A meaningfully Left-wing politics, committed to majorly expanding democracy, has to center questions of class power and socio-economic inequality, which in today’s world even social democracy largely does not do.
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Cutrone's critique of Rockhill is sharp, but he ends up doing the same thing he criticizes. He uses the lessons of Marx and the Frankfurt School to defend a position of standing alone, without a party. My main point is that when critique is separated from the group context that Marx stressed, it turns a specific defeat into a permanent way of thinking. This misses the point of Marxist practice and what it leads to.
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What is Stalinism? It is the liquidation of Marxism. More precisely, it is the liquidation of the Marxist self-consciousness and theory of the proletarian socialist party — it is also the practical liquidation of that party. What is most troubling about the history of “Marxism-Leninism” AKA Stalinism is, like with the Jacobins, not their ruthlessness towards avowed counterrevolutionaries, but rather the Revolution eating its own — the unjust and murderous turn against the loyal revolutionaries themselves. The problem with Stalinism is the lies it entails — the lies against the revolutionaries, and against the Revolution itself. And the lies never end.
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Behind society’s deeply damaged attempts to become aware of its own direction, the current, more or less deformed, intellectual instinct already indicates that the world has changed. What is the reality of the past in the present?
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The reversion to capitalism by the “socialist camp” was certainly an eye-opener. It laid bare the fact that society had not undergone a fundamental transformation in the relations of production and the social superstructure. There was nothing comparable to the way capitalism had made itself immune to a relapse into feudalism or something similar.
[. . .]
