Bitcoin, billionaires, and Trump

Donald Trump is assembling a government of the ultra-rich whose collective wealth is estimated at $344.4 billion, nearly 3,000 times greater than that of Joe Biden’s cabinet.  So how did an incoming administration go from populism to hyper-oligarchy in the blink of an eye?

The reasons are many.  One is the poverty of American political debate while another is a two-party system that forces voters to choose between awful and even worse.  Deep anger over inflation is a third, while the fact that Dems were beholden to Silicon Valley mega-donors is a fourth since it prevented them from criticizing Trump’s ties to the super-elite.  

But yet another factor is at work: a financial boom that’s growing more manic by the week.  Not only is the frenzy boosting the US economy relative to all other bourgeois nations, but it’s boosting Trump relative to all other bourgeois politicians.  The result is a combined national, political, and financial upsurge unprecedented since the Republican heyday of the 1920s.

It was not always thus.  As recently as the 1980s, the United States accounted for just 30 percent of the leading global stock index according to Financial Times columnist Ruchir Sharma, while the US share of world markets lagged behind that of Japan in the mid-90s and behind China for much of the aughts.  But “quantitative easing” in the wake of the 2007-08 financial meltdown altered the relationship by injecting vast quantities of central-bank capital in an effort to stabilize markets.  QE critics cite it as a classic example of the “Cantillon effect” – so called for a pioneering eighteenth-century Irish-French economist named Richard Cantillon – in which financiers closest to the source are the ones who benefit most. 

Richard Cantillon

Since the US Federal Reserve was among most aggressive in pushing QE, American banks and corporations therefore pulled out ahead.  The US bourgeoisie benefited from the boom and then benefited from the bailout as well. 

The results have been dramatic.  Financial markets are now soaring, economic polarization is shooting through the roof, while the US share of total stock-market capitalization has risen by nearly 30 percent over the last decade according to Bloomberg columnist John Authers.  With $1 trillion in foreign capital pouring into the US per year, Sharma notes, “the term ‘American exceptionalism’ is hotter than ever” among international investors.

But American exceptionalism has grown hotter still since Election Day, with the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq – up 4.9, 5.9, and 9.6 percent respectively – outpacing almost all other major international indices, which have either been flat or down over the same period.

And then there’s bitcoin, up a stunning 46 percent beginning on Nov. 5.  Back in 2021, Trump called bitcoin “a scam,” but now he’s filling his administration with crypto enthusiasts.  Elon Musk, who will be in charge of slashing the federal workforce, is a major backer of Dogecoin, a crypto currency or “memecoin” created in 2013 as a joke but which has rocketed up 267 percent since Election Day.  Vivek Ramaswamy, his partner in staff reduction, is peddling bitcoins via a wealth management business he’s starting called Strive.  Scott Bessent, Trump’s choice for treasury secretary, is an outspoken crypto advocate, while Howard Lutnick, who is being tagged as secretary of commerce, is a major backer of a crypto firm called Tether.  Other crypto boosters include Paul Atkins, Trump’s choice to head the Securities and Exchange Commission; David Sacks, a venture capitalist whom he has just named AI-crypto czar, and Steve Witkoff, a real-estate magnate who has been appointed as a special Middle East envoy.  Indeed, Witkoff is teaming up with Trump’s no-less-enthusiastic sons Eric and Don Jr. to launch a crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. 

“I think America will be the crypto capital of the world,” Eric recently told CNBC.  “I fully support it.  My father fully supports it.”  With bitcoin recently surging past $100,000 before pulling back slightly, he said at a crypto conference in Abu Dhabi that he is “confident” it “is going to hit $1 million.” *

When rhetoric reaches such heights, it’s a sure sign that markets are overheating, and trouble is on the way.  With the crypto and Artificial Intelligence bubbles intersecting and interacting in new and unexpected ways, the financial scene is outdoing the feverish run-up to the 2008 meltdown when traders bought and sold mortgage-backed securities that turned out to be worthless.

 

If so, three things seem clear.  One is that with bitcoin far outpacing stocks and bonds, it’s plain that the growing stream of capital entering the United States is heading straight for the boom’s frothiest sector.  After all, crypto is the ultimate in fictitious capital, a pseudo-currency that is useless as an instrument of exchange other than on black markets and whose only function is financial speculation.  Created in August 2008 at the height of the financial crisis, it has already seen one crash, a dizzying 74-percent plunge from November 2021 to December 2022, and will undoubtedly see another.

 

A second thing that’s clear is that Eric Trump’s prediction that bitcoin will hit $1 million may be a self-fulfilling prophecy since his father’s backing will likely send it even higher.  A third is that the magic is rubbing off on Trump himself. 

 

The last is essential to any understanding of the Trump phenomenon.  The president-elect has not backed down from his threats to round up 11 million immigrants, to use the Justice Department to go after political enemies, or to pardon more than 1,200 “J6’ers” who have either pled guilty to or been convicted of crimes stemming from the January 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection.  If anything, he’s doubling down, telling “Meet the Press” on Sunday that members of a congressional committee that investigated the uprising “should go to jail” on the ludicrous grounds that they “deleted and destroyed” evidence pointing to Nancy Pelosi as the real culprit.  Among the questions that the Trump transition team is now asking high-level defense and intelligence appointees, according to the New York Times, whether they agree that the 2020 election was stolen and that the January 6 insurrection was justified.  If they say no to either, the clear implication is that they’re out.

 

This is a dictatorship in the making.  Yet the financial boom amounts to a capitalist roar of approval.  Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, says that bankers are “dancing in the street” because Trump is promising to lower interest rates.  Authers agrees: 

 

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House ... has underpinned the recent surge in US assets.  Deregulation and tax cuts, coupled with a miserable dose of protectionism to hit everyone else, are ample reason to expect another US triumph.”

 

So capitalists like what they see in the new administration and are driving up US financial markets in response.  But the phenomenon is built on sand.  As the Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, real GDP growth in the US is lagging in historical terms, slipping from an average of four percent per year during the “golden age” of the 1950s and 60s to three percent during the early 2000s and less than two percent since 2008.  With US corporate bankruptcies in 2024 surpassing 2020 pandemic levels, he says, “the US economy is doing worse than in the 2010s and worse again compared to the 2000s.”  His conclusion: “The story of US exceptionalism is really a story of Europe’s collapse.”

The Trump boom is likewise a story of Washington’s collapse.  After a generation of gridlock, Trump looks good because he is now bullying Congress into submission.  The higher markets go, the more he looms over Capitol Hill and the more Republicans fall into line.  Like an insect caught in a spider’s web, a decrepit legislative branch is yielding to the powers of hyper-presidentialism without a fight.  Indeed, Trump’s most odd-ball cabinet nominees – Christian warrior Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health and human services, GOP hitman Kash Patel for director of the FBI, etc. – are advancing so smartly at this point that he may not have to follow through on threats to forcibly adjourn the Senate in order to ram through appointments on his own.

But what happens once markets crash, as they inevitably will?  No one knows although the damage is certain to be extreme.  But where lesser men would slink away in embarrassment, Trump is made of sterner stuff.  Instead, he’s far likelier to use the crisis to ram through rightwing measures that will be even harsher and more extreme.  For the proletariat, the message is clear.  The bourgeoisie will do its best to foist the costs on the working class rather than on the capitalists who caused the crisis in the first place.  It’s the old story of privatizing benefits and socializing costs.  The more capitalism destabilizes, the more dangerous Trump will grow.

 *As of the time of publication of this essay, midnight Dec, 16, 2024, bitcoin was valued at $104,525.60

 

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Meltdown

Daniel Lazare

12.08.24

More than four weeks after Donald Trump’s election victory, it is increasingly clear where America is heading: toward militarization and authoritarian rule.

Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, Sebastian Gorka

Trump’s strong-man tendencies have long been evident.  Although largely forgotten, he repeatedly accused Democrats of rigging the vote during the 2016 presidential campaign, warning that he might not concede even if the official tally went against him.  Such threats grew more and more ominous in 2020 until Trump finally sent his forces crashing across Capitol Hill in early 2021 in a last-ditch attempt to block Joe Biden’s victory and force Congress to name him the winner.  If Trump had lost in 2024, there would have been every reason to expect more of the same, i.e. more violence, more phony accusations of electoral theft, and more attempts to overturn the results. 

But now that he has won, Trumpian authoritarianism is in full view.  Examples include:

--  His ultra-confrontational cabinet picks;

--  His plans to force the Senate to adjourn so he can bypass the confirmation process and appoint cabinet members on his own;

-- His vow to use the military to round up as many as 11 million illegal aliens;

-- His promise to pardon hundreds of January 6 insurgents the moment he takes office;

 

-- And his close ties to the authors of Project 2025, the rightwing Heritage Foundation’s proposal for a sweeping purge of the federal bureaucracy and a “unitary executive” that will infuse the government with Christian nationalist values.

 

Trump’s cabinet choices run the gamut from ultra-right to centrist.  They include Marco Rubio, one of the most rightwing members of the Senate, who is his pick for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, his choice for defense secretary, who is a Christian nationalist who believes that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today.”  But they also include relative moderates such as Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence and the ever-cranky Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as head of health and human services, who, despite his anti-vax views, is not otherwise illiberal.  Scott Bessent, his choice for treasury secretary, is openly gay while Howard Lutnick, his pick for commerce secretary, is a former Democrat -- as, of course, is Trump.

 

They're an eclectic mix that only have one thing in common: each in his or her own way is an affront to the Washington establishment, whether it's the “intelligence community” up in arms over Gabbard,  the healthcare industry terrified by the accession of RFK , or homophobic sectors of the Trump coalition .  The result is a take-it-or-leave-it approach in which Trump fairly dares the old guard on Capitol Hill to just say no.

If they do, the next step is plain: a constitutional showdown.  With the help of Mike Johnson, the ultra-conservative speaker of the House, Trump is bruiting plans to force the Senate to adjourn against its will so he can use his recess powers to ram through \ appointments on his own.  The strategy, based on an obscure constitutional clause in Article II, section three, is setting off alarms throughout official Washington, with even the libertarian Cato Institute describing it as a “norm-defying abuse” that would trigger “a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

But that is what Trump wants.  With the Supreme Court likely on his side, Trump wants a crisis so he can cow Congress into submission and stretch the Constitution to the limits so as to accommodate his authoritarian designs.  If the maneuver works, the upshot result will be a giant step toward Argentine-style neo-Peronism in which the chief executive casts off constitutional restraints and rules on his own by decree.   

Using the military to round up illegal aliens would cement authoritarianism even more firmly in place.  Article I, section nine, gives the president emergency powers to suspend habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion [as] the public safety may require it.”  So it's a perfect opportunity for a president armed with unilateral powers to denounce illegal immigration as a foreign invasion and announce that he is suspending judicial review so that he can round up millions of people and place them in special detention camps.  And if Trump rounds up millions of immigrants, then it's not too difficult to imagine other roundups that might follow, e.g. leftwing activists who defend immigrants and their interests, anti-Zionists, etc.

. 

As for Project 2025, it is a 1,000-page plan whose ultimate goal is to turn the federal bureaucracy into a conservative battering ram.  Among the goals is banishing DEI, i.e. diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and other such “woke” initiatives and prosecuting “anti-white racism” instead.  Project 2025 also calls for barring the National Institutes of Health from engaging in stem cell research, rejiggering environmental regulations so as to favor fossil fuels, and criminalizing pornography.  Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts is explicit about Project 2025's goals.  “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass,” he writes in the introduction.  “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”  

“Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right,” he adds.  “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error.”  

 

Then there are Trump’s plans to enlist Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in a Javier Milei-like assault on the federal workforce along with his refusal to cooperate with federal agencies like the General Services Administration that traditionally oversee the transition process.  The plan is to decimate a government apparatus that he views as little more than enemy territory while elevating himself high above it. 

“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency the first time,” declares Mike Davis, the leader of another pro-Trump outfit called the Article III Project.  “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”

Finally, there is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s decision to drop charges related to the Capitol Hill insurrection and Trump’s promise to pardon hundreds of “J6’ers.”  Together, they show how the federal government has given up holding Trump to account for the most serious constitutional breach since the Civil War and how the uprising itself is well on its way to being officially vindicated.  The very idea of free elections is coming under assault.  Henceforth, the only elections Republicans regard as valid will be elections they win.

What does it all add up to -- authoritarianism, Bonapartism, or out-and-out fascism?  With ostensible Marxist organizations all over the map with regard precisely what Trumpism at this stage represents, the answer in this writer's view is the first.  One reason is structural.  Broadly speaking, authoritarianism (or hyper-presidentialism to use the academic term) operates within existing constitutional guidelines.  Both Juan Perón of Argentina and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines submitted to regular elections, for instance, and even January 6 would have ended on a constitutional note even if Trump had succeeded in throwing the election into the House since Republicans would no doubt have followed the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the letter.

 

This is not to say that those constitutional procedures are anything other than obsolete, arcane, and undemocratic.  Considering that the Twelfth Amendment dates from 1803 and has never been updated, they are all those and more.  But what's important is that America’s weak and decrepit constitutional structure would have remained formally intact.  By contrast, Napoleon III, the subject of Marx’s famous study, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, overthrew the existing constitution after launching a coup d’état in 1851 so that he could draft a new constitution from scratch, one that allowed him to serve an unlimited number of ten-year terms and gave him have total authority to declare war, sign treaties, form alliances, and initiate laws.  The result was not authoritarianism under the existing constitution but dictatorship over it.  As for fascism, it dispenses with constitutionalism entirely by positing a mystical union between führer and volk that is above the law, one characterized by “unconditional authority downwards, highest responsibility upwards.”  Goebbels thus described Hitler as “the greater German, the führer, the prophet, the fighter, that last hope of the masses, the shining symbol of the German will to freedom” – anything, that is, except a mundane politician or officeholder.

 

Class relations are also key.  Trotsky described fascism as an attempt to resolve the contradictions of capitalism within the confines of the bourgeois state.  Since “[t]he productive forces are in irreconcilable contradiction not only with private property but also with national state boundaries,” the result is an effort “to solve this contradiction through an extension of boundaries, seizure of new territories, and so on.  The totalitarian state, subjecting all aspects of economic, political and cultural life to finance capital, is the instrument for creating a super-nationalist state, an imperialist empire, the rule over continents, the rule over the whole world.”

 

But Trump is not remotely there yet.  He is not a military expansionist, for example, and indeed attacked neocon hawk Liz Cheney during the campaign for launching “forever wars” from the comfort of Washington.  His choice of middle-of-the-road Wall Streeters like Lutnik and Bessent to head up negotiations with China indicates that, for now at least, he is intent on using financial rather than military means in dealing with the “threat” posed by the PRC.  

 

Bonapartism is meanwhile classically associated with a high pitch of class conflict in which the would-be ruler plays off the warring elements against one another so as to maintain himself in power.  Yet the current period is marked by working-class quiescence in which strikes, despite a recent uptick, are still running at a rate 75 percent or more below that of the late 1960s and early 70s.  

None of which is to say that Trump will not “graduate” to Bonapartism in the event of an economic or foreign-policy crisis or other disruption.  In fact, with the world in growing turmoil, such crises are more likely than not, which is why Bonapartism, i.e. outright political dictatorship, is plainly on the agenda.  Fascism, similarly, cannot be ruled out either although it will take political breakdown and a massive upsurge in revolutionary class struggle before it advances to the fore.

To sum up: Trumpism has not yet reached the Bonapartist stage, much less the fascist.  Nonetheless, constitutional constraints have been cast aside so forcibly.  The reason is the political breakdown of the last 30 years or so, which has been unprecedented.  The legislative branch is paralyzed, corruption is soaring, economic polarization is out of control, while ordinary citizens have rarely been more pessimistic.  An eighteenth-century constitution that is increasingly at odds with the needs of modern society is making a mockery of anything resembling democratic self-government.  If we toss in global warming, imperial overstretch, economic instability, and an increasingly powerful drive to war, then it is evident that capitalism is entering into the greatest crisis in history, a perfect multi-dimensional storm involving everything from high finance and the environment to political structure.  With its limits and contradictions, American democracy was never more than a crude facsimile.  But even that it is collapsing under the strain of a growing capitalist breakdown.

 

As far as the US is concerned, this means that mass repression, cultural reaction, and crude expressions of racism, sexism, and homophobia will all follow.  Life in America is changing rapidly, and there is nothing that middle-class radicals, “progressive” journalists, or the washed-up liberals who constitute the Democratic Party’s left wing can do to return it to anything resembling normalcy.

The only force capable of combatting such tendencies is the proletariat.  But it can do so not by restoring the old pseudo-democracy but by replacing it with a real democracy in the form of a workers’ state.  The more repressive and unstable the Trump administration grows, the more the working class must take the lead.  Five programmatic elements are absolutely crucial:

-- No to one-man rule.

 

-- No to mass deportations.

 

-- No to war.

 

-- Yes to workers’ solidarity on both sides of the US-Mexican border.

 

-- Yes to a democratic constituent assembly elected on the basis of strict proportional representation whose task will be to reconstruct America’s broken system of government from the ground up.  

 

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The crisis of Democracy and the 2024 elections

by Dan Lazare

10.18.24

The one safe prediction we can make about the upcoming presidential election is that it can only result in a further intensification of the crisis of US democracy.

George Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention

This is not Marxist boiler-plate in which bourgeois democracy is always bankrupt and capitalism is always in its death throes.   This is the real thing.  A lot of concerns are weighing on voters’ minds as Election Day nears, the economy, the climate crisis, inflation, and housing prices, to name just a few.  But among the most pressing is an across-the-board constitutional breakdown that is rapidly accelerating.  For example:

-- The Electoral College, which nearly quadruples the clout of voters in lily-white Wyoming versus those in minority-majority California, is playing an increasingly outsized role.  In the first two centuries of the American republic, the EC overturned the popular vote on only three occasions: in 1824, 1876, and 1888.  But it has already done so twice since November 2000 and may well do it a third time next month.

-- The Senate is more imbalanced than at any point since 1820.[1]  Thanks to equal state representation, it allows the 54 percent of the population that lives in just ten states to be outvoted four-to-one by the minority in the other forty.  A majority can be gleaned from senators representing just 17 percent of the country while a filibuster can be gleaned from 41 senators representing as little as eleven.

-- The House is so heavily gerrymandered that Republicans next month may enjoy as much as a 16-seat advantage according to estimates by the Brennan Center for Justice. 

-- The Supreme Court is increasingly undemocratic not just in terms of decision making but structure.  Five of the six justices who comprise the court’s six-member conservative majority were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote (i.e. Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barret), while four were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population (Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Thomas).  Given that Clarence Thomas, the oldest member of the court, is just 76, the rightwing judicial dictatorship will likely continue well into the mid-2030s.  If Trump wins a second term, it will continue even longer.

-- Federalism is in shambles.  Since January, Texas has seized control of a portion of the US-Mexican border in the town of Eagle Pass, 140 miles west of San Antonio.  This is outright insurrection, yet the White House is paralyzed.

-- Racial imbalances are growing.  More than 80 percent of racial minorities live in the ten biggest states that are outvoted in the Senate while states that are rural and white tend to benefit most from the Electoral College.  The multi-racial urban majority thus finds itself more and more disenfranchised.

-- What makes this even worse is that reform is essentially impossible thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause laid out in Article V, which stipulates that two-thirds of each house plus three-fourths of the states must consent before changing so much as a comma in America’s holy of holies.  Thirteen states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the nation can thus veto any effort at structural change, no matter how modest.  The US is as frozen as the Celestial Empire on the eve of the 1911 revolution.

The upshot is a perfect impasse.  All advanced capitalist states are under growing strain due to the post-2008 “long recession” and a host of problems that go along with it.  But since no country is saddled with a constitution that is as ancient, dysfunctional, and all-encompassing as the US version, no one faces a mechanical breakdown of anywhere near the same magnitude.  It is the equivalent of a car with a missing headlight, a missing wheel, and a sputtering engine.  But even if it leaves Americans stranded by the side of the road, there is nothing they can do because Article V renders them powerless.  Even a constitutional convention is a non-starter since Article V stipulates that its decisions are merely recommendations subject to the same two-thirds, three-fourths rule.  Wealthy minority interests are using the breakdown to impose an increasingly rightwing agenda.  Yet the democratic majority is powerless to respond.  

Powerless under the existing system, that is, but not under a new one of its own making.

There is a way out -- not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, but a constituent assembly along the lines of France in 1789 or Russia in 1917.  The difference is crucial.  Where one takes place under the Constitution, which describes how it may be called and what it can do, the other takes place over the Constitution since it is a gathering of the constituent elements – “we the people” and all that – who created it in the first place.  It is therefore free to operate on the Constitution as a whole, not according to the document’s rules, but according to its own, which is to say those of direct democracy.  If the assembly votes to ditch the Second Amendment, then out it goes.  If it votes to drop the Constitution in toto and draw up a new plan of government to take its place, then out it goes too.  

This is not a constitutional solution, since no such solution exists.  Rather, it is a revolutionary solution whose goal is either to create a new state or re-found the existing state on an entirely new basis.  Hence, it is one that only the industrial proletariat can implement.  

The US thus faces a classic choice between breakdown and revolution, between decay, authoritarianism, and a deepening social crisis on one hand and socialist democracy on the other.  The founding fathers have done us the favor of closing off all other escape routes.

As for the individual candidates running in 2024, they are an expression of the political crisis rather than in any sense an answer to it.

Kamala Harris is the candidate of the center-right status quo.  While she claims to stand for change, she has made it crystal clear that she will continue White House policies based on war, repression, economic royalism, and inaction in the face of accelerating climate change.  She represents the politics of muddling through, of doing whatever it takes to make it from day to day without regard to long-term considerations.  When vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz recently suggested that the Electoral College should go, the Harris campaign forced him to recant.  Even mentioning the structural crisis was more than Harris could bear.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is the candidate of lower-income voters who are “mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore,” to quote the 1976 movie “Network.”  They support him not despite the fact that he is a bull in a china shop, but because of it.  In their blind fury, they can think of no solution other than smashing stuff up and are therefore counting on him to do it.  His authoritarianism and destructiveness flow from a political structure that is broken, irrational, and increasingly undemocratic.  

For what it’s worth, this writer rates Trump’s chances at 41 percent and Harris’s at 39, with a 20-percent chance of January 6-style chaos instead.  But regardless of who wins, the great American breakdown will continue unabated.

 

---

[1] Frances E. Lee and Bruce L. Oppenheimer, Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10-11.

 

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Cheering on Trump

by Daniel Lazare

01.13.25

When word got out last week that Chris Cutrone was writing an article about Donald Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland, it seemed reasonable to assume that the Platypus founder would open up with both barrels.  After all, the Platypus Affiliated Society, with its many student clubs and discussion groups in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, is broadly Marxist in orientation.  So isn’t it the first task of Marxists to oppose imperialist aggression?

 

AI generated image of Trump and map of Greenland

So one might think, but one would be wrong.  The article – “The Future Belongs to America.  So should Greenland” – is a full-throated endorsement of Trump’s policies.^[1]  Cutrone is not the clearest of writers.  His endorsement of Kamala Harris in the Platypus Review last November laid on the irony so thick that it was hard to know if it was serious or not.^[2]

 

But his January 9 essay in a rightwing Catholic outlet known as Compact Magazine was a model of clarity.

 

“The US-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution,” it declares.  Noting that Benjamin Franklin wanted to take over Canada in the 1780s and that Republicans wanted to do the same after the Civil War as payback for British support of the Confederacy, the article describes Canada as “the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars” and adds: “It remains the European part of the Western Hemisphere.  This has not been a good thing.”

 

The solution?  Do what China would like to do to Taiwan, which is to fold Canada and Greenland into an immensely powerful neighbor known as the USA whether they like it or not.

 

“Trump’s promise to make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Cutrone writes.  “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. ...  This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States.  It is an evergreen promise.  America is revolutionary or it is nothing.  The United States of America liberated the world twice – three times with the Cold War.  Its mission continues.” 

 

It’s not imperialism because Jefferson – a kidnapper and serial rapist who sold his own children into slavery – said so.  Cutrone goes on: “Trump ... represents the ‘hope and change’ that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him. ...  Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities – the necessity for American growth and change.”  

 

Then comes the conclusion:

 

“In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future.  Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

 

Despite Trump’s threats to make Canada the 51^st state, take back the Panama Canal, and deport 11 million migrants, Cutrone’s advice is thus to lay back and enjoy it.  Since America equals freedom, US conquest must equal liberation.  Expansionism is therefore all to the good.  Today we have the United States, tomorrow the world.  What can go wrong?

 

Not that Cutrone is entirely unique.  A growing number of ex-leftists are making overtures to the right as the change of government nears.  With funding by both George Soros and Peter Thiel,^[3] Compact has begun publishing erstwhile leftists who now argue on behalf of RFK Jr. and Kash Patel, the hard-right hitman whom Trump has named to head the FBI.  Its website features a piece by Slavoj Zizek noting – not unhappily – that the left has reached “its zero point” thanks to Trump’s election and another praising Wolfgang Streeck, a New Left Review contributor with a pronounced nationalist streak, as a “prophet of left conservatism.”  Elsewhere in the journalistic firmament we find the leftwing cartoonist Ted Rall informing readers of the Wall Street Journal that “[s]ome of us are optimistic about some of Mr. Trump’s personnel picks and policy priorities” because they promise to be more dovish than Biden.^[4]

 

Tell that to Denmark, Greenland’s nominal owner, as it beefs up defenses in response to Trump’s threats.  Or Iran as it hunkers down in anticipation of a combined US-Israeli strike. Or Gaza following JD Vance’s vow “to knock out the final couple of battalions of Hamas and their leadership.”

JD Vance

But where people like Zizek are cautious and tentative, Cutrone goes whole hog.  Not only does he want Trump to bully the north into submission, but he also wants him to subdue the rest of the hemisphere too.  As he puts it: “...the revolution cannot be undone.  The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas – the rest of America – might still follow and not oppose it.”  

 

US control must extend from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego.  Rather than opposing Trump’s Anschluss, Cutrone applauds it.

 

How did Platypus reach such a parlous state?  There are any number of good things about the movement, which is why many Marxists have written for the Platypus Review since its founding in 2007 or participated in its public panels.  In contrast to the formulaic exchanges that characterize so many leftwing discussions, the Platypus approach is different – irreverent, wide ranging, and provocative.  As a UK socialist outlet known as the Weekly Worker noted:

 

“It is rare in the present to see a supporter of the US Revolutionary Communist Party shouting at a representative of the Communist Party of Great Britain over their differing positions on Libya and imperialism.  To see a panel of supposed Marxists and academics asked questions that make them shift uncomfortably in their seats is an enthralling sight. ...  To observe the complacent leaders of ostensibly revolutionary groups or ‘parties of one’ claiming to have the Marxist perspective being asked questions they would not normally be asked in an academic or political setting is something that those of us living under the chorus of the ‘death of communism’ have never previously experienced.”^[5]

 

Thanks to such freewheeling ways, this writer was able to confront the anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein at a Platypus panel at NYU last March over his uncritical support of Hamas and to present a Marxist analysis of the American Revolution at another Platypus event at Boston College in October – an analysis very different from Cutrone’s own.  With all too many leftists tailing abjectly after the so-called “Islamic Resistance,” it also allowed me to publish an article comparing Hamas with a Serbian terrorist group known as the Black Hand whose assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 led to World War I and the devastation of much of Serbia as well.^[6]

 

But freewheeling discussions are one thing, hosannas to Trump quite another.  Platypus’s troubles begin with an unstable ideology that combines elements of Trotskyism – Cutrone, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, passed through the Spartacist Youth League in the 1990s – with the Frankfurt School via Theodor Adorno.  It also lathers on a layer of social patriotism that adds to the general combustibility.  As Cutrone explained in 2020:

 

“My old comrades in the Spartacist League had a slogan, ‘Finish the Civil War!’ ...  More than 50 years later, we can say that the task is more simply to complete the American Revolution.  Former President John Quincy Adams (the son, not the father), speaking before the United States Supreme Court in the Amistad case advocating the freedom of slaves who rebelled, foresaw the future US Civil War over the abolition of slavery and called it the last battle of the American Revolution.’”^[7]

 

All of which is both ahistorical and un-Marxist.  While the American Revolution indeed saw a proto-democratic uprising among the sans-culottes of Boston, Philadelphia, and other urban centers, it also saw a revolt by southern planters determined to protect slavery against British interference.  It was a profoundly contradictory event, which is why the polity it gave rise to would explode some four score years later.  Pace Adams, the Civil War was a correction that overthrew the slaveholders’ republic of 1776 just as a socialist revolution will be a correction that overthrows the industrial-capitalist republic that emerged in 1865.  Rather than more of the same, it will be a departure in an entirely new direction.

 

Cutrone’s failure to grasp such ABC’s of Marxism leads to a fantasy world in which slavery, Jim Crow, and repeated bouts of anti-communist hysteria pale in comparison to the pure light of freedom that shines as brightly today as it did in 1776.  American freedom is eternal and unchanging, above history rather part of it.  Hence, Canadians, Danes, et al. should be grateful now that Trump is preparing to usher them into the light too.

 

Adolescent prattle like this is bad enough under ordinary circumstances, but absolutely intolerable now that the US is entering into a period of rightwing authoritarianism and mass corruption that makes the Gilded Age seem like an episode of minor pilferage.  If Cutrone really cared about safeguarding American democracy – what little is left of it, that is – he would be alerting his followers to the dangers that Trump represents.  Instead, he is egging him on.

 

This presents Platypus members with a choice.  Do they sit back and watch as Cutrone transforms Platypus into the left wing of Trumpism?  Or do they mobilize against the new administration by repudiating Cutrone’s views as forcefully as possible?  The options are clear: fight Trump or lose themselves in increasingly arid discussions as the rightwing drive intensifies outside the classroom windows.

 

With that in mind, this writer hereby declares a boycott of his own.  Unless Platypus takes a strong stance against Cutrone-style social patriotism, I will cease participating in Platypus discussion groups or writing for the Platypus Review and will instead do my best to expose the fraudulent politics at Platypus’s core.  I call upon all socialists to do the same.  We must not stand idly by as Marxism is twisted into an ideology of passivity and accommodation!

---

^[1] https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-future-belongs-to-america-so-should-greenland/.

^[2] Chris Cutrone, “Why I want Kamala to win,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/02/why-i-want-kamala-to-win/.

^[3] Chris Menahan, “Report: Soros Funds Sohrab Ahmari’s ‘Conservative’ Outlet Compact Magazine,” Information Liberation, Oct. 25, 2024, https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=64709.

^[4] Ted Rall, “Optimism about Trump on the Left,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 1, 2025, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/optimism-about-trump-on-the-left-policies-war-peace-business-markets-2593e0db.

^[5] Corey Ansel, “Dissecting the Platypus,” Weekly Worker 963 (May 23, 2013), https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/963/dissecting-the-platypus/.

^[6] Daniel Lazare, “1914 redux: Why the Left gets Hamas wrong ... and U.S. imperialism too,” Platypus Review 171 (November 2024), https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/01/1914-redux-why-the-left-gets-hamas-wrong-and-u-s-imperialism-too/.

^[7] Chris Cutrone, “The American Revolution and the Left,” Platypus Review 124 (March 2020), https://platypus1917.org/2020/03/01/the-american-revolution-and-the-left/.

 

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