PART THREE
Read here: PART ONE, PART TWO, PART FOUR
The Primacy of Stalinist Pragmatism
Rockhill’s Pipers is not simply about the Frankfurt School or how they were in the pockets of Western imperialism. Were it merely a sordid tale about Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, and their sundry evildoings, the book would be scarcely a third of its size. In introducing his subject matter, Rockhill spends an inordinate amount of time outlining his conceptual-historical “method”, which he dubs “the primacy of practice”.
To the uninitiated, this phrase may sound rather Marxist, even orthodox, and Rockhill declares that “DHM [Dialectical and Historical Materialism] is firmly grounded in the primacy of practice”.[1] It is true he sometimes couples these statements about practice with nods to things that exist independently of human will, such as “objective reality”, “materialist ontology”, and the “dialectics of nature”. But the origin of this particular slogan, “the primacy of practice”, is not readily found in the writings of Marx, Engels, or Lenin. Rather, it appears frequently as a shibboleth in the writings and speeches of Stalinists and Maoists. Its true historical provenance lies in the repressive Soviet context of the 1930s, where an overemphasis on practice contributed to the violent dismantling of serious Marxist philosophy and science. In condemning an entire generation of thinkers, the Stalinist bureaucracy elevated its own crude administrative “commonsense” over any theory that seemed insufficiently subordinated to the Party’s will.
Stalin and his ideological hatchet-men, Mark Mitin and Pavel Yudin, had no patience for philosophers that took their discipline seriously. More than denouncing opportunism – which Stalin engaged in freely and shamelessly – their real target was theoretical “dogmatism”, i.e., adherence to a theory that was not reducible to the whim of the Central Committee. The last major obstacle to Stalin’s consolidation of power in the intellectual field was Abram Deborin. A major Soviet philosopher in the 1920s, Deborin was head of the Academy of Sciences and the chief editor of the premier theoretical journal, Under the Banner of Marxism. For Deborin, dialectics was an objective and genuine science of nature and history. Reality was material, structured by dialectical laws; nothing stood outside this totality. Marxist philosophy served to grasp and articulate the order and connections of real things. Against Stalinist stereotypes, Deborin did not have an a priori contempt for experiment or action but aimed to elaborate philosophical concepts capable of grounding revolutionary practice. To paraphrase Lenin, without revolutionary philosophy, there could be no revolutionary movement. For Deborin’s Hegelian-Marxism, authentic practice begins with rational insight into necessity.
Without deeper reflection on what Marx termed “practical-critical” activity in the Theses on Feuerbach, practice risks degenerating into pragmatism. If Marxists wished to avoid sliding into pragmatism, positivism, or empiricism, Deborin maintained that dialectical materialism must be affirmed as a universal method and ontology. Marxist philosophy could not be reduced to the sum of political slogans; for the sake of maintaining its dialectical side, this meant serious engagement with Hegel’s Logic. When Lenin, in 1922, urged Under the Banner of Marxism to become “a kind of ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics’” Deborin took that to heart.[2] To be a Marxist friend of the Hegelian dialectic meant that the categories of the finite and infinite, the abstract and the concrete, essence and existence, and freedom and necessity could not be interpreted through the narrow lens of political expediency. Such concepts demanded to be carefully worked through, as part of a comprehensive science of thinking, rather than being brushed aside with opportunistic impatience.
In 1931-32, Deborin was condemned for reducing Marxism to abstract metaphysics, and for turning Marxism into another variety of Hegelianism or Spinozism. It did not matter if Plekhanov, the founder of Russian Social Democracy, called Marxism a variety of Spinozism. Grounding Marx in the legacy of classical rationalism was recast by Stalin and his philosophical henchmen as “Menshevising Idealism” or, worse, “Trotskyism”. Philosophical reason had to be limited to make room for the will of the Party.[3] Of course, Stalin retained the terminology of dialectical materialism, but emptied it of substance. In this way, he could be Marxist in form, but subjectivist in practice.
Thus, in order to give the Central Committee and the General Secretary more elbowroom for “practical” manoeuvring, Deborin’s philosophy had to be condemned and purged as “Trotskyist”. It did not matter if Deborin was not a Trotskyist, had paid lip-service to the “primacy of practice”, and even accepted the Stalinist line on Socialism in One Country. He was still condemned as a Left Oppositionist at the level of theory. Hegel himself was suspected of “Trotskyite” deviations. Stalin denounced the Deborinists in 1930 at the Institute of Red Professors: “Everything written by the Deborin group has to be smashed… The Deborinites regard Hegel as an icon”.[4]
What was the result of this purge of “excessive” Hegelianism? Under Stalin, dialectics turned from a legitimate science of thinking to a pseudo-science of legitimation. The words “dialectical” and “concrete” functioned as rhetorical gestures, slogans, and ad hoc justifications for whatever policy Stalin and his cronies announced ex cathedra. Anyone who dissented from this new orthodoxy of the “primacy of practice” faced real physical danger. If thinking the wrong way about Aristotle in the Middle Ages could get you excommunicated (if not burned at the stake), then thinking the wrong way about Hegel in Stalin’s Russia could get you imprisoned (if not shot by the NKVD).[5]
Trotsky was not only politically prescient regarding the consequences of Socialism in One Country, and how it meant the eventual destruction of the USSR. He was also the first critic of Stalin’s “primacy of practice” thesis, which Trotsky attacked in his 1928 piece “Philosophical Trends of Bureaucratism”. He first identified the degeneration of theory in Stalin’s short book, The Foundations of Leninism (1924) and detected in Stalin’s exegesis of Marx, Engels, and Lenin a medieval cast of mind. This Stalinist hermeneutics meant ripping quotes out of context and using the bowdlerised text like sacred scripture: “One must go back to the Middle Ages to find analogous examples of the rise of an entire new ideological system on the basis of a few lines of text which have been misinterpreted or incorrectly copied. Thus the Old Believers let themselves be burned alive for the sake of some miscopied lines from the Bible”.[6]
Trotsky catalogued instances of Stalin’s narrow empiricism, which prioritised the immediate needs of institutions and cliques above the historic mission of the revolutionary movement. This routinisation of Marxism was not unique to Stalin; it had antecedents in Karl Kautsky’s Second International. Kautsky, despite his reputation as the official “Pope of Marxism”, emptied socialism of its dialectical content, ultimately reconciling with the right-wing of German Social Democracy in World War 1.[7] Trotsky likewise noted that Stalin, operating at an even lower theoretical register than Kautsky, further reduced Marxism to tactical machinations. Yet Marxism is an all-encompassing theory, and theory imposes demands on immediate practice from a higher vantage point. As Trotsky wrote:
He [Stalin] absolutely fails to understand that theory-genuine theory or theory on a large scale-does not at all take shape in direct connection with the practical tasks of the day. Rather it is the consolidation and generalisation of all human practical activity and experience, embracing different historical periods in their materially determined sequence. It is only because theory is not inseparably linked with the practical tasks contemporary to it, but rises above them, that it has the gift of seeing ahead, that is, is able to prepare to link itself with future practical activity and to train people who will be equal to future practical tasks. The theory of Marx raised itself like a giant watchtower above the revolutionary practical work of the Lassalleans contemporary to Marx, just as it did above the practical activity of all the organisations of the First International.[8]
The critique of pragmatism runs consistently through Trotsky’s writings on Stalin. To describe Stalin as a genuine dialectical materialist was truly risible, since to “a bureaucrat, theory is the formula of administration”.[9] Whereas “Marxist theory is the weapon of thought serving to clarify what has been, what is becoming and what lies ahead, and for the determination of what is to be done…Stalin’s theory is the servant of the bureaucracy. It serves to justify zig-zags after the event, to conceal yesterday’s mistakes and consequently to prepare tomorrow’s”.[10] In other words, this was a “philosophy” suited to Thermidorians and Bonapartists – a pragmatism that Trotsky regarded as “the mortal enemy of Bolshevism”.[11]
Mao’s Negative Dialectics
Rockhill claims that Mao’s On Practice is necessary for the theoretical rejuvenation of Marxism and strategic thinking.[12] Nonetheless, Mao’s philosophy shares many of the same problems found in the Stalinist “primacy of practice”. It is no coincidence that, during Mao’s struggle for political hegemony within the CPC, his main philosophical whipping boy was Abram Deborin. This might seem strange, given Deborin’s obscurity in the history of philosophy, and even within Marxism. However, Mao’s philosophical pamphlets, namely those On Practice (July 1937) and On Contradiction (August 1937), were directly shaped by the triumph of Stalinist ideology in the 1930s. The position Mao advances in these works was anticipated in the “theoretical struggle” led by Mitin and Yudin; their ideological opponents in the Mechanists and the Deborinites would become Mao’s as well.
Mao’s critique of Deborinism also comes with an added twist; Deborin isn’t just a signifier for theoretical dogmatism, or Trotskyism, but he also commits the sin of resolving contradictions and antagonisms in a “rightist” fashion. This makes Deborin not just a “Trotskyite”, but a Right-Oppositionist Bukharinite, since Deborin’s lack of emphasis on antagonism means the possibility of class reconciliation under socialism.[13] But labelling Deborinism right-wing did not prevent Mao from later saying the complete opposite: that Deborinism represented sectarian Trotskyism in theory. Deborin thus becomes an empty signifier for everything philosophically suspect in Communist Party – i.e., “two-line” – struggles. If Stalin made political amalgams in show trials that read like Mad Libs – lumping together disparate groups like “Trotskyites”, “Bukharinites”, and fascists – Mao, in a philosophical register, did likewise, grouping “Deborinism” with the political enemy of the month (or year).
According to Mao, Deborin’s monism blinded him to the fundamental character of contradiction. Contradictions are so radically constitutive of reality that resolving them is illusory. Since they do not just appear at a specific level of development, they are always and already present, at every level of being. This means that there can be no “negation of the negation” as a dialectical law, and here Mao follows Stalin. In The Short Course chapter on “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (which has been speculated as ghostwritten by Mitin) Stalin omits the “negation of the negation”.[14] But Mao goes further than mere omission and explicitly repudiates the law in “Talk on Questions of Philosophy” in 1964, delivered on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.[15]
For Mao, contradiction – or as he often puts it, “unevenness” – is primary, while the whole or unity is secondary and transient within an ongoing process of flux. Equilibrium does not exist in nature or politics:
In any contradiction the development of the contradictory aspects is uneven. Sometimes they seem to be in equilibrium, which is however only temporary and relative, while unevenness is basic. Of the two contradictory aspects, one must be principal and the other secondary.[16]
We see in Mao’s writings and speeches how contradiction is exacerbated to the point that existence itself appears dualised. More real than any thesis or synthesis is antithesis. Perpetual struggle, rather than rational totality, becomes real. A Deborinite monism – i.e., a Marxist Spinozism – is rejected as dulling antagonism and anaesthetising the political will, and Mao’s Heraclitean sense of negativity and constant struggle starts to resemble Nietzsche’s will to power more than Hegel’s Logic. Synthesis ceases to mean the reconciliation of parts into a more reasonable whole but only the hardheaded victory of one force over another. Mao can even sound like a Stalinised version of the ancient Sophist Thrasymucus, who notoriously argued that “might makes right”:
What is synthesis? You have all witnessed how the two opposites, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, were synthesised on the mainland. The synthesis took place like this: their armies came, and we devoured them, we ate them bite by bite…One thing eating another, big fish eating little fish, this is synthesis. It has never been put like this in books. I have never put it this way in my books either. For his part, Yang Hsien-chen believes that two combine into one, and that synthesis is the indissoluble tie between two opposites. What indissoluble ties are there in this world? Things may be tied, but in the end they must be severed. There is nothing which cannot be severed.[17]
Here, Mao is letting the nihilist cat out of the pseudo-Marxist bag. Dialectics is not about a rational progression and, instead, becomes a contest of perspectives. It is a war of the worlds (three worlds), or a war between “bourgeois” humanity and “proletarian” humanity. That the latter kind of humanity might, for strategic purposes, include the comprador bourgeoisie and Richard Nixon as allies is not a primary concern. Mao’s emphasis on negation as perpetual struggle is not so much a conceptual advance over Stalin; nor is it, as Althusser argued, a “leftwing criticism of Stalinism”.[18] It is, rather, an intensification of the same opportunism. Instead of grounding struggle in a broader theoretical conception, how one struggles is arbitrarily determined by the party bureaucrat.
Thus, at the height of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (GPCR), Mao could promote the slogan “one divides into two” against right-wing opportunism. Yet, when the moment came to smash the Shanghai Commune and reconcile with the West, he could just as readily invoke “non-antagonistic” contradictions. Party members who criticised Mao for political excesses in the GPCR could be denounced as Deborinite-Bukharinists for minimising antagonism. And those who objected to opening toward the West could be dismissed as dogmatic and “sectarian” Deborinite-Trotskyists. In Mao’s hands, there is a sophistical dialectic for all seasons, one in which error is never acknowledged but, instead, constantly projected back onto the enemy. As with Stalin, accusations of opportunism or sectarianism against Marxist critics function as veiled confessions of the counterrevolutionary bureaucrat who levels them.
On another level, Mao promoted his own “negative dialectics” of permanent revolt with no hope of resolution. The Soviet philosopher Eduard Batalov observed how Mao’s philosophy bore certain parallels with the thinking of Adorno. For Batalov, it is rather striking that negative dialectics can vacillate between the extremes of hyperbolic militancy and quietism, with the same theory serving the nonconformist rebel, the conservative academic, and – though Batalov stops short of stating this – the Stalinist bureaucrat.
Adorno endeavours to persuade the individual to adopt a non-conformist approach to the world around him, a critical attitude to that world as something “inferior”. Yet the “negative dialectician” gives the individual no firm basis for such criticism and when advocating the other extreme he transforms the non-conformist into the rebel, for whom the means becomes an end in itself. In his philosophy which is directed towards an end (as something definitive, polar) Adorno comes forward as both nihilist and apocalyptic. Yet apocalyptical revolt is a revolt that knows no moderation, no limits, which sweeps aside everything in its path, and is of course very far removed from social revolution. Confirmation of this can be found in a conception, whose author admittedly has nothing in common with the Frankfurt school and never declared himself an advocate of “negative dialectics”, but who nevertheless evolved ideas very close to “negative dialectics” in spirit, namely Maoist teaching with regard to contradictions which expresses the same spirit of nihilism as that which permeates Adorno’s “negative dialectics”. Naturally it would be wrong to regard Mao Tse-tung as the ideologist of militant youth in the West, yet nevertheless in his statements just as in the works of Marcuse, Adorno, etc., we find philosophical justification of revolt.[19]
To understand Mao’s philosophical manoeuvring more fully, it is worth quoting him directly from On Practice. We do not start with knowledge for Mao, but rather discover
… the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.[20]
Despite the assertion that knowing and doing are one, there is a fundamental instability at the heart of Mao’s theory. Perceptual experience is said to ground theory, but theory likewise needs to be grounded in perception (or practice). The result is a kind of epistemological seesaw that constantly oscillates between practice and theory without resolution. While this reciprocal back and forth is often called “dialectical”, one may recall Hegel’s Logic, and its discussion of “ground”.[21] There, Hegel argues that such reciprocal flipflopping between concept and reality (between reason and its object) is not genuinely rational, but the flux of the “understanding”. Such circular reasoning and dualism cannot be called knowledge, but it may be called “begging the question”. Hence, instead of answering the question of what knowledge is, Mao lumps together a mosaic of disparate concepts and things, presenting their interplay as a theoretical advance. When Mao, in a rhetorical flourish, labels this perpetual back and forth “a unity”, it is somewhat like resolving the chicken-and-egg problem of what came first by coining the hybrid term “chegg”.
Beyond its circularity, Mao’s epistemology resembles a Stalinised version of John Dewey’s own trial and error pragmatism.[22] Like any flavour of pragmatism, it struggles to account for the transition from experience to knowledge. A conception of knowledge that claims objectivity – purporting to reflect a lawful material world – is illicit if it can appeal only to sense-perception or “practice”. As David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued long ago, along with the “good bishop” George Berkeley, sensation alone discloses nothing about an objective world that exists independently of consciousness. Nor can it yield principles, such as the principle of sufficient reason, or universal concepts like time and space, or freedom and necessity. Such concepts are not things one can taste or smell, or “struggle” towards. Thus, the foundation of Mao’s theory of knowledge is thoroughly empiricist, and the transition from particular perceptions (or practices) to universal concepts in his version of Marxism is little better than alchemy.
Mao was not without his Chinese Trotskyist critics on these philosophical questions. Wang Fanxi, writing in exile, argued that Mao severely misunderstood the nature of knowledge and its accumulation. As Wang put it, Mao’s approach amounted to a form of “mechanical induction”. Against Mao’s empiricism and circular dialectics, Wang maintained that Marxist epistemology begins not with isolated perception but with the inherited body of scientific and theoretical knowledge acquired by our scientific forebearers and contemporaries:
Human experience and knowledge accumulated over aeons is ceaselessly handed down. People’s understanding (as individuals or in groups) does not start from their own perception but by studying and digesting the rationality of their predecessors and contemporaries. Do today’s revolutionaries first become Luddites and then Fourierites and Owenites before finding their own way to Marxism? Of course not. Instead, they start with Marxism-Leninism, the highest form of knowledge. So socialists should found their practice in revolutionary theory, gained from past achievements, and thus get twice the result with half the effort, rather than waste time and energy on ‘perceptual’ revolutionary activity. For in today’s conditions, defeat is practically inevitable without a grounding in ‘rational’ revolutionary theory.[23]
Wang observed that Mao’s “primacy of practice” reflected his own political situation. As a military and party leader, Mao privileged tactics and immediate results above all, but at the expense of broader understanding and strategy. The result was a version of Marxism that allowed Mao to drift toward the national interests of the Stalinist bureaucracy. By over-privileging action (“struggle”) in his thinking, Mao ensured that practice does not ground itself in theory; instead, theory is fashioned ad hoc to justify whatever political practice prevails after the fact.
The Red Guard and the Market Stalinist
The zigzags of Mao’s philosophy have inspired both “left” and right deviations. On the one hand stands the French thinker and unrepentant Maoist Alain Badiou. In his work, Badiou celebrates the division central to Mao’s dialectics, proclaiming that “one divides into two” is the main law of revolution: “In concrete, militant philosophy, it is thus indispensable to announce that there is only one law of the dialectic: One divides into two. Such is the principle of observable facts and of action”.[24] For Badiou, Mao is, above all, a rebel when it comes to established institutions – even avowedly socialist ones. He therefore defends Mao for “bombarding the headquarters” during the Cultural Revolution, while also deploring the Chairman’s suppression of the Shanghai People’s Commune in 1967. In a sense, Badiou is more Maoist than Mao, for he treats struggle itself as the only constant in the universe: “Struggle is the only absolute principle of dialectical thought: this is the essence of dialectics as a philosophy in revolt”.[25]
Rockhill cites Badiou as his doctoral supervisor at Paris 8.[26] While Rockhill appreciates some aspects of his former professor’s militancy and polemical style, he criticises Badiou for utopianism and messianism. Rockhill argues in Pipers that Badiou’s idea of communism is emptied of determinate content, functioning instead as an empty signifier severed from “Actually Existing Socialism”. On this view, Badiou’s communism is vague enough to be adopted by students and intellectuals as an intellectually fashionable posture, or as a theoretical “persona”, with little practical significance. One can style oneself as “Badiouan”, just as one might play at being a “Deleuzean” or “Adornian”. Perhaps against Badiou’s own intentions, “Badiouanism” becomes another commodity within what Rockhill calls “the imperial theoretical superstructure”.
Rockhill credits Badiou for being a more systematic philosopher than Žižek. By contrast, Žižek is straightforwardly anathematised as “capitalism’s court jester”, or the epitome of everything wrong with Western Marxism. Žižek is an academic celebrity, who flirts with Marxian (and even Stalinist) labels, but maintains a fundamentally conformist politics. He can be counted on to endorse everything from Obama, NATO, Donald Trump, or Israel. But being a systematic philosopher like Badiou is not necessarily a virtue for Rockhill. Part of Žižek’s problem, Rockhill suggests, is that he borrows too heavily from Badiou’s idealistic Platonism. Instead of communism being rooted in AES, Badiou turns it into a Platonic form, or a Kantian regulative idea. If Kant posited God in the Critique of Practical Philosophy to ground morality, then Badiou posits communism to ground the good life.
Badiou’s Platonic affirmation of communism saves it from the bloody legacies of AES and the contamination of real history. For Rockhill, this pushes Badiou towards an otherworldly anarchism, where any compromise with state-building is cast as treason against the purity of the communist idea. He writes that Badiou’s “anti-politics” resembles “… insurgent anarchism, merged with an unhealthy dose of metaphysics and utopian socialism. After all, this is a politics in which an individual becomes a Subject by being faithful to an inexplicable Event that interrupts history, acting on its consequences like the followers of Christ”.[27]
So much for the antinomianism of Saint Badiou. But also echoing Badiou’s work on St. Paul, Rockhill describes his own road to Damascus moment in Pipers, claiming to have finally seen the light from the East (or at least saw that the East was Red). He finally shifted his grad school allegiance from Western Marxism – or specifically the speculative leftism of the Paris 8 culture – to the People’s Republic of China. Curiously, his Eastern Marxism is strongly mediated through the Western Marxist scholarship of Domenico Losurdo, whom Rockhill has helped to introduce to Anglophone readers.
Like Badiou, Losurdo defended Maoist China in the 1960s. Unlike Badiou, however, he did not recoil from China after the Cultural Revolution. Rather, Losurdo became a staunch defender of the “realism” of Deng Xiaoping’s market socialism. Where Badiou celebrated the mass enthusiasm of the Cultural Revolution, Losurdo condemned it as a form of utopian messianism – at times even linking Mao to Trotsky in this regard. Instead, he championed the side of Mao who emphasised state building and the development of productive forces, viewing Deng as the true heir to this legacy. On this account, Losurdo holds that socialism is best exemplified by the orderly, bureaucratic, and market-driven policies of contemporary China. Socialism comes to mean not the withering away of the state or the abolition of money, but markets tinted red.[28]
For Badiou, dialectics is authentic when the one divides into two, or what he calls “scission”.[29] But Losurdo would stress the need for reconciliation, or what the Maoists would call “two combining into one”. The Maoist legacy seems split between the purism of the GPCR Red Guard and the “capitalist roader” position of Deng. What Badiou condemns Mao for, Losurdo and Rockhill embrace, and vice versa. One can imagine a staged debate between Badiou and Losurdo, hurling epithets at one another borrowed from the heyday of 1960s factional struggle sessions.
But which theorist is the truer heir to Mao? Such a question cannot be answered simply, since the Chairman himself embodied both tendencies. This duality reflects not any principled Marxism, but Mao’s own tactical opportunism and pragmatism. Any emphasis on struggle as opposed to harmony could be readjusted to suit bureaucratic needs. When Raya Dunayvesyaya, in a kind of Orientalism, attacks Mao in 1957 as “permeated to the marrow of his bones … with Confucianism” she did not foresee Mao’s anti-Confucius campaigns during the GPCR.[30] Mao is not “permeated to the marrow of his bones” with The Analects, but with Stalinism and the “primacy of practice”.
If Badiou overlays Maoism with Gallic existentialism and Platonism, then Losurdo obscures Mao and Deng with Hegelian jargon. To paraphrase Marx, Badiou “idealises” the bureaucratic manipulation of Mao during the GPCR as heroic, while Losurdo “empiricises” the actual, reconciling Marxism to bureaucratic realism. In this sense, Badiou represents the poetry of Maoism and Losurdo represents its prose.
The poetic Maoism of Badiou rejects parties, states, and the actual process of history. Revolution does not arise from mundane material processes but erupts like a bolt from the blue. We wait patiently, with militant faith, for the coming of the Event. But, most of the time, we resemble Benjamin’s Angel of History, bearing witness in horror to the wreckage of the past piling up before us – one disaster after another. Nevertheless, if we steel ourselves and maintain fidelity to the Event, perhaps it will arrive like a state of grace. With Badiou’s ontology of the Event, it becomes difficult to distinguish his idea of revolution from the Christian Rapture.
Losurdo rejects Badiou’s antinomianism in favour of being more worldly-wise. In this respect, Losurdo follows Lukács, who made his own Faustian bargain with the Stalinist state, with all its betrayals and bloodshed. In his 1934 essay on Hölderlin, Lukács obliquely justified his turn towards Stalin by invoking Hegel’s notion of accepting the “prose of the present”.[31] If the French Revolution had to pass through the prosaic development of Thermidor in order to consolidate bourgeois power against feudalism, then socialism–likewise–must also endure a Thermidorian phase.
Trotsky, in Revolution Betrayed, sharply criticised such analogies. For socialism to work, he argued it must be international and democratic. One cannot hope to develop the productive forces in isolation from the world economy – no person is an island unto themselves, and no country exists outside the international system. In a speech to the Fifteenth Congress of the RCP, Trotsky compared ignoring international conditions to walking naked through the streets of Moscow in January, absurdly imagining one could avoid both the weather and the police.[32] As for democracy, it is as vital to socialism as oxygen is to the body. Without it, bureaucratic mismanagement would flourish and a chasm would emerge between privileged managers and workers, all setting the stage for capitalist restoration. Against Lukács, what proved effective for the national bourgeoisie of the French Revolution cannot simply be applied in the same way to a Marxist project.
Losurdo inherits this same Lukácsian error. Instead of applying Lukács’ own critique of irrationalism to Stalin, he attempts to Hegelianise the bureaucracy, presenting it as something rational and real. And while Losurdo’s scholarship offers many valuable insights into philosophy and history, his own dialectical reason stops short when it comes to Stalin’s Russia and Deng’s China. Like so many Marxist philosophers before him, such as Lukács and Bukharin, Losurdo limits dialectics to accommodate pragmatic Realpolitik. The vestiges of bureaucracy, the state, markets, and money are not inherently rational institutions. As Marx and Lenin insisted, they deserve to perish when the productive forces develop in harmony with genuinely free social relations.[33]
Rockhill does not have much to say about Losurdo’s Hegelian Marxism. Instead, he adopts the weakest aspects of Losurdo’s Stalinism and even goes further in indulging in conspiracy theories. When Losurdo corresponded with Furr, he supported socialism in one country, and the need to affirm Stalin’s “realism” against Trotsky. Yet Losurdo at least conceded that the purges were tragic, describing them in terms of a “dialectic of Saturn”.[34] Indeed, in his discussion of the inner-Bolshevik “civil war”, the situation under Stalin comes to resemble something akin to Mafia-style gangland killings.[35] Moreover, Losurdo did not go so far as to accept the confessions of the Moscow Trial defendants as true. And last – but not least – it is difficult to overlook that when Losurdo discusses Bonapartism in bourgeois states, he admits that certain aspects of Stalin’s and Mao’s rule could be considered Bonapartist.[36] As far as one can tell, Rockhill shows little of this dialectical or historical nuance. If he did, he might be guilty of “Trotskyite” tendencies in admitting the Bonapartist character of “AES”.
“Socialism From Above”: The Frankfurt School
Opportunism in politics has theoretical roots. If Kant famously limited reason to make room for faith, a similar operation can be found in both Soviet Marxism and Western Marxism. The critique of “dogmatism” in Marxism-Leninism, or the critique of “closed” or “identity-thinking” in Adorno might seem superficially open, pluralistic, and non-reductive; after all, “dogma” is grey but real life is green. But such appearances can be misleading. The limitations of theory stem from a shared pessimism about the self-emancipation of the working class, and what passes for a “dialectical” philosophy often results in a fairly mechanistic and fatalistic politics. It does not matter if the source is Adorno or Stalin: both the original Frankfurt School and the advocates of “AES” arrive at similar conclusions, insofar as A) they do not take the arguments of classical Marxism seriously and B) they look to outside agents to carry on the struggle for liberation. Despite their many differences, the Frankfurt School theorists and Stalinists tend to promote what Hal Draper called “socialism from above”, rather than socialism from below.[37]
To Marcuse’s credit, he rejected Stalinism and was not content to languish in the Grand Hotel Abyss with Adorno and Horkheimer. He continued to look for historical forces and social groups that might carry forward progressive struggles – national liberation movements, feminism, environmentalism, and alternatives to bureaucratic socialism. Marcuse was rightly appalled by Adorno’s attitude toward the student movement, and he openly criticised him for calling the police in 1969 on anti-Vietnam War protestors occupying Frankfurt University. In his correspondence, Marcuse told his old colleague: “I would despair about myself (us) if I (we) would appear to be on the side of a world that supports mass murder in Vietnam, or says nothing about it, and which makes a hell of any realms that are outside the reach of its own repressive power”.[38]
Marcuse should not have been surprised by Adorno’s attitude. The latter’s politics had long followed a conservative trajectory. Apart from the occasionally positive reference to Lenin, he (critically) supported the pro-NATO and pro-Western SPD. True, Adorno yearned to write an orthodox-style critique of the 1959 Godesberg Programme, in which the SPD formally abandoned Marxism.[39] However, after consulting Horkheimer, Adorno thought it better to keep quiet. Just as he had insisted in the 1930s on keeping silent about the Soviet Union and the Moscow Trials to preserve the anti-fascist popular front, he now made a similar argument about maintaining support for the SPD:
If anyone attacks the SPD today – and that is what it would amount to, however one formulated one’s comments – that would be grist to the mill of everyone who wants to shake the already frail pillars of democracy…I would not wish to contribute to the same sort of disaster that people brought about in an earlier age when they coined the slogan of social fascism.[40]
While Adorno acknowledged the political dangers of the SPD joining the mainline conservatives in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – which would go on to form the “Grand Coalition” – he regarded such a fusion as a progressive step insofar as it helped keep the neo-fascists of the NPD [National Democratic Party] at bay:
On the other hand, I regard the Grand Coalition as a real opportunity for a transition to a two-party system of the kind that you [Horkheimer] envisage, and this in turn would lead to the elimination of the NPD which despite all reassurances I take as seriously as you.[41]
Thus, Adorno was clear that any alternative to the SPD was illusionary, sectarian, and nihilistic in outlook. Anti-capitalist movements that went beyond the Bundestag were condemned in advance as reactionary. In this way we come full circle with Adorno: a thinker who prided himself as transcending party-politics and mass conformism ultimately returned to supporting the SPD and the bourgeois status quo as authentically “Marxist”.
Despite condemning the student movement for allegedly precipitating fascist dangers, the West German government that Adorno supported was itself riddled with former Nazis and had even banned the Communist Party in 1956.[42] As Rockhill shows, some of the freshly minted Frankfurt School members of the Federal Republic period also had Nazi pasts. When Adorno was asked about Ludwig von Friedeburg’s earlier involvement in the Third Reich, he remarked that the positive qualities instilled in him during his service in the Wehrmacht – such as a sense of “duty” and a “collective sense of responsibility” – had ultimately “allowed him full emancipation”.[43]
Contrast the authoritarian qualities Adorno admired in these “ex-Nazis” with the traits he condemned in his radical students. It might sound bizarre how the “critical theorist” Adorno died of a heart-attack not long after feminist students bared their chests at him in protest, but the more Adorno and Horkheimer rejected emancipation as beyond this world, the more they practically conformed to the status quo.[44] Hegel might have told them that a stance of absolute scepticism tends to culminate in absolute pessimism – or what he described in the Phenomenology of Spirit as the “unhappy consciousness”.
The fate of Horkheimer and Adorno had already been prophesied by the young Horkheimer of the 1920s. With great prescience, writing under the alias “Henrich Regius”, Horkheimer wrote the following in his Dawn (1926-1931) aphorisms:
The hedged approbation of Marxist theory, its respectful integration in the history of philosophy, is something the bourgeoisie likes to see. The correlate of this contemplative treatment of Marxism in real life is the accommodation to things as they are. To say that socialism does not “follow” from Marxist theory even though socialism is desirable, and to add nothing further, is to scientifically and morally justify capitalism. It is an expression of social skepticism.[45]
What better description of Horkheimer’s mature critical theory could there be than what Horkheimer himself wrote as a younger man? Between these Dawn aphorisms and the later Decline aphorisms (1950-1969), we see a striking sea-change in attitude. In Decline, Horkheimer’s conservatism, pessimism, and even religious mysticism are on full display; he seems fearful about almost everything. It cannot be the place of this essay to show exactly how the philosophical and political makeup of the young Horkheimer could possibly transition from early Luxemburgism toward something resembling neoconservatism. Yet the Dawn aphorisms are quite damning when viewed in light of the author’s later evolution, as a supporter of American intervention in Vietnam, the dismissal of the student movement as authoritarian, and using his clout as a “Marxist” academic to shame radicals.[46]
Horkheimer’s late pessimism also led to a kind of cultural chauvinism against the East. One key reason he supported the Vietnam War was his fear of Maoist China. Horkheimer’s paranoia is explicit in his worry of a Chinese invasion of Europe, warning that if the West failed to build up its arsenals and military capacities, then “the Chinese will be on the Rhine”.[47] Ryan Crawford details how Horkheimer’s descriptions of the Russians and Chinese in his later writings do not go beyond Cold War stereotypes. And, in a Burkean vein, Horkheimer condemned civil rights activists in Harlem for rejecting Western society: “so-called activists…are so close to the demagogues, because they do not want to see in today’s society what is worth preserving and expanding”.[48]
Finally, one cannot separate Horkheimer’s late conservatism from his abandonment of Marxist materialism. It is no coincidence that his rejection of Marxism in the Decline aphorisms also paralleled his dismissal of proletarian emancipation as a pipe dream. Whereas the young Horkheimer had drawn closer to Hegel and Marx, these influences were increasingly displaced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Indeed, during this rightward turn, Horkheimer even concluded that Nietzsche was a greater thinker than Marx.[49] More work needs to be done translating Horkheimer’s theoretical assumptions into their practical political implications. But it seems clear how such forms of theoretical pessimism can readily enable political reaction.[50]
MAGA Adornians
In our interregnum between capitalism and socialism, as Gramsci would call it, we have witnessed some truly bizarre political symptoms. These include tendencies which attempt to transcend the traditional Left-Right divide, echoing in eerie ways the polarisation of the interwar period. On the Frankfurt School side, among those who favour the conservatism of Adorno and Horkheimer over the more radical positions of Marcuse, a new critique of “woke” liberalism has emerged, along with a rejection of the “totally administered society” that increasingly overlaps with themes found on the Right.
The transition from a left-wing orientation toward a more conservative one among Anglophone supporters of the Frankfurt School can be traced in the pages of Telos magazine during the 1980s and 1990s. Russell Berman, a Telos editor, is one of these exponents of a Critical Theory made compatible with what he calls “revolutionary conservatism”. In his introduction to Ernst Jünger’s On Pain, (published by Telos in 2008) Berman observes that Jünger’s critique of modernity shares certain premises with Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. While Jünger and the Frankfurt School’s political conclusions diverge, they share a fundamental rejection of mass consumerism, technological rationality, and historical optimism:
Jünger’s rejection of sentimentalist optimism and his insistence on the centrality of pain—by which he means loss, suffering, and death as well as genuine physical pain—to the human condition is akin to the dark vision of Schopenhauerian pessimism that suffuses Max Horkheimer’s thought. The blithe confidence in a collective “forward” that marked, and still marks, progressivism is no longer on the table. Whatever the consequences of the tragic sensibility—and there are various possible outcomes—it precludes the characteristic mentality of the historical optimist, best allegorised by the frozen smile of an emoticon: happy days aren’t here again… Finally, one can even argue a Doppelgänger resemblance between Jünger and Theodor Adorno … they both share a post Weberian suspicion of bureaucracy; and they are both allergic to facile sentimentality. Perhaps most importantly, Adorno and Jünger present uncannily similar treatments of the demise of subjectivity.[51]
As part of Berman’s concluding remarks to his introduction, he writes that Jünger “makes the strong case for revolution as conservative, rather than as emancipatory, and it ought to be read next to other revolutionary appeals, from Lenin’s State and Revolution to Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken”.[52]
After 2008, Berman went on to elaborate a framework that sought to transcend the Left-Right binary in favour of what he called the “gray zone”. But, like many attempts to move beyond Left and Right, Berman ended up firmly on the Right and endorsed Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016. What makes Berman’s endorsement unusual is the Adornian justification he offered for it. In a 2019 interview with a Swiss magazine, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), he explained how he could simultaneously espouse Adornian theory and support Trump:
NZZ: Mr. Berman, you are a staunch supporter of the neoconservative American President Donald Trump. At the same time, you are a scholar and follower of the neo-Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno. How do the two fit together?
Berman: Adorno has a lot to say to us today. Nobody has described the total socialisation [Vergesellschaftung] of all spheres of life better than he did – a tendency that has only increased following the philosopher’s death in 1969. In the West today – also in the US – we live in rigidly conformist societies, without understanding or describing them in these terms. For his part, Donald Trump is strongly committed to halting this socialisation, even to reversing it.[53]
Given Adorno’s many criticisms of right-wing demagoguery and the culture industry, it might seem odd for an Adorno scholar to support not only an authoritarian demagogue but also a reality television star. Nevertheless, this position is not a totally unique one today. The other prominent Adornian supporter of the Trump administration from academia is the self-described “Last Marxist”, Chris Cutrone.
Cutrone is the founder of the Platypus Affiliated Society, which eclectically synthesises post-Trotskyism, Adorno, and Moishe Postone. He began his political career as a member of the youth wing of the Spartacist League before pursuing graduate studies at the University of Chicago under Postone himself and the German philosophy scholar Robert Pippin. Cutrone wrote his doctoral dissertation on Adorno and Lenin, and has remained deeply influenced by the pessimism of the early Frankfurt School, going so far as to declare the entire Left “dead”. This pronouncement dovetailed with Cutrone’s own notion of “anti-anti-imperialism”, under which he supported everything from the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq to Zionism – which he once described as containing a “rational kernel” of racism against Palestinians.[54]
During the second Trump administration, Cutrone’s departure from Marxism became even more explicit in his support for US proposals to annex Panama, Greenland, and Canada. While much of Alex Gourevitch’s essay on “Neoconservative Multipolarity” correctly identifies Cutrone’s turn to the Right, we disagree that Cutrone’s position is a form of “MAGA Trotskyism”.[55] Although Cutrone remains critical of Stalinism, a more fitting label for his current politics might be MAGA Adornianism, something he shares with Berman.
Cutrone’s embrace of Trump’s imperial ambitions is not entirely surprising. Back in 2016, he wrote an infamous article entitled “Why Not Trump?”[56] While careful not to endorse a candidate outright, he argued that Trump was an anti-establishment “outsider”, even portraying him as a moderate centrist opposed to official Washington liberalism. According to Cutrone, Trump rejected the “post-1960s identity politics of “race, gender and sexuality”… [which included] more minorities and women in the workforce and management”. Yet Cutrone insisted that Trump’s politics were not attacking the spirit of the 60s out of “racism” or “misogyny” but against the lowered expectations of the “new normal”. Although he never states it directly, Cutrone strongly implies that this “new normal” was represented by Hillary Clinton.
This critique of managerial postmodern liberalism – seen as worse than good old-fashioned “bourgeois politics” – also appears in the work of Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher strongly influenced by Adorno’s brand of negative dialectics and cultural criticism. But, like Berman and Cutrone, Žižek once remarked in an interview that he would rather vote for Trump over Clinton.[57] The prioritisation of “authenticity” over so-called “woke” identity politics brings such arguments dangerously close to the paleoconservative rejection of managerial liberalism advanced by figures such as James Burnham, Samuel Francis, and Paul Gottfried. As we saw earlier, Gottfried, in particular, had little objection to Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticisms of modernity, recognising that these themes could be more readily adopted to a right-wing project rather than a left-wing one.
From “Global Class War” to Multipolarity
If the proletariat cannot be trusted or relied upon to fight its own battles, then one must look for someone else to wage them on its behalf. While Horkheimer and Adorno chose the West over the East as the last bastion of freedom against “totalitarianism”, we find the mirror image of their pessimism in the politics of Sam Marcy. For Marcy – an American ex-Trotskyist who gravitated towards Rockhill’s “Actually Existing Socialism” – the only way to combat imperialism was to abandon the idea of permanent revolution and instead (uncritically) side with the Soviet Union and its geopolitical allies.
Marcy had originally been a member of the American Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), but he broke with the majority following the events in Hungary in 1956. While most of the SWP supported the Hungarian Revolution as a genuine workers’ uprising, Marcy adopted the opposite position, condemning it as counterrevolutionary. Whether workers themselves understood it or not, he argued, the uprising objectively played into the hands of US imperialism and the CIA. To the shock of the SWP majority, Marcy and his followers supported Soviet tanks rolling into Budapest and the bloody suppression of the Hungarian Revolution. The epithet “tankie” was later used to describe such supporters of Soviet intervention into Hungary, particularly in Britain. But the term applies with equal force to Sam Marcy’s own neo-Stalinist turn.[58]
After leaving the SWP in 1959, Marcy formed the Workers’ World Party (WWP). As a matter of programme, the WWP advanced the theory of “Global Class War”.[59] According to this conception, the geopolitical conflict between the USSR and American imperialism superseded the class struggle internationally and inside every country. As a result, during the Cold War, Marcy stood for the uncritical defence of the USSR, China, Cuba, and their non-socialist allies. In practice, this meant that any criticism of these “progressive” forces was treated as objectively counterrevolutionary.
The Marcyites attempted to justify the theory of Global Class War on dialectical grounds, arguing that it expressed Lenin’s idea of the struggle between opposites. But, as SWP critics like Arne Swabeck pointed out, their notion of Leninist dialectics was hopelessly rigid and dualistic, leaving no room for the interpenetration and transformation of opposites. Consequently, there was no space for nuance when it came to workers’ uprisings against their bureaucratic overlords. Workers were presented with a stark choice: either support those same Soviet rulers or become pawns of Western imperialism.
The collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991 forced a modification of Marcy’s conception of Global Class War. The WWP continued to defend the five remaining “Marxist-Leninist” states – China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam – but the scope of its doctrine expanded. Marcy now stood for the uncritical defence of virtually any force perceived to be an enemy of American imperialism. Alongside nominally socialist states, the WWP has therefore championed decidedly anti-communist forces such as the mullahs of Iran (who massacred tens of thousands of communists), the Assad dictatorship in Syria, and the revanchist presidency of Vladimir Putin in Russia.[60] The Marcyites portray these regimes as progressive and anti-imperialist, while treating virtually every worker protest against them as a CIA-backed “color revolution”, regardless of the evidence. In effect, their outlook amounts to a form of social democratic “lesser evilism” on the terrain of global politics.
Following the death of Sam Marcy in 1998, a split occurred among his heirs in the WWP in 2004. From this split – very much in the Maoist spirit of “one divides into two!” – two new Marcyite parties emerged: the original Workers’ World Party and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). Unlike the overwhelming majority of leftist splits, the reasons for this division have never been clearly articulated. The founders of the PSL claimed that the WWP leadership failed to uphold Marcy’s legacy. But, in terms of practice and programme, there is no discernible difference between the two organisations. Beyond personality conflicts, the exact political reasons for the split remain a mystery.
The background on Marcyism is relevant here for the simple reason that Gabriel Rockhill was a member of the PSL at least in 2021.[61] Many of Rockhill’s positions reflect the PSL’s broader worldview and political outlook. This is particularly true in his advocacy of “multipolarity”. Multipolarity is a conception of international affairs that favours different power blocs rather than a unipolar system dominated by a single hegemon (i.e. the United States). Like earlier Marcyism, multipolarity replaces the class struggle of the international proletariat with geostrategic realpolitik.
In line with multipolarity, Rockhill supports rivals to the United States as anti-imperialist. This includes states such as Iran, China, and Russia. With regard to the latter, Rockhill believes that the Russian bourgeoisie is torn between nationalist and socialist wings. How the Russian bourgeoisie as a class could possess a “socialist” orientation is quite the example of “non-reductive” Marxism. It is true that Rockhill has gone on record stating that he does not support the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, he claims that “internationally, the role that Russia is playing is one of the leading forces in struggling very directly against US-led imperialism. On the world stage, Russia is playing – partly – a progressive role”.[62]
Contrary to some “Marxist-Leninist” parties, there is nothing anti-imperialist about the Russian bourgeoisie or the rule of Vladimir Putin. For one, Putin is a diehard anti-communist who benefited immensely from the collapse of the USSR. He has condemned Lenin and Bolshevism while promoting the revival of Russian nationalism, Orthodoxy, and revanchism. Added to this are the reinforcement of patriarchal traditionalism, laws on the books discriminating against homosexuality, and the growth of antisemitic and neo-fascist movements. The resulting political atmosphere bears more resemblance to the pogromist Black Hundreds than to the original Bolsheviks.
Nevertheless, there is one Soviet leader whom Putin touts as a hero of Russian history. While he condemns Lenin – going so far as to blame the first Soviet premier for the creation of an independent Ukraine – Putin expresses a far more positive attitude toward Joseph Stalin.[63] Like many contemporary Marxist-Leninists, he calls for a more “balanced assessment” of the General Secretary’s legacy. While acknowledging the repression under his reign, Putin still praises Stalin for defeating the Nazis in WWII, industrialising the Soviet Union, and turning Russia into a superpower.[64] Yet none of this admiration has anything to do with Stalin as a Marxist. Instead, Putin elevates Stalin into the pantheon of great Russian nationalists. The horrible vice of “great Russian chauvinism” that Lenin once condemned in Stalin is now celebrated by Putin as his defining virtue.
[1] Rockhill 2025, 337.
[2] V.I. Lenin, “On the Significance of Militant Materialism”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm
[3] On this repression of Deborinites, Mechanists, and other Marxist philosophers in the Soviet Union, see Yehoshua Yakhot, The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR (The 1920s & 1930s) (Oak Park: Mehring Books, 2012) and Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1985), 151-244. While Abram Deborin never rose to the level of a Stalinist inquisitor – and was ultimately one of its victims – he could be heavy-handed in his treatment of philosophical opponents in the Mechanist camp. Nevertheless, heated polemics are not equivalent to purges, bans, or forced recantations.
[4] Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 231-32.
[5] During the 1930s, many Soviet Hegelians were shot, while Deborin slept on a bench to avoid the NKVD: “In 1937, four years after the events just described, when the mass arrests had begun, Deborin at one time was afraid to spend the night at home. He slept on a bench in the Neskuchny Garden in Moscow. However, the cup passed him by. He was one of the few “Deborinists” who survived”. See Yakhot 2012, 89.
[6] Leon Trotsky, “Philosophical Tendencies of the Bureaucracy”, in The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29) (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1981), 507-08.
[7] On the problems with Kautsky’s philosophy, see Douglas Greene, The New Reformism and the Revival of Karl Kautsky: The Renegade’s Revenge (New York: Routledge Books, 2024), 21-30.
[8] Trotsky 1981, 511.
[9] Leon Trotsky, “Stalin as a Theoretician”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/03/stalin.htm
[10] Ibid.
[11] Leon Trotsky, “We Cannot Follow a Short-Range Policy”, in Trotsky 1981, 93.
[12] See 24:50 in Critical Theory Workshop. “Toronto Book Launch for ‘Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?’” YouTube. February 10, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdshmadDbq0.
[13] Three Major Struggles on China’s Philosophical Front (1949-64) (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1973), 63-4. https://www.bannedthought.net/China/MaoEra/Philosophy/ThreeMajorStrugglesOnChina’sPhilosophicalFront-1949-64-Peking-1973.pdf
[14] On this speculation, see Antin Donoso, “Stalinism in Marxist Philosophy”, Studies in Soviet Thought Vol. 19, No. 2 (Mar., 1979): 138.
[15] Mao Zedong, “Talk on Questions of Philosophy”, Marxists Internet Archive.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_27.htm
[16] Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm
[17] Mao Zedong, “Talks on Questions of Philosophy”.
[18] Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 92.
[19] Eduard Batalov, The Philosophy of Revolt: Criticism of Left Radical Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 91. A similar comparison of Mao and Adorno’s dialectics is made by Slavoj Žižek: “Mao scathingly dismisses the category of “dialectical synthesis” of the opposites, promoting his own version of “negative dialectics” – every synthesis is for him ultimately what Adorno in his critique of Lukacs called erpresste Versoehnung – enforced reconciliation – at best a momentary pause in the ongoing struggle, which occurs not when the opposites are united, but when one side simply wins over the other”.
Slavoj Žižek, “Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule”, in Mao Zedong, On Practice and Contradiction (New York: Verso, 2007), 11.
[20] Mao Zedong, “On Practice”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm
[21] For the circularity of the category of ground in Hegel – and why it ends in tautological statements of grounds grounding (or positing) other grounds in infinite regresses – see the discussion of Ground in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Science of Logic”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl456.htm
[22] For Dewey’s influence on the young Mao, see Emmanuel Renault, “Dewey, Hook et Mao: Quelques affinités entre marxisme et pragmatisme,” Actuel Marx Vol. 54, No. 2 (2013): 138-57.
[23] Wang Fanxi, Mao Zedong Thought (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021), 177-78.
[24] Alain Badiou, The Theory of the Subject (London: Continuum, 2009), 14.
[25] Alain Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction (Maspéro, 1975), 19. http://www.entretemps.asso.fr/Badiou/Theorie-de-la-contradiction.pdf [Our translation] This section draws heavily from Doug Enaa Greene, “A Unity of Opposites: The Dengist and the Red Guard”, Monthly Review Online, August 19, 2022. www.mronline.org/2022/08/19/a-unity-of-opposites-the-dengist-and-the-red-guard
[26] Gabriel Rockhill, “Vita”, Gabriel Rockhill. https://gabrielrockhill.com/about/
[27] Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek”, Counterpunch, January 2, 2023. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zisek/
[28] For more on Losurdo and China, see Domenico Losurdo, “World War I, the October Revolution and Marxism’s Reception in the West and East”, in Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Boston: Brill, 2015), 275; Domenico Losurdo, “History of the Communist Movement: Failure, Betrayal, or Learning Process?” Nature, Society, and Thought Vol. 16, Iss. 1 (Jan. 2003): 55; Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History (New York: Palgrave, 2016), 193 – 96; Domenico Losurdo, “Flight from History? The Communist Movement between Self-Criticism and Self-Contempt”, Nature, Society and Thought Vol. 13, no. 3 (October 2000): 494 – 97.
[29] Badiou 1975, 47.
[30] Raya Dunayevskaya, “The ‘Philosophy’ of the Yenan Period: Mao Perverts Lenin”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/articles/raya.htm
[31] Georg Lukács, “Hölderlin’s Hyperion”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1934/holderlin.htm
[32] “Speech to the Fifteenth Conference”, in Trotsky 1980, 200-1.
[33] On this, see chapter five of Lenin’s State and Revolution on the economic basis for the withering away of the state. V. I. Lenin, “The Economic Basis for the Withering Away of the State,” Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm
[34] For a thorough criticism of Losurdo’s Stalinism see Greene 2023, 285-310 and Greene 2025, 26-49.
[35] Losurdo 2023, 39-40. This point was first made by Alex de Jong.
[36] See Losurdo 2024b, 187-91.
[37] On the distinction between socialism from “below” and “above”, see Hal Draper, “The Two Souls of Socialism”, Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/
[38] Quoted in Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (New York: Verso, 2016), 346.
[39] Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850 – 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 317.
[40] Quoted in Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 419.
[41] Quoted in ibid.
[42] William D. Graf, “Anti-Communism in the Federal Republic of Germany”, Socialist Register 21 (1984): 167. Future Red Army Faction leader Ulrike Meinhoff described the presence of “former” Nazis in the Federal Republic of Germany as follows: “Anyone who speaks of “old Nazis”, however, should also take the next step, which is to recognise and criticise the equally old political ideas that still hold sway”. Ulrike Meinhof, “Hitler Within You”, in Everyone Talks about the Weather … We Don’t, ed. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011), 141. See also Losurdo 2024a, 143.
[43] Rockhill 2025, 214.
[44]On the feminist protest against Adorno, see Lisa Yun Lee, “The Bare-Breasts Incident,” in Renée J. Heberle, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 113-140.
[45] Horkheimer 1978, 36.
[46] See Peter M.R. Stirk, Max Horkheimer: A New Introduction (Boston: Barnes & Noble Books, 1992), 179-81.
[47] Quoted in Ryan Crawford, “Critical Theory Consolidated: Foreword Regression in the Late Work of Max Horkheimer and Its American Reception”, Critical Historical Studies Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring 2025): 91. According to Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer regarded the Vietnam war as a ‘justified attempt to halt the Chinese in Asia’ and thought that US withdrawal would lead to a blood bath that ‘would also expedite China’s passage to the Rhine’. See also Stirk 1992, 179.
[48] Crawford 2025, 94.
[49] Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzschean Legacy in Germany 1890-1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 185.
[50] For an excellent discussion of how the early Horkheimer transitioned to neoconservatism, see Stathis Kouvelakis, La critique défaite: Émergence et domestication de la Théorie critique (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2019).
[51] Russell A. Berman, “Preface”, in Ernst Jünger, On Pain (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2008), viii-x.
[52] Ibid. x.
[53] Ishay Landa and Emancipations with Daniel Tutt. “Philosophy and the Rise of Fascism – Symposium on Lukács’s Destruction of Reason (Day One)”. YouTube. February 2, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsmoihSKvpg and Russell A. Berman, “Donald Trump will den Status quo des Politbetriebs ändern”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, May 21, 2019. https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/trump-als-reformator-gegen-die-logik-der-verwalteten-welt-ld.1482709
[54] For a summary of the reactionary positions of the Platypus Affiliated Society, see Richard Seymour, et. all, “Open letter about the Platypus Affiliated Society”, Lenin’s Tomb, May 29, 2013. http://www.leninology.co.uk/2013/06/open-letter-about-platypus-affiliated.html; On Cutrone’s support for the annexation of Greenland, see Chris Cutrone, “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland”, Compact Magazine, January 9, 2025. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland/; In addition, see Chris Cutrone, “Iraq and the election: The fog of “anti-war” politics”, Platypus Review 7, October 2008. https://platypus1917.org/2008/10/01/iraq-and-the-election-the-fog-of-anti-war-politics/; The Platypus Historians Group, “Catastrophe, historical memory and the Left: 60 years of Israel-Palestine”, Platypus Review 5, May—July 2008. https://platypus1917.org/2008/05/01/catastrophe-historical-memory-and-the-left-60-years-of-israel-palestine/; Chris Cutrone, “Israel-Palestine and the “Left”“, Platypus Review 163, February 2024. https://platypus1917.org/2024/02/01/israel-palestine-and-the-left/?fbclid=IwY2xjawQB_Z5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETJUY2IySnR4ZklHY3FydXc2c3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHv5e87oZPNp5c_gp1nvLV2HRvT1x07brZWjEB5vJO3sCHp6Al8I06wvYkpFT_aem_0Oe5DRBQhlwUpgZd9YhVSA
[55] Alex Gourevitch, “Multipolar Neoconservatism”, The Northern Star, February 15, 2025. https://thenorthernstar.online/2025/02/15/multipolar-neoconservatism/
[56] Chris Cutrone, “Why not Trump?” Platypus Review 89, September 2016. https://platypus1917.org/2016/09/06/why-not-trump/
[57] Ian Steinman, “From Farce to Tragedy: Žižek Endorses Trump”, Left Voice, November 4, 2016. https://www.leftvoice.org/from-farce-to-tragedy-zisek-endorses-trump/; For Žižek’s connections to Adorno, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 2008), 27, 200, and 254.
[58] Arne Swabeck, “Marxist Method and the Lessons of the Hungarian Revolution: A Reply to Marcy and Grey”, Marxists internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/swp-us/idb/swp-1946-59/db/v18n06-mar-1957-db.pdf; On the Hungarian Revolution itself, see Peter Fryer, Hungarian Tragedy (London: Index Books, 1997). On the origin of the term “tankie”, see Stephen Driver, Understanding British Party Politics (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2011), 154.
[59] See Greene 2023, 274.
[60] Workers World, “Iran: What fraud?” Workers World, June 17, 2009. https://www.workers.org/2009/editorials/iran_0625/; Bronx Anti-War Coalition, “Syria: The beating heart of the Axis of Resistance”, Workers World, December 3, 2024. https://www.workers.org/2024/12/82283/; Otis Grotewohl, “Putin’s trip to North Korea, Vietnam weakens US imperialism”, Workers World, June 29, 2024. https://www.workers.org/2024/06/79451/
[61] Claudia De la Cruz and Gabriel Rockhill, “Culture as a weapon of class warfare: An interview with Claudia De La Cruz”, Liberation School, June 15, 2021. https://liberationschool.org/culture-as-a-weapon-of-class-warfare/
[62] See his remarks around 39-40 minutes in Critical Theory Workshop. “Multipolarity and the Role of the Left–Gabriel Rockhill Compilation”. YouTube. July 14, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9Od4H0WkHs.
[63] For Putin’s view on Lenin, Stalin, and Ukraine, see Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation”, The Kremlin, February 21, 2022. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828
[64] Dmitry Solovyov, “Putin calls for balanced assessment of Stalin”, Reuters, December 3, 2009. https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/putin-calls-for-balanced-assessment-of-stalin-idUSGEE5B21J6/
