Politics from another angle
M. Sanchez
Platypus Review 176 | May 2025
“YOU HAVE TO make a choice right now. Red or blue. Whatever you think, you must be only one thing and choose only one thing. All that matters is making the choice. One always lies, and one always tells the truth. One always lies when telling the truth, and the other always tells the truth when lying. Good luck!”
In the United States’ 2024 Presidential election, about 155 million voted.[1] About 244 million of the population was eligible to vote. There are about 341 million people living in the country — only about 63.5% of them were voters in the election.[2] The majority of nonvoters, when asked, responded that they don’t wish they had voted in the 2024 Presidential election.[3]
These are the measures of disengagement from the American electoral representation industry as they appear for the closed feedback loop of voting and voter polls. They don’t tell us the content of the disengagement and disillusionment, which can be identified with any number of reasons and culture war fads. But the void continues, the massification carried out in modern capitalist society is never able to perfect itself into absolute engagement, agreement, and affirmation.
It is clear that the system of representation is broken. It can no longer reconcile the class fractions engaged with it. The petite-bourgeoisie who make up the mass basis of American representational politics are becoming more polarized than ever, and there is no longer much of a sense of constituent political coherence. Most people more or less want something new, things as they are have exhausted themselves.
Those who are complacent with things as they are have decided to lay down and stubbornly hold on to a sinking ship. They no longer have a will to change or adapt. The Democratic Party is the face of this dead and dying portion of the empire. But those who are willing to actively transform the political system of the empire are even more miniscule, and have limited their ambitions to supporting crude politicians in elections over finger-wagging bureaucrats. In other words, not even the second election of Donald Trump has changed very much about U.S. politics.
The two-party system is nothing but a carousel of revolving doors. The whole thing has the appearance of constant action and change, to the exhaustion of the politics junkies, but it’s only so much movement to keep in place. The hulking, Leviathanic state is continuous across parties and administrations. Even the administrations that try to dramatically cut it down and streamline it, like Trump’s administration, are still only giving a haircut and shave to the monster while rearranging its looted furniture and shifting its imperial hoard-collection around.
The bourgeoisie was once a class with its own identifiable political thought and cultural norms, a class which thought about its situation, wrote about its deepest ambitions, and strategized for a long-term future. As it has become secure in its power, as monopoly capital has grown and centralized to gigantic proportions, and as the capitalist state has consolidated into a dizzying complex of machines overseen by professional experts, the bourgeoisie has become superfluous and lazy. Capitalists today care first and foremost about immediate convenience and enjoyment, and are often the most one-dimensional of the whole one-dimensional society. When we look at Mark Zuckerburg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, do we see a bourgeoisie that has any sense of a mission in the world, or do we see ridiculous people who have no idea what they want?
The capitalist class has not had to seriously strategize politically for a long time. Of course, there is a whole network of think tanks, intellectuals-for-hire, and lobbying groups which ensure that capitalists keep their dragon’s hoard of their income on profits. But this hardly constitutes a serious, long-term strategy and world-vision. They don’t make for great strategists, because they don’t need to do anything but give their mercenaries money to ensure that things stay more or less as they are. Trump’s administration defunding USAID, which supported an entire ecosystem of pro-U.S., pro-capitalist political groups, only confirms their superfluousness.
The capitalists have atrophied and become mediocre and weak in their senses, and they have done so specifically because their political power is more hegemonic and secure than ever in the mechanical form of their state patron. Georges Sorel warned:
Enfeebled classes habitually put their trust in people who promise them the protection of the State, without ever trying to understand how this protection could possibly harmonize their discordant interests; they readily enter into every coalition formed for the purpose of forcing concessions from the government; they greatly admire charlatans who speak with self-assurance. Socialism must be exceedingly careful if it is not to fall to the level of what Engels called bombastic anti-Semitism, and the advice of Engels on this point has not always been followed.[4]
This has clearly come to pass in the United States. There are no longer hard cultural or political distinctions between lively classes. The apparent distinctions are only in how the mediocrity of a calcified and lazy capitalist civilization is distributed — who votes for what capitalist politicians and who aligns on what mass media-engineered culture war issue. Everyone thinks like a capitalist, and the capitalists hardly think at all. They merely respond in an immediate way to stimulus with anxiety, fear, rage, or discomfort.
Without class hatred, and without the confrontation of classes, the entire society has become sluggish and uninteresting. Class in the common parlance is nothing but the measurement of income, and that income is understood as the distribution of some pre-existing hoard of wealth. Relations of production hardly figure into individual consciousness at all, much less find their political expression in open and conscious class struggle. Everyone is nothing but a measured distribution, some a greater quantity and some a lesser quantity, of the same. Everyone buys the same things, watches the same things, believes the same things, feels the same things, wants the same things. Some just get to do more of it, while some do less of it.
The only way to bring life back into things is to make political confrontation possible once again. But that requires freeing politics from its identity with the administration of the bureaucratic state, freeing sociality from its homogenous massification, and creating a subject of politics which is no longer just the voting citizen who keeps up to date on the 24 hour news cycle.
The carousel
Politics has become nothing but a function of the capitalist state. The state has grown to massive, all-pervading proportions — whether its gigantism is expressed in liberalism or conservatism. Politics disengaged from the self-composition and self-articulation of classes, especially the majority who can live by nothing but their work, is hardly politics at all. Politics today is instead the carousel, revolving around the state.
Political thought today tends to define victory as either winning the electoral contests for the administration of the state or as achieving recognition and scraps from the Leviathan. Only a small number of people really participate directly in this process, mostly professionals engaged with the mysterious workings and secret passwords of the technocratic bureaucracy.
There are many gradations of these professionals, from national politicians to local volunteers in non-governmental organizations. But all of them are bureaucrats staffing the state machinery, which keeps itself in motion in a manner hardly different from the big capitalist corporations like Amazon or Walmart. The main distinction is really in that the state is less efficient and less clear in its aims in administering and managing society, and so the political bureaucrats at lower levels have more room to appear highly active and creative. Many of them even do what they do out of genuine faith in political change. But the logic of the career, and it is a career, lends itself to compromise and opportunism, since everything is subordinated to the self-preservation of the state totality.
The problem we are faced with is that even truly democratic politics is already limited to reinforcing bourgeois society. Active citizenship, beyond watching news scroll by on a screen and dropping a ballot for someone somewhere, hardly exists anymore. Democracy only thrives on the foundation of mass politics; it does not thrive where the propertyless majority are disengaged and disempowered.
Because of this, any attempt at a ready-made democratic struggle will crash on the rocks of legalism and professionalism. We will be left trying to substitute a mass where one has not yet grown, or we will try to politicize a ready-made mass in the form we find it. On the one hand, you have Angela Davis calling on communists to vote Democrat to defend a perpetually endangered democracy every 2–4 years.[5] On the other hand, you have Chris Cutrone evaluating Trump’s Republican radicalism as heralding the revival of politics and the rule of law in the myth of an Empire of Liberty.[6] We should be suspicious of any attempts to capture the constituencies of either party by working with those parties, or of standing as isolated communists and trying to redirect the energy behind charismatic politicians towards communism through their enthusiasm for their representatives.
Pragmatism, gradualism, reformism, and the liberal variant of “anti-fascism” that frames fascism in two-party terms all feed new energy back into the carousel. They all thrive within the difference between “good enough” and “perfection.” They dismiss the aims of anything genuinely new as utopian, and so fail to make an independent enough stand from the state’s cycles in order to achieve short-term aims. They preach the middle, so they stay mediocre.
We can’t only be defensive of what little we already have. There is always an emergency; we do not have to confine our response to emergencies into preservation of the status quo. We have to take on the offensive to carve out a space to do something differently. We have to try to understand our immediate and long-term aims as political independence. We communists have to become strangers in a strange land, bearing a “this-worldly intention towards this becoming homeland, the future problem in the bearing, encompassing space of homeland: of nature. The problem of what is worth wishing for in general, or of the highest good, always remains the central point here.”[7]
Democracy can only be revived outside and against the administrative state. As Henri Lefebvre noted, the attitude expressed in favor of politics as a serious career represents “the expression of a latent terrorism tied, moreover, to the sense of responsibility, to the respect of competence, incontestable qualities of the techno-bureaucracy.”[8] Strategically we should emphasize the need for a conscious confrontation with bourgeois civilization, since we should make ourselves citizens of a future society instead of constituents of the current one. But we should do so with an equal emphasis on the practical, immanent limitation, the fact that we're struggling to overcome it from within. “I have lived in the monster and I know its entrails; my sling is David’s.”[9]
The sideshows
The solution many offer to this blocked and stagnant juncture is to have faith that to take action is good in itself, that those who act must be the authorities in politics, and that those who act the most should have the most authority. Usually they dismiss thought and theory as wasting precious time that could be used acting, acting, acting.
Most of them are probably sincere in their desire to bring about something new. Many of them are students who, with justification, look on the entire past generation of Left politics as a failure. They believe that immediate action is the clear and obvious solution to powerlessness.
When one only acts blindly, one is beholden to the ready-made order. One’s action is forced through the confined corridors of its limited possibilities. Blind action is at the mercy of whatever orders things. By dismissing thinking for themselves, the actionists fall into the danger of no longer acting for themselves. Immediate action is not self-organization. Self-organization sustains the process of self-emancipation, instead of limiting it to the narrow and stale air of a trapped situation in the name of producing immediately familiar effects.
The separation of head and hand implied in actionism is prolonged in the class of professional activists and the network of professional activist organizations. They live on the carousel and the new energy that it brings to them. They themselves are carousel-like sideshows. Many of them acknowledge this fact openly by running hopeless, funds-absorbent Presidential campaigns in competition for the attention given to the main show. They ensure that discontent is fed back into the cycle of sameness.
Even what is genuinely new and promising among the actionists can become bogged down in the self-preservation of these formal organizations. The formal organizations see their formal membership and leadership as good in themselves, symbols of seriousness. They believe that all actionists must be available, as loyal and unquestioning employees, at the disposal of the leaders’ watchful and wise eyes.
An episode of this unfolded in 2023–24, when the professional activists swooped down on the encampment movement against investment in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. The professional activists successfully disciplined the new energy, which could have broken from the carousel and sideshows by breaking with the closed circle of national electoral and professional politics. They are trying to do the same thing now with the wave of anti-ICE demonstrations.
The sideshows fail to become anything other than the sideshows of the carousel. This is related directly to actionism’s refusal of thought, caution, and strategy. Actionism becomes conservative pragmatism when the capacity of the actors and their scale of action are limited to a small circle of possibilities and isolated scatterings of actors. The professional activists, those who think for the actors, are symptoms of this situation who also prolong it.
Reviving politics
We think that whatever moves the most dramatically, and so catches our eyes, is what pulses with the most vitality and dynamism. Awe-inspiring movement can just as well be the lifeless flapping of scraps in the wind.
The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement is itself a form of actionism, and Trump is a charismatic professional activist. Liberals think he will destroy democracy. They conflate democracy with rule of law, and rule of law with bureaucratic, formal procedures. Trump thinks he will save the bourgeois republic by cutting the imperial Leviathan down to a slim and lean fighting form. Trump and his administration have been carrying out this political reform movement from above, by decree, with the hope that the political leadership of the capitalists will guarantee success by doing their part.
But the capitalists are lazy and complacent in this overripe era of monopoly capital. The capitalist leader who enjoys self-representation within the administration, Elon Musk, has been spending more time stripping the government for scraps and distributing the spoils than trying to help realize the vision of reform. Trump’s vision flies too high; he pulls the reins much harder than what the overgrown and atrophied country can handle.
Trump thinks if he feeds the imperial-state beast with new territories, new funds for capital, and the revitalizing force of war, that it will wake up and begin to cooperate. He calls the country to unity against the inner enemies, whoever the Department of Homeland Security decides they may be. He coaxes the people with imperialist adventures abroad in Greenland, Mexico, Canada, Gaza, etc. But he puts far too much faith in his own class, and he can only appeal to the people as they are: passive consumer-citizens. Many are even workers, but these workers do not act as proletarians — they truly believe that their labor power is also their capital just because it’s their commodity to sell.
The capitalist state remains the most highly adaptable and flexible element of the passive society that it represents. It is the subject of this society, and what Trump has done is become the personified subjectivity of its will to live and adapt. As long as this state lacks a vital and self-acting base, the subjectivity of its personality can only be an actionist who tries to substitute his actions, the actions of the executive, for that of the people. This is limited to the desperate self-contortions of the state, which cannot find a register in the world of the society.
The legislature, which traditionally represents and reconciles the class fractions of capitalist society, has declined into procedure and filibustering self-obstruction. Meanwhile, the personification of bureaucratic rationality — the judiciary — and the personification of political administration — the executive — have each grown incredibly powerful, each acting more or less arbitrarily. Society has stagnated into the raw material of a technocratic state. Trump’s actions are a kind of bourgeois actionism, an attempt to overcome a blocked and exhausted situation by means of the initiative of a few. They will end hardly differently from any other actionism, with the reinforcement of the prevailing state of things.
The Democrats have already discredited themselves with their failure to pose a serious alternative to Trump. Trump and the MAGA movement are the only vital element in bourgeois politics today, save for the social-democratic sideshows in a few local political settings. If the MAGA movement discredits itself and the Republican Party, there will be a situation where both parties of the capitalist state will have been discredited and thrown into disarray.
In such a situation, it would be imperative for communists to push a split between the people and the state. What we have now is a demos[10] that has become identical to the state, massified into its population. If the people are to be more than the homogenous mass of raw material for the administration and bureaucracy, they must revolt and begin to take on some form of their own.
The demos and officialdom would begin to separate, the predominance of formality collapsing. In this development, the people would already begin to be something other than the demos, the constituency of the national state, and begin to become the seeds of something new. New possibilities are opened up when the people set out into an independent form of politics, and possibilities even open up when the people achieve class independence — splitting the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, reviving mass politics from out of the molasses of massification.
Politics must begin from another angle. To make this turn, we must turn away from the carousel and the sideshows. A new communism would begin as primarily negative, embracing and cohering the disillusionment and discontent people feel into a Great Refusal of the existing system. Only in this initial negative movement — “we don’t want that, we don’t want to lay down and continue to accept any of that” — can the path to affirmation of something new begin.
We have to start as the most consistent refusers, the ones who truly do not want this dead weight, in order to become the ones who want more life. A revolution is not about infinite violence. Most of its process is the soft formation of new tissue.
Democracy is a path for development, but it is not our horizon. We can only act from within the capitalist world, but we must act towards our own world beyond it. The “limited horizon of bourgeois right” can only be crossed by a strong and confident step which knows that it is heading somewhere else, which knows this horizon here is only a limit to reach on the way beyond it.[11]
An unconscious attempt at completing bourgeois society on the part of the Old Left, which believed it was winning the battle of democracy by perfecting the state, ended in the integration of the proletariat into the massified state. The demos of the massified society has reached through its endless massification a self-inversion into its opposite, the executive-judicial state.
Massificaiton precludes mass politics. No pre-party formations are possible today, because no prefiguration is possible. We will be sects as long as we consider ourselves to already be the communist party that will conjure up a base from out of the mass. We will always end like the sorcerer’s apprentice, beholden to a power which we tried to command as masters. Mass democracy can only break itself out and move if it acts towards something beyond the demos. The revival of politics today will begin with negativity.
The party can only be the mouthpiece of a movement guiding it towards communism in language and political struggle. It can only be the affirmation made by a Great Refusal. There is no constituency which will guarantee the party; there is no technical trick that can flood us with numbers and take command over their powers. There can only be striking against the weakest links that bind us and striving towards the rays of light coming into our prison.
Many professional activists object to those who want to turn towards something beyond what’s right in front of us, because they believe that it paralyzes us from acting. They want us to limit our horizons to the narrow sphere of immediate action.
Many more of them disbelieve in the possibility of a free society, considering the unwashed masses incapable of self-emancipation and associating together as freely self-determining people. This is only legitimate if we assume that the point of the new society is total self-consciousness and self-possession, without any unconsciousness or strangeness. But that is the aim of perfection, and it is against the aim of freedom.
Holding onto the debts and obligations of the world as it already is keeps us from reaching towards something more. The new society doesn’t need to be prefigured by us in a blueprint. We don’t need everyone to agree in the single consensus of a program to organize ourselves; these agreements are only means for our self-organizing power. We only need to begin to organize our lives for our needs, and struggle against what disorganizes our efforts to begin to become the free participants of a society which organizes its own association.
There is a boring and deadening tendency of democracy which imposes homogenization and conformity. We have to bring out the associating of the different, the enlivening thread in democracy. This life overcomes the need to think of itself in the limited mass-form of a people. Instead of the mass, a constellation, organizing itself in its own form as an infinitely complex interwoven network of relationships between unique points.
A constellation can only come forth in the night. The association of the unique can only take its form by passing through the measure of the people, communism must pass through the democratic struggle, making the split between society and the state. Such a split could revitalize self-activity from out of a prevailing condition of passivity, the territorial population with the state and capitalists as its only subjects.
Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible — and the conditions of the item did not permit it — to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.[12]
That common activity begins with something other than actionism alone. Actionism paralyzes the body by demanding immediate and absolute transformation. Compulsive actionism is the convulsion of atrophied and uncoordinated muscles, which have become bound too tightly in their strain to move deliberately and with growing power towards life. “Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained within the smallest, is divine.”[13] |P
[1] Domenico Montanaro, “A wild year in politics, by the numbers,” NPR, December 27, 2024, <https://www.npr.org/2024/12/27/nx-s1-5222570/2024-politics-recap>.
[2] United States Census Bureau, “U.S. and World Population Clock,” when given the date February 8, 2024, <https://www.census.gov/popclock/>.
[3] Pew Research Center, “Voters’ and nonvoters’ experiences with the 2024 election” (December 4, 2024), <https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/12/04/voters-and-nonvoters-experiences-with-the-2024-election/>.
[4] Georges Sorel, “The Political General Strike,” in Reflections on Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 153.
[5] C.J. Atkins, “Angela Davis: Electing Harris will open space for more radical struggles,” People’s World (September 17, 2024), <https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/angela-davis-electing-harris-will-open-space-for-more-radical-struggles/>.
[6] Chris Cutrone, “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.,” Compact (January 9, 2025), <https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland/>.
[7] Ernst Bloch, “Introduction,” in The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 17.
[8] Henri Lefebvre, “Reflections on the Politics of Space,” in State, Space, World: Selected Essays, eds. Gerald Moore and Neil Brenner, trans. Neil Brenner, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 175.
[9] José Martí to Manuel Mercado (May 18, 1895), <https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/19/letter-to-manuel-mercado/>.
[10] [Ancient Greek] (1) A country-district, land; (2) the people of a country, the commons, etc.
[11] Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (1875), in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 215.
[12] Karl Marx to W. Bracke (May 5, 1875), in Marx & Engels Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 11–12, <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_05_05.htm>.
[13] Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion and Selected Poems, ed. Eric L. Santner, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Continuum, 1990), 1.
