Sleeping through the counterrevolution: Feeling the death of the Left
Ethan Linehan
Platypus Review 177 | June 2025
On March 3, 2021, Platypus Affiliated Society member Ethan Linehan hosted an introductory workshop on the raison d'être of Platypus. A revised version of his opening remarks follows.[1]
ONE WEEK BEFORE his tragic and untimely assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an underappreciated speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on March 31, 1968. The name of the speech has posthumously been titled, “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution.”[2] In this speech, MLK invoked Washington Irving’s short story about a man named Rip Van Winkle: “The one thing that we usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty years. But there is another point in that little story that is almost completely overlooked.” Dr. King recounts how Rip had gone to sleep during the reign of King George III and had woken up during the presidency of George Washington. When he woke up, “he was completely lost — he knew not who he was.” MLK went on: “the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it: he was asleep.” Amidst the storm and stress of the late 1960s, Dr. King used this speech to warn of the dangers that come from being unprepared for one's moment. Should one fail to adequately grasp reality, one will also fail to change it, resulting in countless missed opportunities: “one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses—that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in the world today.”
Consciously or not, in his imagery Dr. King was echoing JFK, who not eight years earlier remarked on the World Revolution, a world in turmoil. JFK said that “We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.”[3] This imagery of the American Revolution was in the water. But what became of that possibility, of that revolution that they spoke of? In Platypus we face the painful truth that Dr. King’s warnings to stay awake amidst the changing reality fell on deaf ears. Increasingly little of the emancipatory desiderata remains in the consciousness of society today because any potential that prior generations of the Left had has been squandered. Real opportunities for emancipation were missed, and these failures continue to cast a dark shadow over us today, clouding our vision and thus our ability to see and change reality. We live not with the gains of a successful revolution, but under the rubble of a failed one. Today, a counterrevolution is taking place that affects the course of history, and the Left knows nothing about it. We should reverse MLK’s provocation and admit that we are sleeping through the counterrevolution.
Why does Platypus consider its work to be insufficient, necessary, and humble? What is that work? In Platypus, one of our many slogans is “The Left is dead! Long live the Left!” This slogan was first uttered in the context of a Left on the ascent, the incipient Millennial Left. The year 2006 saw the formation not only of Platypus, but also of the New Students for a Democratic Society. The doors of many organizations were thrown open to a new generation of youthful Leftists curious about the deep history of radical politics. Organizations like the now-defunct International Socialist Organization continued their rallying of the anti-war movement whose strength numbered in the tens of thousands. There was a semi-conscious break from the post-political Left of the anti-globalization anarchism that characterized the 1990s, and a return to Marxism to motivate anti-imperialism. Centuries-old questions, frozen in time since the 1970s, had begun to thaw. So why was the Left pronounced dead just as it seemed to be coming back to life? And dead according to what criterion? As Omair Hussain has written, “to say that the Left is dead is not simply a moral condemnation of the existing Left for failing to meet abstract criteria of being ‘healthy’ or ‘alive.’ Rather, the Left is ill or dead according to its own history, in relation to what it once was and what it imagined itself to be. Perhaps this is far from self-evident, at least for the Left.”[4] Platypus exists as a self-educational project to clarify what goals the historicalLeft set for itself so long ago, and to make apparent all the ways that the contemporaryLeft thwarts its own attempts to realize them. We trace our necessity all the way to Marx’s call for a ruthless criticism of everything existing that is not afraid of its results.[5] But we are one step removed from the ability to clarify the confusions of those who wish to change the world, like Marx was in position to do, because of our historical discontinuity with the object of Marx’s critique. Our time is not that of Marx or of Lenin. No mass socialist movement conscious of itself exists today. Our unique approach to this absence is via negativa. Our approach is inherited from the critical theory of Theodor Adorno, who said that “one may not cast a picture of utopia in a positive manner”; “one can only talk about utopia in a negative way.”[6] We in Platypus are showing the negative photograph of the struggle for socialism, the negative image of the critical consciousness of Marxism that is not present today.
Today, we can only see what is missing. And with great difficulty, we must make what is absent present. We hope to inculcate a sensibility — the ability to sense — for the usual ways that Leftists avoid the political tasks of the struggle for socialism. Adorno argued that the only way to know what might be right is to know what is wrong. This is Platypus’s approach to the Left: to demonstrate and make palpable what is wrong. What might be right about a potential future Left can only be projected negatively. Following Marx and the best Marxists, who never called for anything positively so much as grasped their existence as limited and symptomatic of what needs to be overcome, Platypus recognizes in the symptoms of the dead Left all the evidence of regression. The dead Left is a symptom of regression, or the growing opacity with which the problems facing the world are posed and addressed. The dead Left is in urgent need of overcoming. And the first step is admitting that the Left today is not the solution, but the problem.
Another slogan in Platypus is that we are a “pre-political” project. But pre-political in what sense? The dead Left, by contrast, either assumes that we live in a political moment, where the task is to formulate a positive strategy and then implement it, or that we live in a post-political moment where we have overcome the need for politics altogether. For them, the only relationship between theory and practice is that we must do preparatory work to “figure things out” so we can then “do something.” For example, Mike McNair of the Communist Party of Great Britain,[7] and the neo-Kautskyists that follow him at Cosmonaut and in the Democratic Socialists of America, believe there could be a Left unity project around a clear program. But there is still a need to know what the program is for, and the goals of the Left, even in their basic formulation, have long since ceased to be self-evident. The Left assumes too much and takes for granted answers that it cannot. Even the dead are not safe.[8] The Left today inappropriately begins with the question, “what is to be done?” while neglecting what made it possible for Lenin to ask that question when he did.
Platypus does not expect to answer the question, “what is to be done?” Rather, we are historically required to point out that what has been done for the past 100 years or more has not worked to advance the cause of socialism. We often get charged with having a pre-World War I, Second International-centric approach that owes itself to our sense that Marxism never survived and has not recovered beyond its crisis at that time. Nothing else has advanced beyond that moment. Nothing else has overcome Marxism. The reading-group syllabi in Platypus are not designed to offer a superior, more intelligent Marxism — much less a political endorsement of Marxism. The pedagogy simply presents what Marxism actually was historically. This is necessary to register its impossibility today. But if yesterday’s solid footing has melted out from underneath us, Platypus aims to turn a break in continuity from a calamity into a chance to start anew. Platypus aims to leverage a liability into an asset. Like Archimedes searching for that one point at which he could insert a lever and use it to shift the entire world, Platypus aims to lift the weight of the dead Left to turn it into a force. We hope to turn the burdensome baggage of historical defeat from an obstacle into an opportunity. Rather than having the weight suppress possibility, we want to unbury ourselves from the crushing weight of the wreckage of the past. We hope to turn a post-political or prematurely political moment into a genuinely pre-political one.
There is a liberatory quality in admitting how dire the situation is and how powerless and confused we really are. While the Left is completely sidelined from positions of power, we don’t have to compromise on what Marxism really means or meant. We have room to breathe without the burden of immediately putting ourselves in the line of fire and without being hysterical over every change in capitalism, i.e., without having to take a position because our positions do not matter (yet). We can learn from Marxism precisely at a critical distance from it, which is a historical distance that is inevitable anyway. Because there is no existent self-conscious struggle for socialism, we have the luxury of contemplating what is really meant by a basic question like, “what is socialism?” The Left today does not exist as a political force; it only exists as a lockbox of ideas. The Left is dead partly because of its impotence to change the world, but it goes deeper than that. Today the Left does not meaningfully act; it only educates. And Platypus believes this is a mendacious miseducation, an anti-Leftism. We seek to interrupt that. We do not abstain from participation on the Left. The question is not whether we are part of the Left, but how we are and how we participate. We in Platypus are included in the death of the Left. We are part of what needs to be overcome. The difference is that Platypus has admitted it. We have become self-aware of the political impotence and the ideological incoherence of today, to which we are immanent. We are not offering a definition of what socialist politics is or should be, but only what it is not and cannot be. We have not arrived at the answer, but we are the only ones still posing the question. There is no available continuity with real historical Marxism, and that is the first truth that must be reckoned with if something like a mass socialist movement is to be reconstituted. “The new does not add itself to the old but remains the old in distress,” wrote Adorno in 1942. “Only he who recognizes that the new is the same old thing will be of service to whatever is different.”[9]
Marxism was the immanent dialectical critique of socialism. Absent socialism, Marxism also does not exist. There is only a suspect pantomiming of Marxism, or a pseudo-Marxism, as the Spartacists might put it. Platypus also risks becoming that. Platypus members constantly face the pressures of a false or premature positivity. One risks doing Platypus without understanding why. One risks hosting the conversation, seeing the results, and wanting more in a confused sort of way. I hear comments all the time like, “Why do we have to keep hearing from the dead Left? We have read enough about the Revisionist Dispute to know how to orient ourselves towards Trump or towards Biden. Let’s just go be a better Left.” We will constantly frustrate our audience, of course, but most of all ourselves. Every time the Left reacts to a change in capitalist politics, Platypus reinscribes its raison d’être to make the death of the Left felt. And every time, Platypus will experience the blowback of this. If you are in Platypus long enough, you will experience what I have taken to calling the “Groundhog Day effect.” You will find the same teachable conversations playing out in repetition. You just explained a concept to someone yesterday, and that same question comes up again today, but someone different is asking it. New students will have the same hang-ups as you yourself did years ago, and might still have. Even long-time members can find themselves repeating these Leftist dogmatisms and thought taboos that they were sure they unlearned. With every new change in capitalist politics, you have to recommit to the basics. As a teacher, get used to repeating yourself ad nauseum. As a student, never think you have nothing more to learn.
The point of Platypus is to shake people awake. You must feel the weight of the death of the Left. You must learn to measure the depth of the problem. As bad as you think it might be, it is probably worse. The zombie Left has learned 100 years’ worth of comforting lies to tell itself to avoid thinking about how much work there really is to be done. Platypus cannot reconstitute the Left by itself, but it can dissolve the ideological obstacles and work to interrupt the miseducation that prevents the formation of a future Left. Platypus exists to produce a felt frustration, a productive and critical resentment with the present situation. We are the only ones who are willing to feel that without avoiding or denying that there is a real problem. The Left have become experts in dodging, while Platypus forces the confrontation. Platypus also hopes to drain the swamp, or to prevent young Leftists from being recruited to existing organizations where they would inevitably burn out. The dead Left will chew you up and spit you out, and it will never take responsibility for ruining your best years of mental and physical capacity. For the last century, all its victims have either died as bright-eyed Leftists failing to understand why they are failing, or they lived long enough to resign themselves to the status quo. Platypus is a more liminal environment where students can entertain ideas and express their curiosity without feeling the pressure to immediately put them into practice. We live in a time, according to James Baldwin in 1962, “in which words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.”[10] The Left, over the course of a century, has dozed off under its warm blanketing of self-deceptions. Whereas Rip Van Winkle’s long sleep only resulted in the misfortune that he was barred from participating in a revolution that nevertheless transpired without him, we, by contrast, can be sure that our collective failure to wake from this nightmarish counterrevolution would indefinitely adjourn the possibility of revolution somewhere over the horizon, and would prevent the light of freedom from being glimpsed ever again. |P
[1] Video of the full event can be found at <https://youtu.be/W6Uz-u4O3Zk>.
[2] Martin Luther King Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: HarperOne, 1986), 268–78.
[3] John F. Kennedy, “Public Rally, Hotel Theresa, New York City” (October 12, 1960), in Papers of John F. Kennedy. Pre-Presidential Papers. Senate Files. Speeches and the Press. Speech Files, 1953–1960. Box 0913, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, <https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfksen-0913-007>.
[4] Omair Hussain, “What does it mean to say that Platypus is the psychoanalyst of the Left?,” Platypus Review 115 (April 2019), <https://platypus1917.org/2019/04/01/what-does-it-mean-to-say-that-platypus-is-the-psychoanalyst-of-the-left/>.
[5] Karl Marx to Arnold Ruge (September 1843), in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 141–45.
[6] Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion Between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W. Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing (1964),” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 10.
[7] The Communist Party of Great Britain (Provisional Central Committee) was founded in the early 1990s and publishes the Weekly Worker.
[8] See Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2006), 391.
[9] Theodor W. Adorno, “Reflections on Class Theory” (1942), in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 95–96.
[10] James Baldwin, “As Much Truth As One Can Bear,” in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 29.
