The crisis of neoliberalism and Marxism in the age of Trump (Platypus 3rd European Conference video and audio recordings)
Audio recording:
Platypus 3rd European Conference Vienna closing plenary panel discussion
Chris Cutrone
Presented on a panel with Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements, Moscow), John Milios (former chief economic advisor of SYRIZA) and Emmanuel Tomaselli (Funke Redaktion, International Marxist Tendency, Vienna), moderated by Lucy Parker, at the Platypus 3rd European Conference, University of Vienna, February 18, 2017. Also presented at the teach-in on “What is Trumpism?” at the University of Illinois at Chicago UIC on April 5, 2017; and on a panel with Greg Lucero and Catherine Liu at the 9th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention, University of Chicago, April 7, 2017. Published in Contango issue #1: Auctoritas (2017).
The present crisis of neoliberalism is a crisis of its politics. In this way it mirrors the birth of political neoliberalism, in the Reagan-Thatcher Revolution of the late 1970s – early 1980s. The economic crisis of 2007-08 has taken 8 years to manifest as a political crisis. That political crisis was expressed by SYRIZAâs election in Greece, Jeremy Corbynâs rise to leadership of the Labour Party, the Brexit referendum, and Bernie Sandersâs as well as Donald Trumpâs campaign for President of the U.S. Now Trumpâs election is the most dramatic expression of this political crisis of neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism has been an unclear concept, often substituting for capitalism itself. It clarifies to regard neoliberalism as politics. It is neoliberal politics that is in crisis.
It is easy to mistake Trump as an anti-neoliberal politician. This is what it means to call him a âRight-wing populistâ — presumably, then, Sanders, Corbyn and SYRIZA are âLeft-wing populistâ phenomena? This suggests that democracy and neoliberalism are in conflict. But neoliberalism triumphed through democracy — as demonstrated by the elections (and reelections) of Thatcher, Reagan, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and Barack Obama.
Neoliberalism is a form of democracy, not its opposite. If neoliberalism is in political crisis, then this is a crisis of democracy. Perhaps this is what it means to distinguish between âpopulismâ and democracy. When the outcome of democracy is undesirable, as apparently with Trump, this is attributed to the perversion of democracy through âpopulismâ — demagoguery.
Capitalism and democracy have been in tension if not exactly in conflict for the entirety of its history. But capitalism has also been reconstituted through democratic means. For instance, FDRâs New Deal, to âsave capitalism from itself,â was achieved and sustained through (small-d) democratic politics. But that form of democratic politics experienced a crisis in the 1960s-70s. That crisis gave rise to neoliberalism, which found an opportunity not only in the post-1973 economic downturn but also and perhaps especially through the crisis of the Democratic Partyâs New Deal Coalition and its related politics elsewhere such as in the U.K. and the rise of Thatcherâs neoliberal revolution against not only Labour but also the established Conservative Party. The same with Reagan, who had to defeat the Nixonite Republican Party as well as the Great Society Democrats.
Similarly, Trump has had to defeat the neoliberal Republican Party as well as the neoliberal Democrats.
Just as David Harvey found it helpful to describe neoliberalism not as anti-Fordism but as post-Fordism, it is necessary to consider Trump not as an anti-neoliberal but as a post-neoliberal. There will be continuity as well as change. There will be a political realignment of mainstream, liberal-democratic politics — just as happened with FDR and Reagan.
The âLeftâ — the Communist Party — initially called FDR a âfascist,â just as the New Left called Reagan a âfascistâ when he was elected — as if liberal democracy were collapsing rather than experiencing a political transformation. Such hysteria amounts to thinly veiled wishful thinking.
The problem with the âLeftâ is that its hysterics are less about society than about itself. The âLeftâ cries foul when mainstream politics steals its thunder — when change happens from the Right rather than through the Leftâs own ârevolutionary politics.â Capitalism has continued and will continue through political revolutions of greater or lesser drastic character.
Avowed âMarxistsâ have failed to explain the past several transformations of capitalism. Neither the Great Depression, nor the crisis of the New Deal Coalition leading to the New Left of the 1960s-70s, nor the crisis of Fordist capital that led to neoliberalism, have been adequately grasped. Instead, each change was met with panic and futile denunciation.
As such, the âLeftâsâ response has actually been affirmative. By the time the âLeftâ began to try to make sense of the changes, this was done apologetically — justifying and thus legitimating in retrospect the change that had already happened.
Such âexplanationâ may serve as substitute for understanding. But reconciling to change and grasping the change, albeit with hindsight, let alone taking political opportunity for change, is not the same as adequately critiquing the change.
What is needed — indeed required — is seeing how a crisis and change may point beyond itself.
What is the Trump phenomenon, as an indication of possibilities beyond it? This is the question that must be asked — and answered.
Unfortunately, the only way the âLeftâ might be posing this question now is in order to advise the Democrats on how to defeat Trump. But this is to dodge the issue. For even if the Democrats were to defeat Trump, this might avoid but cannot erase the crisis of neoliberalism, which is not an accident of the 2016 election outcome, but a much broader and deeper phenomenon.
The heritage of 20th century âMarxismâ — that of both the Old Left of the 1930s and the New Left of the 1960s — does not facilitate a good approach to the present crisis and possibilities for change. Worse still is the legacy of the 1980s post-New Left of the era of neoliberalism, which has scrambled to chase after events ever since Thatcher and Reaganâs election. A repetition and compounding of this failure is manifesting around Trumpâs election now.
For instance, while Harveyâs work from the 1980s — for example his 1989 book The Condition of Postmodernity — was very acute in its diagnosis of the problem, his work from more recent years forgot his earlier insights in favor of a caricatured account of neoliberal political corruption. This played into the prevailing sentiment on the âLeftâ that neoliberalism was a more or less superficial political failure that could be easily reversed by simply electing the right (Democratic Party or UK Labour) candidates.
More specifically, the Millennial âLeftâ that grew up initially against the Iraq war under George W. Bush and then continued in Occupy Wall Street under Obama, and last year got behind the Sanders campaign, is particularly ill-equipped to address Trump. It is confounded by the crisis of neoliberalism, to which it has grown too accustomed in opposition. Now, with Trump, it faces a new and different dilemma.
This is most obvious in the inability to regard the relationship between Sanders and Trump in the common crisis of both the Republican and Democratic Parties in 2015â16.
For just as the New Left — and then neoliberalism itself — expressed the crisis of the Democratic Partyâs New Deal Coalition, Trumpâs election expresses the crisis of the Reagan Coalition of the Republican Party: a crisis of not only neoliberalism as economic policy in particular, but also of neoconservatism and of Christian Fundamentalist politics, as well as of Tea Party libertarian Strict Constructionist Constitutional conservatism. Trump represents none of these elements of the Reaganite Republican heritage — but expresses the current crisis common to all of them. He also expresses the crisis of Clintonism-Obamaism. So did Sanders.
âMarxistsâ and the âLeftâ more generally have been very weak in the face of such phenomena — ever since Reagan and up through Bill Clintonâs Presidency. Neoliberalism was not well processed in terms of actual political possibilities. Now it is too late: whatever opportunity neoliberalism presented is past.
It was appropriate that in the Democratic Party primaries the impulse to change was expressed by Bernie Sanders, who predated the Reagan turn. Discontent with neoliberalism found an advocate for returning to a pre-neoliberal politics — of the New Deal and Great Society. While Trumpâs âMake America Great Againâ sounded like nostalgia for the 1950s, actually it was more a call for a return to the 1990s, to Clintonite neoliberal prosperity and untroubled U.S. global hegemony. In the 2016 campaign, Sanders was more the 1950sâ60s-style Democratic Party figure. Indeed, his apparent age and style seemed to recall the 1930s — long before he was born — and not so much the New Left counterculture, whatever youthful writings of his that were dug up. Whatâs remarkable is that Sanders invoked the very New Deal Coalition Democratic Party that he had opposed as a âsocialistâ in his youth, and what had kept him independent of the Democrats when he first ran for elected office in the 1980s Reagan era during which the Democrats were still the majority (Congressional) party. Sanders who had opposed the Democrats now offered to save them by returning them to their glory days.
But Trump succeeded where Sanders failed. It is only fitting that the party that led the neoliberal turn under Reagan should experience the focus of the crisis of neoliberal politics.
If Sanders called for a âpolitical revolutionâ — however vaguely defined — Trump has effected it. Trump has even declared that his campaign was not simply a candidacy for office but a âmovement.â His triumph is a stunning coup not only for the Democrats but the Republicans as well. Where Sanders called for a groundswell of âprogressiveâ Democrats, Trump won the very narrowest of possible electoral victories. Nonetheless, it was a well-calculated strategy that won the day.
Trumpâs victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. Steve Bannon announced that his main task was to unelect recalcitrant Republicans. Trump economic advisor Stephen Moore, a former neoliberal, declared to Congressional Republicans that it was no longer the old Reaganite neoliberal Republican Party but was going to be a new âeconomic populistâ party. Trump said during the campaign that the Republicans should not be a âconservative partyâ but a âworking-class party.â We shall see whether and how he may or may not succeed in this aim. But he will certainly try — if only to retain the swing working class voters he won in traditionally Democratic Party-voting states such as in the Midwest âRust Belt.â Trump will seek to expand his electoral base — the base for a transformed Republican Party. The Democrats will necessarily respond in kind, competing for the same voters as well as expanding their electoral base in other ways.
Trumpâs economic policies will be no more or less effective than Reaganomics or Keynesianism before that. They are more important as setting political conditions, especially ideologically, than as economics. They are ways of defining and appealing to the electorate, but are thin as politics. The âintegrated stateâ of the mid-20th century, with its mass-organized political parties, is a hollow shell today. However, any change-up of the electorate, especially as it is presently borne of the stagnation of the prior ruling parties, is an opportunity for some, however marginal, political changes. The question is whether and how the Left can take this opportunity. But the prospects for this are not great. The âLeftâ will go from anti-neoliberalism to its last defenders.Â
Is such potential new politicization a process of âdemocratization?â Yes and no. The question is not of more or less âdemocracyâ but rather how democracy takes shape politically. âPopulismâ is a problematic term because it expresses fundamental ambivalence about democracy itself and so fails to clarify the issue. It is understood that new and expanded political mobilization is fraught with danger. Nonetheless, it is a fact of life for democracy, for good or for ill. The frightening specter of âangry white votersâ storming onto the political stage is met by the sober reality that what decided Trumpâs victory were voters who had previously elected Obama.
So the question is the transformation of democracy — of how liberal democratic politics is conducted, by both Democrats as well as Republicans. This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. Thereâs no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism. | §
Video recording of April 5, 2017 University of Illinois at Chicago teach-in on “What is Trumpism?”:
Audience at April 7, 2017 opening plenary of the 9th annual Platypus Affiliated Society international convention at the University of Chicago:
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. | §
Critical authoritarianism
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review #91 | November 2016
Immanent critique
Whenever approaching any phenomenon, Adornoâs procedure is one of immanent dialectical critique. The phenomenon is treated as not accidental or arbitrary but as a necessary form of appearance that points beyond itself, indicating conditions of possibility for change. It is a phenomenon of the necessity for change. The conditions of possibility for change indicated by the phenomenon in question are explored immanently, from within. The possibility for change is indicated by a phenomenonâs self-contradictions, which unfold from within itself, from its own movement, and develop from within its historical moment.
Everything is taken not merely as it âis,â as it happens to exist, but rather as it âoughtâ to be, as it could and should be, yielding as-yet unrealized potentials and possibilities. So it is with âauthoritarianism,â in Adornoâs view. For Adorno, the key is how psychological authoritarianism is self-contradictory and points beyond itself. Adorno is interested in the âactualityâ of authoritarianism: as Wilhelm Reich put it, the âprogressive character of fascism;â[1] as Walter Benjamin put it, the âpositive concept of barbarism.â[2]
This demands a critical approach rather than a merely descriptive or analytically positive or affirmative approach. For something can be affirmed either in its justification and legitimation or in its denunciation. In either case, the phenomenon is left as it is; whereas, for Adorno, as a Marxist, âthe point is to change it.â[3]
So, what possibilities for change are indicated by authoritarianism, and how are such possibilities pointed to by the categories of Freudian psychoanalysis? For Adorno, it is unfortunate that social contradiction has passed from ideology and politics in society to individual psychology (indeed, this expresses a political failure), but there it is.[4] The âF-scaleâ is misleading, as Adorno notes, in that it might â despite its being posed as a âscaleâ â be mistaken for a matter of difference in kind rather than degree. Meaning that, for Adorno, everyone is more or less susceptible to fascism â everyone is more or less authoritarian.
The competing aspects of the individual psyche between liberal individuality and authoritarian tendencies is itself the self-contradiction of authoritarianism Adorno sought to explore. In capitalism, liberalism is the flip-side of the same coin as fascism. Individualism and collectivism are an antinomy that express capitalist contradiction. For individualism violates true individuality and collectivism violates the true potential of the social collectivity. Individuality and collectivity remain unfulfilled desiderata, the aspirations and goals of bourgeois society, its emancipatory promise. For Adorno (as for Marx), both are travestied in capitalism â mere âshams.â
Donald Trump rally, Pensacola, Florida, January 15, 2016.
Authoritarianism is an expression of that travesty of society. Fascism is the sham collectivity in which the sham individuality hides itself; just as liberalism is the sham individuality that conceals the collective condition of society. That collective condition is not a state of being but the task of the need for socialism beyond capitalism. Fascism as well as liberalism expresses that unfulfilled need and tasking demand for socialism in capitalism.
So what would it mean to critique authoritarianism in an immanently dialectical manner? What is the critical value of authoritarianism, in Adornoâs view? How can the potential possibility pointing beyond capitalism be expressed by authoritarianism and revealed rather than concealed by individual psychology? How is society critically revealed in authoritarianism, pointing to socialism?
Psychology
In âSociology and psychologyâ[5] Adorno diagnoses the division of psychology from sociology as itself a symptom of contradiction in society â of the actual separation and contradiction of the individual and the collective in capitalism.
In The Authoritarian Personality,[6] Adorno et al. wrote that the fascist personality was characterized by identification with technology, the love for instruments as âequipment.â Here, Adorno found the emancipatory potential beyond capitalism precisely in such identification and imitation: it becomes a matter of the form of individuation. In âImaginative excesses,â orphaned from Minima Moralia,[7] Adorno wrote that,
[N]o⊠faith can be placed in those equated with the means; the subjectless beings whom historical wrong has robbed of the strength to right it, adapted to technology and unemployment, conforming and squalid, hard to distinguish from the wind-jackets of fascism the subhuman creature who as dishonourâs progeny shall never be allowed to avert it.
The bearers of technical progress, now still mechanized mechanics, will, in evolving their special abilities, reach the point already indicated by technology where specialization grows superfluous. Once their consciousness has been converted into pure means without any qualification, it may cease to be a means and breach, with its attachment to particular objects, the last heteronomous barrier; its last entrapment in the existing state, the last fetishism of the status quo, including that of its own self, which is dissolved in its radical implementation as an instrument. Drawing breath at last, it may grow aware of the incongruence between its rational development and the irrationality of its ends, and act accordingly.
In âOn the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,â Adorno seeks to redeem authoritarianism in his conclusion when he offers that, âEven discipline can take over the expression of free solidarity if freedom becomes its content.â He goes on that, âAs little as [authoritarianism] is a symptom of progress in consciousness of freedom, it could suddenly turn around if [individual psychology], in unity with the society, should ever leave the road of the always-identicalâ[8] â that is, in going beyond capitalism. Here, critical authoritarianism is met by a critical individualism in which âcollective powers are liquidating an individuality past saving, but against them only individuals are capable of consciously representing the aims of collectivity.â[9] What are the aims of the collectivity expressed by the identification with technology? What Adorno following Benjamin called âmimesisâ[10] Freud analyzed psychologically as âidentification.â Adorno wrote that âthe pressure to be permitted to obey⊠is today more general than ever.â But what Marx called the âindustrial forces of productionâ are constrained and distorted by the âbourgeois social relations of productionâ in capitalism. There is a homologous contradiction within the individual personality.
In âReflections on Class Theoryâ, Adorno wrote that,
Dehumanization is no external power, no propaganda, however conceived, no exclusion from culture. It is precisely the intrinsic reality of the oppressed in the system, who used formerly to stand out because of their wretchedness, whereas today their wretchedness lies in the fact that they can never escape. That they suspect that the truth is propaganda, while swallowing the propaganda culture that is fetishized and distorted into the madness of an unending reflection of themselves.
This means, however, that the dehumanization is also its opposite. In reified human beings reification finds its outer limits. They catch up with the technical forces of production in which the relations of production lie hidden: in this way these relations lose the shock of their alien nature because the alienation is so complete. But they may soon also lose their power. Only when the victims completely assume the features of the ruling civilization will they be capable to wresting them from the dominant power.[11]
Society
Karl Marx regarded the ânecessity of the dictatorship of the proletariatâ as a phenomenon of âBonapartismâ â the rise to power of Louis Bonaparte as a result of the failure of the Revolution of 1848 in France. This was Marxâs difference from the anarchists: the recognition of the necessity of the state in capitalism.[12] Hence one should regard Marx on the dictatorship of the proletariat as a âcritical Bonapartist.â[13] Bonapartism expressed an objective societal need rather than a subjective attitude. Bonapartist response to the objective social crisis and contradiction of capitalism pointed beyond itself and so required a dialectical critique, which Marx thought the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon failed to provide by treating Bonapartism as objectively determined, apologizing for it, as did the sentimental socialist Victor Hugo who treated Bonapartism as a monstrous historical accident like a âbolt from the blue.â[14] Fatalism and contingency were two sides of the same contradiction that obscured a necessity that could be addressed properly only in a dialectical way. These are the terms in which Adorno addressed âauthoritarianism.â
Adornoâs “critical authoritarianism” addresses what the “immanent dialectical critique” of authoritarianism would mean, both in terms of Freudian psychoanalytic categories of description, and in terms of (absent) politics for socialism. Adorno’s Dream Notes records a dream of his participating in a gang-rape, as a primal scene of fascism.[15] The âdelightful young mulatto . . . the kind of woman one sees in Harlemâ who catches his eye admonishes him that âThis is the style of the Institute.â The homosexuality and sado-masochism of authoritarianism in pre-Oedipal psychology; the desire as well as fear to “liquidate the ego” in ambivalence about individuality; critical (as opposed to methodological or affirmative) individualism; the desire and fear of collectivity in authoritarian collectivism; projection, identification and counter-identification providing for social cohesion as well as for separation and atomization â these are the themes of Adornoâs critical approach to psychology in late capitalism.
A similar thought was articulated contemporaneously by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, which characterizes negrophobic racism as ârepressed homosexualityâ and a ânarcissistic disorder.â Fanon describes the Freudian approach to rape fantasies as a masochistic fear and desire that is an internalized projection of parental authority, a self-sadism. One fears what one wishes to happen; a wish is a way of mastering a fear by internalizing it; a fear is a way of repressing a wish. The reason rape is so traumatic is that it activates and violates such infantile experiences. There is the experience of parental seduction harking back to the anal phase of libido development, when the child experiences itself as unable to control its excretion, which is experienced as disturbingly involuntary, a blow to narcissism in the difficulty of toilet training, seeking to please the parentsâ expectations. The parentsâ cleaning of the infant is pleasurably stimulating, and the child internalizes the parentâs simultaneous desire and disgust, attraction and repulsion, which becomes the complex of feelings, the combination of shame and guilt with pleasure, that the child takes in its own bodily functions. Humiliation at loss of self-control is a formative experience of transforming narcissism into identification. The infantâs desire for the parents is an identification with the feared power.[16] The parents embody the ego-ideal of self-control. This is channeled later through gendered object-libido in the Oedipus complex as genital pleasure, but retains the sado-masochistic qualities of the anal phase, which precedes gender identification and so exhibits more basic, homosexual (ungendered) qualities that prevents the recognition of difference and individuality. In a narcissistic â authoritarian â society everyone becomes trapped in a static and self-reinforcing identity, where the need was actually to allow the opening to non-identity of freedom: the freedom to âovercome oneselfâ allowed by the healthy ego.
“The madness of an unending reflection of themselves.” Opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, 2008.
Fanon sought to provide an account of how âracial narcissismâ â the failure of the individual ego â could yet point beyond itself, specifically in its treacherously dyadic character of Self and Other, to the need that was blocked: âthe world of the You.â[17]
Adorno brings into his discussion of The Authoritarian Personality a key background writing for Fanonâs BSWM, Jean-Paul Sartreâs Anti-Semite and Jew, which assumes, as Adorno does, contemporary anti-Semitism as a norm and not an aberration. He states simply that what needs to be explained is why anyone is ânot anti-Semitic.â But this pointed not to a problem of psychology but of society. As Adorno commended Sartreâs treatment of anti-Semitism:
We distinguish between anti-semitism as an objective social phenomenon, and the anti-semite as a peculiar type of individuality similar to Sartreâs exposĂ© which, for good reasons, is called âPortrait of the Antisemiteâ rather than âPsychology of Anti-semitismâ. This kind of personality is accessible to psychological analysisâŠ. It would be quite impossible to reduce the objective phenomenon of present-day anti-semitism with its age-old background and all social and economic implications, to the mentality of those who, to speak with Sartre, have to make their decision in regard to this issue. Today, each and every man is faced with a tremendous bulk of objectively existing prejudices, discriminations and articulate anti-semitic attitudes. The accumulated power of this objective complex is so great and apparently so far beyond individual powers of resistance that one might indeed ask, why are people not antisemitic, [sic] instead of asking why certain kinds of people are anti-semitic. Thus, it would be naive to base a prognosis of anti-semitism, this truly âsocialâ disease, on the diagnosis of the individual patients.
This means that the self-contradiction expressed by (non-)racism is one of society as well: the racist society points beyond itself objectively as well as subjectively, socially as well as individually. Racism as a problem contains the key to its own solution.[18] Anti-Semitic demagogues identified with Jews when imitating their stereotypical mannerisms;[19] white racists of the Jim Crow era performed minstrel shows in black-face. As Fanon put it, âLong ago the black man admitted the unarguable superiority of the white man, and all his efforts are aimed at achieving a white existence;â âFor the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.â[20] Racism will end when black people become white. Or, as Adorno put it in âReflections on Class Theory,â âOnly when the victims completely assume the features of the ruling civilization will they be capable to wresting them from the dominant power.â Racismâs abolition will be its Aufhebung: it will be its Selbstaufhebung, its self-completion as well as its self-negation. So will be the overcoming of authoritarianism in capitalism more generally.
The infamous âF-scaleâ of The Authoritarian Personality is a scale, which means that authoritarianism or predisposition to fascism is not a difference in kind but of degree: Everyone is more or less authoritarian. The most authoritarian thing would be to deny â to fail to recognize â oneâs own authoritarianism. | §
Notes
[1] â[T]he mass basis of fascism, the rebelling lower middle classes, contained not only reactionary but also powerful progressive social forces. This contradiction was overlooked [by contemporary Marxists]â in Wilhelm Reich, âIdeology as Material Powerâ in The Mass Psychology of Fascism [1933/46], trans. Vincent Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 3â4.
[2] Walter Benjamin, âExperience and Povertyâ [1933], Selected Writings vol. 2 1927 â34, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap, Harvard, 1996), 732.
[3] Marx, âTheses on Feuerbachâ [1845], available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/>.
[4] See Max Horkheimer, âOn the Sociology of Class Relationsâ [1943] and my discussion of it, âWithout a Socialist Party, there is no Class Struggle, only Rackets,â Nonsite.org (January 11, 2016), available on-line at: <http://nonsite.org/the-tank/max-horkheimer-and-the-sociology-of-class-relations>. In âThe Authoritarian Stateâ [1940/42], Horkheimer wrote that,
Sociological and psychological concepts are too superficial to express what has happened to revolutionaries in the last few decades: their will toward freedom has been damaged, without which neither understanding nor solidarity nor a correct relation between leader and group is conceivable. (The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gephardt [New York: Continuum, 1985], 95â117.)
[5] âSociology and Psychologyâ [1955], originally written by Adorno for a festschrift celebrating Max Horkheimerâs sixtieth birthday, The piece was published in English translation in two parts in the New Left Review, vol. 46, Nov-Dec 1967, 63-80 and vol. 47, Jan-Feb 1968, 79-97.
[6] Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950).
[7] Adorno, âImaginative Excessesâ an unpublished piece intended for Minima Moralia,[1944â47] published as section X of âMessages in a Bottle,â trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review, vol. 200, July-August 1993, 12â14.
[8] Adorno, âOn the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listeningâ [1938], Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 314.
[9] Ibid., 315.
[10] See Benjamin, âOn the Mimetic Faculty,â Selected Writings vol. 2 1927â34, Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, eds. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 19989). 720â722: âThe child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but a windmill and a trainâ (720).
[11] Adorno, âReflections on Class Theoryâ, in Can One Live After Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 93-110.
[12] See Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852] Ch. VII, where he finds that political atomization leads inexorably to the authoritarian state in Bonapartism:
Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection . . . and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them . . . and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The[ir] political influence . . . therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself. (Available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm>.)
Marxâs discussion of the French peasants of the mid-19th century also applied to what he called the âlumpenproletariatâ as a constituent of Bonapartism, and so would apply to the working class in capitalism today without a political party organized for the struggle to achieve socialism. The âsack of potatoesâ or of âhomologous magnitudesâ is what Adorno, among others, characterized as the âmassesâ in the 20th century. (For instance, Benjamin wrote in the Epilogue to âThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionâ [1936] that fascism gave the masses the opportunity to express themselves while depriving them their right to change society.)
Adorno paraphrases Marx here when he writes that,
The masses are incessantly molded from above, they must be mulded, if they are to be kept at bay. The overwhelming machinery of propaganda and cultural industry evidences the necessity of this apparatus for the perpetuation of a set-up the potentialities of which have outgrown the status quo. Since this potential is also the potential of effective resistance against the fascist trend, it is imperative to study the mentality of those who are at the receiverâs end of todayâs social dynamics. We must study them not only because they reflect these dynamics, but above all because they are the latterâs intrinsic anti-thesis.
The manifestation â and potential resolution â of this contradiction of the masses in capitalism that otherwise resulted in Bonapartism was through the politics of socialism: Marxâs âdictatorship of the proletariatâ was to be achieved by the mass-political socialist party. Marx broke with the anarchists over the latterâs refusal to take âpolitical actionâ and to thus consign the working class to merely âsocial action.â i.e. to avoid the necessary struggle for state power.
[13] See my âProletarian dictatorship and state capitalism,â Weekly Worker 1064 (June 25, 2015), available on-line at: <http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1064/proletarian-dictatorship-and-state-capitalism/>.
[14] Marx, Preface to the 1869 edition of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [1852], available on-line at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/preface.htm>.
[15] Adorno, âNew York, 8 February 1941â in Dream Notes (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007), 5-6.
[16] See Anna Freud, âIdentification with the Aggressor,â Ch. IX, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence [1936].
[17] Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, [1952], trans., Charles Lam Markmann, (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 181.
[18] This is because, according to Adorno, âThose who are incapable of believing their own cause⊠must constantly prove to themselves the truth of their gospel through the reality and irreversibility of their deeds.â Violent action takes the place of thought and self-reflection; but this suggests the converse, that critical thinking could prevent such disastrous action. See Adorno, âEducation after Auschwitzâ [1966], in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and ed. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 191â204.
[19] See Adorno, âFreudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propagandaâ [1951], in The Culture Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 132â157.
[20] Fanon, Black Skin, 178.
The self-overcoming of labor: beyond capitalism (audio recording)
Chris Cutrone
Presented at the symposium on Architecture as a Political Practice at Archeworks, Chicago, October 29, 2016 [programme PDF]; published in After the Revolution III Labor (2017), 807-17. [draft PDF]
Audio recording:
Like all great thinkers, Marx ends up being saddled with responsibility for the very category that he is taking under critical consideration. So he is mistaken to be an advocate, whereas in fact he is a critic, regarding the so-called âlabor theory of valueâ. Marx doesnât have a labor theory of value, but heâs rather a critic of itâand not merely a critic, rather, he is mounting a critique of it, i.e. how labor as value might point beyond itself. An analogy would be Friedrich Nietzsche. If you ask most people about Nietzsche as a philosopher, they would say heâs a nihilistâwhereas actually what he was doing was not advocating nihilism, but trying to diagnose nihilism as a symptom, specifically one that needed a self-overcoming, a Selbstaufhebung, a self-fulfillment in self-negation. I think that turn of phrase from Nietzsche, which both is and is not in the tradition of German Idealism that Marx is in, is helpful for thinking about Marxâs approach to labor as value: He looks forward to the self-overcoming of labor as value. So, with respect to this, weâre talking about not a positive theory of labor as value, but a critical theory of labor as value, and specifically labor, as value, is in crisis in capitalism, for Marx. In other words, thereâs a crisis of labor as value in capitalism, which Marx regards as a symptom of a possible and necessary change. So let me say something about labor, and then Iâll say something about value. I know weâre going to have a presentation on Hannah Arendtâs The Human Condition (or Vita Activa, as it was titled in German) and a distinction that Arendt makes is helpful in this regard. She distinguishes between: (1) activity; (2) work, which is transformative activity, as not all activity is transformative, but work is transformative activity, not only of the object thatâs being worked on, but indeed transformative of the subject; and then thereâs (3) labor, which is work, its transformative activity, in society. In other words, itâs the value of work. Not all work is labor, just as not all activity is work.
A famous formulation of Marxâs with respect to this is âthe emancipation of laborâ, what heâs inheriting from the greater socialist and communist tradition, the idea that the emancipation of society demands the emancipation of labor. But in fact, for Marx, this is a fulfillment of what is already the desideratum of bourgeois societyâi.e. bourgeois society is itself understood as the emancipation of labor, the emancipation of the transformative activity of work, and its valuation in society. Just to point out the history for this: John Locke, the theorist of the Glorious Revolution in England, really the consolidation of the bourgeois revolution in England in the late 17th century, had formulated that the right to property was grounded in labor; in other words, that the actual right to property was not a right of might, but a right of labor: itâs something that needs to be recognized in society. And in the Great French Revolution of 1789, the most prevalent revolutionary pamphlet was the AbbĂ© SieyĂšsâs What is the Third Estate?, in which he talked about the estates in the Estates-General that were being called in the crisis of the Ancien RĂ©gime. The First Estate, what does it do? It prays, because it is the Church. The Second Estate, the aristocracy, what does it do? It fights. The Third Estate, however, the commoners (which is at least 95 percent of the population), what do they do? They work. He said that under the old regime, the Third Estate was nothing, but now it shall be everything. In other words, the value of work, which was negligible in terms of the organization of society in Medievalism, in Christianity, the activity of the commoners counted for nothing, but now it will count for everything, it will be the principle of society. So indeed, the bourgeois revolution was announced in terms of the rights of labor and the social recognition of work.
Now I want to turn to Marxâs passage from the Grundrisse, just to put this issue of bourgeois society and labor on the table:
Thus the ancient conception, in which man always appears (in however narrowly national, religious, or political a definition) as the aim of production, seems very much more exalted than the modern world, in which production is the aim of man and wealth the aim of production.
What he’s doing here is engaging in a reversal of means and ends. He thought that in the ancient conceptionâmeaning everything that came before the modernâ a definite form of humanity, or definite forms of humanity in the caste system, was the aim of the activity of society. In other words, everything was geared towards producing a definite way of life. Whereas now, production is not a means towards a definite end, but rather production has become an end in itself, the very aim is production itself. He says:
In fact, however, when the narrow bourgeois form has been peeled away, what is wealth, if not the universality of needs, capacities, enjoyments, productive powers etc., of individuals, produced in universal exchange?
I want to highlight there that production and exchange are inextricable for Marx, in other words, production is in this sense a social form, and exchange is the form of this social production.
What, if not the full development of human control over the forces of nature â those of his own nature as well as those of so-called ânature”? What, if not the absolute elaboration of his creative dispositions, without any preconditions other than antecedent historical evolution which make the totality of this evolution â i.e., the evolution of all human powers as such, unmeasured by any previously established yardstick â an end in itself? What is this, if not a situation where man does not reproduce in any determined form, but produces his totality? Where he does not seek to remain something formed by the past, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois political economy â and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds â this complete elaboration of what lies within man, appears as the total alienation, and the destruction of all fixed, one-sided purposes as the sacrifice of the end in itself to a wholly external compulsion. Hence in one way the childlike world of the ancients appears to be superior; and this is so, insofar as we seek for closed shape, form and established limitation. The ancients provide a narrow satisfaction, whereas the modern world leaves us unsatisfied, or, where it appears to be satisfied, with itself, is vulgar and mean.
I want to unpack that a little bit, in order to get at what Iâm trying to address, namely production for the sake of production. This is the bourgeois epochâs conceptionânot only theoretically, but in practiceâof freedom. Freedom is production for the sake of production, in this open-ended manner, the âabsolute movement of becoming.” But what we have, according to Marx, in the era of capitalism, is that this production for the sake of production has seemed to appear âsatisfied with itself,â and thus has become âvulgar and mean.â
The distinction that Iâd like to make is between the idea of society as a society of production for productionâs sake, and what we have in capitalism, which is not production for the sake of production, but rather production for the sake of value. This brings us back to the issue of labor as valueâdoes Marx have a labor theory of value, or rather does he have a critique of labor as value? In other words, has a society that is pursuing production for the sake of production actually outgrown labor as value? In a way, the bourgeois conception is this kind of Promethean notion of human labor as productive. So I wanted to invoke there the classic definition that Marx has of capitalism, namely that the capitalist mode of production is a contradictionâas a mode of production itâs a contradiction in itselfâbetween âbourgeois social relationsâ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the âindustrial forces of production.â The industrial forces of production are outstripping and pointing beyond the bourgeois social relations. These bourgeois social relations have usually been understood as private property and the market: private property in the means of production, and the market form of the exchange of goods and the realization of value in capital. What Iâd like to offer is that in fact the bourgeois social relations are not essentially private property in the means of production by the capitalists, but the value of labor, in other words, wage-labor as a social relation. Thatâs whatâs holding back the industrial forces of production, for Marx. Again, this is the distinction between production for the sake of production, in which case, for instance for someone like Adam Smith, labor as value is a means to the endâif you want to maximize production for the sake of production, you can use labor as value to mediate a society effectively to emancipate production. What Smith could not have foreseen, but which is Marxâs concern, is what happens with the Industrial Revolution, when labor as value ceases to be an adequate means for emancipating production, and thus ceases to be adequate to the task of freeing production in the unlimited way he calls for here.
In that respect, the issue is how labor as value has itself generated and continues to generate these industrial forces of production, in other words, continues to generate a crisis, a situation pointing beyond itself, how labor in its own activity in society points beyond itself, and points beyond the bourgeois conception of humanity as homo faber and homo economicus. The bourgeois conception is that there has been this long history of human development from the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, up through settled, subsistence agriculture, and now into bourgeois production, in which humans are the producing animalâthey make things, homo faberâand they produce with increasing efficiencyâhomo economicus. The history of humanity as the history of homo faber and homo economicus is of course not actually true of past forms of humanity, but is the way that bourgeois society appropriates all of human history to itself, so, e.g. it appears that the so-called âhunter-gatherersâ had a âdivision of labor.â Did they have a division of labor? No, they actually just had a gendered way of relating to the totemic species, in which the men hunted and the women gathered. Itâs not a division of labor, a mode of production. Did peasants, in the long history of traditional civilization practicing subsistence agriculture, constitute a mode of production? Can we say that agriculture was their mode of âabsolute movement of becomingâ? Not really. But from the bourgeois standpoint this looks as if this is the case, it looks as if what humans have always been doing is perfecting production, perfecting their production with respect to nature, and with respect to themselves. That has not always been the case, it has rather been the case specifically in the emancipation of society in the bourgeois era, and it will not always be the case. So, for Marx, the crisis of capitalism is actually marking, as he puts it, the potential end of âpre-history,â and the beginning of âtrueâ human history. What that would mean is that in fact we would cast the history of the human species that is projected back from bourgeois society as the history of production, as the history in a sense of human labor, into pre-history, if socialism and communism were attained. In other words, we would transcend this conception of human nature that is specific to the bourgeois epoch.
Marx thinks this has happened precisely through the demand, in the industrial era, of workers for the value of their labor. What came up earlier was the distinction between âformalâ and âreal subsumption,â and the related but not identical distinction between ârelativeâ and âabsolute surplus value.â Of course, these are not discrete periods in time, but are both constitutive, and reproduce a contradiction in capitalism, meaning that we always have an interaction of formal and real subsumption, we always have an interaction of absolute and relative surplus value. We always have the paradox of overwork and unemployment, we always have sweatshops and robots, and in a sense, weâve always had that since the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Now Marx thought that this has come about precisely because of the political crisis caused by the Industrial Revolution, and by the workersâ own class struggle against the capitalists in the Industrial Revolution, for example, with the Chartists in England, or the rising of the weavers in Lyon in Franceâthis period of the early 19th century, at the close of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution. In fact, things like wage levels, subsistence levels, norms for all kinds of aspects of social reproduction, the reproduction of the workforce in society, according to Marx in âThe Working Dayâ chapter of Das Kapital, are extremely variable, theyâre the product of political struggle, of cultural-social norms, legal reforms, etc. For instance, it became âun-Christianâ to exploit people, so it was Christian pastors in England who led the fight to get the workers to have at least one day off, Sunday, because itâs un-Christian to work them on the Sabbath. And it became un-Christian to work women and children in the factory era. These are all not part of the strictly economic logic of labor as value, but are actually extrinsic to itâthey are external constraints imposed for political, cultural, social reasons, and itâs this that in fact motivates and impels the introduction of machines into the factory process.
I can come around to my end-point, then, quickly. I want to conclude on a paradoxical formulation that Marx has, with respect to a world beyond labor. He says that work will go from âlifeâs prime need,â to becoming âlifeâs prime want.â We will no longer work because we need to, out of the false necessity of the social valorization-process of capitalâin other words, capital itself has to justify itself with respect to labor as value. We will no longer work because we need to; in that respect, we will overcome the social necessity for work. We will work because we want to. In other words, the degree to which humans engage in transformative activity, activity that transforms nature and transforms ourselves, it is because we want to, not because we need to. Therefore, we will have transcended the value of work in society, as we now experience it: we will transcend labor as value. So we will not necessarily transcend work, but we will transcend labor, labor as a social principle, beyond capitalism. | §
Deferred
Chris Cutrone
I would like to follow up on my articles, âWhat was social democracy?â (July 7) and âSacrifice and redemptionâ (July 14), and comment on the question of social democracy and the need for a socialist political party today, especially in light of controversies around Jeremy Corbynâs leadership of the Labour Party and the challenge to the Democratic Party represented by the ostensibly social democratic – âdemocratic socialistâ – Bernie Sanders, as well as the crisis of the EU around Brexit and its social democratic parties, such as the collapse of Pasok and rise of Syriza in Greece, and the equivocal role of Portuguese, Spanish and French socialists.
What has been forgotten today is the essential lesson for Marxism in the failure of the 1848 revolutions, why petty 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 petty bourgeois democracy means: naturalising the framework of capital. International social democracy once signified 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. | §
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. | §