, so blacks are a nation and they’re centred in the South, the Black Belt, even as they are leaving.

Now the legacy of slavery is peculiar, meaning many countries, especially in the Western Hemisphere, have a legacy of slavery. But it seems like the legacy of slavery is pointed in the United States in a way that’s quite different from the Caribbean or Brazil, you know, other countries that tend to have shades of colour.

Whereas in the United States, you have the one-drop rule, meaning that if you have any black heritage, then you’re black. Very peculiar idea. Obviously a lot of white Americans have black heritage, and are unaware of it, and are thus not subject to the one-drop rule, but have passed for white.

All right, so now I’m influenced by the history of Marxism on this question.

I’m also influenced by other thinkers. For instance, Franz Fanon — Black Skin, White Masks — who’s writing from a different experience. He’s writing from a majority black country Martinique, but also as a French black person, really, as the way he put it, where he didn’t ever advocate or support Martinique independence. He thought, no, Martinique is part of France, we are French. We’re French, but we happen to be black.

But in fact, his view of racism is that racism is not the same thing as colonialism, that the U.S. was an exemplar of this difference. So he took inspiration from the black struggle in the United States, the black struggle for equality, the black struggle against racism, which is different, he thought, from decolonisation, from like, national liberation struggles, which he participated in Algeria.

So I take some inspiration from that.

I also take some inspiration from a peculiar character, Adolph Reed, who was a black political scientist and mentor of mine. He referred me to Harold Cruse, who wrote in 1967 The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, and who considered himself to be a non-nationalist separatist. We could say he had a kind of black nationalist critique of black nationalism, as it had emerged in the 60s.

Cruse had this phrase where he said the United States was a nation of nations, meaning the United States has no authentic American Marxism because American Marxists had modelled their view of things too much on Europe, and had not been true to American history. In the United States, you had a nation of nations, you had three nations: white, black, and red. And the Red Nation were the Native Americans and the Chicanos, insofar as that could be considered also an indigenous population.

His point was that American Marxists had never done a good job of addressing this because they’d never faced the unique character of the United States as a nation of nations. In this the task of socialism in the United States was to produce an authentic American socialism and American Marxism. And in that way, he also thought an American culture.

Cruse thought American culture, insofar as it was unique, it was never fully realised, and it had contributions from white, black, and red people. But then also borrowed in an unfortunate way from European culture and continued to do so in the 1800s, and into the 20th century. He thought intellectuals in particular borrowed too heavily from European culture, and had abandoned the authentic American culture, like the American folk culture basically had been abandoned by the intellectuals in favour of European culture, and Marxism was a part of that.

So the unfortunate thing is that Marxism was adopted by intellectuals as a European import as opposed to a way of addressing American society, right?

So Cruse sees “the black question” as affected by that. In other words, that American Marxists had sort of insisted that blacks were a national population, either like Jews in Europe, or like other national minorities in Europe, and had therefore neglected the true status of blacks in the United States, which were an integral population of America, not a diasporic one.

Those are my influences. And so when all this comes back in the Millennial moment, there is a great deal of confusion that I felt the need to try to make some schematic attempt, at least, to clarify.

Key readings for class on May 31st:

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Angela Davis: How does change happen? In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 205-208.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. “Race” in social-historical and political context. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 209-216.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Obama: progress in regress. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 217-224.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Progress or regress? The future of the Left under Obama. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 225-228.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The American Left and the “black question” In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 229-234.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Republicans and riots. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 235-246.

Key prompts/questions:

• How should we think the relationship between Black Lives Matter and MeToo as cultural phenomenon of the progressive left?

• How did the Great Recession and the Obama presidency condition the emergence and character of Black Lives Matter?

• What did cultural progressives misrecognise from the perspective of a Marxist analysis?

• What does a Marxist analysis say about the middle class character of the relationship between the Great Recession and Black Lives Matter?

• What are the central differences between European minority populations and American minority populations?

• How can Marxism be interpreted independent of its European roots? Does America need a post-Marxism to be authentic?

To learn more about the course Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, or to sign up:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

The fifth Philosophy Portal anthology, Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity, is now available:

Rosy Cross

To access a two-month Rosy Cross event-process in The Portal inspired by the anthology, register below, or send proof of purchase of the anthology to cadell.last@gmail.com for free access:

Rosy Cross at The Portal

Summary video for the process behind and content of Rosy Cross:

Rosy Cross at The Portal

"The rose in the cross of the present" is a well-known line used by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his political philosophy, Philosophy of Right. This seminar series takes inspiration from this line in order to develop a "theopolitical conversation", structured in two sections, one political and one theological, and inspired by both Hegel's Philosophy of Right as well as the dialectical concept of Christian Atheism. All eight seminars are led by authors of an anthology — Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity — connected to this series. The political section, Question of Right, will feature lectures and conversations with Cadell Last, Dimitri Crooijmans, Quinn Whelehan, and Eliot Rosenstock; and the theological section, Truth of Christianity, will feature lectures and conversations with Cadell Last, Daniel L. Garner, Cleo Kearns, and Daniel Coughlan.

Each session will give a different window into questions of right and the truth of Christianity, inspired by writings from the anthology, available for all who register.

Signing up gives you access to live sessions and lifetime access to recordings.

Each session focuses on a core aspect of modern politics or theology, and is connected to an extended reflection in the Rosy Cross anthology.

1. Question of Right and the Politics of (Life/Death) Immortality

2. The Process of Communisation in Absolute Capitalism/Dialectical Materialism at War

3. The Ideology of Crisis and the Contradiction of Subjectivity

4. Landian Post-Human Ideology and a Hypermodern Notion of the Whole

5. Zizek’s Dialectical Notion of Theopolitics (Christian Atheism)

6. The Function of Heresy — Both Christian and Atheist — For Global Pluralism

7. Nature of God/The Father’s Desire in a Christian Atheist Theology of Monotheism

8. Sermon About Being Born of Spirit (Through Death/Loss) and Life on Fire

Seminar Leaders:

Cadell Last is the creator/founder of Philosophy Portal, and author of Global Brain Singularity, Systems and Subjects, Real Speculations, and more. His work is dedicated to and inspired by the human evolution, technological singularity, the Zizekian moment of philosophy, and his teaching reflects core texts in continental philosophy and psychoanalysis, with the aim of expanding the general understanding of this tradition, as well as embedding it in experiments with online education and community.

Dimitri Crooijmans is a philosopher, writer, and creator of Actual Spirit, a blog and podcast dedicated to spirit reconciling itself with itself. His writings focus on spirit’s phenomena: philosophy, fiction, and poetic rhetorica, towards thought that overreaches to reach over, heal. He has published in several Philosophy Portal anthologies, including “The Work of Love” in Logic for the Global Brain, “What Doesn’t Work” in Writing For (a) First Cause, and “Dialectical Materialism at War” in Rosy Cross.

Quinn Whelehan is a philosopher, writer, and aspiring psychoanalyst with an interest in Buddhism, Christianity, Hegelianism, and Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. His writings at Philosophy Portal have explored the tension between Nāgārjuna’s philosophy, Mahayana Buddhism and Hegelian philosophy and the broader movement of German Idealism (in: Enter the Alien, Logic for the Global Brain), Nietzshe’s notion of amor fati (in: Abyssal Arrows), as well as politics of crisis/contradiction (in: Rosy Cross).

Eliot Rosenstock is a psychotherapist and writer working from the notion of Hyperpsychology. He is the author of Zizek in the Clinic, which explores a Zizekian lens for clinical work, and The Ego and its Hyperstate, which focuses on a dialectical notion of self-interest. His work in Rosy Cross seeks to critique Landian post-humanism, and also develop a hypermodern notion of the whole.

Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose spent several years working collaboratively with other artists at Eunoia, a creative community. Now Rose helped develop, and now lives on a farm, manages a wedding venue named Mead Lake Lodge, and teaches piano using visuals from the DLG Pattern Method. A finalist for the UNO Press Lab Prize and Pushcart Nominee, Rose’s creative works appear at The Write Launch, Iowa Review, Burningword, Broken Pencil, and elsewhere, with published works on Amazon.

Cleo Kearns is a scholar, teacher and writer in philosophy, religion, anthropology and cultural studies. She is currently working on the engagement of continental philosophy with the texts of the Abrahamic scriptures. She is also the author The Virgin Mary, Monotheism and Sacrifice and T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions. Her work for the Rosy Cross focuses on Christian Atheism and the Desiring God of Monotheism.

Daniel Coughlan is an emerging theologian committed to the way of Christ, with an interest in philosophy, tantra, spirituality and breathework, and creating through his HoleyCow Project. His work operates in the tensions of theology, politics and history, specifically within the context of South Africa, and its struggles with both truth, reconciliation, in regards the legacy of apartheid and the contradictions of being a “rainbow nation”.

Event schedule in The Portal:

All start times: 830pm CEST

Sunday May 3rd / Session 1: Right and the Politics of Immortality w/ Cadell Last

Sunday May 10th / Session 2: Capitalism, Communism, War w/ Dimitri Crooijmans

Sunday May 17th / Session 3: Crisis to Contradiction w/ Quinn Whelehan

Sunday May 24th / Session 4: Don’t Be Spooked by Land w/ Eliot Rosenstock

Sunday June 7th / Session 5: Zizek’s Theopolitics w/ Cadell Last

Sunday June 14th / Session 6: Appearing Heretical w/ Daniel L. Garner

Sunday June 21st / Session 7: Desiring God of Monotheism w/ Cleo Kearns

Sunday June 28th / Session 8: Contradictions Wake w/ Daniel Coughlan

Rosy Cross at The Portal

Philosophy Portal has been committed to released a body of written work that is connected to our course and conference processes. Today I am excited to announce the release of our fifth anthology: Rosy Cross: Question of Right and Truth of Christianity. This anthology represents a "theopolitical conversation" inspired by both Hegel's Philosophy of Right and the dialectical concept of Christian Atheism. The anthology includes 23 authors, 2 sections, 22 chapters, 2 interludes, an introduction and a conclusion. This anthology is the result of over 2 years of work, including courses, conferences, and an extensive community-drive peer review process. You can learn more or pick up a copy here:

Rosy Cross

ABSTRACT: "The rose in the cross of the present" is a well-known line used by philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his political philosophy, Philosophy of Right. This anthology takes inspiration from this line in order to develop a "theopolitical conversation", structured in two sections, one political and one theological, and inspired by both Hegel's Philosophy of Right as well as the dialectical concept of Christian Atheism. The result is a work that aims to give body to a tradition that has its unconscious roots in the Protestant Reformation, but which becomes self-conscious of itself through the works of German Idealism in philosophy, and through the Atlantic Revolutions (American/French) in modern politics. The section focused on politics explores the "Question of Right", and thinks through liberal and Marxist theories of the state in capitalism, potential forms of social organisation either mediated by the internet or designed to sublate capitalism, the nature of crisis and contradiction, as well as engages contemporary philosophical and political debates relevant for the future of human civilisation. The second section focused on theology explores the "Truth of Christianity", and thinks through both Christianity and Atheism as a dialectical interplay, the practical embeddedness of these ideas in contemporary theological projects, the ethics of religious and non-religious forms of social identity, the structural tension between religion inside and outside of the church, the existential tension of operating at the intersection of different beliefs, the nature of belief and speculations on the trinity. The anthology features the work of 23 authors and is the result of three years of collective work inspired by courses, conferences, and a peer review process mediated by the online education platform, Philosophy Portal.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Note on the Rosy Cross by Cadell Last

Editor’s Note by Daniel L. Garner ()

Foreword by Cadell Last

PART 1: QUESTION OF RIGHT

Introduction 1: Philosophy of Right by Cadell Last

Chapter 1: Bonapartism is not Bonaparte by

Chapter 2: Breaking the Third Information Barrier by

Chapter 3: On Vultures by

Chapter 4: The Christian Case Against Capitalism by

Chapter 5: Leading a Cooperative, a philosophical conversation with Joris De Kelver

Chapter 6: Communisation in Absolute Capitalism by

Chapter 7: From Ideology of Crisis to the Contradiction of Subjectivity by

Chapter 8: Landian Post-Humanism and Reconstituting the Human Whole by Eliot Rosenstock ()

Chapter 9: Right and the Political Challenge of Immortality by Cadell Last

Chapter 10: Love as Tarrying with the Negative by

Chapter 11: Dialectical Materialism at War by Dimitri Crooijmans

Interlude 1: A Rosy Cross of a Book by

PART 2: Truth of Christianity

Interlude 2: The Corpse in the Machine by Bryce

Introduction 2: Zizek’s Theopolitics by Cadell Last

Chapter 12: History-Heart of Radical Theology and the Theological Unconscious by

Chapter 13: Introduction to and Speculations on Pyrotheology by

Chapter 14: Cave Walls and the Unconscious God by

Chapter 15: Can Atheism Save Christianity? by

Chapter 16: The Necessity of Christian Atheism by Cadell Last

Chapter 17: “Appearing Heretical” for the Fulfillment of Global Pluralism by Daniel L. Garner (O.G. Rose)

Chapter 18: Pyrotheological Minimalism by John Feldmann

Chapter 19: A Dangerous Curiosity by

Chapter 20: Christian Atheism and the Desiring God of Monotheism by

Chapter 21: Towards a Formal Theory of Belief by

Chapter 22: The Phosphorescence Between Us by

Conclusion: Fire Sermon by Daniel Coughlan ()

Rosy Cross

Philosophy Portal is also committed to creating contexts, both before the publication of our anthologies and after. Towards this end we are hosting a new post-anthology release event in the form of a two-month process in The Portal focused on core chapters of the anthology. You can find out more about these processes or get involved using the link below:

Rosy Cross at The Portal

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

Previous articles in this series:

1. How to Approach “Marxism” and the Possibility of “Post-Marxism”?

2. On Black Holes and Socialist Unity

3. The Fantasy of Sanders Socialism and the Bitter Pill of Trump’s Revolution

American Imperialism Caught Between Two Death Drives: Liberal and Marxist

The most perplexing topic for me in all of politics has been related to international relations often referred to as “imperial”. I have not put almost any energy into researching imperialism due in part because of how daunting and overwhelming I find the topic. Of course, when I think imperialism, I am generally thinking about the form of “American imperialism”: the wars in the Middle East, their motives, and how to make sense of the ethics of these dynamics. I suppose I could describe the feeling of perplexity and confusion on the level of the antagonisms between nations of vastly different histories, vastly different power, and vastly different responsibilities on the stage of global capitalism. How can I possibly see through my own cultural and geographical bias, whether it is related to the history of liberalism, democracy, development, industrialisation, let alone cultural issues of religion, sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and so forth and so on? However, I do feel that this general perplexity and confusion is shared by many, even those who state very strongly held views about this or that war — usually coloured by the frame of “America bad”.

This is the mind-state that I had upon entering the third section of Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left: “War on Terror and Arab Spring — and after”, which focuses on topics related to:

• Imperialism

• Islamic Revolution/Iran

• Middle East/Iraq (Egypt, Afghanistan)

• and more…

While reading my state of general perplexity and confusion started to lift when reading the chapter titled “Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons”.1 In this chapter, Cutrone deviates from his standard approach in The Death of the Millennial Left as a whole, by explicitly bringing in his Marxist framing of history (an approach otherwise reserved for his text Marxism and Politics). I would like to center and highlight the importance of this chapter, in order to perhaps share the clarity I feel it brings to the topic of international relations, American imperialism specifically, and its stakes for thinking about the contemporary dynamics of global capitalism from a Marxist perspective.

Cutrone opens the chapter linking two disparate events in Iran and Egypt:2

“What links both eruptions of democratic discontent, in Iran and Egypt, then is their authoritarian outcome.”

What I want to highlight in this quote is the phenomenon of an oscillation between “democratic eruption” and “authoritarian outcome”, or what we have covered previously3 as the oscillation, reminiscent of 1789, of the choice between “revolutionary terror” and “ancien régime”, resulting in a triad of:4

1. “ancien régime”,

2. its abstract negation in “revolutionary terror”, and

3. its sublation into a “post-revolutionary rational state”

What we are going to isolate in this article is not the success of this movement in 1789, but rather the nature of its failure to repeat itself in modern political history, and how the repetition of this failure gives us insight into the double-structure of not only a liberal death drive (related to the repetition of 1789), but also a Marxist death drive (related to the repetition of a different form of revolution). Here death drive is being conceived, not as a drive to inanimate matter and equilibrium, but rather the insistence of repeating a certain state of tension5 vis-a-vis a specific form of “negative energy” where something (the presence of a higher state, e.g. “post-revolutionary rational state”) can seemingly appear out of nothing (the lack/absence or hole of that higher state, previously occupied by the “ancien régime”).6

In Cutrone’s work on this oscillation between democratic discontent and authoritarian outcomes in the Middle East, he seeks to see-through the “superficial narratives” about the possibilities or impossibilities of democracy in the “Arab or Muslim world”.7 These superficial narratives have persisted throughout modern political history — usually in the tension between Islamic Republics as “ancien régime” and modern liberal democracies as potential “post-revolutionary rational state” — but now take a specific form, after the death of the Millennial Left, in the disappointments of the “Arab Spring”.8 These disappointments are marked by the phenomenon of “protests and insurrections” toppling “the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt”, initiating “civil wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria”, but ultimately failing to establish a democratic revolution.9 In the failure of such revolution, Millennials have come to accept “diminished expectations” about what is possible for international politics today.10

In this context, Cutrone asks us to avoid the reification of the Middle East as forever lost in anti-democratic and anti-liberal Islamic politics, but rather asks us to reflect about what history can teach us (because humans are naturally very good at learning from history):11

“The history of the Left, both locally and globally, and reaching back for generations, is important, perhaps not so much for the obvious reasons — a relative lack of “democratic institutions” in one or another part of the world, or indeed globally today, by contrast with the past — as that it raises the question of history per se. What resources does history provide to the present?”

In analysing these resources, or bringing to our attention these resources, Cutrone makes a sharp distinction between successful and failed “democratic revolutions”, claiming that we only find “success” in the “French Revolution of 1789”, and failure everywhere else:12

“unlike the French Revolution of 1789, whatever its tortured career and the opposed judgements about it, democratic revolutions since then have been dogged by the spectre of failure. One thing that cannot be said of 1789 is that it failed, however ambiguous was its success.”

We might extend this interpretation, as Cutrone emphasised in our first course in The Portal,13 to the “Atlantic Revolutions” of 1776 and 1789 — the American and French Revolutions — which establish what we consider to be the telos and standard for modern politics under the banner of “liberal democracy”. We might even say that what constitutes modern politics is the successful establishment of liberal democracies and their tension with pre-liberal, pre-democratic totalitarian regimes that masquerade as traditional authorities.

Here I again highlight/expand a precise oscillation between:

1. The ambiguous and fragile establishment of a modern liberal democracy (e.g. Western Europe, America), and

2. The strong tendency and stable strategy of totalitarian regimes masquerading as traditional authorities (e.g. Middle East, Latin America, etc.)14

While many might here object at the simplicity of this framing, this distinction offers a general mapping between nations perceived to be integrated into industrial capitalism, and nations that are basically perceived to be on the periphery, or excluded from the “capitalist core”.15 Of course, in the 20th century “Cold War”, the distinctions between “First World”, “Second World”, and “Third World” were used to demarcate the capitalist core (First World), the socialist bloc (Second World), and the undeveloped or unindustrialised nations not strictly aligned to either developmental pathway (Third World).16 Today, Cutrone claims that we find, obviously, the collapse of the “Second World” qua “socialist bloc”, and the emergence of a gap between “First World” (capitalist core, e.g. America, European Union, Japan, China, etc.) and “Third World” (postcolonial and undeveloped “poor” countries, whether in Asia, Middle East, Latin America or Africa). This collapse of the “socialist bloc” and emergence of “gap” between “First and Third World”, for Cutrone:17

“changes the political and social framework of world-historical possibilities fundamentally”

The question of how this changes the political and social framework for world-historical possibilities fundamentally, seems open to and need of interpretation. It also raises fundamental questions about how socialism has been conceived in the 20th century. But before we can get to rethinking world-historical possibilities, we have to complete reflection inspired by Cutrone’s bringing to our attention the resources of modern political history. If, for Cutrone, 1776/1789 represent the “success” (however ambiguous) of “democratic revolution” towards “democratic institutions”, this ambiguous success has its own repressed haunting “weighting like a nightmare on the brains of the living”: 1848, or “The Spring of Nations” in “France, Germany and beyond”.18

If the 1776/1789 “Atlantic Revolutions” represent the birth of modern liberal democracy (and their attempted repetitions elsewhere represent a “liberal death drive”), the 1848 “Spring of Nations” represents, for Marxism, the failure or “present absence” of liberal politics to raise itself to the challenge of socialist politics (and its attempted repetition represents a “Marxist death drive”). As has been made clear in previous posts,19 Cutrone’s work orbits this “present absence” as if about a “dark star”.20 For Cutrone, this present absence totally escapes and obscures the “imagination of present considerations of the moment of democratic revolution”.21 In other words, if much of Latin America and the Middle East remains haunted by the failure of their attempts at democratic revolution, constantly falling back into totalitarian regimes masquerading as traditional authorities, then, for Marxism, the “capitalist core” remains haunted by “1848” as the “canon of failure”.22 In this way, I am proposing that we see the “capitalist core” as “repeating a certain state of tension” vis-a-vis a specific form of “negative energy” that has no historical correlate (i.e. unlike the 1776/1789 repetitions for liberal democracy, for example, in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, i.e. the “liberal death drive”, the “Marxist death drive” has never actualised/stabilised itself, and has only ever fallen back into what, for it, is an “ancien régime”, i.e. liberal democracy itself as “ancient regime”).

Thus, we should not underestimate the difference between these hauntings: the hauntings experienced by Latin America and the Middle East are hauntings that are in reference to a concrete empirical observation: democratic revolution is possible because we have seen it happen (1776/1789); whereas the hauntings experienced by the capitalist core have no reference to a concrete empirical observation: a successful socialist revolution has never happened and we don’t know if it is possible (maybe it is impossible and we have overestimated what is possible for us politically). In this context, Cutrone’s stubborn persistence in the use of signifiers “Left/Right” is instructive and useful, against those who would seek to further confuse us in collapsing the distinction completely:23

“The Left is defined by potential and possibility, the Right by its foreclosure. The Left expresses and reveals potential possibilities, while the Right represses and obscures these.”

In this precise context, being politically “Left” is inherently more difficult than being politically “Right”, because to be politically “Left” is to be constantly tarrying with the negative energy of what does not exist, but might. To be politically “Right” simply functions as a “negation” of this possibility with an uploading or an affirming of what we already know can exist because it either does exist or has existed. In other words, to be politically Left is more difficult because it inherently involves dialectical thinking, whereas to be politically Right can settle into the identity of a worldview. Here the main problem is that we should not underestimate just how many people identify as Left but are thinking in a Right wing form (i.e. from the perspective of an identitarian worldview). In Cutrone’s work we see all the time his claim that what passes as Left today and throughout most of the past few decades, is actually the formation of a Right wing by another name, e.g. “In its reactionary character […] the Left has largely already become a new Right”.24

However, we should not underestimate the “developmental parallax” at work in the signifiers Left/Right from a Marxist perspective, i.e. these signifiers will function differently in the “capitalist core” than they will function in “postcolonial” or “underdeveloped” nations:

1. In postcolonial and underdeveloped nations Left/Right should be interpreted in relation to the potential and possibility of democratic revolution (with Left striving for its potential and outlining strategies for actualising its possibility, and the Right foreclosing/obscuring this same potential and possibility, often with recourse to traditional structure masking authoritarian relations on the periphery of capital);

2. whereas in the capitalist core Left/Right should be interpreted in relation to the potential and possibility of socialist revolution (with Left striving for its potential and outlining strategies for actualising its possibility, and the Right foreclosing/obscuring this same potential and possibility, often with recourse to traditional structure masking authoritarian relations within the capitalist core itself).

To further expand the difficulty inherent to the “Leftist” political orientation: it is that it requires the modern (Hegelian) dialectics of “being-nothing” in order to sustain itself because it is operating in reference to a “present absence” (capitalism-to-socialism) — where something, the presence of a higher post-revolutionary rational state can seemingly appear out of nothing, a hole occupied by an ancient regime — as opposed to a concrete empirical observation of what is (global capitalism). In terms of the way the Left functions in the “capitalist core”, this is arguably even more difficult than the way the Left functions in its periphery because in the periphery there is at least a concrete reality that we know is in principle possible. This extra difficulty is not only why:25

“No one on the Left seems to actually believe in the possibility of a transformed and emancipated world.”

But also, and more importantly, why:26

“the Left has abdicated the possibility for a responsible politics for progressive social transformation and emancipation.”

In fact, the reason why I have not more frequently engaged the topic of international relations on the level of American imperialism, is because I felt that I could not speak on it responsibly, and what I have read about what people have to say about it, I find largely unconvincing, only further confusing the situation. Here Cutrone’s reference to Moishe Postone at the opening of the section “War on Terror and Arab Spring — and after” illuminated both my concern:27

“The Left should be very careful about constituting a form of politics that, from the standpoint of human emancipation, would be questionable, at the very best, however many people it may rouse.”

And also what haunts me:28

“However difficult the task of grasping and confronting global capitalism might be, it is crucially important that a global internationalism be recovered and reformulated…”

And so it is towards this double-problem:

1. avoiding a questionable if arousing form of politics and

2. reformulating a global internationalism

That strikes the core of what motivates me here in the oscillation between:

1. The ambiguous and fragile establishment of a modern liberal democracy (e.g. Western Europe, America), and

2. The strong tendency and stable strategy of totalitarian regimes masquerading as traditional authorities (e.g. Middle East, Latin America, etc.)

With “Left” representing an aim for “democratic revolution” on the level of the nation in the latter, and “Left” representing an aim for “socialist revolution” on the level of the international in the former. Here I interpret 1776/1789 as haunting the latter, and 1848 as haunting the former, with an extra — “unenviable”29 — burden of responsibility on the former with regards to a Left capable of reformulating a global internationalism.30

The Capitalist Core Has No Left

This is all preamble to further the framing of what I take to be Cutrone’s central mission in The Death of the Millennial Left: not only is what calls itself Left in the capitalist core not Left, but that the capitalist core of politics (since at least the 1930s) has been constituted by a collapsing/disappearing Left to the point that the Left does not exist anymore; even the Millennial Left was not really Left in the context of Cutrone’s challenge to re-think Marxist historicity for our time. This claim should be specifically linked, in Cutrone’s work, to the collapse/disappearance of a politics seeking a qualitative transformation of capitalist politics itself, via, for Cutrone, the object known as the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.31

In a certain sense what we do have since the 1930s, in the capitalist core, are “two right wings of capital” (spinning in circles) — with one wing using cultural traditionalism to justify policies orbiting the limits of capital (“Right”) and one wing using cultural progressivism to justify stop gaps and half-measures in relation to the limits or outright failures of capitalist politics (“Left”). To be clear: what both wings lack is a way to think through the limits of capitalist politics towards a socialist politics.

Throughout The Death of the Millennial Left Cutrone is trying to reformulate how we might better frame this situation, and in the process:

1. clarify how we should think about Left/Right as it relates to post-Cold War American politics after the Reagan Revolution/hegemony of neoliberalism, and

2. identifying just how deeply confused our thinking about these distinctions has been in the late 20th century and has become in the early 21st century.

I have started to unpack this clarification and confusion in the last two posts focused “socialist unity” as a “dark star”,32 and on the parallax of Trump/Sanders,33 with the crucial insights that:

1. what calls itself the Left and what represents itself as the Democratic Party in post-Cold War U.S. neoliberal politics is actually regressive (reacting to the “Reagan Revolution” with quasi-socialist policies from the 1930s-1960s as opposed to genuinely thinking through the limits of capital), and

2. what calls itself the Right and what represents itself as the Republican Party in post-Cold War U.S. neoliberal politics is actually quasi-revolutionary (carrying out the principles of neoliberalism to their limits and — now collapsing — results), but not actually revolutionary insofar as they do not/will not think beyond these limits.

In the section “Great Recession” this dynamic played itself out in relation to the politics of:

1. “Keynesian economics” and

2. “Reaganomics” (via Hayek and Friedman)34

And in the section “Trump” this dynamic played itself out in relation to the politics of:

1. Trump’s attempt at a post-neoliberalism via the undermining of the neoconservatives in the Republican Party, and

2. the politics of Sanders as simply a “protest pressure-tactic” on the Democratic Party as opposed to a desire for a genuine socialist revolution35

Here the question of what a responsible socialist politics emerging from the capitalist core in post-neoliberalism would be, seems totally open to and need of interpretation. And this cannot be done if we do not understand these aforementioned confusions about the use of Left/Right in American politics.

Dialecticising Neoconservative Imperialism

Towards deepening our understanding of this topic, it appears like the continuation of Cutrone’s central mission in The Death of the Millennial Left can be formulated on the level of thinking the policies of neoconservatism as it relates to American imperialism (largely in the Middle East).36 While Cutrone labours under no illusions about neoconservative international policy to extend “peace and democracy” to the Middle East, recognising it as:37

“only ever going to be a neoliberal farce: only the neoliberal version of “democracy”.”

He at the same time keeps his focus on the reactionary character of the (irresponsible, reactionary) American Left, this time as it relates to American imperialism in which:38

“a contrarian mood prevails in which U.S. policy and its relationship to the social and political realities with which it grapples, are opportunistically vilified.

It seems enough to say that the U.S. is an imperialist power and to derive politics from this hypostatised characterisation. In doing so, the Left seeks to avoid its own inconvenient history.

The most crass expression of this is the paranoiac hatred of Bush and the neocons”

Cutrone frames the general tension between neoconservatives and the Left as follows:39

“This is the irony. Since […] the Marxist-Humanists, liberals, and others on the Left seem anxious to prove that the U.S. neoconservatives and others are wrong in their hawkish attitude […], to prove that any U.S. intervention will only backfire and prevent the possibility of a progressive outcome, especially to the present crisis, they tacitly support the Obama approach, no matter how supposedly differently and less cynically motivated theirs is compared to official U.S. policy.”

While Cutrone’s critics will then say that he just uncritically supports [insert Right wing form/figure: the Reagan Revolution, Republican Party, Trump, Neoconservatism, etc.], in fact Cutrone’s point is that the Left’s reactionary stance leads them towards neutralising the core international problem and avoiding the fact that there is no significant geopolitical difference between the way they are currently theorising “Left/Right”. For example, on the issue of American imperialism:40

“The difference between Obama and McCain campaigns regarding U.S. “imperialism” would amount to no difference at all.”

He expands:41

“Obama, no less than McCain, is campaigning for the office not only of the “top cop” of the U.S., but of the world. Obama’s campaign is over effective policy for this role, not the role itself.”

Another way of saying this is that, whether we are thinking:

• Reaganomics vs. Keynesian economics (on the level of economy)

• Trumpian Post-Neoliberalism vs. Democratic Socialism (on the level of national politics)

• Hawkish Neoconservatives vs. Leftist Anti-Imperialism (on the level of international politics)

We are dealing with a “split-one” of the “capitalist core” — between “two Rights” and an “inexistent Left” — in which the the first terms (Reaganomics, Trumpian Post-Neoliberalism, Hawkish Neoconservatives) are perceived as (evil) “Right wing conservatism”; and the second terms (Keynesian economics, Democratic Socialism, Leftist Anti-Imperialism) are perceived as (good) “Left wing progressivism”. However, in reality the first terms are taking responsibility for (the evils of) global capitalism to the best of our current political capacities (at the limits of capitalist politics, but not beyond them), and the second terms are reactionary confusion (or even self-victimisations under the banner of the good) which struggles to overcome the inability to take responsibility on the proper level (as well as for their own evil).42 As a result, for Cutrone, what calls itself the Left is constantly lapsing into “the ugly naïveté of adolescence”43 (and unable to confront the truths beyond good and evil because it is easier to stay with the “image of being good”).

As emphasised above, Cutrone’s analysis, as well as that of the work at Platypus, involves rethinking what we perceive to be Left/Right in the context of both the failures of the “Old Left” (1930s) and the “New Left” (1960s). As Cutrone states the outset of ““Imperialism” — What is it? Why should we be against it?”:44

“Platypus […] [is] dedicated to investigating the problems and tasks inherited from the Old/1930s and New/1960s Left, and the post-political Left of the 1980s and 90s. […] We feel that an authentic Left for today would almost go unrecognised according to the received categories of the Left, or, if recognised, only as a living fossil.”

Thus, when we think of the Left as we inherit it, in the Millennial generation, and its tendencies to see emancipatory potential in a revisitation of Keynesian economics, Democratic Socialism tied to the Democratic Party, as well as its tendencies to not only anti-imperialism but also anti-fascism, we have to start to untangle the knot with the deadlocks encountered in the 1930s: where we find the origin of “anti-imp” and “anti-fa”.45 Cutrone states that:46

“anti-imperialism has been problematic for the Left for quite some time but has taken on particularly grotesque forms in more recent history and especially in the present.”

Beyond well-known divides like “Socialist vs. Liberal”, or “Libertarian vs. Authoritarian”, or “Anti-Stalinist vs. Stalinist”, Cutrone maintains that the “set of categories we need to confront” — stemming from the Old Left/1930s — is the divide of “anti-fascism” and “anti-imperialism”.47 Cutrone suggests that anti-fascism has its origins in debates between Stalinists and Trotskyists, where Stalinists perceived Trotskyists as a potential “Social Democratic” path “to unleash the fascists against the Communists”.48 Could this be why “Leftist” forces today that brand themselves as “anti-fascist” give the appearance of being “anti-liberal” “anti-democratic” Stalinists?

In contrast, Cutrone suggests that anti-imperialism has its origins in Communists making “common cause” “with the Nazis” as the Nazis had “their own brand” of anti-imperialism.49 Could it also be that when “Leftist” forces today brand themselves as “anti-imperial” they do so from a position that could be foreclosing their own fascist tendencies and desires? I really don’t know but it is worth thinking through.

However, I do think there is one clear point here, when considering a Left grounded in either “anti-fa” or “anti-imp”: one gets the impression that when a Leftist movement fundamentally grounds itself in a simple negation — anti-fa, anti-imp — it fails to reach the level of its own standards as a negation of negation, i.e. negation of the very need for either fascism or imperialism in global capital. Can we say the reverse?: that in global capitalism fascism and imperialism are both necessary? If they were would it be possible for genuine Leftist/Marxists/Communists to be able to actually take responsibility for the realities of their necessity?

For Cutrone, both forms of “anti-” as an approach to contemporary Leftism is not only flawed but fatal,50 with potentially both, but specifically anti-imperialism failing specifically in relation to its American context because no opposition to American imperialism “could have possibly challenged the fundamental conditions of U.S. power in global capital.”51

This problem of dealing with power in global capital is again what leaves us with the need for a more direct tarrying with the:

1. limits of Reaganomics (as opposed a regression to Keynesianism),

2. the possibilities opened by Trumpian post-neoliberalism (as opposed to Sanders-style Democratic Socialism), and

3. the responsibility of Hawkish neoconservatism (as opposed to Leftist anti-imperialism).

I would formulate these more positively, and speculatively as follows:

1. What do we find at the limits of neoliberal capitalism that can provide us material for sublation in alternative economic modes?

2. What are the possibilities opened by post-neoliberalism that point towards the practical necessity of a socialist-oriented collaboration?

3. What would a responsible form of neoconservativism look like in relation to the necessity of imperial international projects?

However, the “grotesque forms” of Leftist anti-imperialism we specifically inherit today, revolve around not only their origins — entangled with fascist alliance in the 1930s — but also the New Left and its cultural cope with the impossibilities of its own project. The strongest symptom of this, for Cutrone, can be found in the Leftist interpretation of political emancipatory possibilities in Iran, stemming from the 1979 Revolution.52 The general positive thesis for Cutrone is that there is no difference between “Islamism” and “neoliberal capital”, in claiming that Islamism “shares in the essential historical moment of neoliberal capital”,53 and thus the Left’s “present search for an “emancipatory” Islamist politics” is just a “sad repetition” inherited from the 1960s New Left.54 In the context of working with the “liberal death drive” in the oscillation between “modern liberal democracy” and “totalitarian regimes masquerading as traditional authorities”, Islamist politics would just find itself on the side of the latter, with no potential for emancipation to the former.

For Cutrone, he is not only against the Left’s search for an emancipatory Islamist politics, identifying it as “Right” wing,55 and emphasising that the political challenge of it still “looms”;56 but goes so far as to say that the only thing that the “political significance of Islamism” represents for the Left is “the slaughter — of the Left”.57 In other words, the uprising of democratic revolution should not be expected to take on the character of “Islamism”, but rather, the reaction against the uprising of democratic revolution towards it resulting in a totalitarian regime, should take on the character of “Islamism”. To put it simply: organisations like ISIS or the Taliban or whatever other Islamic political movements have nothing to do with socialist politics.

So where does this leave us in regards to the central problem and question of a responsible socialist politics emerging from the capitalist core in post-liberalism? And how should we think of the necessity American imperialism in the context of global capitalism? What would be an American imperialist project that actually pointed towards socialist politics?

My starting point would be, on the one hand:

1. American imperialism/neoconservatism — its role as “top/global cop” vis-a-vis the “chaos of global capitalism” — is false in its attempts to establish democracy in the Middle East (or Latin America), not because it is acting irresponsibly on the terms of global capitalism itself, but because it has yet to confront what it itself is haunted by (the sublation of capitalism to socialism); in other words, its imperial efforts in Middle East/Latin America are just the politics of resource extraction in global capitalism

2. Thus, the attempt at post-neoliberalism in America — on the level of imperialism and conservatism — would have formulate a real international strategy for the sublation of capitalism to socialism on the level of the capitalist core itself — international coordination with the European Union and other developed nations — in order to start to demonstrate that it can in principle be done; in other words, can American envisage a day where there is genuine power sharing and coordination on the level of production and military with other members of the capitalist core? (i.e. could the term “Conservative Communism” be useful as an orientation tool here: from “Neo-Conservatism” without “capitalist politics” towards “Conservative Communism” as an attempt to “sublate capitalist politics to socialism”?).

And, on the other hand:

1. When what thinks about itself as the Democratic Left romanticises the cultural and religious attachments of countries in the “Third World” — whether Islam or other traditions — seeing in them an “emancipatory political potential” in an antagonism with American imperialism and neoconservatism, it is also false insofar as it is lost in its own nostalgia for a past it no longer truly believes in (whether traditional Christianity or other aspects of the Western legacy); in other words, what calls itself the Left infantilises the “black and brown people” in the Third World in falsely perceiving emancipatory power in their traditional religious cultures

2. Thus, the Left itself must think post-neoliberalism in America in the context of reconciling itself with its own (negative) past (which it blocks with nostalgia for traditions in Third World countries) in order to perceive again the possibility of a real emancipatory future capable of working from the actual tensions internal to the capitalist core; in other words: the real emancipatory future has to move from traditional religious cultures through secular liberal cultures universally, not just in Europe and America (i.e. could the term “Christian Atheism” could be useful as an orientation tool here: from perceiving “trad-religious revivals” as emancipatory towards a strategic undermining of the necessary transcendental illusion of religion itself?).

Here I want to engage a specific extended reflection offered by Cutrone on how we should be thinking about the past and the future, inspired by one of his core inspirations: Walter Benjamin. From Cutrone:58

“So, the question becomes, what would be the conditions for true victory? What success can we aspire to win?

Marx attempted to capture this problem in his demand that the revolution “take its poetry from the future” rather than the past. But if this is more than the banal statement it appears at first glance to be, then it raises a rather obscure difficulty: In what way can present revolution draw upon the emancipatory energy of the future? And Marx’s dedicated followers Walter Benjamin’s caveat echoes closely behind, that faith in the future sapped the strength of the revolution, which, Benjamin wrote, needed to be “nourished with the image of enslaved ancestors rather than liberated grandchildren”. But we may need both imaginations — of emancipation and redemption — today; The question is, how so?

Marx and the history of Marxism still speak, even if their voices are drowned out in the clamouring din of the present. In history after 1848, Marx understood a world — the present — caught between past and future. Marx’s term for this historical world, “capital”, refers to the radical ambivalence of the present: its being already past, accumulating all of history and annexing the future, continually crowding the moment off stage; and its constant liquidation of that history, the incessant consumption of the moment in light of a future that never arrives. Past and future seem to recede infinitely beyond the horizons of a present that is as perpetual as it is empty and futile, trapped, static but constantly in motion. So we resign ourselves to the present’s eternal passing and recurrence, in which “everything changes” and yet “remains the same”.”

What the terms “Conservative Communism” and “Christian Atheism” both share is not only their inherently dialectical nature — the presence of Conservative Christians world and the absence/failure of a truly Communist Atheist world — but also situating of the dialectical nature of Marxist historicity itself: Marxism itself is caught between the presence of Conservative Christianity (which it wants to negate, as the “nightmarish tradition”) and the absence of Communist Atheism (which it wants to affirm as the post-historical utopian vision). But does not this tension require the logic of the negation of negation? Is not Cutrone’s work on Marxism not a recognition of the failure of a Left rooted in a simple negation of, for example, “Neo-conservatism”? Why not Trump? Why not “Conservative Communism”? Why not “Christian Atheism”? Do not these concepts provide us with precise, not bridges, but “parallactic logic” with which to analyse fundamental tensions that point beyond themselves towards a socialist politics? Would not any future Communism necessarily require a Conservative base? Does not Marxist atheism depend on and emerge from the historical revolutionary tradition of Christianity itself, from Paul through Luther and Hegel? This is not claiming that “Paul was a Communist”, but rather the emergence of Communism as an Idea occurred within/is necessarily situated within, a history that includes and is in some sense indebted to Paul (and Luther, and Hegel).

Perhaps here I find a way to conceive of what Cutrone is saying in relation to the need for a past-future tension — “we may need both imaginations” — between Marx’s dreams of a “future poetry” and Benjamin’s recognition of the need for the memory of “enslaved ancestors” (whether actual bodily slavery or wage slavery). Christianity and Conservatism represent the necessary foundations which, without them — “faith in the future” will sapp “the strength of the revolution”. And Communism and Atheism represent the necessary future orientation and telos which, without them — we remain not only enslaved but also give birth to a future without real liberation.

I will expand on this, why I link both “Conservative Communism” and “Christian Atheism” as potentially useful practical “theopolitical” tools here is double:

1. Not only does “Conservative Communism” short-circuit the “paranoiac” reaction of the Left to “neoconservatism”, allowing it to take a “conservative responsibility” for international politics on the level of the sublation of capitalism to socialism; but it also allows “neoconservatism” itself to see the flaw in an international strategy that is tarrying with the impossibility of bringing countries through democratic revolutions in conditions of global capitalism that will never work insofar as the capitalist core is not trying to overcome itself;

2. And “Christian Atheism” short-circuits the romantic image the Left has in relation to Third World traditional religiosity or culture as an emancipatory pathway in the context of global capitalism by allowing it to see how its own religion and tradition has been (incompletely) overcome in secular liberal politics; but it also allows the Right to see the dignity of its own religious tradition, history and culture without necessarily needing to believe in it from a paradoxical and insincere pre-modern stance

Thus what both a “Conservative Communism” and a “Christian Atheism” would serve is the mega-contradiction internal to emancipatory politics of the repetition of 1776/1789 in the “Third World”, and the repetition of 1848 in the “First World”. Here to reiterate, while both repetitions are a form of death drive, one is a “liberal death drive” — oscillating between the possibility of “democratic institutions” and an “ancien régime” — and the other is a “Marxist death drive” — oscillating between the possibility of socialism and an “ancien régime” that we call liberal democracy itself. Here the repetition of 1776/1789 in the “Third World” requires the repetition of 1848 in the “First World”; the responsibility is asymmetrical on the side of the First World. It is not the “superficial narrative” that the Middle East cannot achieve liberal democracy because of Islamism; it is that the Middle East cannot achieve liberal democracy and regresses to Islamism because the First World is not trying to overcome its own from of liberal democracy/capitalist politics for socialism.

As a closing note, while I totally agree with Cutrone that socialism can only be achieved in a sublation of the capitalist core, which is centred in American politics; I think that much more thought needs to be put into the historical and present relationship between the United States and the European Union as capitalist core. Here I follow Zizek completely in his latest article titled “IF UNITED EUROPE IS DEAD, EVERYTHING IS ALLOWED”.59 In thinking the historical and present relationship between the United States and the European Union I think we find potential and possibility for international socialism on the level of both overcoming a Left grounded in anti-fa and anti-imp. In contrast to a Left grounded in anti-fa or anti-imp we need a Left that is at least capable of thinking the necessity of fascism and imperialism in global capitalism, what they represent as necessary symptom, and also what it would mean to take responsibility for these symptoms, given the truth of the two death drives internationally: both liberal and Marxist.

Of course, the biggest symptom of all of this, the inability to think the link in capitalist to socialist politics between the U.S. and the EU, is the United Kingdom.

Death Drive as Burden of Immortality

A final note on death drive: one of the most responsible Leftists in our era, Slavoj Žižek, claims that the philosophical results of Freudian death drive do not actually point us towards a “desire for death”, but rather point us towards the “burden of immortality”.60 In thinking death drive in the form of international politics, repeating a state of tension that we can call “liberal” and “Marxist”, we crucially find a pathway where any future Marxist must raise to the challenge of the immortality of our species-being. If this challenge is not met, then why wouldn’t Islamism fill in the vacuum left in the absence of real theopolitical thinking?

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

This year at Philosophy Portal we are unfolding a new course, Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, led by “The Last Marxist”, Chris Cutrone. Throughout the course we will be thinking American Revolution, Trump, Lenin, Critical Theory, The Party, and much more. To find out more or to get involved, visit the link below:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

What can be found below is an edited reflection offered by Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone informed by a question that will shape the upcoming class at Philosophy Portal Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials.

How do we think about the War on Terror and the Arab Spring in the context of the experience of the Millennial Left?

So, the Neocons, right?

I’ve been a Leftist since the 80s. I’ve been a self-conscious Marxist, Leftist, Socialist, since the 80s. There was Neoconservatism in the Reagan era, and those were like Cold War Social Democrats, like Jeane Kirkpatrick. There was that Neoconservatism, these characters who were like, ex-Trotskyists or something, advocating fighting the Cold War to the end, to victory.

Then there was the Clinton era, the project for a new American century. And that was different because that was coming from a realist perspective. It was also coming from a liberal human rights interventionist perspective, and not classical neoconservatism, that had a whole theory of how the U.S. could justify supporting authoritarian regimes while actively opposing totalitarian regimes.

All of that got jumbled together post 9-11, meaning it looked like 9-11 was the opportunity for the neocons, for the neoliberal human rights interventionists, and what got seemingly left out was the realist perspective.

So since that time we have had this kind of Neocon versus realist, and Neocon has included the liberal human rights interventionist type people, foreign policy people. We have had John Mearsheimer versus everyone else, versus Madeleine Albright versus Paul Wolfowitz versus Donald Rumsfeld, whoever, right?

And basically the War on Terror seemed to be this ideological crusade by the Neocons and also by the liberal human rights interventionists to democratise the Middle East and, you know, establish liberal American hegemony in the world, starting in the Middle East.

And the Middle East had been largely a Soviet client state region. So countries like Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, had been more in the Soviet orbit, right? It looked like the U.S. was continuing to fight the Cold War by going after the remnant of Arab nationalist regimes that have been Soviet client states. It seemed like some strange throwback to Cold War hawkishness.

Again, the Neocons.

And also, in the 90s in the Clinton era, there had been the breakup of Yugoslavia, and U.S. military intervention in both with respect to Bosnia and Kosovo. Now Tony Blair had been part of that, and Tony Blair was such a long-standing prime minister that he was there from the Clinton era all the way through George W. Bush, so he kind of persisted.

So it seemed like American foreign policy with Britain as the lapdog of U.S. imperialism was on this crusade, and it was Neoconservatism. But it was also this liberal human rights interventionism. That looked like the problem with American policy in these wars.

My perspective on this was, well, no, it’s not as straightforward as that, meaning it’s not just an ideological crusade. It’s not like a bad policy implemented by ideologues, because after all, especially when the war started going wrong, like in Iraq in particular, this was just a setup for a Democratic Party opposition to the war.

And, you know, being a long-time Leftist, I was aware of the fact that the wars were controversial, they were brutal, they were bad. The wars impacted people not only in the region, but also in the United States.

I knew that the discontents with the war could be exploited by the Democrats, and were exploited by the Democrats. Obama was the anti-war candidate against Hillary Clinton in 2008. And ultimately, when he was elected, he was elected more on the financial crisis rather than the wars, because the Iraq war seemed to enter a new phase in 2007-2008. I think Obama called it tactical success within a failed strategy, meaning the failed strategy was invading and occupying Iraq to begin with. The tactical success was the Anbar uprising, and you know, the defeat of the insurgents, which then later led to ISIS, but that’s another question that happened under Obama.

So I was aware of the fact that the motives for the war, the discontents with the war, were going to be channeled in a certain way. At the same time, the Millennial Left had been radicalised by the war, and interested in Marxism. But the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) didn’t want to be a one issue anti-war movement. They wanted to be a broader, more radical, and indeed socialistic movement. But they failed to do that.

When Obama was elected, the SDS basically ceased to exist. Only a shell of it remained because it was taken over by Maoists in the end. So a lot of this was just sort of undigested. And it’s coming back now, like how we understand these things.

It was seen as a crisis of American Empire in the 90s. Prior to 9-11, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had published three books — Empire, then Multitude, and finally Commonwealth — about their vision of a kind of post-imperialist, post-Cold War world. In their vision, it was just an American Empire and the struggle for Socialism. Communism had to take place within that world.

I think that people were always kind of discontented with this view.

And then it seemed like with 9-11, the U.S. became a rogue actor and broke out of its own international system. It broke out of the coalition of the willing, as opposed to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). NATO went to war in Afghanistan to defend the U.S. after 9-11, but refused to get involved in the Iraq War.

So it was the British and the Americans kind of on their own, and some Eastern European countries, but not NATO and not the United Nations per se. Whereas the Afghan War had been approved by the United Nations and supported by NATO.

So we have had this thing going on for a long time, which is the U.S. going rogue, and so it’s coming back now with Trump in his second term.

But really, I think this is a misapprehension of everything, of the world system, of the U.S. role in it, everything. I’ve always been aware of the pitfalls of this.

But that’s one side of it: War and Terror, as a formative experience. The other side of it is the Arab Spring.

The Arab Spring is something that is the result of the Great Recession. So the War on Terror predates the Great Recession, and the Arab Spring is a product of the Great Recession.

The Arab Spring breaks out first in Iran, which again, things are happening right now in Iran in late 2025, early 2026, we are witnessing a return of what broke out in the Green Movement in 2009. And that’s because of the way Iran had been hit by the financial crisis and the Great Recession, it was hit hard. And the Green Movement and the electoral controversy, the disputed election in 2009, was the first of what has become a series of protests, movements and uprisings in Iran since then. Usually for Iran its economic issues, in fact.

Now that rumbled across the Middle East.

So you had Tunisia, Egypt, but then ultimately Syria and Libya, you had a breakout of rebellions. The Arab Spring, which mostly has come to grief, has been suppressed, and in a couple of instances, has resulted in horrific civil wars like Syria and Libya.

But it also seems to be haunted by this question of maybe the War on Terror, maybe this Neocon crusade to democratise the Middle East, maybe it’s working. Maybe it’s happening, meaning maybe the democratisation of Iraq, even though it involved a lot of sectarian violence, did show these regimes need not be accepted. This legacy of quasi-dictatorial, developmental nationalist regimes in North Africa, in Egypt, in Syria, need not be accepted as the last word in Arab politics.

So you did have what I consider to be an authentic democratic uprising throughout the Middle East and Iran. Now again, it was all a failure and tragedy and, you know, a lot of violence. In Egypt, there was a lot of violence in the suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Civil Wars that are just horrific, and have been regionally destabilising in a profound way. So there was some radicalisation, especially around Kurdish socialism with respect to the Arab Spring.

There was also, at the same time, a kind of funny right wing, I would call radicalisation. People forget there were Europeans and Americans who went to join ISIS. They forget that people went and volunteered to join ISIS. We kind of quickly forget these things and we are a little bit embarrassed about them. But nonetheless, that’s real.

In any case, there was some kind of radicalisation that came, that took the form of the broader, what was known as, the Syntagma square movement. The Arab Spring was related to the squares movement in Greece. But also in other places of Southern Europe, that were hit hard by the financial crisis, and by the Great Recession: Spain, Portugal, the squares movement. It was basically similar to Occupy Wall Street.

There was a lot of mutual inspiration for Occupy and the Arab Spring. I would include the squares movement as part of that, the occupying of the squares in the cities by people who were economically discontented, by the devastation, really, of the Great Recession.

But again, for me, I would want to think about that politically, meaning, yes, an economic crisis, but then what does it expose about the political system, and the inability of the political system to deal with the economic crisis, whether in Europe or the Arab world, or the United States.

Occupy was even broader. I mean, there was some Occupy kind of activism as well in the U.K. So, you know, I do think of these things as related to each other, and again, a formative experience for the Millennial Left. It seems to inspire the possibility for Socialism for the Millennial generation.

Key readings for class on April 25th:

• Cutrone, C. 2023. “Imperialism” — What is it? Why should we be against it? In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 129-132.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Iraq and the election. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 133-144.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The failure of the Islamic Revolution. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 145-154.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. 30 years of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 155-160.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The Left and prospects for democracy in the Middle East: Iraq. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 161-164.

• Cutrone C. 2023. Egypt, or, history’s invidious comparisons. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 165-172.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. To the shores of Tripoli. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 173-176.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The “anti-fascist” vs. “anti-imperialist” Left. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 177-180.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. 10 years after the Iraq War. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 181-186.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Afghanistan: After 20 and 40 years. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 187-198.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Ukraine: More of the same. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 199-204.

Key prompts/questions:

• How is Neoconservatism connected to ex-Trotskyism?

• Are we still living in the confusion between Neo-conservatism and Liberal human rights interventionism?

• Did the Cold War end or become radically transfigured in the context of U.S. “going rogue” in the Middle East?

• How should we interpret the U.S. desire to “democratise the Middle East”?

• What are the major tensions today between the U.S. “going rogue” and the international organisations like NATO?

• How should Marxism re-frame the Hardt and Negri dualism between American Empire and the fight for socialism?

• Considering that the Arab Spring has mostly come to grief, how should it inform the way we re-think about political strategies and political struggle?

• What is the relationship between political struggle, economic precarity, and religious fundamentalism?

• How would Marxists interpret the attraction of forces like ISIS?

To learn more about the course Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, or to sign up:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

A Philosophical Reflection on Peter Rollins’ Theological Project

A Four-Week Seminar Series ft. Peter Rollins, Barry Taylor, John Feldmann, LaVonne Chantal

Throughout the course we will be hosting Peter Rollins, Barry Taylor, John Feldmann, and LaVonne Chantal for an introduction and investigation of Peter Rollins pyrotheological project. Peter Rollins will offer an introduction to pyrotheology, Barry Taylor will be exploring its relationship to everyday life, John Feldmann will be its theoretical relationship to religious structure, and LaVonne Chantal will be introducing an idea about the potential of pyrotheological practice.

Each session will give a different window into pyrotheology, from its basic relationship to everyday life, to the nature of religious structure.

Signing up gives you access to live sessions and lifetime access to recordings.

Introduction to Pyrotheology

Seminar Leaders

Peter Rollins

Peter Rollins is a Northern Irish writer, public speaker, philosopher, producer and theologian. Drawing largely from various strands of continental philosophy, Rollins' early work operated broadly from within the tradition of apophatic theology, while his more recent books have signalled a move toward the theory and practice of death of God theology. In these books Rollins develops a "religionless" interpretation of Christianity called pyrotheology, an interpretation that views faith as a particular way of engaging with the world rather than a set of beliefs about the world.

Barry Taylor

Taylor’s work is focused on the intersections between religion, theology and culture, with a particular emphasis on the impact and interplay of contemporary digital life on religion and belief (particularly Western Christianity). I am particularly interested in religion where it is least obvious and in cultural clinamens, the behaviour and phenomena that escape our categorizing and thus provide opportunity for re-framing how we think and approach life.

John Feldmann

John Feldmann is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Theory at the New School for Social Research in New York City, specializing in psychoanalysis and its intersection with french philosophy, working on theories of the subject. He has been lecturing at various universities on social and political theory, psychoanalysis, international relations and post-Soviet politics.

LaVonne Chantal

LaVonne Chantal is a counsellor and small pizza shop owner who works at the intersection of psychological inquiry and lived experience. Her interests gravitate toward ideas that unsettle certainty and invite deeper reflection on relationships and life. On Substack: .

Each session focuses on a core aspect of pyrotheology and attempts to open the space for engagement, discussion, and personal reflection.

1. Introduction: what is pyrotheology? What differentiates it from classical theology?

2. Everyday life: how should we be thinking about pyrotheology in the context of everydayness?

3. Structure: does pyrotheology embody an organisational structure?

4. Practice: what practices define pyrotheology? How might they impact our social life?

Session Focus:

Session 1: Introduction to Pyrotheology (w/ Peter Rollins)

Session 2: Everyday Life

Session 3: Structure

Session 4: Practice

Schedule

All times 830pm CEST

Sunday April 5th / Session 1: Introduction w/ Peter Rollins

Sunday April 12th / Session 2: Everyday Life w/ Barry Taylor

Sunday April 19th / Session 3: Structure w/ John Feldmann

Sunday April 26th / Session 4: Practice w/ LaVonne Chantal

Introduction to Pyrotheology

Pre-course supplements:

Throughout the development of Philosophy Portal, Peter Rollins work and focus on pyrotheology has been a constant source of inspiration and engagement. You can find below several conversations with Peter Rollins and Barry Taylor which seek to explicate its importance for philosophy. These conversations also function as great supplementary material for our investigation:

(This presentation was originally delivered at the Logic for a Global Brain conference)

(Presentation by Barry Taylor focused on “The Heart of Radical Theology”)

(Conversation focused on Peter Rollins The Orthodox Heretic)

(Conversation focused on Barry Taylor’s Sex, God, and Rock N’ Roll)

(Seminar delivered by Peter Rollins in preparation for Lacan’s Ecrits course)

(Conversation with Barry Taylor in preparation for the Christian Atheism course)

(Conversation with Peter Rollins in preparation for the Christian Atheism course)

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

Previous articles in this series:

1. How to Approach “Marxism” and the Possibility of “Post-Marxism”?

2. On Black Holes and Socialist Unity

What If Sanders Beat Trump?

“The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone is often critiqued for reifying justifications for the existing order of things, e.g. Trump and the right wing populist turn as an inevitable direction for post-neoliberal politics and society.

Why not Trump?1 Why not Trump again?2

Why not let Trump take Greenland?3 Or Canada?

This is the new post-neoliberal order of things, this is the new reality for geopolitics today. The critique is simple: instead of forming a true “Socialist Internationale” that sublates neoliberalism, Cutrone reifies a world doomed to fall into technofeudal fiefdoms, divided up by fascist dictators: Trump takes the Western Hemisphere (starting with Greenland and Canada), Putin and Jinping can divide up the rest. Maybe World War 3 will be a collision resulting from this new technofeudal pseudo-international sphere organised by a zero-sum logic?

Against such Cutronian reifications, can we not critique him on the level of philosophy for not being truly open to obvious counterfactuals?4 For example, does he not dismiss too quickly the alternative “quantum history” timeline: a history in which the Democratic Party throws their full weight of support behind Bernie Sanders and ends up beating Trump in the 2016 Presidential elections?

As a member of the (now dead) Millennial Left, I vividly remember the power and energy that circulated around the Sanders campaign for democratic socialism: ‘a socialist is openly running for president of America!’ I remember the emancipatory possibilities that seemed to be opening in regards to tackling the problem of inequality, and the practical redistribution of obscene concentrations of wealth. What new normative standards would have been established internationally in the past ten years if Sanders had four or eight years in office? Would not free health care and free education become universal standards to which all the world strives? Would not redistribution of the obscene wealth of big technology companies open up new socialist projects establishing a higher order social infrastructure for housing and transportation? Maybe even the first “world communist” project would eventually be capable of establishing a Star Trek-like colony on Mars?!

The point here: is there not an alternative history timeline in which ‘left wing populism’ triumphed over ‘right wing populism’ in the past 10 years? Does not this alternative history timeline open us to a reality in which radical democracy explodes towards the “socialist unity” that Cutrone now calls for in his writings?5

We can imagine:

1. in this timeline, big technology companies become castrated (limited) and regulated (for the people) by a growing international alliance in North America and Europe, which insures the advancement of the fourth industrial revolution leads to a genuine class revolution: workers as a totality have the capacity to buy back what they produce opening up an era of unprecedented collective economic prosperity and social well-being.

2. In this timeline, big technology companies using their AI-mediated international power to build new feudal aristocracies reducing the proletariat into an algorithmically controlled tech-serfdom, or “cloud-proles”, is itself an alternative history nightmare that we only narrowly missed.

3. In this timeline, the fear of cyberpunk dystopian futures — a feature of neoliberalism — dissipate, and a new era of science fiction re-opens the 20th century Star Trek-like dreams: “socialism to the stars!” or “space communism!”6

4. In this timeline, we do not even need to tarry with a figure like Cutrone, because his critiques of the Left turn out to be misguided; and his enormous books: The Death of the Millennial Left, as well as Marxism and Politics, are never even published as collective works.

5. In this timeline, Marxism itself fades into an even deeper academic obscurity as a weird curiosity, as democratic socialism and its successful regulation of global capitalism erodes the need for any deep thinking about a dictatorship of the proletariat; the triumph of Marxism — mirroring what would also be the triumph of Christianity — will not be when it is the signifier organising everyone’s speech, but precisely when it is no longer needed at all.

Before we too quickly reach the conclusion that this is indeed a possibility that Cutrone’s analysis of Trump misses, let us first consider, not only what he actually has to say, but also do so from the standpoint of a self-critical psychology of the (now dead) Millennial Left. The psychology of the (now dead) Millennial Left might produce such an alternative quantum history timeline qua fundamental fantasy, precisely in order to repress, foreclose or disavow — as opposed to remembering, repeating and working-through — the “trauma of Trump”.

On a personal level, the “trauma of Trump” is what totally deflated my once over-zealous excitement for Sanders, and the possibility of a true American socialist project setting a new universal standard for all others to follow. I still remember the day Trump was first elected, it literally sent me into a depression that resulted in a more or less total withdrawal of my political attention for almost a decade. In retrospect, the victory of Trump represented for me the revelation of a gaping hole self-organising — not the dictatorship of the proletariat qua Cutrone’s call for “socialist unity” — but rather the triumph of a whole new era of global capitalism. In this new era “barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods” would fight it out for supremacy, under a logic of “might is right”, with total disregard for the commons sphere, and thus reverse the Enlightenment ideals that Europe had exported throughout the world in the previous centuries.7

In this context, part of my attraction to Cutrone’s work is that, as he says himself (paraphrasing): his work tells the Left what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. Of course members of the (now dead) Millennial Left want to hear that Sanders represented a real possibility for establishing an alternative concrete universality to the one we now occupy; of course the (now dead) Millennial Left wants to hear that democratic socialism is a real possibility to resolve the tensions and antagonisms of the fourth industrial revolution. But is that what we need to hear?

Moreover, when we think of the situation for not only Millennials, but now also Zoomers, is it not more or less obvious that the actuality of Trump’s victory has established a series of cascading victories throughout the rest of the world mirroring his own, and reflect a deeper truth about a new era of global capitalism that totalises us all?

To put it in another way: what are the real possibilities of our present moment? Can what remains in the graveyard of the Millennial Left see it clearly?

Sanders as Regressive? Trump as Revolutionary?

Cutrone’s writings during the build up towards Trump’s first presidential elections are insightful as they are deflating for any former supporter of the Sanders campaign. In the midst of the 2015-16 campaigns themselves, Cutrone totally dismisses the fundamental fantasy of ‘Sanders Socialism’ as pure fantasy disconnected from any understanding of real politics, and instead functioning to mask the hole in the status quo, a hole that he fills with a specific question: “Why not Trump?”8

In this context, Cutrone seems shockingly confident for anyone who had been captured by the idea that ‘Sanders Socialism’ was a real emancipatory opportunity; and he claims that the only reason someone would negate Trump is because they are (repressing, foreclosing, disavowing) the hole of the (neoliberal) status quo itself.9 For Cutrone, there was nothing truly revolutionary in Sanders: while he recognises that both Sanders and Trump represented a potential for a significant challenge to the ‘two major parties’,10 and that Sanders specifically had the potential to represent a deeper reform of the status quo in contrast to Trump,11 but that his alliance with the Democratic Party, as opposed to deep challenge of it, made such reform impossible.12 Cutrone frames the Sanders campaign as revealing a cultural-identitarian opposition internal to the Democrats, between Sanders-style “brocialists” (a certain liberal-type of ‘straight white man’),13 and (Hillary) Clinton-style ‘woke identitarians’ (liberal ‘blacks’, ‘women’ and ‘gays’).14 He furthermore frames this opposition as the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the Democratic Party (Sanders brocialists as ‘left’ and Clinton woke as ‘right’); resulting in critiques of Sanders internal to the Democratic Party itself that he had a “problem with women and blacks”.15 But on a deeper level, for Cutrone, “brocialists” do not understand that Sanders whole campaign was but a “protest pressure-tactic on Hillary”,16 while true revolution would have required “a much greater and more substantial mobilisation for a different politics” impossible “to muster through the Democrats”.17

Why?

As we covered previously,18 Cutrone sees in Sanders a lack of revolutionary spirit on the level of his adherence to “nostalgia for the [FDR] New Deal, [LBJ] Great Society”.19 While many with left-leaning political sensibilities share this nostalgia, for Cutrone, this politics is not a revolutionary sublation of neoliberalism, but a maintenance of a turn to the right for the Democratic Party that stems from FDR’s 1930s ‘top-down’ response to the Great Depression;20 a turn which has continued as a reactionary form of “Third Way” ‘pseudo-radical centrism’ through its results in the 1980s: the neoliberalisation of (the inexistence of) society.21 Consequently, for Cutrone, as long as the Sanders campaign maintained an allegiance as opposed to a deep challenge to the Democratic Party itself, in a genuine return to political mobilisation on the level of labour unions and civil society institutions,22 it is nothing but a mirage (qua fundamental fantasy), and a return to “diminished expectations” from the perspective of Cutrone’s Marxism.23 It is in this context that Cutrone concludes that the real truth of U.S. politics in the mid-2010s was — not the surge of grassroots support for Sanders and his attempt to be a “better champion for the Democrats”24 — but rather the ‘truthful hysteria’ on display in both Democratic and Republican parties alike, and on display by both mainstream conservative and liberal media outlets alike, provoked in the realised potential of Trump’s first presidency.25

So, when it comes to the fantasy of ‘Sanders Socialism’ (qua haunting superposition, ‘did we miss our chance at real socialism?’) and the ‘Trumpian Real’ (qua collapse of the wavefunction into a determinate post-neoliberal form), what is the core of Cutrone’s message for the Left in a nutshell when he provokes hysteria by repeating the question: “Why not Trump?”26

The core of Cutrone’s message is this: while those under the fantasy of ‘Sanders Socialism’ think that it is a sublation of neoliberalism, it is in fact a regressive ‘sub-neoliberalism’ (stemming from Keynesian policies that failed into the neoliberal era);27 whereas the ‘Trumpian Real’ is potentially a genuine post-neoliberalism,28 where we should ask ourselves questions about what potential is opened, not by Trump himself, but about a politics post-Trump:29

“What is the Trump phenomenon, as an indication of possibilities beyond it? This is the question that must be asked — and answered.”

For example, consider this extended reflection by Cutrone in the context of our upcoming class for Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials which centres Trump’s core motivations for becoming president:

“Trump had toyed with the idea of being president for so long, for 30 years or more before he decided to run, well before the 2016 election. So why did he finally do it? And why did he want to be president? Like, what is the point?

You have to read his books, because he wrote books about it where he said explicitly, ‘this is what you can do as president’, ‘this is what the presidential powers would allow me to do’, ‘and this is what I’m going to do’. It is mostly about tariffs, it is about things that he thought he could do unilaterally as president, which is complicated because, of course, tariffs, it seems obvious that it has to be passed by congress or whatever. But he looked also at what Obama, and also Clinton, did in terms of things like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He looked at how they had been negotiated. He looked at how China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had been negotiated by Clinton. And it was not based on congressional legislation, it was based on a lot of executive action. So he took the lessons of that, and said, ‘I could do better’, ‘I’d get a better deal for the United States’.”

In this context, it is instructive to formulate a dialectical antinomy of neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism on the question of international trade agreements that favour a kind of ‘post-national corporate sphere’ (Clinton, Obama) vs. ‘nationalistic protectionism’ (Trump). Consequently, when we look for answers to the possibilities beyond the Trump phenomenon, should we not be directly engaging this antinomy? Should we not be thinking about how international alliances can be better forged as a sublation of nationalistic interests, as opposed to submitting to the shadowy logic of trade agreements forged in secret and without democratic regulation? In other words, what if trade agreements like NAFTA and TPP are themselves forms of ‘corporate fascism’, to which Trump’s reaction is but a lesser symptom? Consider Žižek on the topic of the crisis of ‘democratic capitalism’:30

Even in places where democracy is still formally alive, it's becoming more and more irrelevant as we see with this TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership -- a proposed trade agreement between the European Union and the United States) and other commercial agreements, which are incredibly important. They set the frame for what governments can do, but without any democratic consultation -- they're half-secret, and so on.”

My point here is that without actively taking up “concrete conditions of the historical process” and “the struggle of living social forces” with dialectical logic (e.g. neoliberalism as ‘post-national corporate sphere’ vs. post-neoliberalism as ‘nationalistic protectionism’), what calls itself ‘progressive’ could wind up reversed into its opposite: regressive.

To further engage and reflect Cutrone’s message: he is saying that, considering that the Millennial Left has not done this dialectical work, their fantasies do not, as of now, help us when looking for answers to the beyond of Trump and post-neoliberalism.31 For Cutrone, what called/calls itself the Millennial Left in U.S. politics was/is nothing but a way to avoid the crisis of neoliberalism and the necessity of post-neoliberalism; whereas its own self-narrative that the 2016 (and now 2024) election outcome as just an “accident”, ignores this “much broader and deeper phenomenon”.32

Thus, for Cutrone, in the absence of any real thinking about Marxism, and specifically the problem of the absence of the dictatorship of the proletariat — a problem and absence which precedes both the failures of the 1930s Old Left and the 1960s New Left33 — we do and will continue to find ourselves in an era of post-neoliberalism driven by an energised base which in name tends to be signified as ‘right wing populism’ (even if that specific term is one Cutrone calls into question on the basis that populist phenomenon realises itself through democracy, not its opposite).34 In such a situation we are lost in ‘cultural-identitarian’ struggles between ‘whites’ and ‘blacks’, ‘straights’ and ‘gays’, ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘Europeans’ and ‘others’, etc.

To be clear: this is the hole which Trump not only reveals, but occupies, inclusive of all its comedic stupidity — as a ‘Master Signifier’ that (often) signifies nothing but itself, i.e. its own self-aggrandisement, egotism or narcissism. For example, from Trump at Davos 2026:35

I’ve come to this year’s World Economic Forum with truly phenomenal news from America. Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of my inauguration, and today, after 12 months back in the White House, our economy is booming.

Growth is exploding, productivity is surging, investment is soaring, incomes are rising, inflation has been defeated. Our previously open and dangerous border is closed and virtually impenetrable, and the United States is in the midst of the fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history.

For Cutrone, any ‘Left’ lost in a ‘Sanders Socialism’ fantasy (reflected on the other side of the Atlantic in an equally impotent form of ‘Corbynite Socialism’),36 or defending the neoliberal ‘status quo’ against a real and angry disenfranchised base.37 What is key here is that the base no longer sees in the current political order a future for their children, or even a present in which children can be conceived at all, but instead fear (correct or not), that the future of children will come from importing them via mass immigration from developing countries with naturally higher birth rates. For Cutrone, this dialectical antinomy avoids the crisis of neoliberalism and its politics.38 In contrast, for Cutrone, we should learn to see the relationship between Trump-Sanders as a unified but asymmetrical symptom of both Republican and Democratic Parties (c. 2015-16 to the present),39 and one that leaves us in deep need to return to fundamental political theory.40

For Cutrone, the key asymmetry between the Trump-Sanders parallax (as a self-relating negativity or self-repelling one) is that while Sanders “called for” revolution, Trump “effected it”.41

Thus, the challenge which Cutrone’s stance as “The Last Marxist” is representing, on the level of both politics and economics, and in the context of Trump as signifier of post-neoliberalism, is nothing but the gaping hole where the ‘Master Signifier’ of the dictatorship of the proletariat should be thought-through in theory and embodied in praxis (as a feedback loop): a true ‘Third Way’ ‘radical centrism’ beyond the ‘two party system’ qua ‘status quo’. To really think-act the theory-praxis of dictatorship of the proletariat is to seek the “transformation of democracy” itself, something which the symptom of the term “populism” itself represents — on the one side, from the “frightening spectre” of an angry (white) base; on the other side, from the defenders of a bourgeois status quo.42 Either way, this need for the transformation of democracy must be worked through in the crisis of the politics of neoliberalism, since after Trump, it cannot be avoided.43

Here we should never forget, that for Cutrone, as for Marx, the entire ‘two party system’, or even democracy itself, is not something to be reified as an eternally beautiful ideal of truth and goodness, but rather something to be historically and socially overcome; something which is hopefully, given the establishment of a truly post-capitalist politics, simply unnecessary.44

“Those who demand guarantees in advance should in general renounce revolutionary politics. The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process. It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discord, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. No one has bothered to pave in advance the road of revolutionary upsurge for the proletariat. With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past. Those who are frightened by this had better step aside.” - Trotsky45

My difference(s) with Cutrone, or: Is Cutrone Professor Pangloss?

One salient difference between Cutrone and myself is that, in 2015-16, I was totally naive about the political potentials of the Millennial Left. Sure, he has age and thus experience on me, as well as decades of extended study of the history of politics, especially as informed by early modernism, modernism and Marxism. Nevertheless, when I look back on my political sensibilities in 2015-16, I have long been embarrassed by aspects of my own naivety. It was indeed this naivety that forced me into philosophy as a project to rectify this disposition, which had become totally existentially unstable. Perhaps this difference is just a difference of age and experience? Perhaps 2015-16, as the mark of the “Death of the Millennial Left”, represented the death of a certain field of potentials, and who was to really know what was possible and what wasn’t? Maybe I needed to be caught be a transcendental fantasy in order to truly become ethically in the open movement of the negative?

To be honest, while I have tracked closely and honestly what I call the “right wing counter culture” that started to emerge in 2015-16 (in Trump, politically; but also in Jordan B. Peterson, as a popular intellectual); I sense that I have probably, perhaps, still yet to reconcile myself with this reality. I certainly would not say that I like how politics has actualised over the past ten years. These past ten years have also been marked by incredible and largely unprocessed vicissitudes and disturbances to our collective social life. Either way, strict or simple non-dialectical identification with the “right wing counter culture” as a true emancipatory pathway, still seems totally off to me. I have more come to see it as a potentially necessary moment in a larger movement that is ‘doomed’ to swing back around towards the direct challenge of global capitalism itself.

This general ambivalence, recognising the ‘Death of the Millennial Left’, while at the same time not being able to identify with the ‘right wing counter culture’, is perhaps why I am attracted to Cutrone’s work. Cutrone seems to express a similar sensitivity; consider his personal self-reflection:46

“As a Marxist academic professional and a gay man living in a Northern city, married to a nonwhite Muslim immigrant, it would have been beneficial to me for Hillary Clinton to have been elected President for the U.S. that would have served my personal interests. No doubt about it.

I am opposed to all of Trump’s policies.

I am especially opposed to Trump on his signature issue, immigration.”

The absurdity of most Leftist reaction to Cutrone is just unprocessed sensitivity from the lack of mourning (the Death of the Millennial Left). The reason why I can engage Cutrone’s work is because I have simply undergone the existential work of mourning that political phenomenon. For Cutrone, if one can see clearly, Trump’s election is a disappointment, and not a victory. Why? It is because Cutrone sees all the “anti-Trump” energy and protest as a “distraction from the necessary work”.47 What is the necessary work? As should be consistent in all these articles: it is the dictatorship of the proletariat (as question, as problem, as absence). From Cutrone directly:48

“One response to Trump’s “Make America Great Again!” was a Mexican nationalist slogan, “Make America Mexico again!” But, as a Marxist, I go one step further: I am for the union of Mexico and the U.S. under one government — the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

While I in a way share these sensitivities, and appreciate the way this framing is developed, considering its total absence from our mainstream political discourse; another difference I have with Cutrone, perhaps, is the difficulty in believing this reality is possible. While I was a delusional member of the Millennial Left, whose fantasies circulated around the possibilities of the reduction of wealth inequality and redistribution towards new universal systems of international cooperation and coordination, universal access to education and health care, and so forth; it is hard to buy into the zero-level fantasy of Marxism qua dictatorship of the proletariat.49 In fact, in engaging with Cutrone’s work, I have started to develop the idea that what we find in working through Marx as fundamental political-economic theory, is something specific and useful, albeit in a different way than conventionally interpreted by Marxists themselves:

• Marx really saw the emergence of the first industrial revolution (1760-1840) as mediated by the emergence of a society dominated by capitalism — and in a way “completes” what Adam Smith first developed as classical political economic theory (The Wealth of Nations, 1776) in only seeing the seed-form of this movement;

• but in Marx’s observation and consequent theorisation of its meaning throughout the 1840s and beyond — the need for socialism and ultimately the dictatorship of the proletariat — what we have in fact experienced historically as a world society, is in a sense the opposite of what Marx thought would develop politically: the deepening and intensification of the industrial revolution (second (1870-1914), third (1947-2000), fourth (2016-present)), as mediated but the deepening and intensification of a society dominated by capitalism (and thus under the perpetual crisis of capitalist politics);

• thus, what Marxism teaches us positively is that, under the twin forces of industrial revolution and global capitalism, what has grown since the end of the first industrial revolution and the opening of three further waves, is the absence in the midst of bourgeois social relations of what is necessary for a true society: the dictatorship of the proletariat;

• but also, what grows in this absence is the presence of a “non-society” (Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’), of the breakdown of social links and the growth of isolation (a key feature of ‘neoliberalism’);

• and to make matters more complicated, what grows in industrialisation is the emergence of technology that makes our work, what is supposed to be self-organised by the proletariat, obsolete, ever-shifting and changing, rendering most of us precarious, forever on the edge of practical and utilitarian irrelevance;

• in this context, it is hard to imagine, that if any political action traditionally called ‘socialist’ fails to emerge, we are either doomed to ‘feudal relations’ (which those too strongly identified within religion, and simultaneously misrecognising the modern theological revolution of Christianity, would call ‘sacred social order’), or we are doomed to some kind of techno-apocalyptic extinction (clearly on display in the fundamental fantasies of leading AI tech-experts).

How does Cutrone maintain a faith and hope for the dictatorship of the proletariat? Does he really think its a true political possibility? Or is Cutrone just a ‘Socratic gadfly’ buzzing around our digital heads and upsetting authorities in academically cloistered left-wing political theory communities? The Millennials failed, what about the Zoomers? Are the Zoomers really going to lead a political movement that quasi-resembles something like the emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat? It seems unfathomable, unthinkable even.

A future where a technofeudal elite continues to dominate the production of a base deluding itself (pathetically soothing itself) with religious ideology as superstructure, is most probable, even inevitable.

And as critical as Cutrone is of the fantasies of the (now dead) Millennial Left, in his most self-reflective moments, perhaps he in the end does share aspects of my more doomer-directed sensibilities about the possibility of a dictatorship of the proletariat?:50

“The only argument I found for Hillary was that we lived in the “best of all possible worlds” — as Voltaire’s Professor Pangloss described it in Candide. I didn’t want to be Professor Pangloss. I wanted to spare my students that.

But perhaps we did live in the best of all possible worlds under Obama, and would have continued to do so under Hillary. Perhaps Trump really has ruined everything for everyone. Perhaps the world has come to an end.

I don’t know.

I wish Hillary had won — so I could have found out.”

Well Hillary Clinton certainly does not lead us to a dictatorship of the proletariat! Obama and Clinton as the best of all possible worlds?!

I don’t know, either.

Let’s get more personal. I let my Millennial Left ‘Sanders Socialism’ fantasies die, and in tracking the emergence of the ‘right wing counter culture’ (Trump/Peterson, etc.), I mourned the death (of ‘Sanders Socialism’).

But I did not only mourn, I also started to build. I started to build a philosophical ground that, as mentioned above, would be capable of defending myself from the same naive political sensibilities that led me down the rabbit hole of the fantasies that trapped and killed the Millennial Left. In this building, I did not start with Marx, but Hegel, as inspired and directed by Žižek’s insistence that the time (in the death of the Millennial Left) was for thinking, and not action.

And yet, building an online philosophy community is not only thinking, but also action. And in building I learned online business, and I started to explore para-academic possibilities beyond the structures of the university. And in exploring these para-academic possibilities, I have started to build a more direct relationship to capitalism, entrepreneurship, and collaboration with others either walking a similar path, or starting to.

Here Cutrone’s ideas about the dictatorship of the proletariat have been, at the very least, thought-provoking for me. Consider the following reflections:51

“the “producers’ democracy” of the “workers’ councils” in the revolutionary “dictatorship of the proletariat” was intrinsically related to, and indeed the political expression of, an intensification of the “reification” of the commodity form.”

and:52

“the only possibility of preserving the gains of bourgeois society was through the “dictatorship of the proletariat.””

and:53

“for Marxism more generally, the dictatorship of the proletariat (never mind socialism) required the preponderant power over global capitalism world-wide, that is, victory in the core capitalist countries.”

and:54

“The socialist revolution and the political regime of the dictatorship of the proletariat was not for Lenin the achievement of socialism but rather its mere precondition, opening the door to the self-transformation of society beyond capitalism led by the — “dictatorship,” or social preponderance, preponderance of social power — of the working class.”

and:55

“For Lenin, the necessary dictatorship of the proletariat was the highest form of capitalism — meaning capitalism brought to the highest level of politics and hence of potentially working through its social self-contradictions — and not yet socialism — meaning not yet even the overcoming of capitalism.”

and:56

“For Marx, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” is not merely the overcoming of abstract labor by living labor, but rather the highest expression of their contradiction in the subjectivity of the commodity form.”

and:57

“In this sense, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” marks the end of politics as we know it, and the beginning of politics in a new and more advanced sense, with the working class and its activity helping to point beyond the social dynamic of capital.”

and:58

“evading or otherwise abandoning Marx’s conception of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” means abandoning the struggle to overcome capital.”

and:59

Karl Marx regarded the “necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as a phenomenon of “Bonapartism” — […] This was Marx’s difference from the anarchists: the recognition of the necessity of the state in capitalism.

and:60

Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” was to be achieved by the mass-political socialist party. Marx broke with the anarchists over the latter’s refusal to take “political action” and to thus consign the working class to merely “social action.” i.e. to avoid the necessary struggle for state power.

There is more to be said and explored in regards to this series of quotes, but for our purposes, let me highlight the following threads of relevance to the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (as Cutrone understands it) under the banner “Cutrone’s 10 Commandments for Socialist Unity”:

1. Intensified reification of the commodity-form

2. As the only means of preserving bourgeois social relations

3. Expressed as victories within core capitalist countries (spreading world-wide)

4. As not socialism but its mere precondition

5. As the highest-form of capitalism brought to politics (social self-contradictions)

6. As the highest expression of contradiction in subjectivity of the commodity form

7. Towards a more advanced politics pointing beyond the social dynamic of capital

8. Without this form of politics the struggle to overcome capitalism is abandoned

9. Without this form of politics we fall into anarchism

10. And so socialist party politics must serve the aims of this more advanced politics

Is Philosophy Portal just my entrepreneurial hustle? Or in building Philosophy Portal am I starting to build out the knowledge in seed-form of what would be useful to a “dictatorship of the proletariat”? What I have learned and what I have overcome in myself in building Philosophy Portal is the following:

1. I have reconciled myself to the necessity of the commodity-form

2. I see this commodity form is essential and indispensable for maintaining and potentially enhancing my bourgeois social relations (as opposed to abandoning them for some form of religious communitarianism, which I dislike)

3. I believe that any socialist revolution would have to emerge within core capitalist countries (industrially developed countries)

4. That I am a capitalist politician at best, and not yet socialist

5. That my capitalist activities must be slowly mediated by politics of my immediate social self-contradictions (those closest to me, starting with my family, and building out from there, starting with those I work with directly)

6. That I will experience the highest form of my own social self-contradictions in this work (my motives for learning and teaching philosophy, etc.)

7. That a politics can emerge from this work that is not reducible to capitalism (i.e. socialist forms of life and ways of being)

8. That without this work I would be relegated to a daily life and life work that is simply within capitalism (whether admitted or not)

9. That anarchism is a dead-end (I’ve never been deeply attracted to it)

10. And the question: how does this work connect to an actual socialist party politics?

Or is it more likely that I am just a symptom of neoliberalism, and do I just need to face the fact that entrepreneurship is the only real option today when our institutions have all been hollowed out? Should I just rage quit?

I certainly don’t want to delude myself here, and try to defend myself against that. Of course, it would be attractive to believe ‘I am building the seed-form for something that would be useful knowledge informing a dictatorship of the proletariat’. What would be a much more bitter pill to swallow would be ‘I am just a symptom of neoliberalism and in post-neoliberalism I will be forced to accept the zeitgeist of a new religious ‘sacred social order’ that preserves the base of capitalist politics’.

In-between these two possibilities, I don’t want to lose some real sense that there could be an emancipatory possibility here or there, as long as I remain attentive, as long as I keep my mind sharp to the moment, self-reflective in relation to both the theory and practice of what I am doing. And, in truth, small victories, from time to time, do happen. In the context of the entire journey, there have even been some big victories. I try, and have to remind myself all the time, to focus on those victories when the defeats feel overwhelming or when the social circumstances appear daunting.

But what about those defeats? Following Cutrone, it seems to me: the biggest obstacle for a dictatorship of the proletariat, is not the reductive capitalists, but it is simply the workers themselves, human beings, people being people, people being what they are. Humans are humans, as Christians and Lacanians know well, full of sin or lack or whatever you want to call it. Humans are humans, doomed to lack the self-reflective and self-critical capacities (even after centuries Kant and Hegel!) to really be helpful in any genuine and meaningful sense, in any way that would point in the direction of the self-organisation of the proletariat. The self-organisation of global capitalism, in contrast, works very well exploiting and dominating the human condition in this very sin and lack.

At the moment, I see a bit of spread but nothing of scale, nothing of any relevance of the larger political processes shaping our world.

And so I wait patiently, thinking and acting, building slowly, trying to get a better sense and understanding of the real of the social field, trying to get a better sense and understanding of what is really possible, and what is not.

I wait patiently, trying not to rage quit.

Any honest investigation in this direction is dark.

In the first class I led with Cutrone, inspired by the Lenin chapter of Marxism and Politics, only reinforced this sensitivity and understanding. Cutrone noted that the biggest problem for the formation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in and following the Russian Revolution, was not Stalin or American capitalism, but the people or workers themselves. In other words, the revolution failed not because of this or that leader, but because of people, because of the workers. In Christian or Lacanian terms, because of their sin, because of their lack. And in that context, it is hard not to try and reconcile oneself to the truth of religion, as frustrating as it is for those fantasies of socialism, those socialist fantasies die hard.

But, if Christianity is the truth of religion, as I like to say, what if it is true, and Atheism is the truth of Christianity? (as I also like to say).61

For now, I go on, with the dialectical concepts, of not only “Christian Atheism”,62 but also “Conservative Communism”.63 I go on with the hopes that the direction of world society still points towards the re-contextualisation of the former terms (Christian, Conservative) within the realisation of the latter terms (Atheism, Communism).

In 10 years, how deluded will I find my own thoughts now? Am I still trapped in a (necessary) transcendental illusion? Or am I moving ethically in the open movement of negativity?

Is Cutrone Professor Pangloss?

Do you (idiots) not see that Trump is happening again?

Cutrone is trying to tell us that, against the ‘Trump hysteria’, we have to reconcile ourselves to a few facts:64

• Trump is actually a Democrat — who even wants to but cannot give free health care! — and who invaded and destroyed the Republicans

• The Democrats are not Socialists, i.e. they are not fighting for a dictatorship of the proletariat, and so running within the Democratic Party as currently constructed, will never lead to Socialism (that is the fantasy)

Thus we should remember:

• The Democrats are already right-wing, they are already lost in fantasies that will never be brought to bare on the true fundamental problems of capitalist politics

Here we should ask:

• What is post-neoliberalism and what are its possibilities beyond Trump?

In this context, there are no easy answers (e.g. Universal Basic Income). Consider Žižek on the topic:65

“While in principle I support basic income, but I don’t think its the solution. Basic income is, really maybe its a more intelligent, efficient version of capitalism, where the idea is this, that, if you take care of those who don’t work through basic income, you can have a much more pure and tougher competition, efficient capitalism, for the rest.”

Cutrone reminds us here that the Republicans, through Nixon, even floated the idea of UBI but it was opposed by the Democrats and the labour unions, who were afraid that it would be an excuse to reduce the pay of actual workers.66

The question that haunts Cutrone is one that haunts me as well: is anything like ‘progressivism’ (which is a word that has been now basically destroyed) possible in post-neoliberalism? Cutrone’s message is again simple: don’t look for anything like a real progressivism in the Democrats.67

Where should we look for it? For Cutrone, its not in anything like the Democratic Socialists of America, but rather in the Chinese Communist Party.68 As for the Democrats themselves, Cutrone’s view is simple, the ‘right wing’ identitarianism will simply kill them (and again, Trump is the True Democrat):69

“The Democrats’ only answer to racism, sexism and homophobia is to fire people and put them in prison. — Whereas Trump lets them out of jail to give them a job.

Perhaps their getting a job will help us, too.

So: Why not Trump again?”

I’ll end by saying that I would claim that Cutrone’s current writings do not occupy the space of “Why not Trump” or “Why not Trump again?”, but rather: “Do you (idiots) not see that Trump is happening again?”

A Reflective Note on Quantum History

As suggested previously,70 Žižek’s latest work Quantum History is a useful work to put into conversation with Cutrone’s political works published by Sublation Press. Žižek notes that, for quantum physics, we are focusing on a (Hegelian) movement in which the collapse of the wavefunction (e.g. the election of Donald Trump, and again) not only retroactively changes and reconstructs the past71 — not the actual facts but how it is symbolically contextualised72 — but also opens a forward movement in time (e.g. neoliberalism to post-neoliberalism). This is for Žižek ‘the parallax of time itself’, i.e. the “non-relation” or “lack of common ground” between “past and future” in the present. Thus, it is cheap and lazy for Leftists to only make fun of Trump’s retroactive re-imagining of America (e.g. “Make America Great Again”); Leftists must also recognise the way in which Trump’s collapse (of the political wave function) also functions to move us forward (into post-neoliberalism).

Here Žižek’s Quantum History reminds us that one of the meanings of the collapse of the wavefunction is that there is a genuine openness to the future, that reality is not determined, that reality has not “yet made all the children it’s going to make”.73 There is a birth process it be attentive to here, which requires “philosophical midwifery” qua “Socratic Marxism” (i.e. our spontaneous authoritarian sensibilities must not only tolerate, but learn to love, gadflies). By definition, a baby does not know what a child is, or that it is destined to be a child, but also and more interestingly, what type of child, let alone adult, it will be. Here Cutrone’s work reminds us of this old birth metaphor when it comes to thinking about the relationship between capitalism and socialism.74 Capitalism is a ‘labour qua birth process’, and socialism is the ‘foetus’ which capitalist politics repeatedly ‘aborts’, instead of ‘bringing to term’.

How do we bring it term?

First, we have to engage the Freudian work on the level of — not our personal Oedipal constellation — but rather the political social constellation of capitalist politics itself. This is what makes Cutrone’s work so valuable: it functions as a “remembering, repeating and working-through”. In this context, Žižek makes this surprising connection between Freudian analysis and quantum physics: what is revealed in quantum mechanics is that, not only is our personal subjective familial history a ‘barred-one’ (qua marriage, parental relations, etc.), but that the history of reality is itself a trauma.75 Recall, as Cutrone often does, the old Marxist axiom that “tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”.

Thus, the current turn within the ‘right wing counter culture’ to ‘respect’ tradition, should be seen as the crucial first step of ‘remembering’: not to in the end fall into a non-dialectical identitarian relation, but rather to ‘repeat and work-through’, the trauma of the history reality itself. Žižek reminds us that remembering on its own runs into an immediate deadlock:76

“the content brought out lacks its proper symbolic context and thus remains ineffective; it fails to transform the subject and resistance remains active, limiting the amount of content revealed.”

In other words, the problem of simply remembering:77

“stays focused on the past and ignores the subject’s present constellation which keeps this past alive, symbolically active. Resistance expresses itself in the form of transference: what the subject cannot properly remember, she repeats, transferring the past constellation onto a present (e.g., she treats the analyst as if he were her father).”

Does not someone like political commentator Nick Fuentes make this mistake in his identity with Trump? Is he not now going through a child-like reaction formation qua rebellion to ‘His Father’? Does not the entire ‘right wing counter culture’ make this mistake, whether in identity with Christianity or whatever other tradition?

The stakes of moving from ‘remembering’ through ‘repeating’ to ‘working-through’, requires psychoanalysis, insofar as it requires attention to the present moment of the subject’s ‘libidinal-economy’. From Žižek:78

“Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis, and this turn is self-reflexive in a properly Hegelian sense: resistance is a link between object and subject, between past and present, a proof that we are not only fixated on the past but that this fixation is an effect of the present deadlock in the subject’s libidinal economy.”

And this brings us back around ‘full circle’ to the problem of ‘Sanders Socialism’, as well as Cutrone’s insistence that the form of political thinking we find here, is inadequate to the task of post-neoliberalism and the beyond of the Trump phenomenon. Here Žižek states that “counterfactual thinking” (e.g. running the thought-experiment: ‘What if Sanders beat Trump?’), allows us to “counter the facts” and entertain, from the position of philosophical speculation in a parallax (non-relation) with politics: “What if?” or “If only…”.79

So how do we avoid, not only the naive identity of ‘Sanders Socialism’ while not becoming ‘Professor Pangloss’ (i.e. the belief that Obama and Clinton represented the ‘best of all possible worlds’?); we should strengthen — through remembering, repeating, and working-through — our capacity for speculative cognition about socialism. And here, Cutrone’s work is indispensable.

This year Philosophy Portal will be hosting a year-long course with “The Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone. To learn more or to get involved, see:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

6

In this timeline, Cutrone does not even have to bother being “The Last Marxist”, because he is actually the leader of a “space communist” federation managing a fleet of new X-wing pilots to take on nefarious forces in a galaxy far far away.

This year at Philosophy Portal we are unfolding a new course, Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, led by “The Last Marxist”, Chris Cutrone. Throughout the course we will be thinking American Revolution, Trump, Lenin, Critical Theory, The Party, and much more. To find out more or to get involved, visit the link below:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

What can be found below is an edited reflection offered by Marxist theorist Chris Cutrone informed by a question that will shape the upcoming class at Philosophy Portal Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials.

How should we be thinking about a figure like Donald Trump in the context post-neoliberalism?

The discourse we are dealing with now, especially that we are in a second Trump term, is that of post-liberalism. People will call it post-liberalism. I think that’s rather precipitous, meaning there is a difference between liberalism and neoliberalism, otherwise it would never have been called neoliberalism.

I wrote about Trump and Bernie Sanders as parallel figures, meaning that you can’t really understand one without the other. But Trump actively courted Sanders voters much more than Sanders actively courted Trump voters.

Trump is in some ways like an ultra-neoliberal figure. It seems like his entire career is based on neoliberalism. So Trump could be seen as someone who is trying to restore neoliberalism, who is trying to return capitalism to when neoliberalism worked.

And yet Trump also seems to be an anti-neoliberal figure in the sense that he was a dissident of neoliberalism at its inception.

Trump first floated the idea of running for president in 1987. Why? Because of the Black Monday stock market crash. In other words, it seemed like Reagan and Reaganism was actually inadequate to the task of successfully managing capitalism in the stock market crash of 1987. This gave rise to the movie by Oliver Stone, “Wall Street”, emphasising “greed is good” with the Michael Douglas character.

Trump was there, right there, to say Reagan’s policies were not good enough.

Bernie Sanders is also a figure of the 1980s, who was there as a dissident from Reaganism. And so the fact that Trump and Sanders, these dissenters from Reaganism, back when Reaganism seemed successful, come back in during the crisis of neoliberalism, it makes sense.

For me, Trump is a complicated figure when he says “Make America Great Again”. His political career is kind of curious. He floated the idea of of running for president but didn’t end up running in 1988. He joined Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 1992, mostly as a support for anti-NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement). When Perot lost, he was like, well maybe Bill Clinton, who also ran against NAFTA is going to be good enough. But then he felt betrayed by Clinton because Clinton ultimately signed NAFTA, an agreement that had been negotiated by George Herbert Walker Bush.

And so Trump was stuck with the Reform Party, but then quit the Reform Party when it got taken over by Pat Buchanan because, as Trump put it, Buchanan was a fascist. So he quit. Trump and Jesse Ventura led a walkout from Perot’s Reform Party.

And then we didn’t really hear from Trump. He supported Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign. He basically supported the Democrats. So where do Trump and Sanders come from, really?

Trump and Sanders come from the failure of Obama and the disappointment with Obama. Both Trump and Sanders would have been provisionally supportive of the Reform moment that Obama represented, both in the realm of the economy, again, the financial crisis and the wars, the “War on Terror”. Both Trump and Sanders were dissenters from the War on Terror and they were dissenters from the neoliberalism that led to the crisis of the financial crash and the Great Recession of 2008. Both Trump and Sanders were critical of how Obama handled those things.

In other words, Obama seemed to betray or let down the promise of his own presidency.

So both Trump and Sanders came up with the idea of running for president in 2016 in 2012, as a result of being disappointed with Obama and with the campaign he ran. They both kind of grudgingly came around to, you know, ultimately having to put their hat in the ring, but obviously very differently.

Sanders never meant to be president, and he never even meant to be the candidate, because he knew that that wasn’t in the cards. He was a message candidate, he was trying to affect the Democratic Party platform. He was trying to show the Democrats how they could win the Obama vote from 2008 back, and how they needed that vote to succeed. He was trying to show the Democrats how they should appeal to that vote, you know, in terms of a reform agenda and program. That is what his candidacy was about, it was about winning back the youth vote that got disenchanted with Obama on an economic message.

Trump, on the other hand, is very different. He didn’t want to be a message candidate. He wanted to be president. For Trump, there’s no point in running at all unless you’re going to win. So contrary to Sanders, he wanted to be president. Then the question is: why did he want to be president?

Trump had toyed with the idea of being president for so long, for 30 years or more before he decided to run, well before the 2016 election. So why did he finally do it? And why did he want to be president? Like, what is the point?

You have to read his books, because he wrote books about it where he said explicitly, ‘this is what you can do as president’, ‘this is what the presidential powers would allow me to do’, ‘and this is what I’m going to do’. It is mostly about tariffs, it is about things that he thought he could do unilaterally as president, which is complicated because, of course, tariffs, it seems obvious that it has to be passed by congress or whatever. But he looked also at what Obama, and also Clinton, did in terms of things like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He looked at how they had been negotiated. He looked at how China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had been negotiated by Clinton. And it was not based on congressional legislation, it was based on a lot of executive action. So he took the lessons of that, and said, ‘I could do better’, ‘I’d get a better deal for the United States’.

And so Trump took all these discontents with neoliberalism, how he felt that it had been botched going back to Reagan, and how the potential of neoliberalism had been squandered, including the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, and said ‘I can do better than Bill Clinton did’, ‘I can do better than Obama did’.

And, you know, he was not a George W. Bush supporter, right? So he did a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. He overthrew the Republican Party of Bush and Cheney and of McCain and Romney. And, in his way, Trump signalled that through personal attacks on McCain and Romney, and on Liz Cheney, like seemingly gratuitous personal attacks, but they mean something.

Key readings for class on March 29th:

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The Sandernistas: the final triumph of the 1980s. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 85-96.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Why not Trump? In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 97-102.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The crisis of neoliberalism and Marxism in the age of Trump. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 103-108.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. The Millennial Left is dead. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 109-118.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Why I wish Hillary had won. In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 119-122.

• Cutrone, C. 2023. Why not Trump again? In: The Death of the Millennial Left. Sublation Press. p. 123-128.

Key prompts/questions:

• Why should we think of Trump and Sanders as parallel figures?

• What is the difference between “post-liberalism” and “post-neoliberalism”?

• What are the core antagonisms between Reagan’s style of neoliberalism and Trump’s style of post-neoliberalism?

• How would Trump have negotiated ‘better deals for America’ than Clinton and Obama regarding both NAFTA and TPP?

• What are the core differences between Trump’s motivations in his first and second terms?

• Why did Trump provoke so much hysteria on both sides of the political spectrum?

• How did Trump manage to organise such a passionate base? What is wrong with conceiving of this base as ‘right wing populism’?

To learn more about the course Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials, or to sign up:

Marxist Politics for Undead Millennials

The Slovenian School Reading Group is a monthly reading group. Throughout 2026 the reading group will be focused on Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View. This work covers a wide range of topics, including philosophy, psychoanalysis, neuroscience, politics, literature, and film, and is divided into three main sections: philosophical, scientific, and political. The book has often been described as his magnum opus, as he attempts to outline his system of thought.

The goal of the Slovenian School Reading Group is to help us to think the politics of subjectivity and come to a refined understanding of the dialectical and unconscious dimensions of the subject’s life.

To get access to both the live sessions and recordings, sign up as a member to The Portal, or become a paid subscriber to Dimitri Crooijman’s Substack or Patreon:

Slovenian School Reading Group

Previous articles in this series:

1. Introducing The Parallax View

Ethical-Politics in Open Movement of Negativity

Žižek’s The Parallax View operates most specifically in the parallax of philosophy-politics, not as an ahistorical eternity, but rather in the historical wake of the French Revolution and German Idealism. For Žižek, the parallax at this precise location still haunts modern subjectivity and the modern world, whether this haunting takes the form of “substantial-ethical identification”,1 the “modern rational state”,2 the “uncontrollability of global capitalism”,3 or even the “shadow” of “Hegelian dialectics” itself.4

True to the book and to his work in general, Žižek is not looking to “synthesise” the results of the French Revolution and German Idealism into a “philosopher king” who could “set things right” — which arguably already happened in “Bonapartism”5 — but is rather attempting to demonstrate how the subversive core of Hegelian dialectics is located in maintaining the “parallax gap” “between-the-two” itself.6 Žižek refers to this maintenance of the parallax gap as occupying a space of “two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible”;7 and thus the true operates as an “inherent tension, gap, non-coincidence, of the One itself”.8

Practically speaking, this brings us to the problem that haunts modern rational “Enlightenment” cognition: the problem of the sublation of violence; that our rational orders are always the result of having moved through a specific form of catastrophic war, civil or international:9

“The revolutionary Terror (of the French Revolution) is a kind of obscene double of Kant’s ethical thought: its destructive violence merely “externalises” the terrorist potential of Kant’s thought.”

And:10

“Hegel’s point is (…) the enigma of why, despite the fact that revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to go through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State.”

In terms of the historical break that the parallax of French Revolution-German Idealism represent, the principle of identification takes center stage: Žižek suggests that we move from the immaturity of identification with ethnic substance and particular traditions (pre-modern totalities), to the “very open movement of negativity” itself (modern totality).11 This open movement of negativity is not an “explosion” that “parasitises” the positive order (e.g. World War I, II, Cold War), but rather represents the challenge for subjectivity to embody a universal ethical-political principle in the negativity itself (post-World War international order, neoliberal world order, etc.).12

The question for us today, and the question that haunts us in Žižek’s work, is what form of negativity will explode the coordinates at the end of the neoliberal world order (or just “global capitalism”), and what ethical-political principle will emerge in the negativity itself? In Žižek’s work, despite his emphasis on a return from Marx to Hegel, he maintains a type of fidelity to the ethical-political category “communism”. How does this category appear in Žižek’s work? It certainly cannot be reduced to the “planned economy” of 20th century “State Socialism”,13 but it also cannot be reduced to the central Marxist object of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.14 In Žižek’s work, what we find is a commitment to thinking the “real of capitalism” — its tendency to “impersonal compulsion”, “endless circular movement”, “expanded self-reproduction” as an “end in-itself”,15 which is reflected back into the very core of the modern subject: death drive as “possession” to “enjoy life in excess”, to become “passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things”.16

Thus, for Žižek, whatever “communism” means as an ethical-political category, it cannot erase this dimension of death drive, but must learn to work with it directly. The idea of a “planned economy” where a “modern rational state” controls/regulates capital, thus seems out of the question; but does it rule out the “dictatorship of the proletariat” where subjects collectively regulate their own life in capitalism? How should we think about the ethical-political nature of our situation if we start from the point of view of subjectivity as inherently/fundamentally “possessed” (demonic), doomed to enjoy life in excess of any regulatory given, repeating higher order tensions that break the “the All of continuity”, introducing “radical imbalance” into the field of political-economy? Would not the name for “communism” here be a process of breaks (communisation?) that “progressively” “real-ise” this “inhuman core” of the human itself? The subjective position of a “communiser” would thus not be one of desiring the impossible thing that we all lack (Kingdom of God/Communism), but rather the position of drive which embodies the hole at the heart of the parallax between lack and excess (i.e. openness to the negativity of the other realising their inhumanity).

1. Lacan’s Object and the Real of German Idealism

Žižek opens the first chapter of The Parallax View with a direct reference and connection to another of his core texts: The Ticklish Subject. If The Ticklish Subject focuses on the nature of subjectivity, The Parallax View focuses on the nature of objectivity. He frames the question: “what is the object tickling the ticklish subject?” His answer?: “at its most radical” “the object” “which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things”.17

Here we can already jump ahead of ourselves, into the field of political-economy: in the 20th century modern subjectivity attempted two alternative routes or responses to the liberal capitalist society as object: think of 20th century Fascism — planned (ethno-nationalist) society — or Communism — planned (state-socialist) economy. Both projects could be framed as the collectivity of modern subjectivity attempting to avoid “being tickled”, i.e. to make society or the economy “run smoothly” — vis-a-vis “others” (Jews/minorities) or “capitalism” (M-C-M’) — as disturbing the smooth running of things. From Žižek:18

“(We should not forget that the first half of the twentieth century was marked by two big projects which fit this notion of “alternate modernity” perfectly: Fascism and Communism. Was not the basic idea of Fascism that of a modernity which provides an alternative to the standard Anglo-Saxon liberal-capitalist one of saving the core of capitalist modernity by casting away its “contingent” Jewish-individualist-profiteering distortion? And was not the rapid industrialization of the USSR in the late 1920s and 1930s also an attempt at a modernization different from the Western-capitalist one?)

The logic of these alternate modernities is simple: if only we could remove X (Jews/minorities) or remove Y (capital accumulation) then we would remove the obstacle to a realised society/economy. The result was the object “tickling” modern subjectivity in the most devastating way possible, i.e. “Holocaust” and the German’s losing WWII, and “Gulags” and the USSR losing the Cold War.

Only the realisation of 21st century global capitalism — the embrace of constantly disturbing our traditional/ethnic substance in the constant revolution of both industrial production and consumption (e.g. “Fourth Industrial Revolution” of AI/machine learning, all solid objects melting into “digital commodities” on virtual storefronts, etc.) — has opened the possibility of “being tickled properly by the object” (i.e. in a way that does not lead to genocides, war, or total social collapse). In other words, whenever modern subjects attempt to generate a “collective narrative” that would replace the “inhuman narrative” of capitalism, it fails, becomes undermined by a real object that brings about absolute catastrophe.19

While Žižek does not mention it directly until the end, the object of his focus in the first chapter of The Parallax View is ultimately related to thinking how we reconcile with the real of global capitalism.

Žižek notes that his understanding of dialectical materialism is grounded in an object that constitutively “eludes”, an object representing a “blind spot”, which at the same time indicates the “inclusion” of the subject.20 Here we should, as we did for the opening reflection on the book, juxtapose the materialism of “determinate reflection” — that of conceiving of reality as a substantial whole represented in laws and formulas (positive external substance) — with the materialism of “reflective determination” — that of subjectivity tarrying with its inner torsions and disturbances (self-relating negativity). Žižek’s name for this objective elusive blind spot with which we must tarry as our fundamental correlate is the same as Lacan’s: objet petit a, the object-cause of desire (or the “absent Cause” of the subject, the “unfathomable X” that is both singular and universal).21 In the aforementioned examples of 20th century Fascism — obsessed with ridding good society of the Jews/minorities — or 20th century Communism — obsessed with ridding a good economy of capital accumulation — Jews/Capital represent a misrecognition of the “absent Cause”/“unfathomable X” to be abolished.

For Žižek, crucially, not only is this object is not substantial — it is insubstantial; but it is at the same time open to being “transubstantiated” into an object of desire that, for one subject is the complete focus of libidinal investment (e.g. “we have to get rid of the Jews/Capital accumulation”), and for another subject, is just an ordinary object to which the subject is ultimately indifferent (“why do you care so much about the Jews/Capital accumulation?”).22 In this context, Žižek calls the objet petit a a “pure parallax object” in which we find an “inherent tension, gap, non-coincidence” of “the One itself”. Here we should make the additional emphasis that Žižek is thinking of this pure parallax object — say between the focus of libidinal investment and ultimate indifference — as not only occurring between subject A and subject B, but internal to subject A itself, i.e. an object that totally possesses the subject in one moment, the subject can be indifferent to in the next. In Žižek’s words, we are dealing with:

“a difference which is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a minimal difference which divides one and the same object from itself”

This is what allows Žižek to avoid the “dialectical maths of synthesis”: A + B = C; and instead operates in the “dialectical maths of negative self-relation”, where A does not equal itself (A≠A), which can result in either the “desire of spurious infinity” (A, B, C…), or the “drive of true infinity” (self-relating negativity of A with itself: $<>a).23 In a maths of dialectical synthesis we can fall into the trap of:

• A (German identity as thesis/abstract) + B (Jewish identity as anti-thesis/negative) = C (realised German society/concrete); or

• A (Proletarian identity as thesis/abstract) + B (Bourgeois identity as anti-thesis/negative) = C (realised Communist society/concrete)

In other words, we fall into the trap that our identity is complete or completable, if only we get rid of “the object” “which objects, that which disturbs the smooth running of things”. In contrast, the methods of negative self-relation asks of us something more challenging: a constant tarrying with inner torsions and disturbances where we ultimately reflect the antagonism of our very identity (e.g. German or proletariat), and why our identity appears to require an external enemy-obstacle for transcendental support and the structuring of temporality towards a non-problematic reconciliation.

• A (German identity as abstract) ≠ A (German identity as own negative) = A (German identity as itself contradictory/incomplete/open to the future)

• A (Proletarian identity as abstract) ≠ A (Proletarian identity as own negative) = A (Proletarian identity as itself contradictory/incomplete/open to the future)

In these second formulas we encounter a concrete problem but also a concrete solution. The concrete problem involves the problem of telos or directionality given that the prior telos or directionality was dependent on an obstacle-enemy and fantasmatic reconciliation in the formulas for synthesis. The concrete solution involves the capacity for retroactive analysis in regards to both 20th century Fascism and Communism, the Germans and the Proletariats, were their own worst problem, i.e. Fascism failed because German identity was itself misrecognised, and Communism failed because Proletarian identity was itself misrecognised. While this does not give us, perhaps, the solution to the problem we are looking for, it at least allows us a critical distance from forms of identity that we know are misrecognitions of the problem. If we are honest, we should take a critical distance from both an idealisation of an ethnic substance as capable of realising the good society, or an idealisation of proletarian subjectivity as capable of realising the good economy.

However, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, on the level of philosophy, this dialectical maths of negative self-relation gives us the fundamental difference between a Deleuzian philosophy of multiplicity, and a Žižekian philosophy of negativity. Deleuze attempts to think multiplicity without any relation to “the One” (his attempt to escape both the classical philosophy of Plato and the modern philosophy of Hegel); whereas Žižek attempts to think the way multiplicity is epiphenomenal in relation to negativity of the objet a (his attempt to rethink both classical and modern philosophy through Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis):24

“Objet petit a is the very cause of the parallax gap, the unfathomable X which forever eludes the symbolic grasp, and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives.”

In the first chapter of The Parallax View, Žižek does not focus his attention so much on Plato as he does on Hegel. We are confronted with a fundamental question: how does the objet petit a as the cause of the parallax gap relate to German Idealism, and specifically the passage from Kant to Hegel, i.e. the field that Deleuze ultimately wanted to reinvent? We can understand Žižek’s interpretation of the passage from Kant to Hegel if we frame it in relation to the Lacanian algorithm $<>a (barred subjectivity in non-relation to its object-cause of desire). Žižek suggests that the barred subject is what Kant and Hegel would both refer to as “the transcendental I”, which is “barred” (limited on the level of phenomena) in relation to its own “object-cause” in the sense that:25

“if it were to appear to itself, its self-appearance would be the “thing itself”, that is, the direct self-transparency of a noumenon”.

While the transcendental I qua barred subject is “pure apperception” (neither noumenal nor phenomenal), empty with no phenomenal correspondence, its limitation vis-a-vis its own object-cause (X) literally “causes our perception”, i.e. we perceive because the object-cause of the transcendental I is absent.26 Consequently, Žižek suggests that what Lacan calls objet petit a is an invention located at the level of what Kant and Hegel would both refer to as “noumenon”:27

“the void of the transcendental object, the inaccessible X (beyond phenomenal appearances)”

What the self-limited “human/modern subject” qua barred subject/transcendental I encounters in the objet petit a/noumena is neither animality (pre-human reality) nor the divine (transcendence) but the “gap in immanence”,28 the space were the human faces the inhuman, or what negates the human as inherent to the human itself.29 If we apply this logic to our running examples, we get the “spectre of the Jew” (for the German Fascist), and the “spectre of Capital accumulation” (for the Proletarian Communist) as occupying both this repressed dimension of the “inhuman”, i.e. “the Jew” or “Capital accumulation” as an “inhuman monstrosity” that is thwarting our capacity to become “fully human”. Žižek is thus calling for us to more deeply reflect how the very truth of German Idealism, as opening up this inhuman dimension in-between the limitation of the transcendental I and the inaccessibility of the noumena, has been misrecognised (in the situation of 20th century Fascism, by German politics itself). We can dive deeper into the structure if we work with the following formulas:

• Transcendental I/$ <> Noumena/objet petit a

• Self-limited phenomena <> inaccessible beyond

What we find “in-between”, i.e. in the “non-relation” (<>) is:

• Spectre of the Jew/Capital accumulation as “inhuman monstrosity” which at once “self-limits phenomena” (German/Proletarian identity) and creates an “inaccessible beyond” (realised German society/realised Communist economy)

However, the dialectical maths of self-relating negativity is what would ask of us to precisely not reduce the “inhuman monstrosity” to its “historical substance” or properly “misrecognition via transubstantiation” qua “the Jew” or “Capital accumulation”. The dialectical maths of self-relating negativity would rather shift our attention to a dimension that Žižek, following Hegel, calls the “Night of the World”:30

“only with Kant and German Idealism is the excess to be fought absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (this is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World”, in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the darkness all around).”

Thus, what both 20th century Fascists and Communists miss for Zizek is this dimension of the “Night of the World” (i.e., the very core of subjectivity), and instead project their “Light of Reason” as capable of “fighting the darkness all around”. In this situation the insubstantial objet petit a, in its historical transubstantiation as “Jews/Capital”, gets misrecognised as “the substantial problem”. The deeper problem of substance itself is found if we are capable of reflecting modern subjectivity as such as being confronted with the challenge of the “gap in immanence” itself (qua Night of the World). To put it simply: getting rid of and/or overcoming “Jewish subjectivity” or “Bourgeois subjectivity” is not the problem of subjectivity as such. Thus, we can say that 20th century radical politics was unable to recognise the problem at its deepest level: subjectivity as such.

Towards thinking this dimension, Žižek, again following Hegel, attempts to revolutionise the parallax of phenomena-noumena vis-a-vis the problem of the subject’s freedom. Žižek locates the subject’s freedom, not on the side of phenomena (the limited transcendental I), nor on the side of noumena (the inaccessible beyond), but rather in-between the two.31 To state this differently: if the subject were not self-limited by an inaccessible object, and if the inaccessible object were present and/or accessible to the subject, the subject would lose/be deprived of, its freedom or “spontaneity”.32 This is all to say that Žižek’s parallax object/real is structured in such a way that we human beings are free, and any real politics has to start with understanding the reality of that freedom. The key here is understanding the price we pay for freedom: which is that any “coherent identity” or “enemy obstacle” will be reduced to the parallax object/real of the “negative one”. Žižek states that this object “pulverises sameness” (e.g. German/Proletarian) into a “multitude of appearances” (e.g. 21st century global capitalism).33 However, there is dialectical movement that may be generalisable vis-a-vis this real:34

1. First, the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions), and

2. Second, the Real is purely virtual, actually non-existent, something which is retroactively constructed by the multiplicity of symbolic formations

In order to understand this parallax movement vis-a-vis the real-object, we can use the examples of anti-Semitism or anti-Capitalism. Both these ideologies reveal how we first assume that the impossible-real can be overcome with our symbolic identities, and then secondly, we realise that our ideologies are epiphenomenal to a deeper problem. The difference between the first and second movement in the parallax is crucial: in the first movement the human subject treats the object as being approached via an asymptotic approach in time, something which is “currently impossible”, but in potential realisable through the “right symbolic” (i.e. form of Nazism/Communism). In the second movement the human subject via a perspective shift on the impossibility of the object, recognises that what it thinks operates in the future is actually something being constructed in the present in relation to a structural impossibility, potentially inherent to the symbolic itself.

But this does not bring us yet to what Žižek thinks of as the “Real” of German Idealism itself: the purely parallactic shift from “negative access to the noumena” (e.g. Nazism/Communism as something retroactively constructed due to the structural impossibility inherent to the symbolic itself qua “transcendental schematism”) to the “Absolute itself as negativity”.35 This most ‘bitter pill to swallow’ is a result of a perspective shift on the classical Kantian distinction between phenomenal self-relating and unknowable noumena; rather than trying to “overcome” the distinction, Žižek claims Hegel simply asserts it as the Thing-in-itself:36

“Hegel’s move is not to “overcome” the Kantian division but, rather, to assert it “as such”, to drop the need for its “overcoming”, for the additional “reconciliation” of opposites.”

When we think about 20th century Fascism/Communism do we not have to confront precisely the “Absolute itself as negativity”? While this can lead one to a “doomer” position, it only does so without the accompanying Hegelian logic, the “negation of negation”: Kant’s noumena is impossible/inaccessible (a negativity vis-a-vis phenomenal knowing), whereas Hegel’s noumena as impossible/inaccessible is already the thing-itself. Or from Žižek:37

“This is what “negation of negation” is: the shift of perspective which turns failure into true success.”

Is this not precisely what 21st century subjectivity needs to enact?: a movement which shifts a perspective on its own failures (e.g. Fascism, Communism), and see them as true success (e.g. global capitalism)? But is not seeing global capitalism as true success completely defeatist? Is this true success not the ultimate form of gaslighting? Can we really do no better than world society under an economics of global capitalism? Is this really the truth of the absolute as negativity? In this situation do we not face, not the annihilation of Jews or Capitalists, but rather the annihilation of humanity itself in the wake of endless revolutionary industrial waves that will eventually render our labour and our being redundant?

2. Impossible Object to the Problem of Appearance

The impossibility of the object in question does not stop subjectivity from trying to realise it, as we have now seen with analyses of both Fascism and Communism as forms “alternate modernities”. However, let us further consider two forms that appeared before modernity itself, to demonstrate how this problem stretches back and down into the roots of the problem of subjectivity itself. Consider for a moment the mystical form of subjectivity, which often finds itself on the side of the “non-limited” “transcendental I” pretending there is no more “real object” that “disturbs the smooth running of things”. Or consider the theopolitical form of subjectivity, which often finds itself on the side of the “accessible noumenal beyond” pretending that it knows the fully realised Kingdom (usually “of God”). While one form is on the “inner” side (transcendental I), and one form is on the “outer” side (Kingdom), what both forms share is the attempt to completely shut down tension and antagonism, to reconcile and fully realise the One in a way that would make it identically coincide with itself (as “transcendental I” or as “Kingdom”). We should keep these two forms in mind as they historically spill over into our reflection on modernities “alternate” forms and failures.

For now, let us keep our attention on subjectivity as such as attempting to avoid the problem of the antinomy that presents itself in the in-between spaces of the (self-limited) transcendental I and the (inaccessible) noumenal beyond. For Žižek this takes us through the aforementioned parallax on the impossible object and towards the “problem of appearance”. For Žižek, in moving from impossible object towards problem of appearance, we move from Kant to Hegel:38

“The fundamental lesson of Hegel is that the key ontological problem is not that of reality, but that of appearance: […] “How could — in the middle of the flat, stupid reality which just is there — something like appearance emerge?”.”

The problem of appearance is so difficult because one has to hold the process of a multiplicity of self-appearing subjects (on the one side), and the negativity of their disunity or non-coincidence with each other (on the other side). The result of playing out “both sides” — multiplicity of self-appearing and fundamental disunity or negativity — is an increase in tension both internal to self-appearings (A≠A) and in-between self-appearings themselves (A≠B). In this context, if the “classical One” took the form of a completed circle that closes in on itself — bringing the incompleteness of identity, and its tension, towards a reconciliation (either as “transcendental I” or “Kingdom”) — Žižek suggests that the “modern One” (or Hegelian One), what Žižek wants to bring towards the “ontology of parallax”, presents the geometry of the Möbius strip.39 The Möbius strip, for Žižek, represents the logic of a “curved space” “bent onto itself”, introducing a “simple/empty frame” which redoubles the flatness/stupidity of “reality”:40

• ○ = Classical One

• ∞ = Modern One

Here we should note that the way Žižek theorises the problem of appearance is absolutely central to the distinction between the “transcendental philosophy” (rooted in Kant) and the “evolutionary philosophy” (rooted in Darwin). The parallax real that manifests between these two traditions often finds itself in a poorly framed theological tension, one that we might even want to describe as a “Christian Atheist” tension. This tension is key if we want to move from “impossible object” to “problem of appearance”.

What we find on the side of the evolutionary philosophy is the development of the Darwinian perspective through various forms of neo-Darwinism and ultimately towards the complexity sciences and cosmic evolution, which recognises that universal substance cannot be properly understood within reductionist disciplines, or even be categorised as “substance” (but rather as “process”). In contrast, the transcendental philosophy simplifies the situation by focusing on the cut in substance — the introduction of a simple/empty frame — in which subjectivity is always-already redoubling substance (or external processes). Here we should recall the distinction between “determinate reflection” and “reflective determination”, as the evolutionary philosophy tends to find itself leading towards the former, conceiving of reality as a substantial whole represented in laws and formulas explaining becoming; while the transcendental philosophy forces one towards the latter, that of subjectivity tarrying with its inner torsions and disturbances qua self-relating negativity. We might want to say is that the evolutionary philosophy focuses on the “appearance of reality” and the transcendental philosophy focuses on “realities self-appearing”.

Now on the level of the Classical One (○) and the Modern One (∞) it is arguably that the problem of the “appearance of reality” is in fact more of a classical problem (conceiving of reality as a substantial whole appearing to subjectivity), whereas the problem of “realities self-appearing” is much more of a modern problem (that of subjectivity tarrying with its inner torsions and disturbances). This presents to us a paradox, insofar as the evolutionary philosophy typically presents itself as “modern” in relationship to theology as representing a pre-evolutionary stance in regards to the status of substance. In contrast, the transcendental philosophy does often find itself mired in theological problems and difficulties, but it should be noted that these theological problems and difficulties in the transcendental philosophy are not of theology in general, but rather related to Christianity specifically. Indeed, if one looks to the origin of the transcendental philosophy in Kant and the German Idealists in general, one will find figures whose philosophy is trying to reconcile thought with the “mystical mysteries” of Christianity, and which had become politically problematic, both during the Protestant Reformation, and also during the French Revolution. There are two ways in which we could look at this paradox:

1. Either the evolutionary philosophy is self-consistent, and its attempt to conceptualise the appearance of reality as a whole is a forward advance, not only in terms of elevating reductionism, but also pre-modern transcendentalism, relegating the problem of appearance to classical curiosity; or

2. The transcendental philosophy is actually wrestling with a form of religion, Christianity, which represents the birth of theological modernity (key to the birth of scientific, philosophical, political modernity), and the problem of appearance is something which evolutionary philosophy has yet to resolve in its own logic

The Hegelian dialectic of abstract-negative-concrete, and logic of abstract and concrete universality, is here not only helpful but instructive. For the transcendental philosophy, it is clear that the evolutionary philosophy has a tendency towards a performativity on the level of subjectivity as “abstract universality”. In other words, the evolutionary philosophy presents itself to modern subjectivity as a whole, as if reality appears to itself as full and complete substance. In contrast, Žižek notes that the transcendental philosophy introduces the logic of “minimal difference” (like that of an simple/empty frame), as the “constitutive non-coincidence of a thing with itself”, which provides to us the ‘negative key’ to “concrete universality”.41

What this means practically is that those thinking, writing, speaking, and otherwise identifying with the evolutionary philosophy can exist as if their particular subjectivity is not fundamentally entangled with the abstract thought corresponding to the object of their worldview (they can keep a safe distance from the thing, to prevent being burned by the thing). In contrast, those operating within the transcendental philosophy recognise the way in which their particular subjectivity is fundamentally entangled with their abstract thought, which brings abstract thought to face directly its negativity (its failures/mistakes) in order to derive concrete results which correspond to a stranger object. To put this in another way, for the evolutionary philosophy there is the tendency to viewing substance as an objective neutral container for subjective reflection; whereas, for the transcendental philosophy, this stance remains abstract and not concrete insofar as concrete universality is not conceived as a neutral container for identity, but rather the “battle” or “struggle” of particular formations themselves.42 Here the paradox between the two deepens insofar as the transcendental philosophy deepens the battle and the struggle on the level of subjectivity that evolutionary philosophy retroactively stages vis-a-vis universal substance. In this context, it is almost as if the evolutionary philosophy thinks that because it is capable of theorising the past battles and struggles of universality, that it somehow allows this battle or struggle to come to an end or a resolution in the abstract neutral medium of their universal thought now.

Perhaps the 20th century political symptoms of Fascism and Communism, the “alternative modernities” emerging after the rise of the evolutionary philosophy, and which variously use the evolutionary philosophy to justify their logics (Fascist insistence on the “Master Race” and the science of eugenics, and the Communist insistence on Socialism and Communism as a “teleological necessity”), are the clearest representations of the failure of the evolutionary philosophy itself.

Žižek’s philosophy, in its dogmatic Hegelianism and faithfulness to the radicalisation of the transcendental philosophy of Kant, is in this context totally other to both the evolutionary logics of 20th century Fascism and Communism. For Žižek, his insistence on Hegel as the philosopher of the Modern One (∞), brings him to focus on concrete universality as an irreducible tension of minimal difference between self-appearances themselves (like Fascists and Communists). This dimension of things is either under-thought or totally overlooked, not only by the evolutionary philosophy, but by subjectivity as such. Consider here Žižek’s description of concrete universality:43

“the very heart of the concept of concrete universality […] [is in that] it persists in the very irreducible tension, non-coincidence, between […] particular forms of appearance.”

In order to get to this very heart, Žižek doubles-down on the fact that the birth of the transcendental philosophy is found not only wrestling with theological problems of Christianity specifically, but also situated in a historical context that is the result of the Protestant Reformation. Here this theological background becomes the very site where Žižek locates the power of Christian universality as a distinctly “Modern One”, introducing a twisted and negative self-relation, in contrast to the pre-modern or the “Classical One” as wholistic substance ontology. Here consider Žižek’s understanding of Christian universality as it relates to Hegel’s concrete universality:44