Introductory Note: Platypus is a Marxist discussion group. Finding Platypus to be of potential interest to revolutionary Marxists, HWRS and the CWG-NZ decided to initiate a dialogue with its members. Our initial contribution to the discussion, and a response from a Platypus member, are reproduced below. In the interest of authenticity, they have not been copy-edited, though links have been corrected.
Can Platypus Merge Two Legacies
Without Abandoning One or the Other?
An Exchange of Correspondence
From HWRS and the CWG-NZ to Platypus, September 2, 2010
Your discussion about Trotsky in the thread following the 70th anniversary of his assassination, can and should attract a wide audience of revolutionaries, or subjectively revolutionary individuals and/or grouplets to investigate your project to see if there is co-incidence. Our work is to find Marxists not dogmatists, who study and apply dialectical materialism in the class struggle, and then to work side by side with them to make the revolution. To that end we edit and publish International Trotskyist, available at our web site, and our comrades in New Zealand publish in the journal Class Struggle, available on the web here, and on the Redrave blog.
In evaluating the Platypus material, we are finding much that we agree with yet many questions remain. We hope to engage with your comrades and discern your group’s trajectory and understand its role in building a revolutionary workers party and a revolutionary workers international. You have made strong critiques of the left of reformism, of revisionism, of social democracy, of Stalinism. These critiques puts us on a similar trajectory and should serve a starting place for investigatory discussions. Louis Proyect made an interesting comment on your role in the left and predicted your demise. We think that unless you fully embrasce the Lenninist project you may continue for some time be all about Marxism, providing some insite but you will not provide praxis and will ultimately wither on the vine.
Obviously groups define themselves in many ways as comrades form study groups, propaganda groups, fighting propaganda groups, external factions to other groups etc. If we take the basic lessons of Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg we have to put an action organization on the agenda at some point in every self proclaimed Marxist grouping’s existence. So we are curious is Platypus making itself into an action organization which intervenes in the class struggle and develops and offers program to the working class? It is one thing to make philosophical contributions to the science of Marxism but the Theses on Feuerbach is clear, that is not enough.
“The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-sidedness [Diesseitigkeit] of his thinking, in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.”
Despite the limited size of our organizations we analyze, intervene and record our participation in the class struggle. Our method and practice is available for you and the international working class to evaluate. Obviously all comrades can not be in the working class or the organizations of the working class and we do not fetishize this although we do suggest comrades find union positions where possible. And to that end our journal and web site reports on our union interventions and work with the student movement and K-12 teachers and youth in our districts.
Of course when revolutionaries engage in the class struggle questions of strategy and tactics come up. How to apply the method and intention of the Communist Manifesto, What is to be done, State and Revolution, the first four congresses of the Third International as reflected in the 1938 Transitional Program. It is easy to sign on to all those documents but when it comes to applying them in the field, the wheat is separated from the shaft.
Utilizing the Marxist method to develop and apply program leads to differences as the alienated consciousness of the subjective revolutionary tries to break into and develop proletarian class consciousness and to master the dialectic. They, more often than not, stumble into a thousand potholes which have already been dug for them (or are dragged into the swamp) by all variety of social democrats, reformists, centrists, Stalinists, Maoists, Guavarists, Fidelistas, and now even Chavezistas his acolytes in the World Social Forum and the Bolivarian 5th Internationalists. Our job is to engage those subjective revolutionaries who are stumbling into the pot holes bravely waving red flags, and lead them out of the swamp before they end up bogging the class down opening the way up for the guns of reaction.
Our organization and its members have struggled against opportunist and reformist capitulation of the old Morenoite IWP to the Peace and Freedom Party. We struggled against the Stalinophilic capitulation of the IBT and the Spartacist family to crushing of Solidarnosc at the same time we struggled against the USec capitulation to Walesa. We struggled against the Workers Power capitulation to Yeltsin at the same time that we identified the distinction between the fast road to restoration and the slow road. Noting that there was no qualitative difference between the Generals and Yeltsin both were restorationists, we fought for the independent mobilization of the working class and for the revitalization of real soviet power. While the rest of the left called for the bombing of Serbia we stood with a small few against imperialisms violent bombing and restoration in the former Yugoslavia.
In the early 90’s we identified the restoration in China and their path which was a quantitatively different method than Yeltsins, using the slow road, which we have shown, how when coupled with the failed attempt to re-subjugate China and the strength of the remaining institutions of the deformed workers state (DWS) has allowed China to emerge as a budding imperialist power; which today is on a trajectory toward outright confrontation with the waning and sole superpower US imperialism.
This development is increasing the threat of the next inter-imperialist war, it could be ten years out it could be sparked by an attack on Iran tomorrow or a flare up between China and Vietnam over the disputed islands. It could take the form of a series of proxy wars. Obviously China, which now has a significant Navy, is still far from capable of challenging the US militarily in a direct confrontation. But the US knows well those capabilities and is increasing its plan to encircle and isolate China, a policy which is both confrontational and may, if not stopped by proletarian revolution, lead to the shortest world war in history (the last war).
Marxists have a responsibility (the ability to respond) to the world working class which needs to be prepared to prevent this potential inter-imperialist catastrophe by the means of international socialist revolution; to that end building solidarity between the US working class and the Chinese working class is essential. We must struggle to unify workers at home and in China in a joint struggle against all parasitic imperialism. American communists must bring the working masses to understand that their enemy is always our own imperialist bourgeoisie.
Only by a real display of proletarian internationalism can the international solidarity be forged which is needed to end the cause of war (imperialism) , absolve Marxism of the crimes of the second international, the comintern, and the capitulations, missed opportunities, and multiple degenerations and deviations of the Fourth Internationals and assist to raise the class to the role of a class for itself.
In identifying China as imperialist we (Humanist Workers for Revolutionary Socialism) rattled the cage of the Argentine Ligue Obrero Internationalista (LOI-Ar) and their international grouping (the FLTI). The documentation of all these past struggles is on our web site as well as our book on alienation which takes one chapter to describe how the Trotskyist left in particular (but we can generalize to the entire left) maintains and reproduces alienated bourgeois relations in its organizations and to the extent that our leaderships and memberships are alienated we have sewn many the seed of our own destruction as a movement. Of course this insight is not to negate the other causal factors, theoretical deviations and mitigating circumstances leading to the collapse of the Trotskyist movement, of which there are many. But as dialecticians we understand that many of the features of the alienated personality played roles in the degeneration of organizations, and had significant effects on method, program and application of program.
So in closing, we understand the loose nature of Platypus (and have received your invitation to attend the NY study group) and the intention of many to find a synthesis of Trotsky and Adorno and the best contributions of the Frankfurt School (FFS). We see no problem with this type of investigation in fact we find it healthy, up to a point. And that point is where the rubber hits the road. Is the task to create a revolutionary workers party/International /movement to overthrow capitalism by brining the strength of these basically academic philosophical contributors into the task of building on the foundations laid by the 3rd and 4th international’s (drawing the best lessons of the three L’s plus a T) or is the Platypus trajectory to take class struggle and working class Marxists away from this task and derail their efforts in the halls of academia.
Any critical evaluation leading to a synthesis of these two trajectories (Lenin/Trotsky & The FFS) has to acknowledge that the FFS attacks Marxism, and in particular Trotskyism, by revising Marxism away from Marx’s dialectics towards an eclectic ‘critical theory’ that dispenses with the fundamental contradiction between use-value and exchange value that underlies class struggle and is the main dynamic for capitalist development and exploding its historic limits.
This means that the FFS no longer sees class struggle at the point of production as the road to revolution or social liberation, let alone the need for a revolutionary party to unite theory and practice in the program.
Instead, it sees this contradiction as displaced externally by universalising use-value (which is a return to Ricardo etc) or internally through state suppression and cultural domination. No wonder the FFS is accused of epochal pessimism!
This leads away from Trotsky’s characterization of the crisis of humanity as the crisis of revolutionary leadership of the working class as the historical agent of socialist revolution, and its replacement by a pessimistic cult of the social democratic bourgeois intellectual who has nothing to offer by a cultural cum philosophical critique of capitalism’s domination of nature.
Fundamentally, the FFS reverts from Marxist Dialectics to Hegelian Dialectics where God becomes replaced by a sort of Fuerbachian humanism that is given voice by the intelligentsia priesthood. For this reason the FFS theorists were not to be found publishing in the Journals of the Left Opposition or the early Forth International let alone building the revolutionary workers international party or applying the dialectic in the class struggle. Revolutionary Marxism welcomes all dialecticians to the barricades but as Trotsky was apt to say, “Your passports gentleman!”
We hope you take this inquiry with all the seriousness that revolutionaries apply to our project and look forward to further investigatory communications with your comrades.
Charles for HWRS (US)
Dave for CWG (NZ)
Response from Platypus member Chris, September 2, 2010
Thanks, Charles and Dave, for writing such an engaged and thoughtful series of questions, statements of position (including history of positions), and critiques of Platypus. It is a very welcome turn for us to have these posed to us and our project.
I’m going to make a few attempts at response.
First, come clarification.
We deliberately characterize our project as “pre-political.” We do this not only because of an estimation of our own practical capacities as an organization (which is less than 4 years old), but, perhaps more importantly, from an estimation of our historical moment of emergence (late 2000s-present) .
This means that we cannot assume a quantitative- qualitative or organic path of development, from study circle, to propaganda group, to faction, to political party, but rather must be open to not only various alternative directions of potential development, but also the possibility of multiple simultaneous paths of development for our project.
So, we do not see ourselves (at this point, but also as a clear goal at present) developing in the direction of Lenin’s Bolsheviks (or even Kautsky and Bernstein’s SPD). Specifically, we do not see ourselves developing in terms of “splits and regroupments” among the existing “Left.” Our slogan/provocation, that “the Left is dead!,” is meant to indicate, among other things, a break in continuity with past/existing “Marxist” politics (i.e., organizations/ tendencies) . This is not only a practical orientation on our part, but also a judgment of historical realities. We don’t think that the future of a Marxian (or Marxist, in the sense of the legacies of a very few outstanding historical Marxists) approach will be the result of a development out of immediately prior trends but rather a critical break from them. (The fact that 2 of us were members of the Spartacus Youth Club more than 20 years ago, and one of us for an exceptionally brief time, the other for less than three years, from ages 19-21, and both of us in a location marginal to and in the absence of the Spartacist cadres, means that we cannot be considered some kind of a splinter from Spartacism.)
But we also do not consider ourselves to be a version of the Frankfurt School, again, not only for reasons of conscious practical choice, but also due to historical circumstances. Like the politics of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School presupposed a large and politically vibrant (Marxist) Left that does not exist today. Also, we are just as discontinuous with the actual concrete theoretical practices and social and political orientations of the FS as with historical Marxist politics (of LLT).
One point we would make about the FS “critical theory” component of our project is that we distinguish sharply from among its exemplars. Adorno is an exceptional figure for us and stands apart from and above the other FS thinkers. Your characterization of FS critical theory is only valid (in any way, and to any extent) for Horkheimer and Marcuse, not for Adorno. Since Adorno’s work was the most sustained in its engagement with Marx of any of the FS critical theorists, the exceptional character of his work, which consistently involved his challenging the undialectical conclusions of his colleagues, is not surprising. – It is significant that Adorno elaborated whole works (e.g., Negative Dialectics) out of dialogue with Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. Adorno’s point was not to dispute Marx in the abstract but in the context of historical changes in which Marxism itself had played a role.
The actual foundation of Platypus’s approach to FS critical theory is Adorno’s own, namely the works circa 1923 of Lukacs and Korsch. (Also, Benjamin’s work, so inspirational for Adorno, remains important for us; it is important not mistake Benjamin’s work as being merely “cultural,” for it involved a highly sophisticated critical engagement with Lukacs and Korsch, and thereby Lenin and Luxemburg [and Trotsky] – and Marx – on the Marxist philosophy of history, hence on the Marxian theory of capital.)
So, the reason for our “synthesis” of the 2nd International radicalism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky is not so much the later history of the 20th century, as the working-through, in theory and practice, of the moment of the revolutions of 1917-19. As Korsch put it, the crisis of Marxism meant the “separating out” of theory and practice, their “umbilical cord” broken. Trotsky and Adorno were in this sense left holding the broken-off pieces. Our approach is less about putting the pieces back together today than the (necessarily speculative) reproduction of the inner coherence – and tension – of the original moment of conscious political practice (circa 1917) that has since disintegrated. We recognize that this moment can only influence any potential political practice today or in the future distantly, and not without (perhaps erroneous) interpretative reconstruction. This is why we are “pre-political,” because we recognize that the resources of any purported Marxist approach today are inevitably pre-political.
This brings me around to the question of what Trotsky called “leadership.” The problem today, we think, is not so much the lack of practical political leadership as it is the lack of consciousness of emancipatory possibilities. Hence, our focus in Platypus, not on “Marxism” as on the broader question of the “Left,” a question we approach informed by the history of Marxism, but not in a way in which we can take our own “Marxism” for granted, but must reconstruct, speculatively, how Marxism ever expressed an emancipatory impulse (which we don’t think “Marxism” per se today expresses). We think that Marxism was the best of the Left, historically, but this is for us entirely in the past tense. (I.e., “Marxists” today are not necessarily better than, e.g., “anarchists,” et al.)
Our project is thus about keeping the most fundamental/ radical questions open. This is found in the nature of our practical activity, which is geared towards “hosting the conversation” on the Left (with or without scare quotes), because we think that the questions, let alone the answers, of emancipation are hardly properly formulated in the present.
The best we can say is that historical Marxists posed the questions/problems of emancipation better than the “Left” today is capable of doing. But we are not an antiquarian society, but a (pre-)political project, in the sense that we are doing something (political) that no one else is doing, “hosting the conversation” about the critical issue of the Left, that is, of (the possibilities for) emancipatory politics.
We would be very interested in engaging you on that level.
Chris