23.01.2025
Do the evolution
Going from left to right is a well-trodden path. Paul Demarty traces the development of the ‘last Marxist’ from Spartacism to Trump cheerleader
Donald Trump’s plans for the annexation of Greenland have some eccentric cheerleaders in the United States - none more so than Chris Cutrone.
While most cheerleaders look hungrily at the vast territory and natural resources, and fear - rightly or wrongly - being beaten to the punch in a new scramble for the arctic, for Cutrone, it seemed to mean much more. In extending its territory over this rough land, home to slightly fewer people than Taunton, the United States would be renewing its vitality as a revolutionary nation - perhaps, indeed, the only one. Cutrone likes to style himself as “the last Marxist”, and indeed has done so for close to two decades at this point. He certainly seems to be a true believer in manifest destiny.
Perhaps some readers will be surprised to find out that this man styles himself as a Marxist. It will depend, perhaps, on a few factors - above all, how familiar they are with a whole ecosystem that for a time was called the ‘post-left’. Perhaps we thought the whole matter had resolved itself when many leading lights of this ‘not quite’ movement (including Cutrone) turned improbably Trumpite during and after 2016. Cutrone’s strange Greenland article is perhaps a good moment to check in on Platypus, which deliberately named itself after a quirk of evolution, to make note of any chance mutations that may have taken place.
What was Platypus beforehand? That is in part, necessarily, a matter of the biography of its ‘guru’. As a young man, Cutrone floated for a time in the orbit of the Spartacist League - it is not clear to me if he was ever a member per se. The Sparts were a robustly polemical outfit, committed to what they considered orthodox Trotskyism. It is less their conception of orthodox Trotskyism than their particular, angular style that he has carried with him.
The Sparts faced outward primarily to rival left organisations, whom they considered various species of vacillators, traitors and poseurs. Their political method consisted of taking the sharpest possible line on an issue of momentary politics, posing that position to their rivals, and denouncing their inevitable vacillation, treachery, etc. As an example - it was not enough, for the Sparts, to merely fight against US backing for the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The US left had to organise international brigades to fight them, guns in hand. Squeamishness about such voluntarism would not go unpunished.
By the mid-2000s, Cutrone had certainly broken with the Sparts’ model of anti-imperialism. He contributed a couple of letters to their Workers Vanguard paper commending the US occupation of Iraq (these letters seem, sadly, to have disappeared from the internet since I read them in the early 2010s).
At around this time, he came under the influence of Moishe Postone, a quasi-Marxist academic whose great achievements are an essay on anti-Semitism that has become the great holy text of today’s ‘left’ Zionists, arguing that the left is prone to anti-Semitism because the Jew is identified with the abstract power of capital; and an interpretation of Marxist political economy which reconstructs Marxism as a description of an endlessly self-perpetuating mechanism that wholly subsumes labour, thus making redundant the Marxist commitment to the proletariat as the agent of what Postone and his followers insist on calling “emancipatory politics”.
Origins
Platypus was formed in 2006 (out of a seminar run by Postone at the University of Chicago) by Cutrone and others who thought it was necessary to do something other than run a seminar at the University of Chicago. To do what? The Platypus template was formed early, and has remained strangely unvarying ever since. They organise almost entirely on campuses. They do panels: they invite a few people of often wildly varying political and institutional backgrounds, ask them a few questions in slightly stilted academese, and run what looks for all the world like a moderated session at an academic conference.
Under the hood, there was something else going on - the ‘Platypus synthesis’, which one ideally encountered at their other form of activity, the reading group, which ran through a distinctive series of set texts, basically from Kant to the Sparts, via Hegel, Benjamin Constant, Lenin and Trotsky, Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer, and Postone. To compress things inevitably past the point of caricature, the Platypus synthesis is an idea of the left that sees it as whatever pushes things forward (best exemplified, in the reading group syllabus, by Leszek Kołakowski’s piece, ‘The concept of the left’, written not long before he abandoned the left altogether).
To push things forward is always to push towards freedom, and the Platypus conception of freedom is unabashedly an inheritor of classical liberalism’s novel conception of freedom, and the emergence of capital as a revolutionary force; but capital gives way to capitalism with the transition from absolute to relative surplus value and the consequent emergence of mass unemployment as a periodic phenomenon that separates people from that freedom. Socialism is primarily to be addressed to that problem, and thereby conceived as a fulfilment of the promises of modernity, rather than a revolutionary struggle against it.
The contemporary left, however, is incapable of undertaking such a project. It merely slaps back, ineffectively, at the forces arrayed against it. In its pure defensiveness, it gives up the promise of liberal modernity, of real freedom. For the same reason, it has illusions in reactionary anti-capitalism (Islamism, Ba’athism …). Therefore, ‘the left is dead’ - but it might be reconstructed along lines informed by the Platypus critique - and so ‘Long live the left!’
Given this outlook, and the Postone inheritance, it was not surprising that, when Platypus did spread out of the US, it found a ready audience in Germany, principally in the circles of the Antideutsche. The implied comfort with the imperial adventures of the American state, the disdain for conventional leftwing causes, very much including the Palestinian struggle, made it a good fit.
It was not until 2016, however, that Platypus would start turning towards open political arguments, occasioned partly by the success of the Bernie Sanders campaign, but fundamentally by the rise of Trump and the hysterical reaction from the liberals. Under those circumstances, Cutrone wrote a short essay under the title, ‘Why not Trump?’1 As the opening salvo in Cutrone’s career as an open post-left contrarian, it was not quite as unreasonable as the title makes it sound, mostly being a (sometimes well observed) critique of the various idiocies and hypocrisies of liberal anti-Trumpism. The odd conclusion follows not entirely from that premise, but the prevenient one that the left is dead - if the liberals are mad, and the left is dead, what option is left other than Trump?
This might have been thought to entail a final break with the left, as was to follow over the years with other contrarian left celebrities, mostly through spending too much time on the internet. Yet it was in these years that Platypus’s newly ‘politicised’ outlook gave rise to various side projects which seemed more conventionally political. There was a ‘campaign for a socialist party’, which was some kind of intervention in the Bernie-or-bust milieu, without any noticeable success. There was the foundation of Sublation magazine, later to become a wider media operation called Sublation Media, along with Douglas Lain, a long-time leftwing eccentric.
There is a contradiction here between the old-line Platypus ‘the left is dead’ routine and the novel initiatives in, apparently, doing plain, old-fashioned sectarian leftism. (Reluctance to get involved in Adolph Reed’s quixotic Labor Party was one part of the Platypus origin story.) Among later Cutrone assertions was “the millennial left is dead”, as he told his readers in 20172, but was he not a year or two later dipping his toe into the waters of this ‘millennial left’? (Endless recourse to the superficial demographic categories of the marketing industry is one of the defects of Platypus historiography, but they are hardly alone in that respect.)
Amnesia
It could look, if one were uncharitable, a little like excusing defeat in advance - like a football manager going through the team’s injury list in the pre-match presser. Yet it is not clear that these side initiatives really matter all that much to Cutrone. He remains more interested in the movement of those great celestial spheres, freedom and authoritarianism. In this drama, mere political actors are reduced either to spectators or wholly absorbed (if they are part of the ‘Platypus synthesis’) into these alien forces.
Attending the Platypus reading group in London many years ago, I found it astonishingly difficult to get their members really to care about the politics of the disputes in the early 20th century socialist movement - the nitty-gritty of who disagreed with whom, when, and about what. The texture of that history, so important to a bright-eyed CPGBer like me, was more or less treated as an irritating distraction, as Catholics sometimes find those historians who are impertinent enough to conclude that most of the ‘martyrs’ of the reign of Julian the Apostate simply never existed.
Cutrone himself, in fact, makes the point - and its absurdity - abundantly clear in his letter to this week’s Weekly Worker. I objected to his article last week that his historical schema of the unique role of the US had no room for “the carpet-bombing of Cambodia”. He objects in turn that the US “targeted Vietnamese communist forces”, and did not demand an unconditional surrender of the Cambodians, which “says something”. (Any old American can sing the praises of Lincoln or Jefferson, but it takes a true patriot to go out to bat for Richard Nixon.)
“Says something” - but what? Of course no surrender was demanded; after all, this was not officially a war, and the ghastliness of what the US inflicted on that ill-starred nation was meticulously concealed even from the American population, if in the end unsuccessfully. (And if that is the difference, what about all the people of whom such a surrender has been demanded?)
How, in the end, can this stuff be reconciled with the wider providential history of America offered? Simply by effacing it - either with an absurdly aseptic reading of actions taken by the US government that would cost countless lives and devastate Cambodia, or simply with an open advocacy of Reaganite morning-in-America amnesia. “Socialists in the US”, he informs us, “have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of US government actions, but for the future course of society and politics”. Problem solved!
Where is this all going? The obvious answer is - to the plain old right. The British milieu associated with Spiked went from ultra-leftist swagger to libertarian accelerationism and, finally, to Orbánite conservatism. At an earlier time, the American journal Telos abandoned its Frankfurt School-inflected Marxism for neo-conservatism. The modern American conservative movement, indeed, was to a considerable extent populated by ex-communists, and the early days of neo-conservatism by ex-Trotskyists. It is a well-worn path.
This may in fact be more difficult for Platypus, since their project is so entirely oriented around the idea of freedom in its classical, negative sense, and the various strands of conservatism must in the end return to some positive, reified idea of the good life, which has been lost precisely in the ravages of modernity. Breaks of this sort, however, need not be dramatic: merely the open avowal, at last, of premises long present, but not yet thematised.
We wait and see - but, if that is the trajectory, it will not be anything like the evolutionary surprise offered by the egg-laying mammal of eastern Australia.