Description
Capitalism is a revolutionary situation of the last stage of pre-history, and the potential and possibility for freedom, or else it is just what Hegel said history has always been: the slaughter-bench of everything good and virtuous humanity has ever achieved. Marxism defined itself as the critical self-consciousness of this task of socialism in capitalism, but this has been eclipsed by the mere moral condemnation of catastrophe. This happened as a result of Marxism’s own failure, over a hundred years ago, to make good on the crisis. This pattern has repeated itself since then, in ever more obscure ways.
The essays by Chris Cutrone collected here span the time of the Millennial Left’s abortive search to rediscover a true politics for socialism in the history of Marxism: the attempted recovery of a lost revolutionary tradition. Cutrone’s participation as a teacher alongside this journey into the heart of Marxism was guided by the Millennial investigation into controversial and divisive figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School, and Marx himself. The question of a political party for socialism loomed large — but was abandoned.
Readers of these essays will find no taboo unchallenged, as every aspect of Marxism’s accumulated wreckage is underwritten by the red thread and haunting memory of what was once the world-historical character of socialist revolution. Can this Marxist “message in a bottle” cast adrift by history yet be received?
“The Millennial Left is fading, because it lost sight of the telos of historical Marxism. Chris Cutrone’s fascinating essay ‘The end of Millennial Marxism’ could serve as a good primer on dialectical materialism.”
— Sohrab Ahmari, Editor of Compact Magazine
“Chris Cutrone’s The Death of the Millennial Left is explicit in pronouncing fatality: how this generaation’s failure is a product of past defeats and the bad ideas it has internalized.
“If an authentic Marxian Left were to emerge today, it would be unrecognizable, unclassifiable: the Left itself has become so distorted by the experience of defeat that it hardly recognizes its own traditions.
“Cutrone offers a searching and deep historical critique of a Millennial Left whose failures are mere iterations on previous failures: what is taken to be ‘Left-wing’ or ‘socialism’ today is nothing more than the ‘naturalization of the degeneration of the Left into resignation and abdication.’
“This is explored through reference to Left-wing political traditions.”
— Alex Hochuli, author of The End of the End of History, review of The Death of the Millennial Left, American Affairs
“Cutrone is most comfortable with the larger stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s claims and how their position emerges from Marx’s and Lenin’s own example.”
— Todd Cronan, Nonsite
“The worthwhile and provocative article by Chris Cutrone, ‘Lenin’s liberalism’ argues that Lenin helped legitimize political differences.”
— Mike Macnair, author of Revolutionary Strategy, Communist Party of Great Britain
“A great wodge of material spanning Hegel, Kant, Marx, Lenin and the esoterica of 20th century Hegelian Marxism.”
— Paul Demarty, Communist Party of Great Britain
“Inspirational.”
— Philip Cunliffe, author of Lenin Lives!
