Sexuality and gender in capital

On Juliet Mitchell, “Women: The Longest Revolution” (1966)

Chris Cutrone

Presented at the University of Chicago, May 18, 2010.

In my presentation, I will be drawing from but not citing a variety of readings we do in Platypus, including Georg LukĂĄcs’s book History and Class Consciousness (1923), Theodor W. Adorno’s essay “Sexual Taboos and the Law Today” (1963) and John D’Emilio’s essay “Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983), as well as University of Chicago Professor Moishe Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s critique of capital (in Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 1993).

I want to start with a quotation from Juliet Mitchell’s groundbreaking essay “Women: The Longest Revolution,” published in the New Left Review in 1966, that will establish some categories I wish to explore in considering a Marxist approach to problems of sexuality and gender in capital:

Socialism will be a process of change, of becoming.  A fixed image of the future is in the worst sense ahistorical. . . .  As Marx wrote (in Precapitalist Economic Formations): “What is progress if not the absolute elaboration of humanity’s creative dispositions . . . unmeasured by any previously established yardstick[,] an end in itself . . . the absolute movement of becoming?” . . .  The liberation of women under socialism will [be] . . . a human achievement, in the long passage from Nature to Culture which is the definition of history and society. (37)

Here, Mitchell concludes her essay with an emphasis on the issue of “becoming,” or the open-ended transformation of gender and sexuality that capital makes possible but constrains.

To illustrate the problem regarding the history of the Left, including Marxism, on issues of gender and sexuality, it should suffice to address a poorly registered shift that occurred in the 20th century in the social imagination and ideology of discontents with capital between two crucial periods, the early 20th century “Old Left” of the 1930s and ’40s, and the “New Left” of the 1960s and ’70s.  In the earlier period, of the “Old” Left, the predominant form of discontent and grievance regarding capitalism, which had some continuity with similar forms of the 19th century workers’ movement, was how capitalism undermined the working class family and sexual life, breaking up the “hearth and home,” and denying the benefits of the bourgeois family to the workers, in exploiting not only men but also women and children.  In the late 20th century “New Left,” by contrast, there was a reversal of the discontent and grievance with capitalism, in that it made women and children (and men) prisoners of the “bourgeois” family.  Where once capitalism was seen as barring the family life of the workers, now capitalism was seen as depending upon and thus keeping workers constrained in the conventional family.  Where once the demand was to have the freedom to have a family, there arose the demand to abolish the family along with capitalism.  Where once, in supposed “Marxism-Leninism,” that is, Stalinist, Maoist, and Guevarist, etc., Communism, the family was regarded as the “fighting unit of socialism,” for “New Left” Marxists, the family was seen as a bulwark of capitalism.  Similarly, where once, in such supposed “Marxism,” homosexuality and other “deviance” was seen as the result of “bourgeois decadence,” for the “New Left,” sexual liberation found pride of place.  What accounts for this shift?

As shown by the fact that today, paradoxically, a central concern of politics around homosexuality is the demand for equal rights to marital and “family” status, it is not a simple matter of “progress,” in which at one time Marxists had been unaware of the depth of issues of gender and sexual oppression, and then came to be aware, trying to incorporate issues of gender and sexuality into their critiques of capital.  For, as Mitchell points out, not only Marx and Engels themselves, but also later Marxists, such as the German Social-Democratic Party leader August Bebel, as well as younger Marxist political activists, such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Trotsky, were very much aware of how gender and sexual liberation were central concerns for overcoming capital.  For instance, in the late 19th century, August Bebel was the first modern parliamentarian to call for the decriminalization of homosexuality.  When Bebel’s party later inherited power in the Weimar Republic after the German Revolution of 1918 at the end of the First World War, it became the first modern democratic state to decriminalize homosexuality, but only after the Bolsheviks had already done so in the Russian Revolution of 1917.  It was the demise of the Weimar Republic with the 1933 Nazi seizure of power that recriminalized homosexuality (and, incidentally, this was one of very few laws implemented by the Nazis that was not repealed with their defeat at the end of World War II).  In the Soviet Union, it was only in the process of conservatization that occurred through Stalinism, the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, that homosexuality was recriminalized, and the conventional heterosexual family was reinforced (for instance through the recriminalization of abortion and the restoration of legal obstacles to divorce) around the same time, in the 1930s.  As a result, subsequent “Marxists” took as axiomatic the celebration of heterosexuality and the family, and the pathologization of homosexuality, neither of which had been the case for earlier Marxist radicals.

Thus, conventional but false “Marxist” accounts that came later have posed the issue of “gender vs. class,” or, in “socialist feminist” versions, have tried to demonstrate the “interconnectedness” of “gender, sexuality and class,” where what needed to be addressed was how gender or sexuality could, equally as well as socioeconomic “class” accounts could do, describe the problem of capital, in terms of the problem of emancipatory transformation.  To do so it would be necessary to show how gender and sexuality are in themselves issues of class, or, perhaps more importantly, how class is an issue of sexuality and gender. For gender and sexuality are capital. That is, they comprise its conditions of reproduction, as much as socioeconomic classes do. And, like modern classes, gender and sexuality have themselves been formed by the history of capital.

One way to disentangle the problems that have usually beset and confounded purported “Marxist” anticapitalist approaches to gender and sexual liberation is to recognize that a Marxian account of capital is concerned with conditions of possibility and not causal-deterministic explanations for oppression.  So, the question would not be how capitalism causes sexual and gender oppression, which could indeed be shown, but, rather, how capital could be grasped as the historically specific social condition of possibility for forms of sexual and gender constraint and oppression.  This is especially important with regard to how, in the modern era, sexuality and gender roles have taken a variety of forms, but all nonetheless remained problematical and ultimately constraining of social possibilities for developing greater human potential.

The modern era of capital, beginning in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, has demonstrated a great deal of potential, in a variety of different forms, for sexual life and gender relations.  Such potential has been inherent in the overcoming of traditional ways of life in capital.  Conservatives have responded to such changes as the dangerous break-down of traditional values, but, from the beginning, Marxists, among other bohemian socialists of the 19th and early 20th centuries, had been interested in how to push such potential further, in an open-ended way.  They regarded capital as a constraint, an obstacle to this.  At the same time, however, they regarded capital as the inevitable condition of possibility for emancipatory transformation.  As regards changes already underway, Marxists found them expressing potential capital already embodied.  Marxists thus distinguished themselves sharply from conservative responses to capital’s dynamic of change.  Capital undermined traditional ways of life, but not nearly enough, according to Marxism, because modern capitalist society allowed for the reproduction of (new forms of) gender and sexual oppression.  Capital not only undermined, but allowed the recrudescence of the worst forms of supposed “traditional” ways of life.

An example I’d like to raise is the phenomenon of the return of the traditional sexual prostitution of boys in Afghanistan after the U.S.-led NATO coalition ousted the Taliban.  This has been chronicled in a recent PBS Frontline documentary.  Whereas the former Soviet client regime and the Taliban radical Islamic fundamentalists, each in their own ways and for their own reasons, had suppressed the practice of the “dancing boys” in Afghanistan, the post-U.S. invasion and occupation regime, while formally outlawing it, has largely tolerated its return.  This is because the Mujahideen fighters (for instance of the Russian- and Indian- and then U.S.-backed Northern Alliance) that had fought the Soviet-backed regime and then had been ousted in turn by the Taliban, but now form pillars of the new, post-NATO intervention regime, had cultivated the practice of “dancing boy” prostitution among themselves over the course of the past 30 years.  Indeed, their opposition to Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet regime in the 1970s and ’80s could be attributed almost as much to their adherence to this “traditional” sexual practice as to their opposition to the unveiling, education, public life and rights of women.  As one adherent put it in the Frontline documentary, “Women are for children, but boys are for pleasure.”  In Afghanistan, as elsewhere, the nexus of pressure of a money economy with conditions of wretched, abject poverty, massive social dislocation, including conditions of far-ranging migrant labor markets, and some dubious “traditional” cultural values, results in the worst of both modern and traditional forms of social life.  How would a Marxist approach address a phenomenon like the Afghan “dancing boys?”

While there is no simple, straightforward answer, it is clear that “dancing boy” prostitution in Afghanistan today bears only superficial resemblance to anything that was practiced traditionally in a prior historical era, itself nothing to celebrate.  So the practice can and should be condemned, as in the liberal sensibility of the Frontline documentary, directed at scandalizing a Western audience towards opposing present U.S. and NATO/European policy in Afghanistan that tolerates such abuses by the regime they have fostered there.  But opposing the prostitution of the “dancing boys” on the basis of some “hetero-normative” (and hence homophobic) assumption of conventional sexual and gender life elsewhere, such as found in America and Europe, is problematic, to say the least, however much it may appear to be a possible improvement, as advocates in Afghanistan seeking to put an end to the “dancing boys” may imagine.

Such supposed “traditional” practices of male inter-generational, pederastic homosexuality that finds grotesque expression today in Afghanistan can obviously in no way be found to express the full potential of male homosexuality — or of child sexuality, for that matter.  So, the solution is not to try to get Afghan men to adopt a more “normal” sexual orientation towards relations with (adult) women and the modern (Western) marriage based on love and (heterosexual) intimacy, which is highly unlikely under present social conditions in a place like Afghanistan, anyway.  And, as anyone concerned with sexual and gender emancipation in places like America and Europe would point out, not only the conventional forms of intimate life and family practices that take place hegemonically “here,” but also those found in the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender subcultures, are hardly the final word in terms of sexual and gender emancipation.  And, just as importantly, as can be observed in the society of “law and order” such as practiced in places like the U.S., criminalization of sexual practices of any kind offers no solution.

Another example I’d raise is female genital mutilation, as “traditionally” practiced in parts of Africa and the Middle East and also among immigrant communities from such places in North America and Europe.  While socio-biologists have desperately tried to find a biological-evolutionary “reason” for female orgasm, it turns out to be entirely extraneous from survival imperatives of natural selection.  As one writer put it, female orgasm, unlike the male orgasm, seems to exist naturally just “for fun.”  Biology is a condition, and not a “destiny.”  There is nothing simply “natural” about human biological conditions.  But these can indeed play out in a variety of different ways, depending on society.  It can also, for instance, allow whole cultures to practice the sexual mutilation of — the excising of sexual pleasure from — female children, as occurs routinely for millions of girls around the world each year.  It is a “voluntary” practice, by and among women.  But this is only an extreme example of how “culture” shapes “nature,” or, how society forms “sexuality,” through gender roles, among other practices, all of which, to one degree or another, could be understood as forms of “mutilation,” including psychologically, when seen from the standpoint of potential emancipation.  How would Marxists respond? — Especially, as regards female genital mutilation, when what is at stake concerns marital eligibility, and, hence, a whole host of life-chances for women, if the “traditional” practice is abrogated.  We could broaden this concern in addressing the phenomenon of “honor killings” of women for sexual infractions, including involuntary ones such as being raped, in the Arab world and elsewhere.  Even more broadly, sex work, especially as a global phenomenon, for instance among millions of migrant workers, points to problems of life chances, for the men who are clients no less than for the women who are prostituted.  It is not merely a matter of gender oppression, although gender oppression as a condition certainly plays a key role.  Clearly, as in the case of the Afghan “dancing boys,” what is required is some kind of increased scope for both individual and collective possibilities.  The task is to grasp capital, the social-historical moment of the present in a process of becoming, as a matter of economics, politics and culture, including gender and sexuality, as embodying both potential and constraint for such possibilities.  How could a less destructive way for humanity be opened?

Addressing capital as the fundamental and global context for such phenomena is a challenging but necessary requirement for even beginning to approach the question and problem of what it would take to open possibilities for gender and sexual practices for the vast majority, if not simply the totality of humanity in our modern epoch.  In the forms of purportedly “inhuman” practices as can be found in the phenomena of gender and sexuality with which the present world is rife, can be seen, in however distorted form, potential possibilities for becoming human, in ways that can only be barely imagined today.  As Mitchell warned in her essay more than 40 years ago, we need to attend to the problem of our present discontents taking static, hypostatized forms, and beware of the normative principles we may be tempted to offer against manifest destructive practices we face and want to overcome.  For what is necessary is to grasp the “movement of becoming” in capital that must be transformed, from the break-down of tradition, as well as the specious re-positing of “tradition” in the face of the onslaught of modernity, into a truly “human achievement” of emancipation. | §

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Adorno and Korsch on Marxism and philosophy

Chris Cutrone

Presented on the panel “Reconsiderations in Western Marxism: LukĂĄcs, Korsch, Adorno, Marcuse,” with panelist Baolinh Dang, at the Historical Materialism conference, York University, Toronto, May 14, 2010; and on the panel “Hegel, Marx, and Modern Philosophy,” with panelists Patrick Murray and Richard Westerman at the Weissbourd 2011 Annual Conference, the University of Chicago, May 6, 2011. Excerpted from “Book review: Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy” and “Rejoinder on Korsch,” originally published in The Platypus Review (#15, September 2009, and #20, February 2010).

The publication of Karl Korsch’s seminal essay “Marxism and Philosophy” in 1923 coincided with the publication of Georg Lukács’s landmark collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness. While Lukács’s book has the word “history” in its title, it follows Marx’s Capital in addressing the problem of social being and consciousness in a primarily “philosophical” and categorial manner, as the subjectivity of the commodity form. Korsch’s essay on philosophy in Marxism, by contrast, is actually a historical treatment of the problem, from Marx and Engels’s time, through the 2nd International, to what Korsch called the “crisis of Marxism” and the revolutions of 1917–19. More specifically, Korsch’s essay takes up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which Korsch considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism.

Independently of one another, both Korsch’s and Lukács’s 1923 works shared an interest in recovering the Hegelian or “idealist” dimension of Marx’s thought and politics. Both were motivated to establish the coherence of the Marxist revolutionaries Lenin and Luxemburg, and these 2nd International-era radicals’ shared grounding in what Korsch called “Marx’s own Marxism.” Due to a perceived shortcoming in the expounding of revolutionary Marxism, the problem for Korsch and Lukács was interpreting Marxism as both theory and practice, or how the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg (rightly) considered itself “dialectical.” Both Lukács and Korsch explicitly sought to provide this missing exposition and elaboration.

Lukács and Korsch were later denounced as “professors” in the Communist International, a controversy that erupted after the deaths of Luxemburg and Lenin. In the face of this party criticism, Lukács acquiesced and made his peace with “orthodoxy,” disavowing his work of 1919–24 as comprising a misguided attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel.”

Korsch responded differently to the party’s criticism. Quitting the 3rd International Communist movement entirely, he became associated with the “Left” or “council” communism of Antonie Pannekoek and Paul Mattick. Though making a choice very different from Lukács and distancing himself from official “Marxism-Leninism,” Korsch also came to disavow his earlier argument in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Specifically, he abandoned the attempt to establish the coherence of Lenin’s theory and practice with that of Marx, going so far as to critique Marx. Thus, in the 1930 essay “The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy:’ An Anti-Critique,” Korsch argued that, to the degree Marx shared a common basis with Lenin, this was an expression of limitations in Marx’s own critical theory and political practice. Indeed, for Korsch it was a problem of “Marxism” in general, including Kautsky and Luxemburg. Ultimately, Korsch called for “going beyond” Marxism.

The complementary, if divergent, trajectories of Korsch and Lukács are indicative of the historical disintegration of the perspective both shared in their writings of 1923. Both had understood the “subjective” aspect of Marxism to have been clarified by Lenin’s role in the October Revolution. The figure of Lenin was irreducible, and brought out dimensions of the Marxian project that otherwise lay unacknowledged. No less than Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Korsch’s essay on “Marxism and Philosophy” inspired the work of the Marxist critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School — Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the reputation of Korsch’s work has been eclipsed by that of Lukács. What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but “anti-Stalinism” as well. Both Korsch’s and Lukács’s post-1923 trajectories were critiqued by the Frankfurt School writers.[1] Korsch, in the 1930 “Anti-Critique,” distanced himself from the problem Adorno sought to address, of the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice. Writing 40 years later, in Negative Dialectics (1966), Adorno thought, like Korsch and Lukács in the early 1920s, that Lenin and Luxemburg’s theoretical self-understanding, together with their revolutionary political practice, comprised the most advanced attempt yet to work through precisely this non-identity.

In Adorno’s terms, both the later Korsch and official “dialectical materialism” (including the later Lukács) assumed “identity thinking,” an identity of effective theory and practice, rather than their articulated non-identity, to which Korsch and Lukács had drawn attention earlier. Instead of this recognition of the actuality of the symptom of “philosophical” thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice, Korsch, by embracing “council” communism, and shunning Marxian theory in the years after writing his famously condemned work, succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking” — just as Lukács had done in adapting to Stalinist “orthodoxy.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch sought their “reconciliation,” instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation.

Just as Adorno tried to hold fast to the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness in the face of Lukács’s own subsequent disavowals, the first sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics reiterated Korsch’s statement in “Marxism and Philosophy” that “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized” (“Marxism and Philosophy,” in Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday [NY: Monthly Review Press, 1970 and 2008], 97). As Adorno put it,

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed.[2]

In 1923, Korsch had explicitly tied the question of “philosophy” to Lenin’s treatment of the problem of the state in The State and Revolution (1917). Just as, with the overcoming of capitalism, the necessity of the state would “wither,” and not be done away with at one stroke, so too the necessity of “philosophical” thinking, specifically the critical reflection on the relation of theory and practice, as it appeared in the epoch of capital, would dissolve. This side of emancipation, “theoretical” self-reflection, thought’s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem.

Korsch divided the relation of Marx’s thought to philosophy roughly into three periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. These periods were distinguished by the different ways they related theory and practice: the first period was the critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition; the second, the sublimation of philosophy in revolution; and the third, the recrudescence of the problem of relating theory and practice.

Korsch’s third period in the history of Marxism, post-1848, extended into what he termed the “crisis of Marxism” beginning in the 1890s with the reformist “revisionist” dispute of Eduard Bernstein against the “orthodox Marxism” of the 2nd International — when the “revolutionary Marxism” of Luxemburg and Lenin originated — and continuing into the acutely revolutionary period of 1917–19, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the German Revolution and civil war of 1918–19, to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (in which Lukács participated) and the workers’ uprisings in Italy (in which Antonio Gramsci participated) in 1919.

It was in this revolutionary period of the early 20th century that “Marx’s own Marxism” of 1848, as expressed in the Communist Manifesto, regained its saliency, but in ways that Korsch thought remained not entirely resolved as a matter of relating theory to practice. In “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch found that while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to better relate Marxian theory and practice than 2nd International Marxism had done, they had recognized this as an on-going task and aspiration, and not already achieved in some finished sense. In the words of the epigraph from Lenin that introduces Korsch’s 1923 essay, “We must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint” (“On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” 1922). If Marxism continued to be subject to a “Hegelian dialectic,” thus requiring the “historical materialist” analysis and explanation that Korsch sought to provide of it, this was because it was not itself the reconciled unity of theory and practice but remained, as theory, the critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice — which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances.

For Korsch in the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” Lenin and Luxemburg’s “revolutionary Marxism” was bound up in the “crisis of Marxism,” while advancing it to a new stage. As Korsch commented,

This transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed “like a nightmare” on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers’ movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. . . . [T]he internal connection of theory and practice within revolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established. (67–68)

Korsch thus established the importance for what Adorno later called the “historically changing” relation of theory and practice, making sense of their vicissitudes in the history of the politics of Marxism. Furthermore, by establishing the character of the “crisis of Marxism” as a matter of theoretical reflection, Korsch re-established the role of consciousness in a Marxian conception of social revolution, why the abandonment or distancing of the practical perspective of revolution necessitates a degradation of theory.

Adorno, in one of his last writings, the “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (1969), stated that,

If, to make an exception for once, one risks what is called a grand perspective, beyond the historical differences in which the concepts of theory and praxis have their life, one discovers the infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis, which was deplored by the Romantics and denounced by the Socialists in their wake — except for the mature Marx.[3]

According to Adorno, Marx had a critical theory of the relation of theory and practice — recognizing it as a historically specific and not merely “philosophical” problem, or, a problem that called for the critical theory of the philosophy of history — and a political practice of the relation of theory and practice. Adorno noted that the relation of theory and practice is “not settled once and for all, but fluctuates historically.”[4] There is not simply a theoretical or practical problem, but also, and more profoundly, a problem of relating theory and practice. It is not a matter of finding either a correct theory or correct practice, but of trying to judge and affect their changing relation and recognizing this as a problem of history. This is a function of the past’s problematic legacy in the present.

The revolutionary politics of Lenin and Luxemburg, following Marx, which inspired the Marxian critical theory of Lukács, Korsch and Adorno, recovered and struggled through the problem of theory and practice for their time, precipitating a crisis in Marxism, and thus potentially advancing it. Overcoming the “vulgar Marxist” ossification of theory and practice in the 2nd International opened the way to their critical relation, which Adorno elaborated. This meant the Marxist critique of Marxism, or, a Left critique of the Left. This was not a finished but an on-going task. Adorno’s focus, following Korsch, on the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice, is key to recovering a Marxian approach to the problem of an emancipatory, “dialectical” politics, an unresolved but neglected problem in the history of Marxism. | §

1. The reverse was also true. Korsch, in distancing himself from his 1923 work that was so seminal for the Frankfurt School writers, also came to critique them:

[Korsch] intended to try and interest Horkheimer and the [Frankfurt] Institute [for Social Research] in Pannekoek’s book Lenin as Philosopher (1938) [which traced the bureaucratization of the USSR back to the supposedly crude materialism of Lenin’s 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]. . . . [Either] Korsch [or, the Director of the Institute, Horkheimer himself] would write a review for [the Institute’s journal] the Zeitschrift. . . . Yet no such review appeared. . . . [Korsch suffered] total disillusionment with the Institute and their “impotent philosophy.” Korsch [was] particularly bitter about the “metaphysician Horkheimer.” [Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), 73–74.]

The record for Korsch’s deteriorating relations with the Frankfurt Institute in exile is found in his private letters to Paul Mattick, editor of the journal Living Marxism: International Council Correspondence.

2. Translated by Dennis Redmond (2001).

3. Adorno, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical Models, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 266. This essay, a “dialectical epilegomenon” to his book Negative Dialectics that Adorno said intended to bring together “philosophical speculation and drastic experience” (Critical Models, 126), reflected his dispute with fellow Frankfurt School critical theorist Hebert Marcuse over the student protests of the Vietnam War (see Adorno and Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” trans. by Esther Leslie, New Left Review I/233, Jan.–Feb. 1999, 123–136). As Adorno put it in his May 5, 1969 letter to Marcuse,

[T]here are moments in which theory is pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither exists objectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism that confronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow. (“Correspondence,” 127.)

4. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Publishing, 1983), 143.