Rejoinder on Marxism and individuals
Chris Cutrone
I concluded my dismantling of Gabriel Rockhill’s slander against the Frankfurt School with the deliberately provocative lines:
Everyone has to think for themselves. There’s no “we” in socialism, comrades.
I don’t celebrate political isolation but recognize it — and am trying to overcome it! To paraphrase Nietzsche, I take my revenge on a bad feeling by making it public (in “Use and abuse of history for life,” Unfashionable Observations, 1876).
I have previously written about Adorno and Horkheimer’s Towards a New Manifesto and related writings, among other places, in two particular articles published at Nonsite.org, “Do we need Adorno?” and “Horkheimer in 1943 on party on class,” the latter on Horkheimer’s previously unpublished essay “On the sociology of class relations.” I refer to them so that my prior arguments about the Frankfurt School’s politics do not need to be repeated.
But there is much more than the Frankfurt School to the question of Marxism as an isolating intellectual phenomenon. It goes back to Marx and Engels themselves. Indeed, Lenin found himself a man alone at key moments, including both in 1917, when he had to criticize his comrades in the Revolution, and at the very end, in his resistance to Stalinization (see Moshe Lewin’s Lenin’s Last Struggle, 1968). While there should not be a reinforcement let alone ratification of the casting aside of Marxist critical theory by politics, it is also important to recognize that the actual problem is rather the opposite: turning Marxist critics into mere comrades. “Comrade Marx” won’t do. Neither will Comrade Adorno — nor Comrade Cutrone.
In response to the Critique of the Gotha Program, the Social-Democratic Party of Germany founder and longtime Chairman August Bebel wrote, “One can see that it was no easy thing to reach agreement with the two old men [Marx and Engels] in London.” (Bebel, My Life, 1912). But was it merely lack of agreement? Or was there an indispensable role for (Marx’s) critique in the proletarian struggle for socialism? The repressive character of having to justify critique by its practical applicability was not original to Adorno and Horkheimer, but already observed by Marx and Engels early in their political career.
Marx and Engels relished their isolation in the wake of 1848, which they found liberating. As they wrote to each other in 1851:
Marx to Engels (Feb. 11, 1851):
I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_11.htm
Engels to Marx (Feb. 13, 1851):
From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. . . . Besides we have no real grounds for complaint if we are shunned by the petits grands hommes; haven’t we been acting for years as though [Tom, Dick and Harry] were our party when, in fact, we had no party, and when the people whom we considered as belonging to our party, at least officially, sous réserve de les appeler des bêtes incorrigibles entre nous [with the reservation that between ourselves we called them incorrigible fools], didn’t even understand the rudiments of our stuff? How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we’re of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years [since 1848].
We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.
The main thing at the moment is to find some way of getting our things published; either in a quarterly in which we make a frontal attack and consolidate our position so far as [definite] persons are concerned, or in fat books where we do the same without being under the necessity of mentioning any one of these vipers. . . . What price all the gossip the entire émigré crowd can muster against you, when you answer it with your [forthcoming] political economy?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_02_13.htm
This wasn’t sour grapes. Their marginalization would be vindicated by history.
Adorno and Horkheimer made the relation of their theory to the non-existent political practice of a socialist party clear in Towards a New Manifesto (1956):
[25 March:]
ADORNO: Shouldn’t we really have to think everything out from the beginning? Write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation. In Marx’s day it could not yet be seen that the immanence of society had become total. That means, on the one hand, that one might almost need to do no more than strip off the outer shell; on the other hand, that no one really wants things to be otherwise.
HORKHEIMER: We still have something of a breathing space. We must not lose sight of that in our discussion of theory. We cannot be active politically and yet every word we write is political. We have to say clearly that the Communist Party is not a whit superior to the liberal politicians in the Federal Republic. The claim that new constellations are possible has echoes of Trotsky.
ADORNO: The fact that art exists is not rendered immaterial by the statement that what really counts is revolution.
HORKHEIMER: Art is actually not different from what we have in mind, but we have to articulate it.
ADORNO: We should not blind ourselves to this.
HORKHEIMER: We need to make explicit matters that Picasso can remain silent about. It must become quite clear from our general position why one can be a communist and yet despise the Russians.
ADORNO: We must be against [West German Chancellor Konrad] Adenauer.
HORKHEIMER: But that is only true as long as we list the reasons that make it possible to keep on living in the West. An appeal for the re-establishment of a socialist party.
ADORNO: With a strictly Leninist manifesto.
HORKHEIMER: Then we would be told that such a manifesto could not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless. At best, it might have some success in France and Italy. We are not calling on anyone to take action.
ADORNO: Practice is a rationally led activity; that leads ultimately back to theory. Practice is driven on to theory by its own laws.
HORKHEIMER: Theory is, as it were, one of humanity’s tools.
ADORNO: That means that theory and practice cannot be separated.
HORKHEIMER: That is conformism.
ADORNO: For a form of behaviour to be practical I must reflect on something or other. If I have the concept of reflection, the concept of practice implicitly postulates that of theory. The two elements are truly separated from each other and inseparable at the same time.
HORKHEIMER: Theory is required to reflect; it must know why.
ADORNO: What makes theory more than a mere instrument of practice is the fact that it reflects on itself, and in so doing it rescinds itself as mere theory.
HORKHEIMER: It can achieve that only by targeting true practice.
ADORNO: Contemplation had a point while it was still directed at an object in a theological sense. You always criticize theory on the grounds that a communist theory is really an absurdity, the pure observation of something that no longer exists. The concept of theory has undermined itself through the overall concept of enlightenment. There is something archaic about the concept of theory.
HORKHEIMER: Marx would say that what we perceive are not ideas but products of human practice, in a twofold sense. Firstly, in the sense that our attention is still taken up by our needs, and secondly, because we regard as nominalistically insoluble something that we are as yet unable to produce with the methods of science.
[30 March:]
HORKHEIMER: We have asked about the relationship between theory and practice if there is no longer a party. Now there is no party and this means that two sources of uncertainty are involved, if we continue to operate in the realm of theory. Firstly, because what is produced in the way of theory no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat. Secondly, it seems then as if we are working on a theory for keeping in stock.
ADORNO: In the best case, it is theory as a message in a bottle.
HORKHEIMER: In stock. Perhaps the time will come again when theory can be of use. A theory that has ceased to have any connection with practice is art. What we need to respond to is the question of whether we are doing philosophy as pure construct.
ADORNO: If I had the choice between a construct and the stockroom, I would always choose the construct. To think thoughts because it is fun seems more dignified.
HORKHEIMER: First thesis: the choice between ideas as constructs and ideas in stock.
ADORNO: We have to express this as bluntly as possible without leaving anything obscure.
HORKHEIMER: Even if our theory doesn’t directly feed into practice, and even if the link with practice is utterly opaque, it will nevertheless benefit practice somehow or other. Thinking has lost direction in a very crucial way. Philosophy differs from art in this respect. If we speak of the injustice and mendacity of the world in a philosophical text and the world replies that it is not unjust and mendacious, since there is no alternative at present, it is just doing the best it can, this means that there is something wrong with theory. We rightly expect theory to have a definite meaning. In contrast, we just listen to music. Theory cannot be oblivious of itself. Theory as resistance. Basically your thinking too has a highly practical orientation.
ADORNO: I know that everything is false as long as the world is as it is.
HORKHEIMER: You would say that merely to say this is to achieve much. I say that a lot more has to happen. We have to point to the direction we must travel in to make sure that the horrors are no longer necessary. In your view theory has done its job once we can say that. I believe we must retain the aspect of Marxism which insists that it is not enough to say something is bad. In actuality we still have to do battle with the standpoint of the French counter-revolution, which maintains that the work done by the executioner is still needed since otherwise things would be even worse. . . .
HORKHEIMER: I do not myself think that pure cultural criticism is so important. An American might well say to us, what do you really want, we are the better human beings, we want to organize things so as to put an end to barbarism. This is what we have to sort out. Do you know what it is about practice that you reject? The recipe. Theory should not be a recipe, but if it remains quite unconnected with any such thing —
ADORNO: — It negates itself. When ideas become too concrete, I protest; when they become too abstract, you protest. When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto there was no party either. It is not always necessary to join up with something already in existence.
HORKHEIMER: If you produce revolutionary writings in a non-revolutionary situation without engaging with the positive aspects of a culture, it always seems somehow hopeless.
ADORNO: But Marx did not have the aura of someone who was godforsaken.
HORKHEIMER: There was nothing sectarian about him. We must not write a single word that might fail to acknowledge that we live in this particular society and are a part of it.
ADORNO: We live on the culture we criticize.
HORKHEIMER: I meant the society.
ADORNO: You said that the barbarism of this culture can be countered only with barbaric methods. So are the means neutral towards the ends? In other words, can I really be opposed to barbarism if I myself write like writers in the Marxist tradition? . . .
ADORNO: We have to express ourselves in such a way that our readers can see quite clearly how things have to be changed, but one must allow the reader to see enough to enable him to glimpse the idea that change is possible.
HORKHEIMER: Second thesis: What we say today is something implicit in morality or Christianity. If there is so much affluence as there is in the Western world, we must give to those who have nothing.
ADORNO: The fault lies exclusively with ideology. Basically, we have to change consciousness, to dissolve the context of delusion in the minds of others. Then all would be well.
HORKHEIMER: It is not just the state of consciousness. If those who have plenty were to hand some over to the needy, they would ultimately find themselves overwhelmed by them. Human beings live on horror. It’s connected with eating meat. Your ‘beggar hurries to the gate’ [from a song in Adorno’s unfinished 1933 opera Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe, an adaptation of Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)] — that is the culture we live in.
ADORNO: Theory is already practice. And practice presupposes theory. Today, everything is supposed to be practice and at the same time, there is no concept of practice. We do not live in a revolutionary situation, and actually things are worse than ever. The horror is that for the first time we live in a world in which we can no longer imagine a better one.
HORKHEIMER: The party no longer exists.
ADORNO: Any appeal to form a Left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda. Such a party would either be dragged along in the wake of the Communist Party, or it would suffer the fate of the SPD or [U.K.] Labour Party. It is not a political issue that there is no party.
HORKHEIMER: The moment politics is less able to do the right thing than at any time in history is also the moment politics is no longer of relevance.
ADORNO: The problem of he who speaks.
HORKHEIMER: Can it be said that today the political situation is worse than at any other time? It is not just worse. What links the two of us and separates us from other people is a kind of reluctance to say that twenty million are being murdered in China but soon there will be no more famines. What we reject is not practice but telling others what to do. Because we are still permitted to live, we are under an obligation to do something. | P