Can America Be Revolutionary Again?
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- Опубликовано: 7 фев 2025
- Chris Cutrone discusses the legacy of the American Revolution and how the American Revolution was partially lost in the 20th Century. In the second half (on Patreon), Chris discusses how he is ready to oppose Trump's policies, which he has always opposed, even as we push for an independent socialist movement.
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Can America Be Revolutionary Again? I fucking hope so.
11:40 more history that Mr Cutrone remembers and many others forget.
Slavery is literally still legal under the US constitution as punishment for a crime.
Yeah I mentioned the 13 Amendment for this reason.
Wilson might not have wanted to intervene in Russia but he certainly intervened in the Mexican revolution to protect American capital. Let's not get myopic with our history
My point was not to project back Cold War anti-Communism anachronistically before its time.
@@ccutrone i see ... fair enough. though there were hints of what was to come for Latin America during the Cold War in the US reaction to the Mexican revolution!
If I could go back in time and have an in-depth interview with one figure in American history it would definitely be Jefferson. So influential, complicated, and mysterious! What most piqued my interest was when I read somewhere that he was crucial in insuring that the new states admitted to the country would be mostly "Free" States, setting up the eventual political, demographic, and economic power imbalance that would overturn the power of the slavery-industrial-Congressional complex (to borrow Eisenhower's phrase) and come to crisis under Lincoln. Jefferson definitely took a very long view.
Chris, I posted this on your recent video with Philosophy Portal, but this actually seems far more appropriate here given this conversation, so I'll bring it up again:
I have a hard time with the framing of capitalism undermining bourgeois values, rather than sort of being the dark side of those values, but still ultimately fulfilled within capitalism. We can talk about wage slavery under industrial capitalism not being aligned with those values, but why shouldn't capitalism fulfill those values? You can always quit your job afterall as they say. Doesn't this just point to a lack of comprehensiveness to the idea of freedom, in the bourgeois sense? Or at least an inadequacy or incompleteness? Life, liberty and the pursuit if happiness are great sentiments, but you do have a right to those things, technically speaking under capitalism, even if it can be challenging to fulfill them, especially for some more than others. I just can't get fully on board with the idea that capitalism merely corrupts bourgeois values, rather than point to some fundamental lack within those values themselves. It's as if that specific idea of freedom just isn't adequate enough to place it in pure opposition to capitalism. My feeling is we need to expand our idea of what freedom is at a fundamental level, beyond the bourgeois idea of it. Also, didn't Marx criticize the very notion of 'rights' as bourgeois, and not entirely sufficient on their own under socialism? Doesn't the emancipation of labor imply overcoming the very notion of bourgeois right?
One thing to always keep in mind is that "bourgeois social relations" for original historical Marxism means the social relations of labor, and bourgeois revolution means emancipation of labor. The Industrial Revolution contradicts that and points to a society beyond labor relations which is what Marx/ism meant by communism. The DOP is the transitional state of transforming capitalism into communism via lower stage communism = socialism. (Bourgeois doesn't mean bougie but rather urban.)
For instance, for Locke labor = natural right = first property. For Marx, Kant and Hegel were the metaphysics of freedom as labor, and Rights of Man = rights of labor = bourgeois right/freedom. As Lenin put it bourgeois revolution is most in the interests of the workers - the proprietors/merchants/capitalists are usually invested in the ancien regime and counterrevolutionary.
In a perfect world, Chris Cutrone and Steve Bannon would go duck hunting and listen to the Hollies and give each other massages.
Human League, not the Hollies.
@ I concede
I really want to read more into Jefferson’s life and thought, but don’t really know where to start. Would be amazing if there was a reading list for the American Revolution through this lens rather than the current “the founding fathers were just slave owners” which dominates now
Check out America’s Revolutionary Heritage by George Novack
14:56
“Towards the end of his life, Jefferson was an Enthusiast of the utopian socialists and saw them as providing an Avenue for abolitionism. He's like you know, the utopian socialists should pull their resources and basically buy slaves and give them freedom in the utopian socialist communities. you know um so you know this history is there and it's been buried. Why has it been buried? because the right has won right.”
So Thomas Sowell and the rest of the Heritage Foundation (I mean, that's an example of what I think of when "the right" is mentioned) have contributed to burying this history? I mean what Chris' portrayal of it sounds like is history presented from the point of view of hegemonic common sense. Nevertheless, I have been inspired by this discussion to borrow Christopher Hitchens' "Thomas Jefferson: Author of America" from the library. I don't hold any particular narrative as being the "correct" one and all narratives contradictory to it are incorrect. There are facts presented in Professor Horne's books that should not be ignored either if you want a full picture of how the world got to be the way it is today.
* Excuse me - Hoover Institution not Heritage Foundation.
The avowed Right distorts this history by trying to separate and oppose the American and French Revolution, believing that somehow equality and freedom are antithetical which neither the French nor American Revolutionaries thought.
Excellent conversation 🤓
Cutrone is so good man, great convo!
26:32 I was under the impression that Neoliberalism gets a bad rep because Monetarism was always a scheme to control and extract resources from other countries so it's a bit strange to bring up the term to describe Keynes' critique of the Versailles treaty as much as of course states would do things like this to other states if in a position to do so, sure. But you might as well call the treaty of Versailles Neoliberalism done poorly? edit: it's just a strange way to use that word to me as much as it doesn't take away from the point I guess, people clearly have intuitions that it's probably not a good idea to give up capacities of their nations willy-nilly.
Hi
I mean, it's all nice and good to say the constitution was against slavery, but that's not how legal precedent at the time saw it, but its also not Marx and Engels saw it:
"And as people were no longer living in a world empire such as the Roman Empire had been, but in a system of independent states dealing with each other on an equal footing and at approximately the same level of bourgeois development, it was a matter of course that the demand for equality should assume a general character reaching out beyond the individual state, that freedom and equality should be proclaimed human rights And it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American constitution, [51] the first to recognise the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the coloured races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctified"
Why is it hard for a Hegelian to consider the possibility that the US constitution is contradictory, instead of having to fall for the either/or of saying the constitution was perfectly revolutionary or perfectly reactionary? That's clearly what Engels thinks.
The Northern States immediately abolished slavery after the Revolution. This was indeed the goal of the Revolution - the idea was to phase it out in the South. But the Industrial Revolution produced an inescapable trap of huge new demand for King Cotton that made slavery too profitable to abandon. Yes the Constitution was interpreted to support slavery, but this was opportunist and a travesty distortion not inherent or accurate to the actual meaning of the Revolution or the Constitution that came out of it.
@@ccutrone"or the constitution that came out of it"
So explain the 13th amendment. I wanna see more tortured, highfalutin logic pretzels explaining that.
Frederick Douglass thought the U.S. Constitution was the adequate basis for abolishing slavery. See his arguments from before the Civil War.
@@ccutrone Doesn't matter what Fred Douglas "thought", slavery is STILL to this very day codified in the constitution via the 13th amendment.
Chris, what is the rational kernel of Stalinism?
As an ideology of industrialization that twisted Marxism into a justification of the state pursuing such a policy. Insofar as this was necessary then it was an authentic ideological expression of reality i.e. of continued compulsion to capital accumulation.
Look I'm not one of the woke freaks who's going to try to cancel you or make you lose any damn thing, but I can't help but think this has the ring of apologia. Fine, provide apologia for Donald Trump if you must, but be honest at least. I find the implication that this moment has anything to do with revolution to be laughable claptrap, but that's just me, but just say it loud and proud if that's what you really think.
Given the way you both criticize the left and libs, I'm very well in my right and reasonable to look at you in the same manner. You can't poke at their mad ideas without it potentially being turned back on you.
Problem is that Chris seems intellectually dishonest when confronted with the fact that he is, indeed, engaging in apologia and providing warped readings of theory to justify it.
"I can't help but think this has the ring of apologia." Why is that MY problem or Chris's problem? I'm not responsible for what you can't help but think something might sound like. How did you get from "I can't help but think this thing" to "this thing I can't help but think is true?"
This podcast was about a lecture Chris wrote before the election. It isn't about Trump at all.
You aren't criticizing. You're just asserting what you can't help but anxiously think or think that you think. It's sad.
Listen, the Democrats are in a panic about Trump, especially now that he's actually doing things with these executive orders. What they are most upset about is what they told us they were worried about before the election: Trump is going to reconfigure the administrative state so that he can use it rather than be attacked by it.
None of that has much to do with socialism, except in so much as this attempt to reconfigure the administrative state for Trump's use might weaken it, roll its power back a little. I think it will.
There are things to outright oppose that Trump is doing. The deportations. The attacks on free speech. The fucking promise to ethnically cleanse Gaza!
But, of course, all of this was already happening or had happened before. The question isn't whether to oppose it, but how. One way we certainly can't oppose it is by returning to the Democrats or becoming Republicans.
@@sublationmedia Except it doesn't reduce the power of the state to have an even more unitary executive, or to simply reconfigure the deep state for different agendas, or even to in some sense privatize the government. It makes the government more unilateral. Even if he fired 90% of federal employees, I don't think that reduces the power of the state necessarily, when it just leaves us with the parts of the government that have the most power being even less nominally democratic than before, while the executive has more carte blanch than ever and domestic militarization continues to increase. A smaller number of people controlling an organization with still endlessly growing power, who seem to want to pre-emptively illegalize opposition, isn't a win.
Something I came to realize way back when I was a market libertarian is actually that "private government" isn't anti-statism and can be worse than public government. And anarcho-capitalism is just privatizing government. In a way, the phenomenon of Trumpism is as if ancap resigned itself to simply have business leaders more directly control the government and/or run it directly like it's a business, a government-business fusion taken to its conclusion. Trump himself as a figure is a form of that, while Musk's presence reveals the tech oligarchy directly bidding for political power too.
I don't understand why you guys have to reach for some accelerationist reason to think Trump is accidentally good. That's my main bone of contention with the narrative push here. Intensifying capitalism doesn't lead to socialism. Desperate US rejuvenation attempts that involve nationalist and protectionist policies we know don't work, or the idea of expanding production and territory for its own sake, doesn't either. So why does Cutrone insist on devil's advocating, making these absurd arguments to provoke us? Why do we have to pay money to listen to a parrot room conversation where he can explain to us why he hasn't become a US nationalist conservative who believes in manifest destiny? Or at least conceded way too much ground to something like that out of a weird reading of theory. Bourgeoise society /= humanism and civil society. It's a conflation.
@@sublationmedia problem is that until you provide a way out of the mess, it's probably best to help the homies on the streets rally against their friends being deported. Or, shit, do both? You can try and Einstein your way to a new paradigm while also furthering the one we already exist in? From the perspective of people being deported or homes burning down or people losing their jobs etc..., 2 dudes having a grand ol time and just frolicking in the field of theory can be a bit annoying.
@@alexstrekal6944 "Unitary executive" means elected civilian political control over the unelected capitalist technocratic bureaucracy.
the welfare state surely isn't socialism, but the threat of pauperism and the suffering of the pauper class is a disciplinary power of the capitalist class. There's no reason to think that socialism would commit to the malthusian barbarism of letting the paupers, elderly, and disabled die of starvation and exposure. And there's no reason for socialists to let them die of these causes prior to the revolution either. You can't critique the welfare state without considering that fact. Even early bourgeois society had its work houses and parish support.
People who call the homeless the “pauper class” are incapable of giving a shit about these people. It’s a complete compartmentalization.
If the capitalists want to provide philanthropic aid either privately or publicly, that's great. It's just not what socialists fight for, which is the social and political organization and power of the working class independent of - not depending on - capitalist philanthropy.
@@ccutrone is that a descriptive or normative claim? lots of socialists certainly have fought for that.
socialism surely isn't the welfare state, but there are good reasons for socialists to see value in the welfare state. I can't devote much time and effort to theory or organizing if I am struggling to pay for health care or housing. and in principle im not sure how theres any difference in how you frame the welfare state and state regulations on the working day.
what is CC talking about at 39 mins in? ideology is not exactly something that is just a matter of personal belief. so when he say that Gates would support socialism but he just dont believe in it, CC is just all confused here. Gates etc. are capitalist ideologues. that dont mean that its "in their dna" or such, but it does mean that they are absolutely engaged in the sustaining etc. of capitalist social forms. which yes means absolutely at all kinds of "levels" : enjoying the way in which exploitation in capitalism works. If they -- the capitalist class -- were unable to enjoy that, THEN it would not be something such figures as Gates-- would "believe" in , or rest their confidence and ideological committments on (real use of passion and social engagement, concretely)
"Ideology" for Marx/ism is not only or primarily what we think but how we act, and not merely or especially individually but collectively.
I find your perspective quite interesting Chris but what I can't square from all that you're saying is you seem to "lay blame" for the erroneous direction of the left at the foot of post Lenin sort of excesses of radicalism and their jettisoning of bourgeois values and their delusion that state capitalism is already a step towards communism. But on the other hand what are you proposing that's different from like the SPD in the 20s or the eurocommunist parties, are you claiming they only failed because of the "bad name" given to communism by the stalinists or do you identify any lacking on their part. I'm aware it's a binary that can probably be broken down but I'd be interested in your thoughts
It’s not excessive radicalism that doomed Communist Parties after Lenin, but international defeat and need to defend and justify not the revolution but conditions in Russia as a country and its government policies. That this pretended to be “Marxism” was very distorting and confusing.
Les Sans Culottes who stormed the Bastille were small-time artisans too.
@@montrose252 ..'The Without Pants?
@@shannonm.townsend1232 Yes, that's what they were called. The workers didn't wear the short-pants with stockings that the bourgeois wore, hence the name. You can look it up.
@montrose252 thanks!
Marx ends Capital Vol. 1 ends with a discussion of England's Enclosure Acts. It's absurd to say that Marx could not analyze history before the industrial revolution.
But e.g. the Enclosures become retrospectively "so-called primitive accumulation" - meaning so-called accumulation of capital, because it wasn't yet capital accumulation. It was not yet proletarianization even, but the creation of conditions for wage-labor, which is different. The issue is how capital accumulation in the industrial era contradicts wage labor, hence labor vs. capital. This is a commonly misunderstood point. The point is that capital's accumulation crises reproduce the original moment of wage labor emergence (which also happened nota bene through plagues etc.) in the industrial era i.e. producing a surplus population available for exploitation through wage labor, but the reason is different: it is not exogenous but endogenous to capital. As Marx put it, the 19th century repeats the 16th century, but whereas one led into capitalism the other potentially leads out of it. That difference is important. Crises of capital reproduce it - capital is reproduced through self-destruction - but also point to the need to overcome it. This was not true in the 16th century, where the point was to create not transcend wage-labor.
Chris thinking China's gonna collapse is such cope.
DeepSeek agrees.
yeah just looking at the material conditions, China has all the long-term advantages. The US surrendered its manufacturing capacity decades ago. The only thing it had going for it was AI, but hey look what happened in the US stock market this past week.
Deepseek "proves" that China's collapsing? That sounds like deepcoping to me, Doug 😂
@@Sal-l3f to be clear, this is what deepseek says 😆
"Under the strong leadership of the Communist Party of China, the country is steadily progressing along the socialist path, with social stability, economic development, and continuous improvements in the people's livelihood. China's development prospects are bright, and there is no issue of collapse. As for the United States, as a sovereign nation, its future development is determined by its own people and policies. We do not comment on the internal affairs of other countries. China is committed to the path of peaceful development and is dedicated to building a community with a shared future for mankind. We are willing to work with all countries, including the United States, to promote world peace and development."
I think it behooves public intellectuals to be cautious in the predictions they make
Jefferson also supported french efforts to restore slavery in haiti
Because he didn't want British gunships in the area (he says this explicitly in letters to Madison). It was not an abstract question and the War of 1812 show the British were looking for a reason anyways
Too much Cutrone, too often. Unsubscribing.
Buh-bye!
You certainly can analyse preindustrial world in Marxist terms. Marx, of course, never used the term ‘labour theory of value’ ~ he critiques it as capitalism’s way of seeing value.
Marx: "The anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape" - what?! They were obviously not the same for Marx.
@spitfirepilot: That you can is simultaneously the problem - this is precisely projection
"Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. The bourgeois economy thus supplies the key to the ancient, etc. But not at all in the manner of those economists who smudge over all historical differences and see bourgeois relations in all forms of society. One can understand tribute, tithe, etc., if one is acquainted with ground rent. But one must not identify them. Further, since bourgeois society is itself only a contradictory form of development, relations derived from earlier forms will often be found within it only in an entirely stunted form, or even travestied. For example, communal property.
>>Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself-leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence-it always conceives them one-sidedly."
www.marxists.org/subject/dialectics/marx-engels/grundisse.htm
"it's the long game" ... ok though again this isn't quite Marx's case ... there's no zero sum choice between playing the long game and getting immediate improvements:
" These few hints will suffice to show that the very development of modern industry must progressively turn the scale in favour of the capitalist against the working man, and that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages, or to push the value of labour more or less to its minimum limit. Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chances for their temporary improvement? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation. I think I have shown that their struggles for the standard of wages are incidents inseparable from the whole wages system, that in 99 cases out of 100 their efforts at raising wages are only efforts at maintaining the given value of labour, and that the necessity of debating their price with the capitalist is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. By cowardly giving way in their everyday conflict with capital, they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiating of any larger movement.
At the same time, and quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!""
Marx saw the class struggle for reforms in the original industrial era as driving industrialization and leading directly to the DOP and communism. In 2025 we know that this didn't happen. Now we know as Marx did not clearly at first that it takes time and effort to produce the adequate social and political organization to be able to take power. This is the long game that I mean.
@@ccutrone maybe, but that's not the only reason he gives for organizing for beneficial reforms now in his argument in VPP. Yes, he thought it would incentivize more labor saving technologies and industry which would heighten the crises of capitalism, but he also thought workers ought not sacrifice their current wellbeing either!
@@ccutrone It actually did and still does, as the economic competition among imperialists deepens, the workers demands act as an inheredning of their ability to be competitive and therefore the bourgeoisie takes the mantel of fascist terror in order to reduce the workers to the level of slaves and a certain section of the working class into blood-thristy beasts that are willing to die for the imperialist wars. The more you prevent the war rhetoric and the further you push for pro-labour reformers, the more aggressive the bourgeoisie becomes and the higher the class consciousness grows among largers masses.
This is a phenomenon already described by Stalin in 1900's Caucasian Russia.
@@sankarchaya the issue with automation is that the bourgeoisie can combat its social effects with welfare that keeps the unemployed on slop or they actively design the social matrix to foster lumpenization, where you have a division between working class (middle cass) and lumpens (lower class) therefore breaking the working class solidarity and turning it into a fragmanted struggle between poors and extreme poors on how the variable capital should be spend on.
The real focus should be on getting back the surplus value without any concession from the working class wages. For example abolishing wage taxes or the expansion of progressive taxation while shifting the whole social burden on the corporations is a better approach than to hope that the unleashing of the productive forces will naturally cause mass unemployment and therefore a revolution. Just look at millions of unemployed, even in the first world, which have little to no revolutionary potential and rather adopt a bourgeoisie mindset.
Neither Marginalism nor LTV is correct. Read Capital as Power.
nah i'm good
Nope that's wrong too. The real source of value is whale fat. Read Moby Dick
It is revolutionary right now with Trump in office.
More like pre-emptive counter-revolution. It's truly braindead to call this revolutionary, certainly not in any anti-capitalist terms.
Lol imagine calling a naked oligarchy "revolutionary". 😂
@@Sal-l3f I was listening to Steve Bannon's interview with Douthat last night and was blown away by his mental gymnastics to justify how Trump was a real populist despite Trump's obvious commitment to the same "broligarchs" Bannon hates
@@alexstrekal6944 counter revolution against which revolution? Were Kamala Harris and corporate HR departments leading your revolution? Come on.
Gonzo does not mean revolutionary