The legacy of 1917 (Platypus 3rd European Conference video and audio recordings)
Audio recording:
What is the legacy of the 1917 Russian Revolution today? A teach-in on problems of Leftist historiography by Chris Cutrone and Richard Rubin at the Platypus 3rd European Conference at the University of Vienna, February 18, 2017.
Chris Cutrone
In 1937, in his article on âStalinism and Bolshevism,â Trotksy wrote that,
âIs it true that Stalinism represents the legitimate product of Bolshevism, as all reactionaries maintain, as Stalin himself avows, as the Mensheviks, the anarchists, and certain left doctrinaires considering themselves Marxist believe? ‘We have always predicted this.’ they say, ‘Having started with the prohibition of other socialist parties, the repression of the anarchists, and the setting up of the Bolshevik dictatorship in the Soviets, the October Revolution could only end in the dictatorship of the bureaucracy. Stalin is the continuation and also the bankruptcy of Leninism.’
âThe flaw in this reasoning begins in the tacit identification of Bolshevism, October Revolution and Soviet Union. The historical process of the struggle of hostile forces is replaced by the evolution of Bolshevism in a vacuum. Bolshevism, however, is only a political tendency closely fused with the working class but not identical with it. . . . To represent the process of degeneration of the Soviet state as the evolution of pure Bolshevism is to ignore social reality in the name of only one of its elements, isolated by pure logic. . . .
âBolshevism, in any case, never identified itself either with the October Revolution or with the Soviet state that issued from it. Bolshevism considered itself as one of the factors of history, its ‘conscious’ factor — a very important but not decisive one. We never sinned on historical subjectivism. We saw the decisive factor â on the existing basis of productive forces — in the class struggle, not only on a national scale but on an international scale.”
In his History of the Russian Revolution (1930), Trotsky argued as follows:
“The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business – kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new rĂ©gime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgement of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny.
“In a society that is seized by revolution classes are in conflict. It is perfectly clear, however, that the changes introduced between the beginning and the end of a revolution in the economic bases of the society and its social substratum of classes, are not sufficient to explain the course of the revolution itself, which can overthrow in a short interval age-old institutions, create new ones, and again overthrow them. The dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.
“The point is that society does not change its institutions as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once for all. For decades the oppositional criticism is nothing more than a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure. Such in principle, for example, was the significance acquired by the social-democratic criticism. Entirely exceptional conditions, independent of the will of persons and parties, are necessary in order to tear off from discontent the fetters of conservatism, and bring the masses to insurrection. The swift changes of mass views and moods in an epoch of revolution thus derive, not from the flexibility and mobility of manâs mind, but just the opposite, from its deep conservatism. The chronic lag of ideas and relations behind new objective conditions, right up to the moment when the latter crash over people in the form of a catastrophe, is what creates in a period of revolution that leaping movement of ideas and passions which seems to the police mind a mere result of the activities of ‘demagogues’.â
In 1924, in The Lessons of October, Trotsky concluded his discussion of the essential historical lessons of the Revolution as follows:
âIn our country, both in 1905 and in 1917, the soviets of workersâ deputies grew out of the movement itself as its natural organizational form at a certain stage of the struggle. But the young European parties, who have more or less accepted soviets as a ‘doctrine’ and ‘principle,’ always run the danger of treating soviets as a fetish, as some self-sufficing factor in a revolution. . . .
âWithout a party, apart from a party, over the head of a party, or with a substitute for a party, the proletarian revolution cannot conquer. That is the principal lesson of the past decade. It is true that the English trade unions may become a mighty lever of the proletarian revolution; they may, for instance, even take the place of workersâ soviets under certain conditions and for a certain period of time. They can fill such a role, however, not apart from a Communist party, and certainly not against the party, but only on the condition that communist influence becomes the decisive influence in the trade unions. We have paid far too dearly for this conclusion — with regard to the role and importance of a party in a proletarian revolution — to renounce it so lightly or even to minimize its significance.
âConsciousness, premeditation, and planning played a far smaller part in bourgeois revolutions than they are destined to play, and already do play, in proletarian revolutions. In the former instance the motive force of the revolution was also furnished by the masses, but the latter were much less organized and much less conscious than at the present time. The leadership remained in the hands of different sections of the bourgeoisie, and the latter had at its disposal wealth, education, and all the organizational advantages connected with them (the cities, the universities, the press, etc.). The bureaucratic monarchy defended itself in a hand-to-mouth manner, probing in the dark and then acting. The bourgeoisie would bide its time to seize a favorable moment when it could profit from the movement of the lower classes, throw its whole social weight into the scale, and so seize the state power. The proletarian revolution is precisely distinguished by the fact that the proletariat — in the person of its vanguard — acts in it not only as the main offensive force but also as the guiding force. The part played in bourgeois revolutions by the economic power of the bourgeoisie, by its education, by its municipalities and universities, is a part which can be filled in a proletarian revolution only by the party of the proletariat.
âMuch has been spoken and written lately on the necessity of ‘Bolshevizing’ the Comintern. This is a task that cannot be disputed or delayed; it is made particularly urgent after the cruel lessons of Bulgaria and Germany a year ago. Bolshevism is not a doctrine (i.e., not merely a doctrine) but a system of revolutionary training for the proletarian uprising. What is the Bolshevization of Communist parties? It is giving them such a training, and effecting such a selection of the leading staff, as would prevent them from drifting when the hour for their October strikes. ‘That is the whole of Hegel, and the wisdom of books, and the meaning of all philosophy’.â
Adorno’s “Leninism” (Platypus 3rd European Conference audio recording)
Platypus 3rd European Conference Vienna opening plenary panel discussion on The Politics of Critical Theory
Chris Cutrone
Presented on a panel with Martin Suchanek (Workers Power, Berlin) and Harizan Zeller, introduced by Stefan Hain and moderated by Jan Schroeder, at the Platypus 3rd European Conference at the University of Vienna, February 17, 2017. [Edited transcript]
THE POLITICAL ORIGINS of Frankfurt School Critical Theory have remained opaque, for several reasons, not least the taciturn character of the major writings of its figures. The motivation for such reticence on the part of these theorists is itself what requires explanation: why they engaged in self-censorship and the encryption of their ideas, and consigned themselves to writing âmessages in a bottleâ without immediate or definite addressee. As Horkheimer put it, the danger was in speaking like an âoracle;â he asked simply, âTo whom shall we say these things?â It was not simply due to American exile in the Nazi era or post-World War II Cold War exigency. Some of their ideas were expressed explicitly enough. Rather, the collapse of the Marxist Left in which the Critical Theoristsâ thought had been formed, in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia and the German Revolution and civil war of 1918â19, deeply affected their perspective on political possibilities in their historical moment. The question is, in what way was this Marxism?
The series of conversations between Horkheimer and Adorno from 1956, at the height of the Cold War, provide insight into their thinking and how they understood their situation in the trajectory of Marxism since the early 20th century. The transcript was published in 2011 in English translation under the title Towards a New Manifesto. The German publication of the transcript, in Horkheimerâs collected works, is under the title âDiscussion about Theory and Praxis,â and their discussion was indeed in consideration of rewriting the Communist Manifesto in light of intervening history. Within a few years of this, Adorno began but abandoned work on a critique of the German Social-Democratic Partyâs Godesberg Programme, which officially renounced Marxism in 1959, on the model of Marxâs celebrated critique of the Gotha Programme that had founded the SPD in 1875. So, especially Adorno, but also Horkheimer, had been deeply concerned with the question of continuing the project of Marxism well after World War II. In the series of conversations between them, Adorno expressed his interest in rewriting the Communist Manifesto along what he called âstrictly Leninistâ lines, to which Horkheimer did not object, but only pointed out that such a document, calling for what he called the âre-establishment of a socialist party,â âcould not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless.â Nonetheless, Horkheimer felt it was necessary to show âwhy one can be a communist and yet despise the Russians.â As Horkheimer put it, simply, âTheory is, as it were, one of humanityâs tools.â Thus, they tasked themselves to try to continue Marxism, if only as âtheory.â
Now, it is precisely the supposed turning away from political practice and retreat into theory that many commentators have characterized as the Frankfurtersâ abandonment of Marxism. For instance, Martin Jay, in The Dialectical Imagination, or Phil Slater, in his book offering a âMarxist interpretationâ of the Frankfurt School, characterized matters in such terms: Marxism could not be supposed to exist as mere theory, but had to be tied to practice. But this was not a problem new to the Frankfurt Institute in exile, that is, after being forced to abandon their work in collaboration with the Soviet Marx-Engels Institute, for example, which was as much due to Stalinism as Nazism. Rather, it pointed back to what Karl Korsch, a foundational figure for the Institute, wrote in 1923: that the crisis of Marxism, that is, the problems that had already manifested in the era of the Second International in the late 19th century (the so-called âRevisionist Disputeâ), and developed and culminated in its collapse and division in World War I and the revolutions that followed, meant that the âumbilical cordâ between theory and practice had been already âbroken.â Marxism stood in need of a transformation, in both theory and practice, but this transformation could only happen as a function of not only practice but also theory. They suffered the same fate. For Korsch in 1923, as well as for Georg LukĂĄcs in this same period, in writings seminal for the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were exemplary of the attempt to rearticulate Marxist theory and practice. Lenin in particular, as LukĂĄcs characterized him, the âtheoretician of practice,â provided a key, indeed the crucial figure, in political action and theoretical self-understanding, of the problem Marxism faced at that historical moment.
As Adorno put it to Horkheimer, âIt could be said that Marx and Hegel taught that there are no ideals in the abstract, but that the ideal always lies in the next step, that the entire thing cannot be grasped directly but only indirectly by means of the next step.â LukĂĄcs had mentioned this about Lenin, in a footnote to his 1923 essay in History and Class Consciousness, âReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,â that,
Leninâs achievement is that he rediscovered this side of Marxism that points the way to an understanding of its practical core. His constantly reiterated warning to seize the ânext linkâ in the chain with all oneâs might, that link on which the fate of the totality depends in that one moment, his dismissal of all utopian demands, i.e. his ârelativismâ and his âRealpolitik:â all these things are nothing less than the practical realisation of the young Marxâs Theses on Feuerbach.
30 years later, Horkheimer and Adornoâs conversation in 1956 took place in the aftermath of the Khrushchev speech denouncing Stalin. This event signaled a possible political opening, not in the Soviet Union so much as for the international Left. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the potential of the Communist Parties in France and Italy, paralleling Marcuseâs estimation in his 1947 â33 Thesesâ:
The development [of history since Marx] has confirmed the correctness of the Leninist conception of the vanguard party as the subject of the revolution. It is true that the communist parties of today are not this subject, but it is just as true that only they can become it. . . . The political task then would consist in reconstructing revolutionary theory within the communist parties and working for the praxis appropriate to it. The task seems impossible today. But perhaps the relative independence from Soviet dictates, which this task demands, is present as a possibility in Western Europeâs . . . communist parties.
Horkheimer and Adornoâs conversation in Towards a New Manifesto was part of a greater crisis of Communism (uprising in Hungary, emergence of the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement, split between the USSR and Communist China) that gave rise to the New Left. Versoâs title was not misleading: this was the time of the founding of New Left Review, to which C. Wright Mills wrote his famous âLetter to the New Leftâ (1960), calling for greater attention to the role of intellectuals in social-political transformation.
As Adorno put the matter, âI have always wanted to . . . develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin.â Horkheimer responded laconically, âWho would not subscribe to that?â It is necessary to understand what such statements took for granted.
The emphasis on Marxism as an account of âexploitation,â rather than of social-historical domination, is mistaken. Marx called âcapitalâ the domination of society by an alienated historical dynamic of value-production (MâCâM’). At stake here is the proletarianization of bourgeois society after the Industrial Revolution, or, as LukĂĄcs put it in History and Class Consciousness (1923), how the fate of the workers becomes that of society as a whole. This went back to Marx and Engels in the 1840s: Engels had written a precursor to the Communist Manifesto, a âCredoâ (1847), in which he pointed out that the proletariat, the working class after the Industrial Revolution, was unlike any other exploited group in history, in both its social being and consciousness. The danger was that the working class would mistake their post-Industrial Revolution condition for that of pre-industrial bourgeois society, with its ethos of work. As the AbbĂ© SieyĂšs had put it, in his 1789 revolutionary pamphlet âWhat is the Third Estate?,â while the Churchâs First Estate with its property of communion with Divinity âprays,â and the aristocratic Second Estate with its property of honor in noble chivalry âfights,â the commoner Third Estate âworks,â with no property other than that of labor. Bourgeois society was the result of the revolt of the Third Estate. But the separate classes of increasing numbers of workers and ever fewer capitalists were the products of the division of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, over the value of the property of labor, between wages and capital. This was, according to Marx, the âcrisisâ of bourgeois society in capital, recurrent since the 1840s.
At issue is the âbourgeois ideologyâ of the âfetish character of the commodity,â or, how the working class misrecognized the reasons for its condition, blaming this on exploitation by the capitalists rather than the historical undermining of the social value of labor. As Marx explained in Capital, the workers exchanged, not the products of their work as with the labor of artisans, but rather their time, the accumulated value of which is capital, the means of production that was the private property of the capitalists. But for Marx the capitalists were the âcharacter-masks of capital,â agents of the greater social imperative to produce and accumulate value, where the source of that value in the exchange of labor-time was being undermined and destroyed. As Horkheimer stated it in âThe Authoritarian Stateâ (1940), the Industrial Revolution made ânot work but the workers superfluous.â The question was, how had history changed since the earlier moment of bourgeois society (Adam Smithâs time of âmanufactureâ) with respect to labor and value?
Adornoâs affirmation of Lenin on subjectivity was driven by his account of the deepening problems of capitalism in the 20th century, in which the historical development of the workersâ movement was bound up. Adorno did not think that the workers were no longer exploited. See Adornoâs 1942 essay âReflections on Class Theoryâ and his 1968 speech âLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?,â which he published in the U.S. under the title âIs Marx Obsolete?â In âReflections on Class Theory,â Adorno pointed out that Marx and Engelsâs assertion that the entire history of civilization was one of âclass strugglesâ was actually a critique of history as a whole; that the dialectic of history in capital was one of unfreedom; and that only the complete dehumanization of labor was potentially its opposite, the liberation from work. âLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?â pointed out that the workers were not paid a share of the economic value of their labor, which Marx had recognized in post-Industrial Revolution capitalism was infinitesimal, but rather their wages were a cut of the profits of capital, granted to them for political reasons, to prevent revolution — a very Leninist idea. The ramifications of this process were those addressed by the split in the socialist workersâ movement — in Marxism itself — that Lenin represented.
The crisis of Marxism was grasped by the Frankfurt School in its formative moment of the 1920s. In âThe Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedomâ (in DĂ€mmerung, 1926â31) Horkheimer explained how the âpresent lack of freedom does not apply equally to all. An element of freedom exists when the product is consonant with the interest of the producer. All those who work, and even those who donât, have a share in the creation of contemporary reality.â This followed LukĂĄcsâs History and Class Consciousness, which prominently quoted Marx and Engels from The Holy Family (1845):
The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognizes alienation as its own instrument and in it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.
The necessary corrective was not the feeling of this oppression, but the theoretical and practical consciousness of the historical potential for the transformation of âbourgeois social relations,â at a global scale: âWorkers of the world, unite!â This could only take place through the growth and greater accumulated historical self-awareness of the workersâ movement for socialism. But the growth of the workersâ movement had resulted in the crisis of socialism, its division into revolutionary Communism and reformist Social Democracy in WWI and the revolutions that followed (in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy). Reformist Social Democracy had succumbed to the âreificationâ of bourgeois ideology in seeking to preserve the workersâ interests, and had become the counterrevolutionary bulwark of continued capitalism in the post-WWI world. There was a civil war in Marxism. The question was the revolutionary necessity and possibility of Communism that Lenin expressed in the October 1917 Revolution that was meant to be the beginning of global revolution. Similarly, for the Frankfurt School, the Stalinism that developed in the wake of failed world revolution, was, contrary to Lenin, the reification of âMarxismâ itself, now become barbarized bourgeois ideology, the affirmation of work, rather than its dialectical Aufhebung (negation and transcendence through fulfillment and completion).
To put it in Leninâs terms, from What is to be Done? (1902), there are two âdialecticallyâ interrelated — potentially contradictory — levels of consciousness, the workersâ âtrade unionâ consciousness, which remains within the horizon of capitalism, and their âclass consciousness,â which reveals the world-historical potential beyond capitalism. The latter, the âHegelianâ critical self-recognition of the workersâ class struggle, was the substance of Marxism: the critique of communism as the âreal movement of history.â As Marx put it in his celebrated 1843 letter to Ruge, âCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction . . . infected by its opposite, private property.â And, in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx stated unequivocally that,
Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.
For Marx, communism demanded an âimmanent critiqueâ according to its âdialecticalâ contradictions, heightened to adequate historical self-awareness.
The issue is the potential abolition of wage-labor by the wage-laborers, the overcoming of the social principle of work by the workers. Marxâs âHegelianâ question was, how had history made this possible, in theory and practice?
While Horkheimer and Adornoâs historical moment was not the same as Marxâs or Leninâs, this does not mean that they abandoned Marxism, but rather that Marxism, in its degeneration, had abandoned them. The experience of Communism in the 1930s was the purge of intellectuals. So the question was the potential continued critical role of theory: how to follow Lenin? In âImaginative Excessesâ (orphaned from Minima Moralia 1944â47 — the same time as the writing of Horkheimer and Adornoâs Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno argued that the workers âno longer mistrust intellectuals because they betray the revolution, but because they might want it, and thereby reveal how great is their own need of intellectuals.â
Adorno and Horkheimer are thus potentially helpful for recovering the true spirit of Marxism. Their work expresses what has become obscure or esoteric about Marxism. This invites a blaming of their work as culpable, instead of recognizing the unfolding of history they described that had made Marxism potentially irrelevant, a âmessage in a bottleâ they hoped could still yet be received. It is unfortunate if their work isnât. | §
Rosa Luxemburg and the party
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review #86 | May 2016
IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST INTERVENTIONS in the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), participating in the notorious theoretical âRevisionist Dispute,â in which Eduard Bernstein infamously stated that âthe movement is everything, the goal nothing,â the 27 year-old Rosa Luxemburg (1871â1919) clearly enunciated her Marxism: âIt is the final goal alone which constitutes the spirit and the content of our socialist struggle, which turns it into a class struggle.â ((Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 38â39; also available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1898/10/04.htm>. ))
Critique of socialism
What did it mean to say that socialist politics was necessary to have âclass struggleâ at all? This goes to the heart of Luxemburgâs own Marxism, and to her most enduring contribution to its history: her Marxist approach to the political party for socialismâa dialectical understanding of class and party, in which Marxism itself was grasped in a critical-dialectical way. When Luxemburg accused Bernstein of being âundialectical,â this is what she meant: That the working classâs struggle for socialism was itself self-contradictory and its political party was the means through which this contradiction was expressed. There was a dialectic of means and ends, or of âmovementâ and âgoal,â in which the dialectic of theory and practice took part: Marxism demanded its own critique. Luxemburg took the controversy of the Revisionist Dispute as an occasion for this critique.
In this, Luxemburg followed the young Karl Marxâs (1818â83) own formative dialectical critiques of socialism when he was in his 20s, from the September 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge calling for the âruthless critique of everything existing,â to the critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), as well as in The German Ideology and its famous Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Marx had written of the socialist movement that:
The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles . . .
[W]e must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, DĂ©zamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesisâthe private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrinesâsuch as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc.âarising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle . . .
Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. . . . We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for . . .
The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.
Such formulations recurred in Marxâs Theses on Feuerbach a couple of years later:
But that the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, in itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionized in practice.
For Marx, this meant that socialism was the expression of the contradiction of capitalism and as such was itself bound up in that contradiction. A proper dialectical relation of socialism with capitalism required a recognition of the dialectic within socialism itself. Marx followed Hegel in regarding contradiction as manifestation of the need for change. The âproletariatââthe working class after the Industrial Revolutionâcontradicted bourgeois society, not from outside but from within. As such, the contradiction of capitalism centered on the proletariat itself. This is because for Marx âcapitalismâ is nothing in itself, but only the crisis of bourgeois society in industrial production and hence its only meaning is the expression of the need for socialism. The very existence of the proletariatâa working class expropriated from its bourgeois property-rights in labor as a commodityâdemanded socialism.
Rosa Luxemburg addresses a Stuttgart crowd in 1907. Here she is flanked by portraits of Karl Marx (right) and Ferdinand Lassalle (left), the founders of the German Socialist movement.
Lassallean party
But had the social-democratic workersâ party been from its outset a force for counterrevolutionâfor preserving capitalismârather than for revolutionary transformation and the achievement of socialism? Its roots in Ferdinand Lassalleâs formulation of its purpose as the âpermanent political campaign of the working classâ evinced a potential contradiction between its Lassalleanism and Marxism. Marxists had not invented the social-democratic workersâ party, but rather joined it as an emergent phenomenon of the late 19th century. The social-democratic workersâ party in Germany, what became the SPD, had, through its fusion of 1875 at Gotha, attained Marxist or ârevolutionaryâ leadership. But this had elicited Marxâs famous Critique of the Gotha Programme, to which Marxâs own followers, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, could only shrug their shoulders at the difficulty of pleasing the âold men in Londonâ (that is, Marx and Engels). The development of the SPD towards its conscious direction beyond mere Lassalleanism was more clearly enunciated in the SPDâs Erfurt Programme of 1891. Nonetheless the ghost of Lassalle seemed to haunt subsequent developments and was still present, according to Engelsâs critique of it, in the âMarxistâ Erfurt Programme itself. (Indeed, one of Rosa Luxemburgâs earliest achievements in her participation in the life of the SPD was to unearth and discover the significance of Engelsâs critique of Bebel, Kautsky, and Bernsteinâs Erfurt Programme.)
Luxemburg, in her critique of the SPD through regarding the party as a manifestation of contradiction, followed Marx and Engels, whose recognition was the means to advance it beyond itself. Lassalle had made the mistake of opposing the political against and derogating the economic action of the workers, rejecting labor unions, which he called merely the âvain efforts of things to behave like human beings.â (( Quoted in Georg LukĂĄcs,âThe Standpoint of the Proletariat,â Part III of âReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariatâ in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 195. Available online at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/hcc07_5.htm>. )) Lassalle thus ontologized the political struggle. For Lassalle, the workers taking political power would be tantamount to the achievement of socialism; whereas for Marx this would be merely a transitional revolutionary âdictatorship of the proletariatâ that would lead to socialism. Engels called it the transition from the âgoverning of menâ to the âadministration of thingsââan eminently dialectical formulation, since humans are both subjects and objects of society.
Lassalleâs political ontology of socialism was complementary to the one-sided âvulgar Marxistâ misapprehensions of the Revisionists who prioritized and indeed ontologized the economic over the political, reducing the social to the economic, and relating the social to the political âmechanicallyâ and âundialecticallyââneglecting the contradiction between them in an âeconomic determinismâ that subordinated politics. Where Lassalle subordinated economics to politics in a âstate socialism,â Marx regarded this rather as a state capitalism. Indeed, despite or rather due to this antinomy, the Lassalleans and the economistic reformists actually converged in their political perspectivesâgiving rise later to 20th century welfare-state capitalism through the governance of social-democratic parties.
Rather than taking one side over the other, Luxemburg, as a Marxist, approached this problem as a real contradiction: an antinomy and dialectic of capitalism itself that manifested in the workersâ own discontents and struggles within it, both economically and politically. For instance, Luxemburg followed Marx in recognizing that the Lassallean goal of the workers achieving a âfree stateâ in political revolution was a self-contradiction: An unfree society gave rise to an unfree state; and it was society that needed to be emancipated from capitalism. But this was a contradiction that could be posed only by the workersâ revolutionary political action and seizing of state powerâif only to âwitherâ it away in the transformation of society beyond capitalism. In this way the Lassallean party was not a mistake but rather a necessary stage manifesting in the history of the workersâ movement. So it needed to be properly recognizedââdialecticallyââin order to avoid its one-sided pitfalls in the opposition of Revisionist, reformist economic evolutionism versus the Lassallean political revolutionism. Kautsky followed Marx in a critical endorsement of Lassalleanism in regarding the dictatorship of the proletariat as the seizing of state power by the workersâ party for socialism. Hence, Luxemburg expressed her sincere âgratitudeâ that the Revisionists had occasioned this critical self-recognition, by posing the question and problem of âmovementâ and âgoal.â
Antinomy of reformism
Luxemburg made her great entrance onto the political stage of her time with the pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution? (1900). In it, Luxemburg laid out how the original contradiction of capitalism, between its chaotic social relations and its socialization of production had been further developed, exacerbated, and deepened by the development of a new contradiction, namely the growth of the workersâ movement in political organization and consciousness: Its movement for socialism was a self-contradictory expression of the contradiction of capitalism. This contrasted with Bernsteinâs view that the growth and development of the workers’ movement was the overcoming of the contradiction of capitalism and the gradual âevolutionâ of socialism. For Bernstein, the movement for socialism was the achievement of socialism, whereas the goal of socialism was a dispensable figment, a useful enabling fiction.
For Luxemburg, however, the contradiction of the industrial forces of production against their bourgeois social relations in capitalism was recapitulated in the contradiction between the means and ends of the workersâ movement for socialism. Socialism was not built up within capitalism; but only the contradiction of capital deepened through workersâ struggle against exploitation. How so? Their demand for a share of the value of production was a bourgeois demand: the demand for the value of their labor as a commodity. However, what was achieved by increases in wages, recognition of collective bargaining rights, legal protections of workers in capitalist labor contracts and the acceptance of responsibility of the state for the conditions of labor, including the acceptance of the right to political association and democratic political participation in the state, was not the overcoming of the problem of capitalâthat is, the overcoming of the great divergence and social contradiction between the value of capital and wages in industrial productionâbut rather its exacerbation and deepening through its broadening onto society as a whole. What the workers received in reforms of capitalism was not the value of their labor-power as a commodity, which was relatively minimized by developments of industrial technique, but rather a cut of the profits of capital, whether directly through collective bargaining with the employers or indirectly through state distribution of social welfare benefits from the tax on capital. What Bernstein described optimistically as the socialization of production through such reforms was actually, according to Luxemburg, the âsocializationâ of the crisis of capitalist production.
The workersâ party for socialism, through its growth and development on a mass scale, thus increasingly took political responsibility for capitalism. Hence, a new contradiction developed that was focused on the party itself. Was its purpose to manage capitalism, or rather, as Luxemburg put it in her 1898 Stuttgart speech, to âplay the role of the banker-lawyer who liquidates a bankrupt companyâ? Luxemburg posed the political task of the socialist party in Reform or Revolution? succinctly: âIt is an illusion, then, to think that the proletariat can create economic power within capitalist society. It can only create political power and then transform [aufheben] capitalist property.â The proletarian socialist party was the means for creating that political power. This differed from the development of bourgeois social relations in feudalism that led to revolution:
What does it mean that the earlier classes, particularly the third estate, conquered economic power before political power? Nothing more than the historical fact that all previous class struggles must be derived from the economic fact that the rising class has at the same time created a new form of property upon which it will base its class domination.
However, according to Luxemburg, âThe assertion that the proletariat, in contrast to all previous class struggles, pursues its battles, not in order to establish class domination, but to abolish all class domination is not a mere phrase.â This is because the proletariat does not develop a new form of âpropertyâ within capitalism, but rather struggles economically, socially and politically, on the basis of âbourgeois propertyââon the basis of the bourgeois social relations of labor, or of labor as a commodity. What the working classâs struggle within capitalism achieves is consciousness of the need to overcome labor as a commodity, or, to transform capital from bourgeois property into social property that is no longer mediated by the exchange of labor. This is what it meant for Marx that the proletariat struggles not to ârealizeâ but to abolish itself, or, how the proletariat goes from being a class âin itselfâ to becoming a class âfor itselfâ (The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847) in its struggle for socialism.
For Luxemburg, the achievement of reforms within capitalism accomplish nothing but the greater practical and theoretical realization, or âconsciousness,â of the need to abolish labor as a commodity, since the latter has been outstripped by industrial production. The further economic, social, and political reforms only dramatically increase this disparity and contradiction between the economic value of labor as a commodity and the social value of capital that must be appropriated by society as a whole.
In other words, the workersâ movement for socialism and its institution as a political party is necessary to make the otherwise chaotic, unconscious, âobjectiveâ phenomenon of the economic contradiction and crisis of wage-labor and capital into a conscious, âsubjectiveâ phenomenon of politics. As Luxemburg wrote later, in The Crisis of German Social Democracy (AKA the âJunius Pamphlet,â 1915):
Socialism is the first popular movement in world history that has set itself the goal of bringing human consciousness, and thereby free will, into play in the social actions of mankind. For this reason, Friedrich Engels designated the final victory of the socialist proletariat a leap of humanity from the animal world into the realm of freedom. This âleapâ is also an iron law of history bound to the thousands of seeds of a prior torment-filled and all-too-slow development. But this can never be realized until the development of complex material conditions strikes the incendiary spark of conscious will in the great masses. The victory of socialism will not descend from heaven. It can only be won by a long chain of violent tests of strength between the old and the new powers. The international proletariat under the leadership of the Social Democrats will thereby learn to try to take its history into its own hands; instead of remaining a will-less football, it will take the tiller of social life and become the pilot to the goal of its own history.
Why âviolent tests of strengthâ? Was this mere ârevolutionaryâ passion, as Bernstein averred? No: As Marx had observed in Das Kapital, in the struggle over the âworking day,â or over the social and legal conventions for the condition of labor-time, workers and capitalists confronted each other, both with âbourgeois rightâ on their side. But, âWhere right meets right, force will decide.â Such contests of force did not decide the issue of right in capitalism, but only channeled it in a political direction. Both capital and wage-labor retained their social rights, but the political arena in which their claims were decided shifted from civil society to the state, posing a crisisâthe need for ârevolution.â
1848: state and revolution
For Luxemburg, the modern state was itself merely the âproduct of the last revolution,â namely the political institutionalization of the condition of class struggle up to that point. The âlast revolutionâ was that of 1848, in which the âsocial questionâ was posed as a crisis of the democratic republic. As such, the state remained both the subject and the object of revolutionary politics. Marx had conflicted with the anarchists in the First International over the issue of the need for âpoliticalâ as well as âsocial actionâ in the working classâs struggle for socialism. The Revisionists such as Bernstein had, to Luxemburgâs mind, reverted to the pre-Marxian socialism of anarchism in abandoning the struggle for political power in favor of merely social action. In this, Luxemburg characterized Bernstein as having regressed (like the anarchists) to mere âliberalism.â What Bernstein like the anarchists denied was what Marx had discovered in the experience of the revolutions of 1848, namely, the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariat,â and hence the necessary political separation of the workersâ âsocial democracyâ from the mere âdemocracyâ of the bourgeois revolution, including the necessary separation from the âpetit bourgeois democratsâ who earned Marxâs most scathing scorn.
While liberals denied the need for such âsocial democracyâ and found political democracy to be sufficient, anarchists separated the social from the political, treating the latter as a fetishized realm of collusion in the bourgeois state and hence capitalism. Anarchists from the first, Proudhon, had avoided the issue of political revolution and the need to take state power; whereas Marxists had recognized that the crisis of capitalism inevitably resulted in political crisis and struggle over the state: If the working class failed to do so, others would step in their place. For Marx, the need for workersâ political revolution to achieve socialism was expressed by the phenomenon of Louis Bonaparteâs election in 1848 and coup dâĂ©tat in 1851, which expressed the inability of the âbourgeoisie to ruleâ any longer through civil society, while the proletariat was as yet politically undeveloped and thus ânot ready to ruleâ the state. But for Marx the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ was that the âworkers must ruleâ politically in order to overcome capitalism economically and socially.
Marx characterized Louis Bonaparteâs politics as both âpetit bourgeoisâ and âlumpenproletarian,â finding support among the broad masses of capitalismâs discontented. But according to Marx their discontents could only reproduce capitalism since they could only at best join the working class or remain dependent on the realization of the value of its labor as a commodity. Hence, there was no possible withdrawal from the crisis of bourgeois politics and the democratic state, as by libertarians and anarchists, but the need to develop political power to overcome capitalism. For the capitalist wage-labor system with its far-reaching effects throughout society to be abolished required the political action of the wage laborers. That the âworkers must ruleâ meant that they needed to provide political leadership to the exploited and oppressed masses. If the organized working class did not, others would provide that leadership, as Bonaparte had done in 1848 and 1851. The means for this was the political party for socialism. As Luxemburg put it in her 1898 Stuttgart speech:
[B]y final goal we must not mean . . . this or that image of the future state, but the prerequisite for any future society, namely the conquest of political power. This conception of our task is closely related to our conception of capitalist society; it is the solid ground which underlies our view that capitalist society is caught in insoluble contradictions which will ultimately necessitate an explosion, a collapse, at which point we will play the role of the banker-lawyer who liquidates a bankrupt company.
The socialist political party was for Luxemburg the means for this necessary achievement of political power. But the party was not itself the solution, but rather the necessary manifestation and concretization of the problem of political power in capitalism and indeed the problem of âsocietyâ itself.
1905: party and class
Luxemburg took the occasion of the 1905 Revolution in Russia to critique the relation of labor unions and the Social-Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in her pamphlet on The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions (1906). This was a continuation of Luxemburgâs criticism of the reformist Revisionist view of the relation of the economic and political struggles of the working class for socialism, which had found its strongest support among the labor union leadership. In bringing to bear the Russian experience in Germany, Luxemburg reversed the usual assumed hierarchy of German experience over Russian âbackwardness.â She also reversed the developmental order of economic and political struggles, the mistaken assumption that the economic must precede the political. The âmassâ or political strike had been associated with social- and political-historical primitiveness, with pre-industrial struggles and pre-Marxian socialism, specifically anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism (especially in the Latin countries), which had prioritized economic and social action over political action. Luxemburg sought to grasp the changed historical significance of the political strike; that it had become, rather, a symptom of advanced, industrial capitalism. In the 1905 Russian Revolution, the workers had taken political action before economic action, and the labor unions had originated out of that political action, rather than the reverse.
The western Russian Empire was rapidly industrialized and showed great social unrest in the 1890sâ1900s. It exhibited the most up-to-date techniques and organization in industrial production: The newest and largest factories in the world at this time were located in Russia. Luxemburg was active in the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in the Russian part of Poland, through her own organization, the Social-Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL). The 1905 Russian Revolution was precipitated by a political and not âeconomicâ crisis: the shaking of the Tsarist state in its losing war with Japan 1904â05. This was not merely a liberal-democratic discontent with the arbitrary rule of the Russian absolutism. For Luxemburg, the Russo-Japanese War was a symptom of capitalism, and so was the resulting crisis of Tsarism in Russia triggered by this war. The political strike was, as she put it, a revolt of âbourgeois Russia,â that is, of the modern industrial capitalists and workers, against Tsarism. What had started out in the united action of the capitalists and workers striking economically against the Tsarist state for liberal-democratic political reasons, unfolded into a class struggle by the workers against the capitalists. This was due to the necessity of reorganizing social provisions during the strike, in which mass-action strike committees took over the functions of the usual operations of capitalism and indeed of the Tsarist state itself. This had necessitated the formation of workersâ own collective-action organizations. Luxemburg showed how the economic organization of the workers had developed out of the political action against Tsarism, and that the basis of this was in the necessities of advanced industrial production. In this way, the workersâ actions had developed, beyond the liberal-democratic or âbourgeoisâ discontents and demands, into the tasks of âproletarian socialism.â Political necessity had led to economic necessity (rather than the reverse, economic necessity leading to political necessity).
For Luxemburg, this meant that the usual assumption in Germany that the political party, the SPD, was âbasedâ on the labor unions, was a profound mistake. The economic and social-cooperative actions of the unions were âbased,â for Luxemburg, on the political task of socialism and its political party. This meant prioritizing the political action of the socialist party as the real basis or substance of the economic and other social action of the working class. It was the political goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat through socialist revolution that gave actual substance to the workersâ economic struggles, which were, for Luxemburg, merely the necessary preparatory âschool of revolution.â
Luxemburg wrote her pamphlet while summering at a retreat with Lenin and other Bolsheviks in Finland. It was informed by her daily conversations with Lenin over many weeks. Lenin had previously written, in What is to be Done? (1902) (a pamphlet commissioned and agreed-upon by the Marxist faction of the RSDLP as a whole, those who later divided into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks), that economism and workerism in Russia had found support in Bernsteinian Revisionism in the SPD and the greater Second International, trying to subordinate the political struggle to economic struggle and thus to separate them. In so doing, they like the Revisionists had identified capitalist development with socialism rather than properly recognizing them as in growing contradiction. Lenin had, like Luxemburg, regarded such workerism and economism as âreformistâ in the sense of separating the workersâ struggles for reform from the goal of socialism that needed to inform such struggles. Luxemburg as well as Lenin called this âliquidationism,â or the dissolving of the goal into the movement, liquidating the need for the political party for socialism. In What is to be Done? Lenin had argued for the formation of a political party for the workersâ struggle for socialism in Russia. He took as polemical opponents those who, like the Revisionists in Germany, had deprioritized the necessity of the political party, thus deprioritizing the politics of the struggle for socialism, limiting it to economic action. (( See also my essay âLeninâs Liberalismâ, Platypus Review 36 (June 2011). Available online at: <http://platypus1917.org/2011/06/01/lenins-liberalism/>. )) The political party had thus redeemed itself in the 1905 Revolution in Russia, showing its necessary role for the workersâ political, social, and economic action, confirming Lenin and Luxemburgâs prior arguments against economism.
Luxemburg regarded the lessons of the 1905 Revolution in Russia to be a challenge to and hence a âcrisisââa potential critical turning pointâof the SPD in Germany. Continuing her prosecution of the Revisionist Dispute, Luxemburg argued for the concrete necessity of the political leadership of the party over the unions that had been demonstrated by the 1905 Revolution in Russia. By contrast, the tension and indeed contradiction between the goal of socialism and the preservation of the institutions of the workersâ movementâspecifically of the labor unionsâ self-interestâwhich might be threatened by the conservative reaction of the state against the political action of the socialist party, showed a conflict between movement and goal. The Revisionists thought that a mass political strike would merely provoke the Right into a coup dâĂ©tat.
Demand for redemption
Walter Benjamin, in his draft theses âOn the Concept of Historyâ (AKA âTheses on the Philosophy of History,â 1940), cited Luxemburg in particular when describing history itself as the âdemand for redemption.â Not only did Luxemburg raise this demand with her famous invocation of Marx and Engels on the crossroads in capitalism of âsocialism or barbarism,â but as a historical figure she herself calls out for such redemption.
The conflict in and about the party on which Luxemburg had focused was horribly revealed later by the outbreak of war in 1914, when a terrible choice seemed posed, between the political necessity to overthrow the Kaiserreich state to prevent or stop the war, and the need to preserve the workersâ economic and social organizations in the unions and the party. The war had been the Kaiserreichâs preemptive coup dâĂ©tat against the SPD. The party capitulated to this in that it facilitated and justified the unionsâ assertion of their self-preservation at the cost of cooperation with the stateâs war. This self-preservationâwhat Luxemburg excoriated as trying to âhide like a rabbit under a bushâ temporarily during the warâmay have been justified if these same organizations had served later to facilitate the political struggle for socialism after the Prussian Empire had been shaken by its loss in the war. But the SPDâs constraining of the workersâ struggles to preserve the state, limiting the German Revolution 1918â19 to a âdemocraticâ one against the threat of âBolshevism,â meant the partyâs suppression of its own membership. Past developments had prepared this. The Revisionistsâ prioritization of the movement and its organizations over the goal of socialism had been confirmed for what Luxemburg and Lenin had always warned against: the adaptation and liquidation of the working classâs struggles into, not a potential springboard for socialism, but rather a bulwark of capitalism; the transformation of the party from a revolutionary into a counterrevolutionary force. As Luxemburg had so eloquently put it in WWI, the SPD had become a âstinking corpseââsomething which had through the stench of decomposition revealed itself to have been dead for a long time alreadyâdead for the purposes of socialism. The party had killed itself through the Devilâs bargain of sacrificing its true political purpose for mere self-preservation.
In so doing, supposedly acting in the interests of the workers, the workersâ true interestsâin socialismâwere betrayed. As Luxemburg put it in the Junius Pamphlet, the failure of the SPD at the critical moment of 1914 had placed the entire history of the preceding â40 yearsâ of the struggles by the workersâsince the founding of the SPD in 1875ââin doubt.â Would this history be liquidated without redemption? This underscored Luxemburgâs warning, decades earlier, against dissolving the goal into the movement that would betray not only the goal but the movement itself. Reformist revisionism devoured itself. The only point of the party was its goal of revolution; without it, it was ânothingââindeed worse than nothing: It became a festering obstacle. The party was for Luxemburg not only or primarily the âsubjectâ but was also and especially the object of revolutionary struggle by the working class to achieve socialism. This is why the revolution that the party had facilitated was for Luxemburg merely the beginning and not the end of the struggle to achieve socialism. The political problem of capitalism was manifest in how the party pointed beyond itself in the revolution. But without the party, that problem could never even manifest let alone point beyond itself.
During the German Revolutionâprovoked by the collapse of the Kaiserreich at the end of WWIâLuxemburg split and founded the new Communist Party of Germany (KPD), joining Lenin in forming the âThirdâ or Communist International, in 1919: to make clear the political tasks that had been manifested and advanced but ultimately abdicated and failed by the social-democratic parties of the Second International in war and revolution. Just as Luxemburg and Lenin had always maintained that the political party for socialism was necessary to advance the contradiction and crisis of capitalism as it had developed from Marxâs time to their own, so it became necessary in crisis to split that party and found a new one. Turning the international war of capitalism into a socialist revolution meant manifesting a civil war within the workersâ movement and indeed within Marxism itself. Whereas her former comrades in the SPD recoiled from her apparent revolutionary fanaticism, and âsavedâ themselves and their party by betraying its goal (but ultimately faded from historical significance), Luxemburg, as a loyal party-member, sacrificed herself for the goal of socialism, redeeming her Marxism and making it profoundly necessary, thus tasking our remembrance and recovery of it today. | §
Notes
What is socialism? International social democracy
Presented on a panel with Bernard Sampson (Communist Party USA), Karl Belin (Pittsburgh Socialist Organizing Committee) and Jack Ross (author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History) at the eighth annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention April 1, 2016 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Published in Weekly Worker 1114 (July 7, 2016). [PDF]
Full panel discussion audio recording:
Communism, socialism, social democracy
Chris Cutrone
I would like to begin by addressing some key terms for our discussion.
Communism is an ancient concept of the community sharing everything in common. It has its roots in religious communes.
Socialism by contrast is a modern concept that focuses on the issue of âsociety,â which is itself a bourgeois concept. Marx sought to relate the two concepts of communism and socialism to capitalism.
Social democracy is a concept that emerged around the 1848 Revolutions which posed what was at the time called the âsocial question,â namely the crisis of society evident in the phenomenon of the modern industrial working classâs conditions. Social democracy aimed for the democratic republic with adequate social content.
Marxism has in various periods of its history used all three concepts — communism, socialism and social democracy — not exactly equivalently interchangeably but rather to refer to and emphasize different aspects of the same political struggle. For instance, Marx and Engels distinguished what they called âproletarian socialismâ from other varieties of socialism such as Christian socialism and Utopian socialism. What distinguished proletarian socialism was two-fold: the specific problem of modern industrial capitalism to be overcome; and the industrial working class as a potential political agent of change.
Moreover, there were differences in the immediate focus for politics, depending on the phase of the struggle. âSocial democracyâ was understood as a means for achieving socialism; and socialism was understood as the first stage of overcoming capitalism on the way to achieving communism. Small propaganda groups such as Marx and Engelsâs original Communist League, for which they wrote the Manifesto, used the term âcommunismâ to emphasize their ultimate goal. Later, the name Socialist Workers Party was used by Marx and Engelsâs followers in Germany to more precisely focus their political project specifically as the working class struggling to achieve socialism.
So where did the term âsocial democracyâ originate, and how was it used by Marxists — by Marx and Engels themselves as well as their immediate disciples?
The concept of the âsocial republicâ originates in the Revolution of 1848 in France, specifically with the socialist Louis Blanc, who coined the expression âfrom each according to his ability, to each according to his needâ to describe the goals of the society to be governed by the democratic republic. Marx considered this to be the form of state in which the class struggle between the workers and capitalists would be fought out to conclusion.
The essential lesson Marx and Engels learned from their experience of the Revolutions of 1848 in France and Germany, as well as more broadly in Austria and Italy, was what Marx, in his 1852 letter to his colleague and publisher Joseph Weydemeyer, called his only âoriginal discovery,â namely the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat,â or, as he had put it in his summing up report on the Revolutions of 1848 in his address to the Central Committee of the Communist League in 1850, the need for âthe revolution in permanence,â which he thought could only be achieved by the working class taking independent political action in the leadership of the democratic revolution.
This was a revision of Marx and Engelsâs position in the earlier Communist Manifesto on the eve of 1848, which was to identify the working classâs struggle for communism with the democratic revolution. They claimed that âcommunists do not form a party of their own, but work within the already existing [small-d!] democratic party.â Now, after the experience of the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Marx asserted the opposite, the necessary separation of the working class from other democratic political currents.
What had happened to effect this profound change in political perspective by Marx and Engels?
Marx had come to characterize the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 in terms of the treacherous and conservative-reactionary role of what he called the âpetit bourgeois democrats,â whom he found to be constitutionally incapable of learning from their political failures and the social reasons for this.
The historical horizon for the petit bourgeois democratic discontents in the social crisis of capitalism was too low to allow the contradiction of capital to come within political range of mere democracy, no matter how radically popular in character. The problem of capitalism was too intractable to the ideology of petit bourgeois democracy. The problem of capitalism exceeded the horizon of the French Revolutionary tradition, even in its most radical exponents such as Gracchus Babeufâs Jacobin âconspiracy of equals.â Such democracy could only try to put back together, in essentially liberal-democratic terms, what had been broken apart and irreparably disintegrated in industrial capitalism.
This was not merely a matter of limitation in so-called âclass interest or position,â but rather the way the problem of capitalism presented itself. It looked like irresponsible government, political hierarchy and economic corruption, rather than what Marx thought it was, the necessary crisis of society and politics in capitalism, the necessary and not accidental divergence of the interests of capital and wage labor in which society was caught. Capital outstripped the capacity for wage labor to appropriate its social value. This was not merely a problem of economics but politically went to the heart of the modern democratic republic itself.
The petit bourgeois attempt to control and make socially responsible the capitalists and to temper the demands of the workers in achieving democratic political unity was hopeless and doomed to fail. But it still appealed nonetheless. And its appeal was not limited to the socioeconomic middle classes, but also and perhaps especially appealed to the working class as well as to âenlightened progressiveâ capitalists.
The egalitarian sense of justice and fraternal solidarity of the working class was rooted in the bourgeois social relations of labor, the exchange of labor as a commodity. But industrial capital went beyond the social mediation of labor and the bourgeois common sense of cooperation. Furthermore, the problem of capital was not reducible to the issue of exploitation, against which the bourgeois spirit rebelled. It also went beyond the social discipline of labor — the sense of duty to work.
For instance, the ideal of worker-owned and operated production is a petit bourgeois democratic fantasy. It neglects that, as Marx observed, the conditions for industrial production are not essentially the workersâ own labor but rather more socially general: production has become the actual property of society. The only question is how this is realized. It can be mediated through the market as well as through the state — the legal terms in which both exchange and production are adjudicated, that is, what counts as individual and collective property: issues of eminent domain, community costs and benefits, etc. Moreover, this is global in character. I expect the foreign government of which I am not a citizen to nonetheless respect my property rights. Bourgeois society already has a global citizenry, but it is through the civil rights of commerce not the political rights of government. But capitalism presents a problem and crisis of such global liberal democracy.
Industrial capitalâs value in production cannot be socially appropriated through the market, and indeed cannot at all any longer be appropriated through the exchange-value of labor. The demand for universal suffrage democracy arose in the industrial era out of the alternative of social appropriation through the political action of the citizenry via the state. But Marx regarded this state action no less than the market as a hopeless attempt to master the social dynamics of capital.
At best, the desired petit bourgeois political unity of society could be achieved on a temporary national basis, as was effected by the cunning of Louis Bonaparte, as the first elected President of Second Republic France in 1848, promising to bring the country together against and above the competing interests of its various social classes and political factions. Later, in 1851 Louis Bonaparte overthrew the Republic and established the Second Empire, avowedly to preserve universal (male) suffrage democracy and thus to safeguard âthe revolution.â He received overwhelming majority assent to his coup dâĂ©tat in the plebiscite referenda he held both at the time of his coup and 10 years later to extend the mandate of the Empire.
Marx and Engels recognized that to succeed in the task of overcoming capitalism in the struggle for proletarian socialism it was necessary for the working class to politically lead the petite bourgeoisie in the democratic revolution. This was the basis of their appropriation of the term âsocial democracyâ to describe their politics in the wake of 1848: the task of achieving what had failed in mere democracy.
The mass political parties of the Second, Socialist International described themselves variously as âsocialistâ and âsocial democratic.â âInternational social democracyâ was the term used to encompass the common politics and shared goal of these parties.
They understood themselves as parties of not merely an international but indeed a cosmopolitan politics. The Second International regarded itself as the beginnings of world government. This is because they regarded capitalism as already exhibiting a form of world government in democracy, what Kant had described in the 18th century, around the time of the American and French Revolutions, as the political task of humanity to achieve a âworld state or system of statesâ in a âleague of nationsâ — the term later adopted for the political system of Pax Americana that U.S. President Woodrow Wilson tried to achieve in the aftermath of World War I. As the liberal chronicler of Napoleon, Benjamin Constant had observed a hundred years before Wilson, in the wake of the French Revolution and its ramifications throughout Europe, the differences between nations were âmore apparent than realâ in the global society of commerce that had emerged in the modern era. But capitalism had wrecked the aspirations of Kant and Constant for global bourgeois society.
The International offered the alternative âWorkers of the world, unite!â to the international strife of capitalist crisis that led to the modern horrors of late colonialism in the 19th century and finally world war in the 20th.
The political controversy that attended the first attempt at world proletarian socialist revolution in the aftermath of the First World War divided the workersâ movement for socialism into reformist Social Democracy and revolutionary Communism and a new Third International. It made social democracy an enemy.
This changed the meaning of social democracy into a gradual evolution of capitalism into socialism, as opposed to the revolutionary political struggle for communism. But what was of greater significance than ârevolutionâ sacrificed in this redefinition was the cosmopolitanism of the socialist workers who had up until then assumed that they had no particular country to which they owed allegiance.
The unfolding traumas of fascism and the Second World War redefined social democracy yet again, lowering it still further to mean the mere welfare state, modelled after the dominant U.S.âs New Deal and the âFour Freedomsâ the anti-fascist Allies adopted as their avowed principles in the war. It made the working class into a partner in production, and thus avoided what Marx considered the inevitable contradiction and crisis of production in capitalism. It turned socialism into a mere matter of distribution.
For the last generation, since the 1960s, this has been further degraded to a defensive posture in the face of neoliberalism which, since the global crisis and downturn of the 1970s, has reasserted the rights of capital.
What has been forgotten today is the essential lesson for Marxism in the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, why petit bourgeois democracy is not only inadequate, but is actually blind to, and indeed an obstacle for, the political task of overcoming capitalism.
In its heyday, Marxism assumed that social democracy had as its active political constituent a working class struggling for socialism. Today, social democracy treats the working class not as a subject as much as an object of government policy and civic philanthropy. Through social democracy as it exists today, the working class merely begs for good politicians and good capitalists. But it does not seek to take responsibility for society into its own hands. Without the struggle for socialism, the immediate goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the working class merely becomes a partner in production at best, and an economic interest group at worst. This is what the liquidation into petit bourgeois democracy means: naturalizing the framework of capital.
International social democracy once meant the means for achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat. Without this as its goal, it has come to mean something entirely different. The working class has deferred to those it once sought to lead.
The âspecter of communismâ that Marx and Engels had thought haunted Europe in the post-Industrial Revolution crisis of capitalism in the 1840s continues to haunt the entire world today, after several repetitions of the cycle of bourgeois society come to grief, but not as a desired dream misconstrued as a feared nightmare, but rather as the evil spirit the doesnât fail to drive politics no matter how democratic into the abyss. And, as in Marxâs time, the alternating âethical indignationâ and âenraptured proclamations of the democratsâ continue to âreboundâ in âall the reactionary attempts to hold backâ the ceaseless crisis of capitalism in which âall that is solid melts into air.â
We still need social democracy, but not as those who preceded Marxism thought, to mitigate capitalism, as was attempted again, after the failure of Marxism to achieve global proletarian socialism in the 20th century, but rather to make the necessity for communism that Marx recognized over 150 years ago a practical political reality. We need to make good on the ârevolution in permanenceâ of capitalism that constantly shakes the bourgeois idyll, and finally leverage the crisis of its self-destruction beyond itself. | §
Adorno’s “Leninism” (Global Adorno conference audio recording)
Global Adorno conference panel: Post-Capitalism, Politics of the Concrete
Chris Cutrone
Presented on a panel with Marcel Stoetzler and Thomas Ogrisegg moderated by Johan Hartle at the Global Adorno conference at the University of Amsterdam, March 22, 2016.
(Cutrone presentation and discussion ~0:36:00 â ~1:06:00)
THE POLITICAL ORIGINS of Frankfurt School Critical Theory have remained opaque, for several reasons, not least the taciturn character of the major writings of its figures. The motivation for such reticence on the part of these theorists is itself what requires explanation: why they engaged in self-censorship and the encryption of their ideas, and consigned themselves to writing âmessages in a bottleâ without immediate or definite addressee. As Horkheimer put it, the danger was in speaking like an âoracle;â he asked simply, âTo whom shall we say these things?â It was not simply due to American exile in the Nazi era or post-World War II Cold War exigency. Some of their ideas were expressed explicitly enough. Rather, the collapse of the Marxist Left in which the Critical Theoristsâ thought had been formed, in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia and the German Revolution and civil war of 1918â19, deeply affected their perspective on political possibilities in their historical moment. The question is, in what way was this Marxism?
The series of conversations between Horkheimer and Adorno from 1956, at the height of the Cold War, provide insight into their thinking and how they understood their situation in the trajectory of Marxism since the early 20th century. The transcript was published in 2011 in English translation under the title Towards a New Manifesto. The German publication of the transcript, in Horkheimerâs collected works, is under the title âDiscussion about Theory and Praxis,â and their discussion was indeed in consideration of rewriting the Communist Manifesto in light of intervening history. Within a few years of this, Adorno began but abandoned work on a critique of the German Social-Democratic Partyâs Godesberg Programme, which officially renounced Marxism in 1959, on the model of Marxâs celebrated critique of the Gotha Programme that had founded the SPD in 1875. So, especially Adorno, but also Horkheimer, had been deeply concerned with the question of continuing the project of Marxism well after World War II. In the series of conversations between them, Adorno expressed his interest in rewriting the Communist Manifesto along what he called âstrictly Leninistâ lines, to which Horkheimer did not object, but only pointed out that such a document, calling for what he called the âre-establishment of a socialist party,â âcould not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless.â Nonetheless, Horkheimer felt it was necessary to show âwhy one can be a communist and yet despise the Russians.â As Horkheimer put it, simply, âTheory is, as it were, one of humanityâs tools.â Thus, they tasked themselves to try to continue Marxism, if only as âtheory.â
Now, it is precisely the supposed turning away from political practice and retreat into theory that many commentators have characterized as the Frankfurtersâ abandonment of Marxism. For instance, Martin Jay, in The Dialectical Imagination, or Phil Slater, in his book offering a âMarxist interpretationâ of the Frankfurt School, characterized matters in such terms: Marxism could not be supposed to exist as mere theory, but had to be tied to practice. But this was not a problem new to the Frankfurt Institute in exile, that is, after being forced to abandon their work in collaboration with the Soviet Marx-Engels Institute, for example, which was as much due to Stalinism as Nazism. Rather, it pointed back to what Karl Korsch, a foundational figure for the Institute, wrote in 1923: that the crisis of Marxism, that is, the problems that had already manifested in the era of the Second International in the late 19th century (the so-called âRevisionist Disputeâ), and developed and culminated in its collapse and division in World War I and the revolutions that followed, meant that the âumbilical cordâ between theory and practice had been already âbroken.â Marxism stood in need of a transformation, in both theory and practice, but this transformation could only happen as a function of not only practice but also theory. They suffered the same fate. For Korsch in 1923, as well as for Georg LukĂĄcs in this same period, in writings seminal for the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg were exemplary of the attempt to rearticulate Marxist theory and practice. Lenin in particular, as LukĂĄcs characterized him, the âtheoretician of practice,â provided a key, indeed the crucial figure, in political action and theoretical self-understanding, of the problem Marxism faced at that historical moment.
As Adorno put it to Horkheimer, âIt could be said that Marx and Hegel taught that there are no ideals in the abstract, but that the ideal always lies in the next step, that the entire thing cannot be grasped directly but only indirectly by means of the next step.â LukĂĄcs had mentioned this about Lenin, in a footnote to his 1923 essay in History and Class Consciousness, âReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,â that,
Leninâs achievement is that he rediscovered this side of Marxism that points the way to an understanding of its practical core. His constantly reiterated warning to seize the ânext linkâ in the chain with all oneâs might, that link on which the fate of the totality depends in that one moment, his dismissal of all utopian demands, i.e. his ârelativismâ and his âRealpolitik:â all these things are nothing less than the practical realisation of the young Marxâs Theses on Feuerbach.
30 years later, Horkheimer and Adornoâs conversation in 1956 took place in the aftermath of the Khrushchev speech denouncing Stalin. This event signaled a possible political opening, not in the Soviet Union so much as for the international Left. Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the potential of the Communist Parties in France and Italy, paralleling Marcuseâs estimation in his 1947 â33 Thesesâ:
The development [of history since Marx] has confirmed the correctness of the Leninist conception of the vanguard party as the subject of the revolution. It is true that the communist parties of today are not this subject, but it is just as true that only they can become it. . . . The political task then would consist in reconstructing revolutionary theory within the communist parties and working for the praxis appropriate to it. The task seems impossible today. But perhaps the relative independence from Soviet dictates, which this task demands, is present as a possibility in Western Europeâs . . . communist parties.
Horkheimer and Adornoâs conversation in Towards a New Manifesto was part of a greater crisis of Communism (uprising in Hungary, emergence of the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement, split between the USSR and Communist China) that gave rise to the New Left. Versoâs title was not misleading: this was the time of the founding of New Left Review, to which C. Wright Mills wrote his famous âLetter to the New Leftâ (1960), calling for greater attention to the role of intellectuals in social-political transformation.
As Adorno put the matter, âI have always wanted to . . . develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin.â Horkheimer responded laconically, âWho would not subscribe to that?â It is necessary to understand what such statements took for granted.
The emphasis on Marxism as an account of âexploitation,â rather than of social-historical domination, is mistaken. Marx called âcapitalâ the domination of society by an alienated historical dynamic of value-production (MâCâM’). At stake here is the proletarianization of bourgeois society after the Industrial Revolution, or, as LukĂĄcs put it in History and Class Consciousness (1923), how the fate of the workers becomes that of society as a whole. This went back to Marx and Engels in the 1840s: Engels had written a precursor to the Communist Manifesto, a âCredoâ (1847), in which he pointed out that the proletariat, the working class after the Industrial Revolution, was unlike any other exploited group in history, in both its social being and consciousness. The danger was that the working class would mistake their post-Industrial Revolution condition for that of pre-industrial bourgeois society, with its ethos of work. As the AbbĂ© SieyĂšs had put it, in his 1789 revolutionary pamphlet âWhat is the Third Estate?,â while the Churchâs First Estate with its property of communion with Divinity âprays,â and the aristocratic Second Estate with its property of honor in noble chivalry âfights,â the commoner Third Estate âworks,â with no property other than that of labor. Bourgeois society was the result of the revolt of the Third Estate. But the separate classes of increasing numbers of workers and ever fewer capitalists were the products of the division of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, over the value of the property of labor, between wages and capital. This was, according to Marx, the âcrisisâ of bourgeois society in capital, recurrent since the 1840s.
At issue is the âbourgeois ideologyâ of the âfetish character of the commodity,â or, how the working class misrecognized the reasons for its condition, blaming this on exploitation by the capitalists rather than the historical undermining of the social value of labor. As Marx explained in Capital, the workers exchanged, not the products of their work as with the labor of artisans, but rather their time, the accumulated value of which is capital, the means of production that was the private property of the capitalists. But for Marx the capitalists were the âcharacter-masks of capital,â agents of the greater social imperative to produce and accumulate value, where the source of that value in the exchange of labor-time was being undermined and destroyed. As Horkheimer stated it in âThe Authoritarian Stateâ (1940), the Industrial Revolution made ânot work but the workers superfluous.â The question was, how had history changed since the earlier moment of bourgeois society (Adam Smithâs time of âmanufactureâ) with respect to labor and value?
Adornoâs affirmation of Lenin on subjectivity was driven by his account of the deepening problems of capitalism in the 20th century, in which the historical development of the workersâ movement was bound up. Adorno did not think that the workers were no longer exploited. See Adornoâs 1942 essay âReflections on Class Theoryâ and his 1968 speech âLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?,â which he published in the U.S. under the title âIs Marx Obsolete?â In âReflections on Class Theory,â Adorno pointed out that Marx and Engelsâs assertion that the entire history of civilization was one of âclass strugglesâ was actually a critique of history as a whole; that the dialectic of history in capital was one of unfreedom; and that only the complete dehumanization of labor was potentially its opposite, the liberation from work. âLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?â pointed out that the workers were not paid a share of the economic value of their labor, which Marx had recognized in post-Industrial Revolution capitalism was infinitesimal, but rather their wages were a cut of the profits of capital, granted to them for political reasons, to prevent revolution — a very Leninist idea. The ramifications of this process were those addressed by the split in the socialist workersâ movement — in Marxism itself — that Lenin represented.
The crisis of Marxism was grasped by the Frankfurt School in its formative moment of the 1920s. In âThe Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedomâ (in DĂ€mmerung, 1926â31) Horkheimer explained how the âpresent lack of freedom does not apply equally to all. An element of freedom exists when the product is consonant with the interest of the producer. All those who work, and even those who donât, have a share in the creation of contemporary reality.â This followed LukĂĄcsâs History and Class Consciousness, which prominently quoted Marx and Engels from The Holy Family (1845):
The property-owning class and the class of the proletariat represent the same human self-alienation. But the former feels at home in this self-alienation and feels itself confirmed by it; it recognizes alienation as its own instrument and in it possesses the semblance of a human existence. The latter feels itself destroyed by this alienation and sees in it its own impotence and the reality of an inhuman existence.
The necessary corrective was not the feeling of this oppression, but the theoretical and practical consciousness of the historical potential for the transformation of âbourgeois social relations,â at a global scale: âWorkers of the world, unite!â This could only take place through the growth and greater accumulated historical self-awareness of the workersâ movement for socialism. But the growth of the workersâ movement had resulted in the crisis of socialism, its division into revolutionary Communism and reformist Social Democracy in WWI and the revolutions that followed (in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy). Reformist Social Democracy had succumbed to the âreificationâ of bourgeois ideology in seeking to preserve the workersâ interests, and had become the counterrevolutionary bulwark of continued capitalism in the post-WWI world. There was a civil war in Marxism. The question was the revolutionary necessity and possibility of Communism that Lenin expressed in the October 1917 Revolution that was meant to be the beginning of global revolution. Similarly, for the Frankfurt School, the Stalinism that developed in the wake of failed world revolution, was, contrary to Lenin, the reification of âMarxismâ itself, now become barbarized bourgeois ideology, the affirmation of work, rather than its dialectical Aufhebung (negation and transcendence through fulfillment and completion).
To put it in Leninâs terms, from What is to be Done? (1902), there are two âdialecticallyâ interrelated — potentially contradictory — levels of consciousness, the workersâ âtrade unionâ consciousness, which remains within the horizon of capitalism, and their âclass consciousness,â which reveals the world-historical potential beyond capitalism. The latter, the âHegelianâ critical self-recognition of the workersâ class struggle, was the substance of Marxism: the critique of communism as the âreal movement of history.â As Marx put it in his celebrated 1843 letter to Ruge, âCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction . . . infected by its opposite, private property.â And, in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx stated unequivocally that,
Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development, the form of human society.
For Marx, communism demanded an âimmanent critiqueâ according to its âdialecticalâ contradictions, heightened to adequate historical self-awareness.
The issue is the potential abolition of wage-labor by the wage-laborers, the overcoming of the social principle of work by the workers. Marxâs âHegelianâ question was, how had history made this possible, in theory and practice?
While Horkheimer and Adornoâs historical moment was not the same as Marxâs or Leninâs, this does not mean that they abandoned Marxism, but rather that Marxism, in its degeneration, had abandoned them. The experience of Communism in the 1930s was the purge of intellectuals. So the question was the potential continued critical role of theory: how to follow Lenin? In âImaginative Excessesâ (orphaned from Minima Moralia 1944â47 — the same time as the writing of Horkheimer and Adornoâs Dialectic of Enlightenment), Adorno argued that the workers âno longer mistrust intellectuals because they betray the revolution, but because they might want it, and thereby reveal how great is their own need of intellectuals.â
Adorno and Horkheimer are thus potentially helpful for recovering the true spirit of Marxism. Their work expresses what has become obscure or esoteric about Marxism. This invites a blaming of their work as culpable, instead of recognizing the unfolding of history they described that had made Marxism potentially irrelevant, a âmessage in a bottleâ they hoped could still yet be received. It is unfortunate if their work isnât. | §
Proletarian dictatorship and state capitalism
The meaning of political party for the Left
Chris Cutrone
Originally published in Weekly Worker 1064 (June 25, 2015). [PDF]
TamĂĄs Krauszâs recent book Reconstructing Lenin (2015) notes the foundational opposition by Lenin to âpetty bourgeois democracyâ – Leninâs hostility towards the Mensheviks was in their opportunistic adaptation to petty bourgeois democracy, their liquidation of Marxism.
The real objects of Leninâs political opposition in proletarian socialism were the Narodniks and their descendants, the Socialist Revolutionaries, who were the majority of socialists in Russia in 1917. The SRs included many avowed âMarxistsâ and indeed supported the âvanguardâ role of the working class in democratic revolution. The split among the SRs over World War I is what made the October revolution in 1917 possible – the alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Left SRs.
Conversely, the collapse of that alliance in 1918, due to the Bolsheviksâ policy of pursuing a peace treaty with Germany at Brest-Litovsk, led to the Russian civil war. The SRs, calling for a âthird Russian revolutionâ, remained the most determined enemies of the Bolsheviks, all the way up through the Kronstadt mutiny of 1921, calling for âsoviets without political partiesâ: ie, without the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks considered them âpetty bourgeois democratsâ and thus âcounterrevolutionariesâ. As Engels had already foretold, opposition to proletarian socialism was posed as âpure democracyâ. It was âdemocracyâ versus the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ.
Hal Draperâs four-volume Marxâs theory of revolution (1977-90) similarly finds Marxâs essential lesson of 1848 in the need to oppose proletarian socialism to petty bourgeois democracy. In the democratic revolution âin permanenceâ the proletariat was to lead the petty bourgeoisie.
What has happened since Marx and Leninâs time, however, has been the opposite: the liquidation of proletarian socialism in petty bourgeois democracy, and the workersâ acceptance of the political lead of the latter – what Trotsky in the 1930s called the âcrisis of revolutionary leadershipâ, the result of the self-liquidation of Marxism by Stalinism in the popular front. Today, the left is characterised by the utter absence of proletarian socialism and the complete domination of politics by what Marxism termed petty bourgeois democracy.
This did not, however, prevent Marx – and Lenin, following him – from endorsing the âbourgeois democratic revolutionâ, which remained necessary not only in apparently holdover feudal-aristocratic states, such as Germany in 1848 or Russia in 1905 and 1917, but also in the US Civil War of 1861-65 and the Paris Commune of 1871. This is because capitalism in the 19th century was a crisis undermining the bourgeois revolution begun in the 16th-17th centuries (in the Dutch Revolt and English Civil War).
The question is, what is the relation between the task of the still ongoing bourgeois democratic revolution, the contradiction of capital and the struggle for socialism? How has Marxism regarded the problem of âpolitical actionâ in modern society?
Programme
Mike Macnairâs four-part series on the âmaximum programmeâ of communism – âThinking the alternativeâ Weekly Worker April 9, 16 and 30 and May 14 2015 – argues for the need âto proletarianise the whole of global societyâ. Macnair means this more in the political than economic sense. So what is the proletariat as a political phenomenon, according to Marxism? Georg LukĂĄcs, following Marx, however, would have regarded the goal of the complete âproletarianisation of societyâ precisely as the âreificationâ of labour: ie, a one-sided opposition and hypostatisation that Macnair articulates as the proletariatâs âdenial of property claimsâ of any kind. But this leaves aside precisely the issue of âcapitalâ in Marxâs sense: the self-contradictory social relation of the workers collectively to the means of production, which for Marxism is not reducible to the individual capitalistsâ property.
âCapitalâ, in Marxâs sense, and the petty proprietorship of shopkeepers, for example, let alone the personal skills of workers (either âmanualâ or âintellectualâ), are very different phenomena. Macnair addresses this issue in the final, fourth part of his series, âSocialism will not require industrialisationâ (Weekly Worker May 14 2015), which clarifies matters as regards his view of wage-labour, but not with respect to capital specifically as the self-contradiction of wage-labour in society. Moreover, there is the issue of how capital has indeed already âproletarianised the whole of global societyâ, not only economically, but also politically. This cuts to the heart of what Marx termed âBonapartismâ.
Macnairâs âmaximum programmeâ, if even realisable at all, would only reproduce capitalism in Marxâs sense. Whereas, for Marx, the proletariat would begin to abolish itself – ie, abolish the social principle of labour – immediately upon the workers taking political power in their struggle for socialism. If not, then petty bourgeois democracy will lead the lumpenproletariat against the workers in Bonapartist politics, typically through nationalism – a pattern seen unrelentingly from 1848, all the way through the 20th century, up to the present. It has taken the various forms of fascism, populism, ethno-cultural (including religious) communalism (eg, fundamentalism), and Stalinist âcommunismâ itself. How have the workers fared in this? They have been progressively politically pulverised and liquidated, up to today.
Marxismâs political allegiance to the working class was strategic, not principled. What Marxism expressed was the socialist intelligentsiaâs recognition of the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ as a means to achieve socialism, not as an abstract utopia, but rather, as Lenin put it, âon the basis of capitalism itselfâ, and thus the necessary ânext stageâ of history.
This is because capitalism produces not only proletarianised workers, but also their opposite: a reserve army of lumpenised unemployed to be used against them – not merely economically, but also politically – as fodder for petty bourgeois demagogy and objects of capitalist technocratic manipulation, but also as enraged masses of capitalismâs discontented. If the working class in revolution would open its ranks to all and thus abolish the lumpenproletariat as well as the petty bourgeoisie through universalising labour, then this would be a civil war measure under socialist leadership, to immediately attack and dismantle the valorisation process of capital, as well as to mobilise the masses against competing petty bourgeois democratic leadership: it will not be as a new, ostensibly emancipatory principle of society. It would be rather what LukĂĄcs dialectically considered the âcompletion of reificationâ that would also lead potentially to its ânegationâ. It would be to raise to the level of conscious politics what has already happened in the domination of society by capital – its âproletarianisationâ – not to ideologically mystify it, as Macnair does in subsuming it under the democratic revolution, regarded as âbourgeoisâ or otherwise.
But this can only ever happen at a global and not local scale, for it must involve a predominant part of the world working class asserting practical governing authority to be effective. This would be what Marxism once called the âproletarian socialist revolutionâ. But it would also be, according to Marx and Lenin, the potential completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution, going beyond it. This ambivalent – âdialecticalâ – conception of the proletarian socialist revolution as the last phase of the bourgeois democratic revolution that points beyond it has bedevilled âMarxistsâ from the beginning, however much Marx was clear about it. Leninâs and Trotskyâs practical political success in October 1917 was in pursuing the necessity Marx had recognised. However, consciousness of that original Marxist intention has been lost.
Democracy
This must be ideologically plausible as âsocialismâ, not only to the workers, but to the others they must lead politically in this struggle. That means that socialism must be as compelling ideologically as the working class is politically organised for the dictatorship of the proletariat – what Marx called âwinning the battle of democracyâ. Note well that this was for Marx the battle of democracy, which he took to be already established, and not the battle âforâ democracy as some yet unattained ideal. For Marx democracy was constitutive of the modern state in bourgeois society and capitalism: hence his statement that the âsecret of every constitution is democracyâ – a notion Marx had in common with bourgeois revolutionary thought going back to Machiavelli, but especially with respect to Locke and Rousseau. âSocialismâ, as the phenomenon of a new need in capitalism, must win the battle of the democratic revolution. The political party for socialism would be the means by which this would take place.
The issue is whether we are closer to or rather further away from the prospect of socialism today, by contrast with a hundred years ago. If socialism seems more remote, then how do we account for this, if – as Macnair, for instance, asserts – we have already achieved socially what Marx demanded in the Critique of the Gotha programme? The return to predominance of what Marx considered Bonapartism through petty bourgeois democracy after the liquidation of proletarian socialism in the early 20th century would seem to raise questions about the âprogressâ of capitalism and of the very social conditions for politics. Have they advanced? It could be equally plausible that conditions have regressed, not only politically, but socially, objectively as well as subjectively, and that there has been a greater divergence of their interrelation by comparison to past historical moments, especially the revolutionary crisis of 1914-19.
The question, then, would be if the necessity of Marxâs âdictatorship of the proletariatâ has been overcome or rather deepened. Redefining the dictatorship of the proletariat, as Macnair, along with many others, has tried to do, will not suffice to address adequately the issues raised by consideration of historical Marxism, specifically how Marxists once regarded the workersâ movement for socialism itself, as well as capitalism, as self-contradictory. And, most pointedly, how Marxism considered capitalism and socialism to be âdialecticallyâ intertwined, inextricably – how they are really two sides of the same historical phenomenon – rather than seeing them as standing in undialectical antithesis.
The task posed by capitalism has been for proletarian socialism to lead petty bourgeois democracy, not adapt to it. The classic question of politics raised by Lenin – âWho-whom?â (that is, who is the subject and who is the object of political action) – remains: the history of the past century demonstrates that, where ostensible Marxists leading proletarian socialist parties have tried to use the petty bourgeois democrats, really the latter have used – and then ruthlessly disposed of – them.
So let us return to Marxâs formulation of the problem and retrace its history – for instance, through the example of the revolutionary history of the US.
Dictatorship
In a letter of March 5 1852, Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer that his only original contribution had been recognising the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ. Bourgeois thought, Marx wrote, had already recognised the existence and the struggle of classes: indeed, the existence and struggle of classes – the struggle of the workers against the capitalists – had been recognised by bourgeois thought in terms of liberalism. Recognition of the class struggle was an achievement of liberal thought and politics. Marx thought that socialists had fallen below the threshold of liberalism in avoiding both the necessity of the separation of classes in capitalism and the necessity of the class struggle resulting from that division of society. Socialists blamed the capitalists rather than recognising that they were not the cause, but the effect, of the self-contradiction of society in capitalism.1 So Marx went beyond both contemporary liberal and socialist thought in his recognition of the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat revealed by capitalism.
Marx wrote this letter in the wake of the coup dâĂ©tat by Louis Bonaparte and his establishment of the Second Empire. It was the culmination of Marxâs writings on the 1848 revolution and its aftermath. Weydemeyer was Marxâs editor and publisher for his book on The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Later, in his writings on the Paris Commune in The civil war in France, Marx summarised the history of Louis Bonaparteâs Second Empire in terms of its being the dialectical inverse of the Commune, and wrote that the Commune demonstrated the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ in action. How so?
Marxâs perspective on post-1848 Bonapartism was a dialectical conception with respect to the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat that Bonapartism expressed. This was why it was so important for Marx to characterise Louis Bonaparteâs success as both âpetty bourgeoisâ and âlumpenproletarianâ, as a phenomenon of the reconstitution of capitalism after its crisis of the 1840s. Bonaparteâs success was actually the failure of politics; and politics for Marx was a matter of the necessity of the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists. Bonapartism was for Marx a âdictatorship of the bourgeoisieâ – not in the sense of the rule of the capitalists, but rather in terms of the political necessity of the state continuing to organise capitalism on a bourgeois basis and the imperative for doing so after the capitalists had lost the ability to lead through civil society. After all, as Marx put it in The 18th Brumaire, in Bonaparteâs coup, âbourgeois fanatics for order [were] shot down on their balconies in the name of … orderâ. It was a âdictatorship of the bourgeoisieâ in the sense that it did for them what they could not.
The crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism ran deep. Marx wrote:
Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an âattempt on societyâ and stigmatised as âsocialismâ (18th Brumaire).
It was in this sense that the Bonapartist police state emerging from this crisis was a travesty of bourgeois society: why Louis Bonaparte was for Marx a âfarcicalâ figure, as opposed to his uncle Napoleon Bonaparteâs âtragedyâ in the course of the Great Revolution. Where Napoleon tried to uphold such bourgeois values, however dictatorially, Louis Bonaparte and others who took their cue from him after 1848 abjured them all. 1848 was a parody of the bourgeois revolution and indeed undid it. The âtragedyâ of 1848 was not of bourgeois society, but of proletarian socialism: Marx described the perplexity of contemporaries, such as Victor Hugo, who considered Bonapartism a monstrous historical accident and, by contrast, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who apologised for it as some expression of historical necessity, even going so far as to flirt with Louis Bonaparte as a potential champion of the working class against the capitalists – a dynamic repeated by Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany with respect to Bismarck, earning Marxâs excoriation. Marx offered a dialectical conception of Bonapartism.
State capitalism
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research director Max Horkheimerâs essay on âThe authoritarian stateâ was inspired by Walter Benjaminâs âTheses on the philosophy of historyâ, which were his draft aphorisms in historiographic introduction to the unwritten Arcades project, concerned with how the history of the 19th century prefigured the 20th: specifically, how the aftermath of 1848 was repeating itself in the 1920s-30s, the aftermath of failed revolution from 1917-19; how 20th century fascism was a repeat and continuation of 19th century Bonapartism. So was Stalinism.
Horkheimer wrote that the authoritarian state could not be disowned by the workersâ movement or indeed separated from the democratic revolution more broadly. It could not be dissociated from Marxâs dictatorship of the proletariat, but could only be understood properly dialectically with respect to it. The authoritarian state was descended from the deep history of the bourgeois revolution, but realised only after 1848: only in the crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism, which made the history of the bourgeois revolution appear in retrospect rather as the history of the authoritarian state. What had happened in the meantime?
In the 20th century, the problem of the Bonapartist or authoritarian state needed to be addressed with further specificity regarding the phenomenon of âstate capitalismâ. What Marx recognised in the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ was the same as that of state capitalism in Bonapartism. Hence, the history of Marxism after Marx is inseparable from the history of state capitalism, in which the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat was inextricably bound up. Marxâs legacy to subsequent Marxism in his critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) was largely ignored.
The question is how the Lassallean Social Democratic Workersâ Party that Marxâs followers joined in Bismarckian Germany was a state capitalist party, and whether and how Marxâs followers recognised that problem: would the workersâ party for socialism lead, despite Marxist leadership, to state capitalism rather than to socialism? Was the political party for socialism just a form of Bonapartism?
This is the problem that has beset the left ever since the crisis of proletarian socialism over a hundred years ago, in World War I and its aftermath. Indeed, Marxism has seemed to be haunted by this historical verdict against it, as state capitalism, and so disqualified forever as a politics for emancipation.
Marxism fell apart into mutual recriminations regarding its historical failure. Anarchists and council communists blamed âLeninismâ; and âLeninistsâ returned the favour, blaming lack of adequate political organisation and leadership for the grief of all spontaneous risings. Meanwhile, liberals and social democrats quietly accepted state capitalism as a fact, an unfortunate and regrettable necessity, to be dispensed with whenever possible. But all these responses were in fact forms of political irresponsibility, because they were all avoidance of a critical fact. Marxâs prognosis of the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ still provoked pangs of conscience and troubling thoughts. What had Marx meant by it?
We should be clear: state capitalism in the underdeveloped world was always a peripheral phenomenon; state capitalism in the core, developed, capitalist countries posed the contradiction of capitalism more acutely, and in a politically sharpened manner. What was the political purpose of state capitalism in post-proletarian society? Rather than in âbackwardâ Russia or China and other countries undergoing a process of industrialising-proletarianising. Socialism was not meant to be a modernising capitalisation project. And yet this is what it has been. How did socialism point beyond capitalism?
Neoliberalism
Organised capitalism relying on the state is a fact. The only question is the politics of it. Lenin, for one, was critically aware of state capitalism, even if he can be accused of having allegedly contributed to it. The question is not whether and how state capitalism contradicts socialism, but how to grasp that contradiction dialectically. A Marxist approach would try to grasp state capitalism, as its Bonapartist state, as a form of suspended revolution; indeed, as a form of suspended âclass struggleâ. The struggle for socialism – or its absence – affects the character of capitalism. Certainly, it affects the politics of it.
A note on neoliberalism. As with anything, the âneoâ is crucially important. It is not the liberalism of the 18th or even the 19th century. It is a form of state capitalism, not an alternative to it. Only, it is a form of politically irresponsible state capitalism. That is why it recalls the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the era of âimperialismâ, of the imperial – Bonapartist – state. However, at that time, there was a growing and developing proletarian movement for socialism, or ârevolutionary social democracyâ, led by Marxists, in nearly all the major capitalist countries. Or so, at least, it seemed.
Historically, Marxism was bound up with the history of state capitalism, specifically as a phenomenon of politics after the crisis of 1873. For this reason, the history of capitalism is impacted by the absence of Marxism 100 years later, today, after the crisis of 1973.2 After 1873, in the era of the second industrial revolution, there was what Marxists once called the âmonopoly capitalismâ of global cartels and financialisation, organized by a world system of states, which Marxists regarded as the âhighest (possible) stage of capitalismâ. It was understood as necessarily bringing forth the workersâ movement for socialism, which seemed borne out in practice: the history from the 1870s to the first decades of the 20th century demonstrated a growth of proletarian socialism alongside growing state capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg pointed out – against social democratic reformists, who affirmed this workersâ movement as already in the process of achieving socialism within capitalism – that âthe proletariat … can only create political power and then transform [aufheben] capitalist propertyâ. That Aufhebung – the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ – would be the beginning, not the âendâ, of the emancipatory transformation of society. As Michael Harrington noted, drawing upon Luxemburg and Marx, âpolitical power is the unique essence of the socialist transformationâ.3 It is this political power that the âleftâ has avoided since the 1960s.
History
In the US, the liberal democratic ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, the idyll of the American Revolution, was shattered by the crack of the slave whip – and by the blast of the rifle shot to stop it. Jefferson had tried to call for abolition of slavery in his 1776 Declaration of Independence, accusing British policy of encouraging slavery in the colonies, but the Continental Congress deleted the passage. Jefferson fought against slavery his entire political life. Towards the end of that life, in a letter of August 7 1825, Jefferson wrote to the abolitionist, womenâs rights activist and utopian socialist, Frances Wright, supporting her founding the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee for the emancipation of slaves through labour:
I do not permit myself to take part in any new enterprises, even for bettering the condition of man, not even in the great one which is the subject of your letter [the abolition of slavery], and which has been throâ life that of my greatest anxieties. The march of events has not been such as to render its completion practicable within the limits of time allotted to me; and I leave its accomplishment as the work of another generation. and I am cheered when I see that on which it is devolved, taking it up with so much good will, and such mind engaged in its encouragement. The abolition of the evil is not impossible: it ought never therefore to be despaired of. Every plan should be adopted, every experiment tried, which may do something towards the ultimate object. That which you propose is well worthy of trial. It has succeeded with certain portions of our white brethren, under the care of a [Christian communist George] Rapp and an [utopian socialist Robert] Owen; and why may it not succeed with the man of colour?4
Jeffersonâs election to president in 1800, through which he established the political supremacy of his new Democratic-Republican Party, was called a ârevolutionâ, and indeed it was. Jefferson defeated the previously dominant federalists. What we now call the Democratic Party, beginning under Andrew Jackson, was a split and something quite different from Jefferson. The Republican Party, whose first elected president in 1860 was Abraham Lincoln, was a revolutionary party, and in fact sought to continue the betrayed revolution of Jeffersonâs Democratic-Republicans. The Republicans came out of the destruction of the Whig party, which produced a revolutionary political crisis leading to the Civil War. They were the party of the last great political revolution in American politics, the Civil War and Reconstruction under Ulysses S (âUnconditional Surrenderâ) Grant that followed. Its failure demonstrated, as the revolutions of 1848 had done in Europe, the limits of political and social revolution in capitalism: it showed the need for socialism.5
The last major crisis of US politics was in the 1960s âNew Leftâ challenge to the ruling Democratic Partyâs New Deal coalition that had been the political response to the 1930s great depression.6 In the 1930s Franklin D Roosevelt had disciplined the capitalists in order to save capitalism, subordinating the working class to his efforts. He thus remade the Democratic Party. Trotsky, for one, considered FDR New Dealism, along with fascism and Stalinism, despite great differences, a form of âBonapartismâ.7 The crisis of the 1960s was essentially the crisis of the Democratic Party, challenged by both the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. The Republicans, first led by Richard Nixon in 1968 then by Ronald Reagan in 1980, were the beneficiaries of that crisis. Both the 1930s and 1960s-70s, however, fell below the standard of Radical Republicanism in the 1860s-70s, which was the most democratic period in US history. It is something less than ironic that the Democrats, considered the âleftâ of the American political party system, have been the most acutely counterrevolutionary of Bonapartist parties. This despite Democratic Party presidential candidate John F Kennedyâs declaration on October 12 1960 that the strife of the 20th century – expressed by the cold war struggles of communism and decolonisation – was an extension of the American Revolution to which the US needed to remain true.8
The history of the state in the modern era is inextricable from the politics of revolution.9 The crisis of the state is always a crisis of political parties; crises of political parties are always crises of the state. The crisis of the state and its politics is a phenomenon of the crisis of capitalism.
The question of left and right is a matter of the degree of facilitation in addressing practically and with consciousness the problem of capitalism, and the problem of capitalism is inextricable from the state.
Regression
Politics today tends to be reduced to issues of policy, of what to do, neglecting the question of who is to do it. But this is depoliticising. Politics is properly about the matter of mobilising and organising people to take action: their very empowerment is at least as important as what they do with it. Marxism never identified itself directly with either the working class or its political action, including workersâ revolution and any potential revolutionary state issuing from this.10 But Marxism advocated the political power of the working class, recognising why the workers must rule society in its crisis of capitalism. Marxism assumed the upward movement of this trend from the 1860s into the early 20th century. But, in the absence of this, other forces take its place, with more or less disastrous results. After 1919 matters have substantially regressed.
Marxism recognised the non-identity of socialism and the working class. âRevolutionary social democracyâ of the late 19th century, in its original formulation by Bebel and Kautsky, followed by Lenin and Luxemburg, was the union of the socialist ideological movement of the revolutionary bourgeois intelligentsia with the workers in their class struggle against the capitalists.11 For Marxism âpoliticsâ is the class struggle. For Marx, the capitalists are only constituted as a class through opposing the working classâs struggle for socialism (see Marxâs 1847 The poverty of philosophy). Otherwise, as Horkheimer recognised, there is no capitalist class as such, but competing rackets. Adam Smith, for instance, had recognised the need for the workers to collectively organise in pursuit of their interests; Smith favoured high wages and low profits to make capitalism work. Marxâs critique of political economy was in recognition of the limits of bourgeois political economy, including and especially that of the working class itself. Marx was no advocate of proletarian political economy, but its critic.
The antagonism of workers against the capitalists is not itself the contradiction of capital. However, it expresses it.12 The goal of socialism is the abolition of political economy, not in terms of the overthrowing of the capitalists by the workers, but the overcoming of and going beyond the principle of labour as value that capital makes possible.13 The question is how the potential for socialism can transcend the politics of capitalism – can emerge out from the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists – that otherwise reconstitutes it.
Rejecting
A political party is necessary to preserve the horizon of proletarian socialism in capitalism over time. Otherwise, the workers will have only consciousness of their interests that reproduces capitalism, however self-contradictorily. A political party is necessary for class struggle to take place at all. According to Marx, the democratic republic is the condition under which the class struggle in capitalism will be fought out to completion; and the only possibility for the democratic republic in capitalism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, or a revolutionary workersâ state.
Such a revolutionary politics would be concerned not with the whether, but only the how, of socialism. It will be marked by great social strife and political struggle, with competing socialist parties. Its purpose will be to make manifestly political the civil war of capitalism that occurs nonetheless anyway. We are very far from such a politics today.
The notion of politics apart from the state, and of politics apart from parties is a bourgeois fantasy – precisely a bourgeois fantasy of liberal democracy that capitalism has thrown into crisis and rendered obsolete and so impossible. Capitalism presents a new political necessity, as Marx and his best followers once recognised. Anarchism is truly âliberalism in hystericsâ in denying the necessity of politics, in denying the need for political party. Neo-anarchism today is the natural corollary to neoliberalism.
In the absence of a true left, politics and the state – capitalism – will be led by others. In the absence of meeting the political necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we will have more or less, hard or soft, and more or less irresponsible capitalist state dictatorship. We will have political irresponsibility.
To abandon the task of political party is to abandon the state, and to abandon the state is to abandon the revolution. It is to abandon the political necessity of socialism, whose task capitalism presents. It is to abandon politics altogether, and leave the field to pseudo-politics, to political irresponsibility. The âleftâ has done this for more than a generation, at least since the 1960s. What would it mean to do otherwise? | §
Notes
- See my âClass-consciousness (from a Marxist perspective) todayâ Platypus Review No51, November 2012.
- See my â1873-1973, the century of Marxism: the death of Marxism and the emergence of neoliberalism and neo-anarchismâ Platypus Review No47, June 2012.
- âMarxism and democracyâ Praxis International 1:1, April 1981.
- http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-chron-1820-1825-08-07-3.
- Lincolnâs Gettysburg address declared the goal of the Union in the US Civil War to be a ânew birth of freedomâ. But its declaration that it was fought so that âgovernment of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earthâ expressed the sobering consciousness that, by contrast with the European states after the failures of the revolutions of 1848, the US was the last remaining major democratic-republican state in the world.
- See my âWhen was the crisis of capitalism? Moishe Postone and the legacy of the 1960s New Leftâ Platypus Review No70, October 2014.
- See The death agony of capitalism and the tasks of the Fourth International aka Transitional programme for socialist revolution (1938).
- Kennedy was speaking at the Hotel Theresa in New York: âI am delighted to come and visit. Behind the fact of Castro coming to this hotel, Khrushchev coming to Castro, there is another great traveller in the world, and that is the travel of a world revolution, a world in turmoil. I am delighted to come to Harlem and I think the whole world should come here and the whole world should recognise that we all live right next to each other, whether here in Harlem or on the other side of the globe. We should be glad they came to the United States. We should not fear the 20th century, for this worldwide revolution which we see all around us is part of the original American Revolution.â Fuller excerpts from Kennedyâs speech can be found at www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25785.
- See âRevolutionary politics and thoughtâ Platypus Review No69, September 2014.
- See L Trotsky, âStalinism and Bolshevismâ (1937).
- See VI Lenin What is to be done? Burning questions of our movement (1902), and One step forward, two steps back: the crisis in our party (1904), where, respectively, Lenin argues for the non-identity of socialist and trade union consciousness, and defines revolutionary social democracy as Jacobinism tied to the workersâ movement.
- See my âDemocratic revolution and the contradiction of capitalâ Weekly Worker October 16 2014; and my follow-up letters in debate with Macnair (November 20 2014, January 8, January 22 and April 16 2015).
- See my âWhy still read LukĂĄcs? The place of âphilosophicalâ questions in Marxismâ Platypus Review No63, February 2014; abridged in Weekly Worker January 23 2014.
Future class
Chris Cutrone
Mike Macnair accuses me of “Toryism” (“Magna Carta and long history,” Weekly Worker 1051, March 26, 2015), to which my natural response would be to accuse him of “Whiggism” and progressivist history. Macnair’s recent article (“Thinking the alternative,” Weekly Worker 1053, April 9, 2015) helps dispatch that potential charge, however, in favour of a new issue: the politics of ‘class’ beyond the socialist revolution.
Still, the problem of Bernsteinian evolutionism versus Marxist revolutionism remains – which is not that the goal is literally nil, but rather the gradualist belief that socialism is nothing apart from the struggle for it and as a goal is thus absorbed into the movement itself. By contrast, Marxists, such as Luxemburg, Lenin and Trotsky, recognised a dialectic of means and ends, practice and theory, movement and goal: the struggle for socialism took place within the contradiction of capital, and the revolution was a necessary expression of that contradiction to be worked through.
The problem with Bernstein as well as Kautsky is the endless deferral of the political revolution for socialism at the expense of its actuality. It should not take us centuries to get out of capitalism. Neither the storming of the Bastille nor the Tennis Court Oath nor the Continental Congressâs Declaration of Independence were the realisation of Machiavelliâs vision of politics or a confirmation of Hobbes on the state. On the other hand, they consolidated bourgeois society politically in ways that the political revolution for socialism will only inaugurate the struggle for its potential achievement.
Macnair thinks that an adequate socialist politics needs to offer a better collectivism than Islamism or Christian fundamentalism, etc, which is conservative-reactionary, but I think that socialism needs to offer a better individualism (as well as a better collectivism) than capitalism, which is progressive-emancipatory. But the progressive-emancipatory character of capitalism is expressed in bourgeois-revolutionary terms, not that of capital: âcapitalâ is a critical term.
Islamic State is not a misguided freedom movement, but revels in unfreedom. So does neoliberalism, which must be distinguished from classical bourgeois thought, as bourgeois emancipation must be distinguished from capitalism. Neoliberalism does not posit religious fundamentalism or the police state as external and internal other: these are expressions of the failure of society in capitalism, not the success of the capitalist politics. Liberal democracy has failed, and for a long time now: the only question is, why?
The Abbé SieyÚs was inspired both conceptually and politically not by the Christian Bible, but by Locke and Rousseau. The French Revolution was not a peasant jacquerie, but a bourgeois revolution, expressed through urban plebeian revolt. Communists historically are not on the side of the peasants against the clergy and nobility, but with the burghers against all of the above. The question is what happens in the industrial revolution when the labouring classes against the ruling castes become the working class against the capitalists, which is a new and different social contradiction, the self-contradiction of bourgeois society: wage-labour against capital.
The âdictatorship of the proletariatâ in Marxismâs original sense was meant to be global: if not absolutely every single territory of the earth, then at least in very short order all the advanced capitalist countries, and so a form of political rule of global import.
Comrade Macnairâs attribution of class to productive technique is mistaken. This causes him to reconceive the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat in terms of egalitarianism against the basis of middle classes in the development of high productive technique. Lenin, by contrast, followed Marx and described the problem not in such sociological terms, but in the historical social relations of âbourgeois rightâ, which came into self-contradiction in capitalism.
Macnair mistakes capital for social surplus: that, so long as advanced technique allows the opportunity for accumulation of social surplus through knowledge of specialist technicians, it will be necessary to suppress them. But capital is not like the surplus of grain in peasant agriculture, on which the aristocracy and church depended. According to Bukharinâs ABC of communism, capital is not a thing, but a social relation. And it is one not of the exploitation of workers by capitalists, but of the domination of society by the valorisation process of capital. This is a change and crisis of both individuality and collectivity in society. Marx distinguished between the phases of bourgeois society in cooperation, manufacture and industry for just this reason. Industry was a crisis for bourgeois society, not due to technology itself, but its role.
According to Moishe Postoneâs interpretation of Marxâs critique of capital, after the industrial revolution the issue is the accumulation not of goods, but time – or a matter of the power to command not the value of work, but time in society – not by proprietor capitalists as either entrepreneurs making a killing through competition or as capital-rentiers living off interest, but rather by capital in its âvalorisation processâ. Liberalism is inadequate to just this problem. Furthermore, capital dominates – constrains and distorts – not only living, but also dead, labour.
So credit is an entirely different matter in capitalism than previously. Interest expresses not usury, but the imperative to increase productivity in time, and not for the purpose of profit, but rather to preserve the social value of capital from the depreciation of the value of labour-power in production in the changing organic composition of capital.
Overcoming capitalism will not mean a continuation of wage-labour, but its abolition. The compulsion to wage-labour is not the exploitation of workers by capitalists, but rather the need to valorise capital in society – at least according to Marx. Macnair finds labour subsisting.
The point is that the social value of capital is for Marx the (distorted expression of) âgeneral social intellectâ and the (self-contradictory) social relations of this, which is no longer, after the industrial revolution, adequately mediated by the value of the exchange and circulation of labour-power as a commodity. Capital is not a thing; it is not the means of production, but a social relation of the working class to the means of production through the self-alienation of their wage-labour in capital, which is not the same as capitalist private property ownership of the means of production, but rather the role of the means of production as âgeneral social intellectâ in the valorisation process of capital. Capital is a social relation not of the capitalists to the means of production through their private property, but of the working class through their wage-labour.
So the dictatorship of the proletariat will mean making the social value of both capital and labour (human activity as a social resource) into an explicitly political rather than chaotic (and politically irresponsible) âeconomicâ matter. Marx thought that this was already placed on the agenda by the demand for the âsocial republicâ in the mid-19th century.
This is a very different issue from that of the social surplus commanded by the ruling castes in feudalism that Macnair thinks produced âdirectlyâ capitalism rather than a bourgeois society of free exchange. The accumulation of capital is not the same as the political command of social resources (as in feudalism). And it is not a matter of individual countries, but rather of the global system of production.
When Luxemburg wrote that the proletariat could not build its economic power in capitalism as the bourgeoisie did in feudalism, she did not mean to distinguish between economics and politics, but rather to foreground the issue of society.
This will not mean a levelling down to protect equality, enforced by the working class in a protracted dictatorship of the proletariat, but the separation of human activity from the social value of production, which will become an immediate political issue, as it is indeed already in capitalism, however obscurely. That will be decided by a free (âdemocraticâ) association of the producers, whose status as producers will not be literally through their labour, but rather as subjects of humanity, as the inheritor of the accumulated history of technique, no longer mediated as a function of time in capital. The relation between society and time will be changed.
Technique will not be the province of specialised technicians potentially become capitalists, but rather the collective property of society, and on a global scale – as it already is under capitalism, but in alienated form: in the form of âcapitalâ.
For Luxemburg as well as Lenin this meant that, for instance, the already developed system of banking and credit provided the coordinating technique for socialist planning. But it will require a political revolution and a continued politics of socialism – subject to dispute – after the revolution to achieve this. Politics will survive the dictatorship of the proletariat into socialism.
That is what it will mean, as Lenin put it, to achieve socialism âon the basis of capitalism itselfâ. | §
What is political party for the Left?
Presented on a panel with Mike Macnair (Communist Party of Great Britain), Adolph Reed, and Tom Riley (International Bolshevik Tendency) at the seventh annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention April 11, 2015 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Full panel discussion audio recording:
Marx, the dictatorship of the proletariat and state capitalism
Chris Cutrone
In a letter of March 5, 1852, Marx wrote to Joseph Weydemeyer that his only original contribution had been recognizing the necessity of the âdictatorship of the proletariat.â Bourgeois thought, Marx wrote, had already recognized the existence and the struggle of classes: indeed, the existence and struggle of classes — the struggle of the workers against the capitalists — had been recognized by bourgeois thought in terms of liberalism. Recognition of the class struggle was an achievement of liberal thought and politics. Marx thought that socialists had fallen below the threshold of liberalism in avoiding the necessity of both the separation of classes in capitalism and the necessity of the class struggle resulting from that division of society. Socialists blamed the capitalists rather than recognizing that they were not the cause but the effect of the self-contradiction of society in capitalism. So Marx went beyond both contemporary liberal and socialist thought in his recognition of the historical necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat revealed by capitalism.
Marx wrote this letter is the wake of the coup dâĂ©tat by Louis Bonaparte and his establishment of the Second Empire. It was the culmination of Marxâs writings on the 1848 revolution and its aftermath. Weydemeyer was Marxâs editor and publisher for his book on The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
Later, in his writings on the Paris Commune in The Civil War in France, Marx summarized the history of Louis Bonaparteâs Second Empire in terms of its being the dialectical inverse of the Commune, and wrote that the Commune demonstrated the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ in action. How so?
Marxâs perspective on post-1848 Bonapartism was a dialectical conception with respect to the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat that Bonapartism expressed. This was why it was so important for Marx to characterize Louis Bonaparteâs success as both âpetit bourgeoisâ and âlumpen-proletarian,â as a phenomenon of the reconstitution of capitalism after its crisis of the 1840s. Bonaparteâs success was actually the failure of politics; and politics for Marx was a matter of the necessity of the class struggle of the workers against the capitalists. Bonapartism was for Marx a âdictatorship of the bourgeoisieâ but not in the sense of the rule of the capitalists, but rather in terms of the political necessity of the state continuing to organize capitalism on a bourgeois basis and the imperative for doing so after the capitalists had lost the ability to lead through civil society. After all, as Marx put it in The 18th Brumaire, in Bonaparteâs coup, âbourgeois fanatics for order [were] shot down on their balconies in the name of . . . order.â It was a âdictatorship of the bourgeoisieâ in the sense that it did for them what they could not.
The crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism ran deep. Marx wrote that,
âEvery demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most insipid democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an âattempt on societyâ and stigmatised as âsocialismâ.â (18th Brumaire)
It was in this sense that the Bonapartist police state emerging from this crisis was a travesty of bourgeois society: why Louis Bonaparte was for Marx a âfarcicalâ figure, as opposed to his uncle Napoleon Bonaparteâs âtragedyâ in the course of the Great Revolution. Where Napoleon tried to uphold such bourgeois values, Louis Bonaparte and others who took their cue from him abjured them all. 1848 was a parody of the bourgeois revolution and indeed undid it. The âtragedyâ of 1848 was not of bourgeois society but of proletarian socialism: Marx described the perplexity of contemporaries such as Victor Hugo who considered Bonapartism a monstrous historical accident and, by contrast, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who apologized for it as some expression of historical necessity, even going so as to flirt with Louis Bonaparte as a potential champion of the working class against the capitalists, a dynamic repeated by Ferdinand Lassalle in Germany with respect to Bismarck, earning Marxâs excoriation. Marx offered a dialectical conception of Bonapartism.
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research director Max Horkheimerâs essay on âThe Authoritarian Stateâ was inspired by Walter Benjaminâs âTheses on the Philosophy of History,â which were his draft aphorisms in historiographic introduction to the unwritten Arcades Project, concerned with how the history of the 19th century prefigured the 20th: specifically, how the aftermath of 1848 was repeating itself in the 1920sâ30s, the aftermath of failed revolution from 1917â19; how 20th century fascism was a repeat and continuation of 19th century Bonapartism. So was Stalinism. Horkheimer wrote that the authoritarian state could not be disowned by the workersâ movement or indeed separated from the democratic revolution more broadly. It could not be dissociated from Marxâs dictatorship of the proletariat, but could only be understood properly dialectically with respect to it. The authoritarian state was descended from the deep history of the bourgeois revolution but realized only after 1848: only in the crisis of bourgeois society in capitalism, which made the history of the bourgeois revolution appear in retrospect rather as the history of the authoritarian state. What had happened in the meantime?
In the 20th century, the problem of the Bonapartist or authoritarian state needed to be addressed with further specificity regarding the phenomenon of âstate capitalism.â What Marx recognized in the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ was the same as that of state capitalism in Bonapartism. Hence, the history of Marxism after Marx is inseparable from the history of state capitalism, in which the issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat was inextricably bound up. Marxâs legacy to subsequent Marxism in his critique of the Gotha Programme (1875) was largely ignored.
The question is how the Lassallean social-democratic workersâ party that Marxâs followers joined in Bismarckian Germany was a state capitalist party, and whether and how Marxâs followers recognized that problem: Would the workersâ party for socialism lead, despite Marxist leadership, to state capitalism rather than to socialism? Was the political party for socialism just a form of Bonapartism?
This is the problem that has beset the Left ever since the crisis of proletarian socialism over a hundred years ago, in WWI and its aftermath. Indeed, socialism has seemed to be haunted by this historical verdict against it, as state capitalism, and so disqualified forever as a politics for emancipation.
Marxism fell apart into mutual recriminations regarding its historical failure. Anarchists and council-communists blamed âLeninism;â and âLeninistsâ returned the favor, blaming lack of adequate political organization and leadership for the grief of all spontaneous risings. Meanwhile, liberals and social democrats quietly accepted state capitalism as a fact, an unfortunate and regrettable necessity to be dispensed with whenever possible. But all these responses were in fact forms of political irresponsibility, because they were all avoidance of a critical fact: Marxâs prognosis of the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ still provoked pangs of conscience and troubling thoughts: What had Marx meant by it?
We should be clear: State capitalism in the underdeveloped world was always a peripheral phenomenon; state capitalism in the core, developed capitalist countries posed the contradiction of capitalism more acutely, and in a politically sharpened manner: What was the political purpose of state capitalism in post-proletarian society, rather than in âbackwardâ Russia or China and other countries undergoing a process of industrializing-proletarianizing? How did socialism point beyond capitalism?
Organized capitalism relying on the state is a fact. The only question is the politics of it. Lenin, for one, was critically aware of state capitalism, even if he can be accused of having contributed to it. The question is not whether and how state capitalism contradicts socialism, but how to grasp that contradiction dialectically. A Marxist approach would try to grasp state capitalism, as its Bonapartist state, as a form of suspended revolution; indeed, as a form of suspended âclass struggle.â The struggle for socialism — or its absence — affects the character of capitalism. Certainly, it affects the politics of it.
A note on neoliberalism. As with anything, the âneo-â is crucially important. It is not the liberalism of the 18th or even the 19th century. It is a form of state capitalism, not an alternative to it. Only, it is a form of politically irresponsible state capitalism. That is why it recalls the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the era of âimperialism,â of the imperial — Bonapartist — state. However, at that time, there was a growing and developing proletarian movement for socialism, or ârevolutionary social democracy,â led by Marxists, in nearly all the major capitalist countries. Or so, at least, it seemed.
Historical Marxism was bound up with the history of state capitalism, specifically as a phenomenon of politics after the crisis of 1873 — for this reason, the history of capitalism is impacted by the absence of Marxism 100 years later, after the crisis of 19-73. After 1873, in the era of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, there was what Marxists once called the âmonopoly capitalismâ of global cartels and financialization, organized by a world system of states, which Marxists regarded as the âhighest (possible) stage of capitalism.â It was understood as necessarily bringing forth the workersâ movement for socialism, which seemed borne out in practice: the history from the 1870s to the first decades of the 20th century demonstrated a growth of proletarian socialism alongside growing state capitalism.
Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, against social-democratic reformists who affirmed this workersâ movement as already in the process of achieving socialism within capitalism, that, â[T]he proletariat . . . can only create political power and then transform (aufheben) capitalist property.â That Aufhebung — the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ — would be the beginning not the âendâ of the emancipatory transformation of society. As Michael Harrington noted, drawing upon Luxemburg and Marx, âpolitical power is the unique essence of the socialist transformationâ (âMarxism and democracy,â Praxis International 1:1, April 1981). It is this political power that the âLeftâ has avoided since the 1960s.
In this country (the U.S.), the liberal democratic ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, the idyll of the American Revolution, was shattered by the crack of the slave-whip — and by the blast of the rifle shot to stop it. Jeffersonâs election in 1800, through which he established the political domination of his Democratic-Republican Party, was called a ârevolution,â and indeed it was. It defeated the previously dominant Federalists. What we now call the Democratic Party, beginning under Andrew Jackson, was a split and something quite different from Jefferson. The Republican Party, whose first elected President in 1860 was Abraham Lincoln, was a revolutionary party, and in fact sought to continue the betrayed revolution of Jeffersonâs Democratic-Republicans. It was the party of the last great political revolution in American politics, the Civil War and the Reconstruction under Ulysses S. âUnconditional Surrenderâ Grant that followed. Its failures demonstrated, as the revolutions of 1848 had done in Europe, the limits of political and social revolution in capitalism: it showed the need for socialism. The last major crisis of U.S. politics was in the 1960s âNew Leftâ challenge to the ruling Democratic Partyâs New Deal Coalition that had been the political response to the 1930s Great Depression. But both fell below the standard of Radical Republicanism. It is something less than ironic that the Democrats have been the most acutely counterrevolutionary of Bonapartist parties. This despite John F. Kennedyâs declaration in 1960 that the strife the 20th century — expressed by the Cold War struggles of Communism and decolonization — was an extension of the American Revolution to which the U.S. needed to remain true.
The history of the state in the modern era is inextricable from the politics of revolution. The crisis of the state is always a crisis of political parties; crises of political parties are always crises of the state. The crisis of the state and its politics is a phenomenon of the crisis of capitalism.
The question of Left and Right is a matter of the degree of facilitation in addressing practically and consciously the problem of capitalism, and the problem of capitalism is inextricable from the state.
The notion of politics apart from the state, and of politics apart from parties is a bourgeois fantasy — precisely a bourgeois fantasy of liberal democracy that capitalism has thrown into crisis and rendered obsolete and so impossible. Capitalism presents a new political necessity, as Marx and his best followers once recognized. — Anarchism is truly âliberalism in hystericsâ in denying the necessity of politics, in denying the need for political party.
In the absence of a Left, politics and the state — capitalism — will be led by others. In the absence of meeting the political necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we will have more or less, hard or soft, and more or less irresponsible capitalist state dictatorship. We will have political irresponsibility.
To abandon the task of political party is to abandon the state, and to abandon the state is to abandon the revolution. It is to abandon the political necessity of socialism whose task capitalism presents. It is to abandon politics at all, and leave the field to pseudo-politics, to political irresponsibility. The âLeftâ has done this for more than a generation. What would it mean to do otherwise? | §
Review of Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis (2014)
Review of Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, LukĂĄcs and the Frankfurt School (London and New York: Verso, 2014)
Chris Cutrone
Originally published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (February 14, 2015). Re-published by Heathwood Institute (September 7, 2015).
âThe mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.â
— Walter Benjamin, âTo the planetarium,â One-way Street (1928)
Originally published in Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (February 14, 2015). Re-published by Heathwood Institute (September 7, 2015).
âThe mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.â
— Walter Benjamin, âTo the planetarium,â One-way Street (1928)
Andrew Feenbergâs new book The Philosophy of Praxis is a substantial revision of a much earlier work, LukĂĄcs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory (1981). If one were to sum up Feenbergâs main point it would be to recover Marxist Critical Theoryâs ability to recognize technology as a social relation, and to thus grasp the crisis of capitalism expressed through the crisis of technology. Feenberg arrives at this recognition of Marxism through an investigation of critical theory as the self-reflection of social and political practice, âpraxis,â with its roots in the origins of social theory in Rousseau and the German Idealism of Kant and Hegel that had followed upon Rousseauâs breakthrough. The sources of Critical Theory are thus critical theoryâs origins in the critique of society. Society, indeed, is a modern invention, in that only modern society recognizes social relations as such, as part of the emancipation of those social relations. The new, modern concept of freedom beginning with Rousseau — Hegel had written that âthe principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infiniteâ (The Philosophy of Right) — originated in the revolution of bourgeois society: a new consciousness of social relations came with the experience of their radical transformation. As Adorno, one of the subjects of Feenbergâs book, put it pithily, âSociety is a concept of the Third Estateâ (âSociety,â 1966).
Technology as a social phenomenon, specifically as a phenomenon of social relations, or, technology as a social relation, is Feenbergâs way into political questions of capitalism. His new title for the revised book takes its name from Gramsciâs term for and description of Marxism (in The Prison Notebooks), the âphilosophy of praxis,â which Gramsci took over from Croceâs Neo-Hegelian concept of self-reflective practice. The question for politics, then, is the degree of social reflexivity in the recognition of technology. In this, Feenberg follows from Marcuseâs writings from the 1960s, which were concerned with the post-WWII worldâs exhibiting what Horkheimer and Adorno had earlier called the âveil of technology,â or, âtechnology as ideology.â There was a deliberate attempt to overcome the prevailing Heideggerian critique of technology, in which humans became victims of the tools they had fashioned. As Heidegger succinctly phrased it in a barb directed against Marxism, âThe laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingnessâ (âOvercoming Metaphysics,â 1936â46). Feenberg asks, what would it mean to overcome this reification of technology? And, what would it mean to overcome the political pessimism that the problem of technology seems to pose in capitalism?
The âphilosophy of praxis,â then, is Feenbergâs attempt to recognize technology as self-alienated social practice, or to use LukĂĄcsâs term, âreifiedâ action that engenders political irresponsibility, the false naturalization or hypostatization of activity that could be changed. Feenberg traces this problem back to the origins of social theory in Rousseauâs critique of civilization, the inherently ambivalent character of social âprogressâ in history. Feenberg locates in Rousseau what he calls the origins of the âdeontologicalâ approach to society: a new conception of freedom which is not merely a ârightâ but is indeed a âduty.â What Feenberg calls the âdeontological grounds for revolutionâ in Marx, then, is the Rousseauian tradition that Marx inherited from Kant and Hegel, if however in a âmetacritical approach.â
Why âmetacritical?â Because in the Rousseauian tradition followed by Kant and Hegel, there remains the possibility of a theoretical affirmation and justification of society as being free already, where it would need to become free through radical transformation. Hence the peculiarity of âcritical theoryâ in Marx. According to Feenberg, it was necessary for Marx to transcend the post-Rousseauian âutilitarianâ framework of maximizing happiness through addressing âtrue needs.â For Feenberg, Marx overcomes the âsplit between reason and need,â or between freedom and necessity, precisely because freedom is understood by Marx as the transformation of necessity. Marx thus followed upon the most radical implications of Rousseauian recognition of âsecond nature.â
This bears on the centrality of the problem of âtechnologyâ in capitalist utilitarianism, which is subject to a precipitous lowering or narrowing of horizons through concern with needs that are falsely naturalized: what is âsecond nature,â a social product, is mistaken for âfirst nature,â or what Marx considered a âfalse necessity.â Such critique of ideology is how Marx overcame the potential conservative implications of how Kant and Hegel regarded ânecessary forms of appearanceâ of social reality. Social practices such as those reified in âtechnologyâ seem responsive to necessities that can actually be transformed.
For Feenberg, there is a recurrent problem of neglect but also a red thread of rediscovery of this problem from Marx up to the present, with LukĂĄcs and the Frankfurt School providing key moments for recovery along the way.
This is a problem specific to capitalism precisely because of the centrality of labor. Marxismâs point of departure was to regard capital not as a âthingâ in terms of the means of production or as âtechnologyâ but rather as a social relation, specifically as a social relation of the commodity form of labor. Marx regarded capital as laborâs own product in order to demystify the capitalist estrangement of social relations in technologized production. What Marx called the âcapitalist mode of productionâ was a âcontradictionâ between the âbourgeois social relationsâ of production in labor and their unrealized potential beyond themselves, or âindustrial forcesâ that had yet to be mastered socially — that is, politically.
The danger lay in accepting false limits to politics seemingly imposed by technology which poses ânatureâ as static where it is actually the existing social relations that are recalcitrant obstacles to be overcome.
However, capitalism is not only a problem of false static appearance, but also a âreifiedâ or self-alienated dynamic, in which concrete practices or âtechnologiesâ change, but without adequate social-political awareness and agency. This is why the dynamics of technical change and its invidious social effects appear deus ex machina (literally a theodicy for Heidegger; techne as a god), and why it makes sense at all to characterize the problem in Marxâs terms as capital-ism. It is not a problem of âcapitalist-ism,â that is, a problem of society subject to the greed and narrow interests of the capitalists, but rather a deeper and more endemic problem of overall participation in social practice.
This brings us back to the original Rousseauian problem of society and political sovereignty: the unlimited, free development both collectively and individually that Rousseau apotheosized in the âgeneral will.â What does it mean, following Marx, that the âgeneral willâ appears in the form of âcapital,â and, in the 20th century, in the even more alienated form as the imperative of âtechnology?â It means that the problem of capitalism deepened, and social freedom became even more obscure.
Feenberg provides an important Appendix to his book that addresses the history of Marxism as a phenomenon of this problem. There, Feenberg discusses the issue of LukĂĄcsâs âself-identical subject objectâ of the proletariat in the form of the Communist Party. For Feenberg, LukĂĄcs followed both Luxemburg and Leninâs approaches to the problem of political party and social change. In Feenbergâs formulation, for LukĂĄcs, following Lenin and Luxemburg, the political party for proletarian socialism, or the Communist Party, was not only or even especially the âsubjectâ but was at least as if not more importantly the âobjectâ of the working classâs political action in trying to overcome capitalism.
In this sense, the problem of âreificationâ was not merely an economic or even âpolitical-economicâ problem (in the sense of the workers versus the capitalists), but was indeed first and foremost for LukĂĄcs a problem of politics. The party was objectified political practice. The question was its critical recognition as such. What had motivated LukĂĄcsâs recovery of Marxâs original point of departure, what Feenberg calls the âdeontological grounds for revolution,â was precisely the phenomenon of how Marxism itself had become reified and thus went into political crisis by the time of WWI and the revolution — the civil war in Marxism — that had followed in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Italy, etc. It was LukĂĄcsâs attempt to explain the underlying problem of that crisis in which Luxemburg and Lenin had been the protagonists that led to his rediscovery of Marx, specifically in the form of the âsubjective,â âconsciousâ or âHegelianâ dimension of Marxism that had fallen out as Marxism had degenerated or become âvulgarizedâ as a form of objectivistic economic determinism. The crisis of Marxism had led LukĂĄcs following Lenin and Luxemburg to a rediscovery of the potential for freedom concealed in capitalism.
The subsequent reification of Marxist politics in Stalinism presented a new problem that the Frankfurt School following LukĂĄcs had tried to address. This was paralleled by others, according to Feenberg, such as Merleau-Ponty and Lucien Goldmann. There were problems and some stumbles along the way, however, as Feenberg addresses in discussing the recently translated and published (2011) conversation in 1956 between Horkheimer and Adorno regarding the crisis of official Communism in Khrushchevâs (partial and abortive) attempt at de-Stalinization, which Feenberg finds them to have failed to adequately pursue, an opening only taken up by the 1960s New Left, encouraged not by Adorno and Horkheimer but rather by Marcuse (167â171).
Thus the New Left was another such moment of recovery for Feenberg, motivating an attempted further development of Marxist Critical Theory under changed historical conditions of society and politics. Feenbergâs book, both in its original and its newly revised form, is an ongoing testament to that moment and its continued tasks up to the present. | §