Chris Cutrone teaches in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is an Instructor at the Institute for Clinical Social Work and was a longtime lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the PhD degree in the Committee on the History of Culture and the MA in Art History. His doctoral dissertation was on Adornoâs Marxism. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. He is also a writer and media artist committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society, an international Marxist educational project.
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )
Presentation at the 2020 CAA College Art Association conference in Chicago on the panel “Another Revolution: Artistic Contributions to Building New Worlds 1910-30 (Part 1)” with Aglaya K. Glebova and chair Florian Grosser with discussant Monica C Bravo.
Chris Cutrone
The Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky’s book Literature and Revolution (1923) and its critique of the claims of ârevolutionaryâ art at the time was seminal for the subsequent thought of the Marxist critics of modernist art, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg, all of whom addressed socially and politically committed art as varieties of modernism, subject to the same self-contradictions of bourgeois art in capitalism. They took inspiration from Trotskyâs Marxist approach to history in capitalism, specifically his claim, drawing from Marx, Engels, Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, among others, that the transition beyond capitalism begins only well after the revolution, and that neither revolutionary politics nor ostensible ârevolutionary cultureâ actually prefigure a true socialist or communist society and culture but only exhibit the contradictions of capitalism raised to a heightened and more acute degree. Moreover, modernism as a pathological symptom of capitalism did not exemplify a culture of its own but only a crisis of bourgeois culture that was not a model for a future emancipated culture, but at best was merely a constrained and distorted as well as fragmentary and incomplete projection of capitalism that was authentic only as an exemplar of its specific historical moment.
The history of Marxism is contemporary with and parallels the history of modernism in art. Charles Baudelaire, who coined the term âmodernityâ to refer specifically to the 19th century, and initiated modernism in both artistic practice and theory, is, like Marx, a figure of the 1848 moment. Modernism in art emerged around this central crisis of the 19th century, namely the capitalism resulting from the Industrial Revolution.
The relationship between modernism and Marxism was a potentially fraught one, however. In the aftermath of the post-WWI revolutionary wave, mostly Marxism became hostile to modernism, describing it as bourgeois decadence — a symptom of the decay of bourgeois society and culture in capitalism. Pre-WWI Marxism had a similar estimation of the culture of advanced capitalism, but less simply derogatorily than the utter condemnation by Stalinist repressive Socialist Realism seen in the 1930s and after. Stalinism regarded modernism as formalist and individualist, and raised earlier bourgeois art as a âSocialist Realistâ and Humanist standard against it.
Leon Trotsky, one of the central leaders of the 1917 Russian Revolution, was a Marxist, like Lenin himself, whose sensibilities were formed in the pre-WWI era. Called upon to weigh in on debates within the Communist Party about state patronage of art in the Soviet Union, Trotsky wrote his book Literature and Revolution, which sought to clarify the Marxist attitude towards modern art, especially purportedly revolutionary and even supposedly âproletarianâ art. Trotsky was unequivocal that there was and could be no such thing as proletarian art, but only bourgeois art produced by working class people. This is because as a Marxist, the terms bourgeois and proletarian were not sociological but rather historical categories. For Marxism, bourgeois society and culture had been proletarianized in the Industrial Revolution, but this did not produce a new society and culture but rather the proletarianized bourgeois society and culture went into crisis, exhibiting self-contradiction — unlike the bourgeois society and culture that had emerged out of Medieval civilization in the Renaissance.
The bourgeois social culture and art in the crisis of capitalism, like its economics and politics, demanded the achievement of socialism. This was the proletarian interest in modern art: the authentic democratization of culture and art that capitalism both made possible and constrained, giving rise to only distorted expressions of possibility and potential. Modernist art for Trotsky could not be considered a new culture but rather an expression of the task and demand for transcending bourgeois society and culture.
This is the value of art as an end in itself, taking itself as its own end or purpose; hence, lâart pour lâart, art for artâs sake, is an expression of freedom, in both the bourgeois emancipation of production for its own sake and the Humanistic value of life in itself — a value unknown in traditional culture, which elevated morality above life, and subordinated aesthetic production to ritual or cultic community values.
This meant that the history of society, including its transformation in bourgeois emancipation and crisis in capitalism, could find expression in the history of art. The Marxist approach to art is hence primarily historical in character.
Later, towards the end of his life, in 1938, a decade and a half after his book Literature and Revolution, Trotsky wrote a series of letters to the American journal Partisan Review in which the art and literary critic Clement Greenberg first published. In his letters on “Art and politics in our epoch,” Trotsky described their relation as follows — please allow me to quote from Trotsky at some extended length, for in a few paragraphs he sums up well the attitude of Marxism towards art:
“The task of this letter is to correctly pose the question. “Generally speaking, art is an expression of manâs need for an harmonious and complete life, that is to say, his need for those major benefits of which a society of classes has deprived him. That is why a protest against reality, either conscious or unconscious, active or passive, optimistic or pessimistic, always forms part of a really creative piece of work. Every new tendency in art has begun with rebellion. . . . “The decline of bourgeois society means an intolerable exacerbation of social contradictions, which are transformed inevitably into personal contradictions, calling forth an ever more burning need for a liberating art. Furthermore, a declining capitalism already finds itself completely incapable of offering the minimum conditions for the development of tendencies in art which correspond, however little, to our epoch. It fears superstitiously every new word, for it is no longer a matter of corrections and reforms for capitalism but of life and death. The oppressed masses live their own life. Bohemianism offers too limited a social base. Hence new tendencies take on a more and more violent character, alternating between hope and despair. The artistic schools of the last few decades â Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Surrealism â follow each other without reaching a complete development. Art, which is the most complex part of culture, the most sensitive and at the same time the least protected, suffers most from the decline and decay of bourgeois society. “To find a solution to this impasse through art itself is impossible. It is a crisis which concerns all culture, beginning at its economic base and ending in the highest spheres of ideology. Art can neither escape the crisis nor partition itself off. Art cannot save itself. It will rot away inevitably . . . unless present-day society is able to rebuild itself. This task is essentially revolutionary in character. For these reasons the function of art in our epoch is determined by its relation to the revolution. . . . “The real crisis of civilization is above all the crisis of revolutionary leadership. Stalinism is the greatest element of reaction in this crisis. Without a new flag and a new program it is impossible to create a revolutionary mass base; consequently it is impossible to rescue society from its dilemma. But a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of âleadingâ and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power. . . . Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them. Artistic creation has its laws â even when it consciously serves a social movement. Truly intellectual creation is incompatible with lies, hypocrisy and the spirit of conformity. Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.”
There are several key ideas to be noted here. To begin with, that Trotsky — that is to say, Marxism — does not seek to provide an answer but rather only to correctly pose the question of the relation of art to politics in capitalism and any struggle for socialism: it is not prescriptive of a solution, but only diagnostic of a problem. That art is a âprotest against reality,â no matter whether âconscious or unconscious, optimistic or pessimistic,â still a âprotest,â whether expressing âhope or despairâ — a very peculiar proposition that would not apply to art before capitalism, or before modernism. Adorno famously characterized art as the âexpression of sufferingâ — also a description specific to the history of art in capitalism. And that art cannot save society — as the revolutionary cultural modernist Bohemians of the Russian Revolutionary era claimed — indeed, it cannot even save itself. Not least because it is a specialized activity on a very narrow base: the oppressed masses live their own lives, from which art is necessarily separated and exists apart.
So what can art do, according to Trotsky — according to Marxism? It can express the suffering of capitalism in which the âintolerable exacerbation of social contradictions . . . are transformed inevitably into personal contradictions,â and hence express a task, the âever more burning need for a liberating artâ expressed by every âreally creative piece of work.â Art can express a need — but could not itself satisfy that need. This is the translation of the famous Marxist formulation, that bourgeois society in capitalism stood at a crossroads of âsocialism or barbarism,â or, as Trotsky put it, art along with the greater society will ârot awayâ inevitably under capitalism.
Clement Greenberg’s essay on âAvant-garde and kitsch,â published the following year after Trotskyâs letters on art in Partisan Review, described the barbarization of bourgeois art in capitalism as its âAlexandrianism.â Art in capitalism became instantly transfixed, and, as such, museumified, leading a paradoxical undead existence or only as a spectral after-life of its emancipation in bourgeois society. Georg LukĂĄcs, in History and Class Consciousness, published in the same year as Trotskyâs Literature and Revolution, described this greater effect in society as âreificationâ or thing-ification, as the âspatialization of time,â what Marx called the congealing of human action in capitalism in the form of capital as âdead laborâ which dominates living labor. Greenberg described the avant-garde as the attempt to set Alexandrianism in motion, and, as such, imitating the processes of art. Kitsch, in which Greenberg included Socialist Realism, by contrast, imitated the avant-garde, but exhibiting an apparent timeless value, as opposed to the avant-gardeâs âsuperior consciousness of history.â This was modeled on Marxism itself, as the political avant-garde of bourgeois society in capitalism. Marxism distinguished itself from the rest of bourgeois intellectual culture and politics only by its critical historical consciousness, of its fleeting ephemeral specific moment, as Benjamin described it in his âTheses on the philosophy [or, concept] of history,â the ânow-timeâ (Jetztzeit) of revolutionary necessity that âblasts the continuum of history,â to which culture — barbarism — inevitably conforms, as kitsch.
Trotskyâs Marxist assertion that âart is a protest against realityâ is based on the earlier bourgeois recognition by Kant and Hegel that art, as Geistig or Spiritual activity, seeks not to express what is, not to affirm what exists, but rather to express what ought to be, the potential and possibility for change: art is the expression of freedom. Greenbergâs avant-garde expresses a fleeting historical potential for transformation that kitsch obviates, neglecting the task of freedom in favor of a timeless naturalization of art. Benjamin wrote in his essay on âThe author as producerâ (1934) that the task of artists is to teach other artists: as he put it, the artist who doesnât teach other artists teaches no one. Benjamin called this artistic âquality,â which he distinguished from political âtendency.â Benjamin went so far as to assert that art could not be of the correct — socialist — political tendency if it failed to have formal aesthetic quality. Such quality was primarily educative in value: it demonstrated and educated the potential transformation of aesthetic form itself, for both viewer and producer.
Adornoâs posthumously published draft manuscript Aesthetic Theory — which references Trotskyâs Literature and Revolution as a key departure for his approach — concludes with a criterion for judging the art that lives on in capitalism despite the self-evidence of even its right to exist having been long since lost, that art is the âwriting of historyâ of âaccumulated suffering.â Marxismâs essential legacy for considering the history of modern art, especially as consciousness of the condition of failed socialist emancipation from capitalism formulated by Benjamin, Adorno, Greenberg and others in the post-revolutionary crisis era of the 1930s, is this memory of accumulated suffering — the suffering from the unrealized potential of both art and society. | §
Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. He is the former head of the often contrarian Marxist group The Platypus Affiliated Society and in this podcast, we discuss the possibility of realizing philosophy.
MARXISM CONSIDERED PHILOSOPHY as âbourgeois ideology.â This meant, first and foremost, radical bourgeois philosophy, the modern philosophy of bourgeois emancipation, the thought of the revolt of the Third Estate. But pre-bourgeois philosophy, traditional philosophy, was also addressed as bourgeois ideology, as ideology. But ideology is a modern phenomenon. Thereâs little point in calling either Aristotle or Augustine âideology.â It is when philosophy is invoked in bourgeois society that it becomes ideological. (Religion, too!)
So what is meant by philosophy as âideologyâ?
This goes to the issue of Marxist âideology-critique.â What did Marxism mean by ideology as âfalse consciousnessâ? âFalseâ in what way? For if bourgeois ideology were considered the ideology of the sociological group of the bourgeoisie â capitalists â then there would be nothing âfalseâ about it: it would be the consciousness adequate to the social being of the ruling class; it would be the true consciousness of the bourgeoisie. So it must be false not for the bourgeoisie but rather for others â for the âproletariat.â This kind of âclass analysisâ of ideology would be concerned that the workers not fall for the ideology of the ruling class. It would be a warning against the workers adopting the idealism of the bourgeoisie that would blind them to their real social condition in capitalism. The idea here is that somehow the workers would remain ignorant of their exploitation by the capitalists if they remained mired in bourgeois ideology.
Of course Marxism was originally no such âmaterial analysisâ â debunking â of wrong thinking. No.
Rather, the original Marxist ideology-critique â Marx and Engelsâs ideology-critique of bourgeois society â was the immanent dialectical critique of the way society in capitalism necessarily appears to its members, bourgeois and proletarian â capitalists and workers â alike. It was the critique of the true consciousness of the workers as well as of the capitalists.
Now, that formulation just lost me 99% of ostensible âMarxistsâ as well as all of the rest of the âLeft,â whether socialist or liberal, who do indeed think that the poor benighted workers and other subaltern need us intellectuals to tell them what their true social interests are.
This is not what Marxism â Marx and Engels â originally thought, however.
Marxism began with the critique of socialism, specifically with the critique of the most prominent socialist thinker of Marx and Engelsâs formative moment in the 1840s, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Proudhon â who coined the term âanarchismâ â claimed that he respected only three authorities, intellectually, Adam Smith, Hegel and the Bible!
Marxism is usually thought of as the synthesis of German Idealist philosophy, British political-economy, and French socialist politics. But what Marxism actually was was the immanent dialectical critique of these three phenomena, which Marx and Engels considered three different forms of appearance of the same thing: the most advanced bourgeois ideology of their time, of the earlyâmid 19th century. They were all true expressions of their historical moment, of the Industrial Revolution. But as such, they were also all false.
Proudhon wrote of the âphilosophy of misery,â attacking the heirs of Adam Smith in Utilitarianism â James Mill and Jeremy Bentham â and other contemporary British political economists such as Malthus and David Ricardo and their French counterparts. Marx wrote his first major work on political economy and the class struggle in industrial capitalism as a critique of Proudhon, cleverly inverting its title, The Poverty [Misery] of Philosophy.
I was deeply impressed by this work â and especially by its title â when I first read it as an aspiring young âMarxistâ in college. It signified to me a basic truth, which is that the problem of capitalism and its potential overcoming in socialism was not a matter of âphilosophy,â not a problem of thinking. Reading further, in Marxâs 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, I read and deeply internalized Marxâs injunction that âcommunism is a dogmatic abstractionâ which was âone-sided,â expressing the same thing as its opposite, private property, and, like bourgeois society itself, was internally divided, for instance, between collectivism and individualism, and so could not be considered a vision of an emancipated future society, but only a negation of the present. I had read in Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto their critique of âreactionary socialism,â and their observation that everything of which communism stood accused was actually the âspecterâ of what capitalism itself was already doing â âabolishing private property,â among other things.
This all told me that, for Marx and Engels at least, the problem of bourgeois ideology was not a matter that could be addressed let alone rectified by proper methodology â by a kind of right-thinking opposed to it.
In short, I recognized early on that Marxism was not some better philosophy.
Marxism was not a philosophical critique of philosophy, but rather something else entirely. For instance, Marx and Engelsâs critique of the Young Hegelians was not as philosophers, but in their philosophical claims for politics. This was also true of Leninâs critique of the Machians among the Bolsheviks (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, 1908). The critique was of the relation between philosophy and politics. It was thus also not a political critique of philosophy.
Ends
I have titled my talk here, âEnds of philosophy,â after the title for the week in our Platypus primary Marxist reading group syllabus when we read Karl Korschâs 1923 essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the recommended background reading for todayâs discussion. In the syllabus week title as well as here, I intend to play on the multiple meanings of the word âends.â What are the ends of philosophy, according to Marxism, in terms of its telos, its goals, its purposes, and its satisfaction; what would it take to attain and thus overcome the aspirations of philosophy?
Specifically, what would it take to satisfy bourgeois â that is to say, modern â philosophy? What would make philosophy superfluous?
This is posed in the same way that Marxism sought to make labor as social value superfluous. How does labor seek to abolish itself in capitalism? The same could be said of philosophy.
What would it take to bring philosophy to an end â to its own end? Not by denying the need for philosophy, but by satisfying it.
But there have been other moments, before (and after) Marxism, which sought to overcome philosophy through its satisfaction, through satisfying the need for philosophy.
The need for â the necessity of â philosophy in the modern world is different from its need previously â fundamentally different. The need to account for freedom in bourgeois emancipation was new and different; this did not motivate and inform traditional philosophy. But it fundamentally tasked modern philosophy â at least the philosophy that mattered most to Marxism, the Enlightenment and German Idealism at its culmination. But the need for philosophy in capitalism is also different from its need in the bourgeois revolution.
Please allow me to address several different historical moments of the end of philosophy. I use this concept of moments of the âend of philosophyâ instead of alternative approaches, such as varieties of âanti-philosophy,â because I think that trying to address Marxism as an anti-philosophy is misleading. It is also misleading in addressing other such supposed âanti-philosophies,â such as those of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Existentialism, Heidegger, etc., as well as other traditions entirely, such as the Enlightenment philosophes contra âphilosophy,â or Empiricism and Analytic Philosophy contra âmetaphysics.â (For instance, Heidegger sought the potential end to âthousands of years of Western metaphysics,â going all the way back to Plato.) Yet all these various phenomena express to my mind a common issue, namely the problem of âphilosophyâ per se in the modern era, both in the era of bourgeois emancipation and subsequently in capitalism.
What is âphilosophy,â such that it can experience an end? It is not merely its etymological meaning, the love of knowledge, or wisdom, or the love of thinking. Philosophers are not merely smart or sage â not merely sophists, clever thinkers: philosophy cannot be considered merely the mastery of logic or of semantics. If that were true, then most lawyers would be better philosophers than most avowed âphilosophers.â
The end of philosophy cannot be considered an end to sophistry, finally putting the clever fellows down. It cannot be considered an analogue to Shakespeareâs âFirst, we kill all the lawyers.â It is not meant to be the triumph of Philistinism. Although you might think so from a lot of âMarxistâ deprecation of philosophy, especially as âbourgeois ideology.â Such âMarxistsâ want to put a stop to all mystification by putting a stop to the mystifiers of bourgeois society, the lackeys â the paid liars â of the capitalist bourgeoisie. They want to stop the âphilosophersâ from pulling the wool down over the eyes of the exploited and oppressed. This is not my meaning. â This was not even Socratesâs (Platoâs) meaning in taking down the Sophists.
Authoritarianism
Philosophy cannot be considered, either negatively or positively, as the arrogation of all thinking: it is not some Queen of the Sciences that is to make proper sense of and superintend any and all human thought in every domain. It is not the King of Reason; not the thought-police. Marxism did not seek to replace philosophy in such a role. No. Yet this seems to be precisely what everyone wants from philosophy â or from anti-philosophy. They want their thinking dictated to them.
Korsch addresses this as âBonapartism in philosophy:â we seem to want to be told how and what to think by philosophers â or by anti-philosophers. It is an authoritarian impulse. But one that is an authentic expression of our time: capitalism brings forth its own Philosopher Kings.
This is not at all what the immediate predecessors for Marxist thought in philosophy, Kant and Hegel, considered as their task: Kant, in âbeginningâ philosophy (anew), and Hegel in âcompletingâ this, did not seek to replace the thinking of others. No. Precisely the opposite: they sought to free philosophy, to make it âworldly.â They thought that they could do so precisely because they found that the world had already become âphilosophical.â
After them, they thought there would no longer be a need to further develop Philosophy as such, but only the need for philosophical reflection in the various different diverse domains of human activity. Our modern academic institutions reflect this: one receives the PhD, Doctor of Philosophy, in Chemistry, meaning one is qualified to âdoctor,â to minister and correct, to treat the methods and attendant thinking â the âphilosophyâ â of the science of chemistry, without however necessarily becoming an expert specialist âphilosopher of science,â or studying the specialized discipline Philosophy of Science per se. According to LukĂĄcs, such specialized knowledge as found in academia as well as in the various technical vocations â such as law, journalism, art, etc. â exhibited âreificationâ in capitalism, a disintegrated particularization of atomized consciousness, in which losing the forest for the trees was the very predicate of experience and knowledge. But this was the opposite of what Kant and Hegel had expected. They expected not disintegration but the organic, living and changing relations of diverse multiplicity.
Marx found a very different world from Kant and Hegelâs, after the Industrial Revolution. It was not a philosophical world in capitalism â not an âenlightenedâ realm of âsober senses,â to which bourgeois philosophy had aspired, but something much darker. It was a âphantasmagoriaâ of âcommodity fetishism,â full of beguiling âmetaphysical subtleties,â for which one needed to refer to the âmist-enveloped regions of religionâ for proper models. In capitalism, bourgeois society was sunk in a kind of animism: a world of objects exhibiting âtheological niceties.â
There was a need for a new Enlightenment, a Second Enlightenment specific to the needs of the 19th century, that is, specific to the new needs of industrial capitalism, for which the prior thinking of bourgeois emancipation, even at its best, for instance by Rousseau, Adam Smith, Kant and Hegel, was not equipped to adequately address. It needed a new recognition of the relation between social being and consciousness.
But for Marx and Engels, this new task of enlightenment was something that could not be accomplished philosophically â could not be brought to fruition in thinking â but only in actual political struggle and the transformation of society.
History
This was because, unlike the emancipation of bourgeois society, which took several centuries and came to consciousness of itself as such only late, no longer cloaking itself in the religious garb of Christianity â the Protestant Reformation as some return to true Christianity of the original Apostles, freed from the corruptions of the Church â and arrived at self-consciousness only at the end of its process of transformation, in the 18th century. As Hegel put it, âThe Owl of Minerva [that is, knowledge] flies at dusk:â proper consciousness comes only âpost-festum,â after the fact of change.
But Marx and Engels found the task of socialism in capitalism to be motivated by a new need. The proletarianization of the bourgeois social relations of labor â the society of cooperative production in crisis with the Industrial Revolution â required a new consciousness of contradiction, a âdialecticalâ and âhistoricalâ âmaterialism,â to properly recognize its tasks. As Marx put it, the social revolution of the 19th century â in contradistinction to the bourgeois revolution â could not take its poetry from the past, but needed to take its poetry from the future. This was quite a paradoxical formulation, especially since Marx and Engels explicitly abjured âutopian socialism,â finding it a realm of images of capitalism, and not of a world beyond it.
This was because they found the workersâ struggles against the capitalists to be motivated by bourgeois consciousness, the consciousness of the bourgeois revolution. Socialism was born in the Jacobinism of the French Revolution, for instance, in the former Jacobin Babeufâs Conspiracy of Equals, still motivated by the aspirations of âliberty, equality and fraternity.â Proudhon, for example, was motivated in his anarchist socialism, avowedly, by Adam Smith and Hegel (and the Bible) â animated, unabashedly, by bourgeois political economy and philosophy.
Marx and Engels didnât think that this was wrong, but only inadequate. They didnât offer an alternative to Proudhon â to Smith and Hegel (or the Bible!) â but only a critique of how bourgeois thought mystified the crisis and task of capitalism. The world necessarily appeared in bourgeois terms â there were no other terms. There was no other form of consciousness. There was no other philosophy. Nor was there a need for a new philosophy.
Bourgeois philosophy, for Marx and Engels, had successfully summed up and appropriated all prior philosophical enlightenment. They agreed with Kant and Hegel. Bourgeois social thought had successfully summed up and completed all prior thinking about society. Marx and Engels neither disputed nor sought to replace it. They were concerned only with its self-contradiction in capitalism. Not its hypocrisy, but its authentic antinomies, which both drove it on and left it stuck. The bourgeois âend of historyâ turned out to be the opposite of what it intended: not a final stage of freedom, but rather a final stage of unfreedom; the crossroads of âsocialism or barbarism.â
Impossibility
This affected the status of philosophy. Bourgeois philosophy no longer described freedom but rather unfreedom. Or, more dialectically, it described both: the reproduction of unfreedom in the struggle for freedom. As a result, the task of freedom was no longer expressed by the need for all human activity to achieve an adequate â Hegelian â philosophically reflective self-consciousness, but rather to realize in practice and thus recognize in consciousness the limits of such self-consciousness, of such philosophical reflection. There was a crisis in radical bourgeois philosophy. The crisis and decay of Hegelianism was an authentic historical phenomenon, not a mistake.
Like liberal democracy, philosophy in capitalism was no longer itself, and was no longer tasked with becoming itself, attaining its aspirations, but rather was tasked with overcoming itself, superseding its achievements. The achievements of bourgeois emancipation seemed ruined in the 19th century.
Indeed, capitalism already accomplished such self-overcoming of bourgeois society, but perversely, negating itself without satisfying itself. In so doing, it constantly re-posed the task of achieving itself, as an impossible necessity. Bourgeois philosophy became the opposite of what it was, utopian. Not worldly philosophy, but an ideal, a mere notion, mocked by the real, ugly and anything-but-philosophical world.
Because of this â precisely because of this â bourgeois philosophy did not end but constantly reinvented itself, however on an increasingly impoverished basis. It radically revolutionized itself, but also, in so doing, radically undermined itself.
Philosophy remained necessary but proved impossible. It disintegrated, into epistemology, ontology and ethics. They went their separate ways. But they also drove themselves into blind alleys â dead-ends. This actually indicates the task of philosophy to overcome itself, however in perverted form.
Metaphysics
So, what is philosophy? One straightforward way of answering this is, simply, metaphysics. Kant, following Rousseau, had overcome the division and opposition between Rationalism and Empiricism by finding a new foundation for metaphysics. This was the Kantian âCopernican Turnâ and ârevolutionâ in philosophy. But it was not simply a new metaphysics, but rather a new account of metaphysics â of philosophy â itself. Moreover, it was revolutionary in an additional sense: it was not only a revolution, but also accounted for itself as revolutionary. This is because it was a metaphysics of change, and not merely change but radical qualitative transformation: it was a revolutionary account of the fundamental transformability of the substance of philosophy itself. In short, it was a philosophy of freedom. It was the self-reflection of practical freedom in society â that society made human lifeâs transcendence of nature possible, at all, but in so doing created new problems to be worked through and overcome.
It is precisely this metaphysics of freedom, however, that has gone into crisis and disintegrated in capitalism. This has been the expression of the crisis and disintegration â the decay â of bourgeois society.
The goal of philosophy in overcoming itself is to free thinking from an overarching and underlying metaphysics at all. Kant and Hegel thought that they had done so already, but capitalism â in its crisis of the metaphysics of bourgeois society â revealed that there was indeed an underlying and overarching metaphysics still to be overcome, that of social practice â society â itself. The self-production and self-overcoming of the subject in its socially and practically objective activity â labor â needed to be overcome.
The end of philosophy â the end of a singular metaphysics, or of metaphysics per se â aims at the freeing of both action and thinking from any unitary framework. It is the freeing of an ever-expanding and limitless â without end â diverse multiplicity of new and different forms of acting, being and knowing.
Postmodernism was, as Moishe Postone put it, âpremature post-capitalism.â It aimed at the freeing of the âsmall-s subjects from the big-S Subject.â It also aimed at freedom from capital-H History. It meant overcoming Hegelâs philosophy of history.
We already live in such freedom in bourgeois society, however perverted by capitalism. Diverse activities already inhabit different realms of being and call forth different kinds of ethical judgments. Doctors and lawyers practice activities that define being â define the ârights of life and liberty and the pursuit of happinessâ â in different ways, and are hence ethically bound in different ways. Doctors discipline themselves ethically differently from scientists. Among scientists, Biology has a different epistemology from Physics: there are different methods because there are different objects. There is no âphilosophyâ in the sense of a metaphysical logic that encompasses them all. Lawyers, for example, practice differential ethics: prosecutors and defense attorneys in criminal law are bound by different rules of behavior; the practice of civil law is ethically distinct from criminal law; the rules of evidence are different. We do not seek to bind society to one form of knowledge, one code of conduct, or one way of life. There is no âphilosophyâ that could or should encompass them all. It would be arrogant to claim that there is one singular logic that can be mastered by anyone for governing everything.
Bourgeois society has already established well the reasonable limits to philosophy and its competence.
In Ancient civilization there were differentiated realms of being, knowing and acting. There was a caste system, in which there were different laws for peasants; for merchants; for artisans (and for different kinds of artisans, for different arts and different sciences); and for the nobility; and for the clergy. But they were unified in a Divine Order of the Great Chain of Being. There was heterogeneity, but all with a single origin in God: all of Godâs creatures in all of Godâs Creation. That mystery was to remain unknown to Man â known only to God. There was a reason for everything, but only God could know it. There was not philosophy but theology, and theology was not to arrogate to itself the place of the Mind of God, but only ponder Manâs place in and relationship to it. Theology established the limits to manâs knowledge of God: we knew only what God had revealed to us, through his Covenant. We all heard the Word of God; but God told His different creatures different things. In overcoming theology, philosophy did not seek to replace it. It sought to explore the mind of man, not to relate to and limit itself with respect to the Mind of God. It was not concerned with Divine or Natural limits, but with freedom.
There is no possible one single or once-and-for-all account of freedom, for then freedom would not be free. There is no possible account of âbeingâ free, but only of becoming free. And there is only one such account, that of bourgeois emancipation from traditional civilization. It was to set free all the diverse and multiple activities of mankind, in relation to other humans, to Nature, and to ourselves.
Overcoming
Marx was both a Hegelian and departed from Hegel, with a historical and not a philosophical difference. As Marx put it, for Hegel himself the Hegelian system was not ready-made and finished as it was for those who came after. As Marx observed, Hegelianism went into crisis for real historical reasons, not due to misunderstanding by his followers; but rather the crisis came from Hegelian philosophyâs actual contact with the world, and that world had become as internally contradictory in capitalism as Hegelianism became in contact with it. The Hegelian dialectic is both appropriate and inappropriate to the problem of capitalism. The crisis and disintegration of Hegelianism was a crisis of metaphysics â of philosophy â at a higher and deeper and not a lower or more superficial level from Hegelianism. Hegelianism was falsified not in itself but by history. But Hegelianism was also borne out by history as the last word in philosophy â in metaphysics. Marxism cannot be purged of its Hegelianism without becoming incoherent; Marxism remains Hegelian, albeit with what LukĂĄcs called an âadditional twistâ in the âpure historicization of the dialectic.â
If society in capitalism remains bourgeois in its ideals, with the goal of providing opportunities for social labor, materially, it has become its opposite: as capitalist, it prioritizes not labor but capital, and at the expense of labor. This means society is tasked with the material challenge of overcoming its ideals. But, as Marx recognized, this can only be done on the basis of this societyâs own ideals, in and through their self-contradiction. In philosophy, this means the task expressed by the self-contradiction of Hegelianism.
Capitalism is the model of the Marxist-Hegelian procedure of immanent dialectical critique: this is how capitalism itself moves, how it reproduces itself through self-contradiction. Capitalism is its own practical critique, reproducing itself by constantly overcoming itself. As Marx put it, the only limit to capital is capital itself; but capital is the transgression of any and all limits. It is the way capitalism overcomes itself, its dynamic process of change, which is its unfreedom, its self-limitation. The Marxian horizon of freedom beyond capitalism is freedom beyond the Hegelian dialectic, beyond the bourgeois dialectic of transformation â beyond labor as a process of self-overcoming through production.
There thus remains a unitary metaphysics binding all social practices, dominating, constraining and distorting their further development in freedom under capitalism: the bourgeois right of labor. The form of total freedom in bourgeois emancipation â self-production in society â has become in capitalism the form of total unfreedom. The social condition for labor has become that of the self-destruction of labor in capital. The goal of labor in capital is to abolish itself; but it can do so only by realizing itself â as self-contradiction. Hegelâs ânegative labor of the conceptâ must be completed; short of that, it dominates us.
Overcoming this will mean overcoming metaphysics â overcoming philosophy. At least overcoming philosophy in any way known â or knowable â hitherto. | P
Earlier this summer, I visited Athens and made a pilgrimage to Aristotleâs Lyceum. I was struck by the idea that perhaps what I am doing in Platypus is essentially the same as what Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were doing back in Ancient Greece. Spencer and I were recently discussing the recurrent trope of Aristotle and Marx, apropos of todayâs discussion of Marxism and philosophy, and he recalled his feeling nauseous when reading Castoriadisâs famous essay on Aristotle and Marx, published in the same issue of the journal Social Research alongside Moishe Postoneâs seminal essay, âNecessity, Labor and Time.â Spencer said he had felt sick at the thought that nothing had changed since Aristotleâs time.
I recalled how Frantz Fanon wrote, in Black Skin, White Masks, that he would be happy to learn that an African philosopher had corresponded with Plato, but this wouldnât make a difference for 8 year-olds in Haiti and the Dominican Republic forced to cut sugar cane for a living. This compares well to the former Black Panther Assata Shakur, who, writing from her exile in Cuba on Black Lives Matter, referred to black Americans as âAfricans lost in America.â But are blacks any less lost in Africa today? Am I an Italian or Irish lost in America, too? I often feel that way, that my peasant ancestors were dragged into bourgeois society to ill effect, to my present misery. What would it mean not to be lost? Was I returning home, in a sense, when, as an intellectual, I returned to Aristotleâs school in Athens? Was I any less lost in Athens?
Adorno wrote, in his inaugural lecture on âThe idea of natural history,â that âI submit myself, so to speak, to the materialist dialectic.â What he meant of course was that he could only speak misleadingly of submitting himself to the materialist dialectic, as if he would not already be dominated by it, whether he was conscious of his submission or not. This reminds us of Trotskyâs statement to his recalcitrant followers who rejected Hegelianism that, âYou may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you.â
Why should we be interested in âphilosophy,â then? Adorno did not mean that he was submitting himself to Marxism as the âmaterialist dialecticâ in the sense of submitting to Marxâs thought. No. He meant, as we must mean in Platypus, that he accepted the challenge of Marxâs thought as thinking which registered a greater reality, as a challenge and call to task for Adornoâs own thinking.
Foucault wrote about his chagrin that just when one thinks one has overcome Hegel, Hegel is still there smiling back at you. This rather paranoid claim by Foucault as a mental phenomenon has a real meaning, however, which is that Hegel still speaks in some unavoidable way to our real condition. What is meant by âHegelâ here, of course, is the entirety of the alleged âMaster Narrativeâ of the Western philosophical tradition culminating in bourgeois modernity.
Engaging philosophy then, is not being told how to think, but allowing oneâs thinking to be challenged and tasked in a specific way. It is a microcosm of how society challenges and tasks our thinking, whether we are inclined to it or not.
Historical philosophers are not some âdead white malesâ the authority of whose thinking threatens to dominate our own; we do not, or at least ought not, to read philosophy in order to be told how to think. No. The philosophy that comes down to us from history is not the dead weight of the past, but it is part of that past. And the past is not dead or even really past, since past actions still act upon us in the present, whether we like it or not. Marx reminds us that, âMan makes history, but not according to conditions of his own choosing.â
We cannot avoid the past, but we are concerned with the symptomatic attempts to free ourselves from the past by trying to avoid it. Especially on the âLeft,â and especially by ostensible âMarxists.â
As Korsch reminds us, among other ways, this can take the form of trying to avoid the âphilosophicalâ aspects of Marxism.
We might recall that Korschâs essay on âMarxism and philosophy,â the background reading for today, was the very first text we read in the Platypus reading group. This was before it was called Platypus, of course, but it was still our first collective discussion of a reading as a group. Our reading was predicated on opening up, not philosophy, but rather the political foundations for Adornoâs thinking. It was meant to help lead my academic students of Adorno, not from Marxism to philosophy, but rather from philosophy to Marxism.
This is the intention of todayâs event as well: we come full circle. Perhaps indeed nothing has changed. | P
An abridged version of this article was presented at the 4th Platypus European Conference closing plenary panel discussion, “What is the Future of Socialism?,” with Boris Kagarlitsky (Institute of Globalization and Social Movements), Alex Demirovic (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation), Mark Osborne (Alliance for Workersâ Liberty; Momentum) and Hillel Ticktin (Critique journal), at Goldsmiths University in London on February 17, 2018.
The liquidation of [Marxist] theory by dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice. . . . The interrelation of both moments [of theory and practice] is not settled once and for all but fluctuates historically. . . . Those who chide theory [for being] anachronistic obey the topos of dismissing, as obsolete, what remains painful [because it was] thwarted. . . . The fact that history has rolled over certain positions will be respected as a verdict on their truth-content only by those who agree with [Friedrich] Schiller that âworld history is the world tribunal.â What has been cast aside but not absorbed theoretically will often yield its truth-content only later. It festers as a sore on the prevailing health; this will lead back to it in changed situations.
âAdorno, Negative Dialectics (1966)[1]
THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM is the future of capitalismâthe future of capitalism is the future of socialism.
Socialism is an illness of capitalism. Socialism is the prognosis of capitalism. In this respect, it is a certain diagnosis of capitalism. It is a symptom of capitalism. It is capitalismâs pathology. It recurs, returning and repeating. So long as there is capitalism there will be demands for socialism. But capitalism has changed throughout its history, and thus become conditioned by the demands for socialism. Their histories are inextricably connected and intertwined. This is still true today.
Society under capitalism in its concrete form will be conditioned by the need to realize capital. This means that society will be conditioned by the contradiction of capital. The future of socialism will be conditioned by that contradiction. This is an illness of self-contradiction of society in capitalism.
Illness
What kind of illness is capitalism?
Friedrich Nietzsche described the modern affliction of nihilism in capitalismâhe didnât use the term âcapitalismâ but described itâas an âillness, but the way pregnancy is an illness.â
Socialism is the pathology of capitalismâin terms of Marx and Engelsâs Manifesto, âcommunismâ is the âspecterâ âand capitalism is the pathology of socialism, always threatening its return. The question is the prognosis of socialismâthe prognosis of capitalism.
Capitalism is an illnessâa pathologyâof potential. We suffer from the unrealized potential of capital.
Capitalism is an imbalance of production and appropriation. It is a problem of how society produces, and how society appropriates its own production. As such it is a problem of metabolism. This is often referred to, for instance by Keynesians, as a problem of overproductionâa problem of underconsumption. But it is more self-contradictory than that. It is more than a temporary market imbalance awaiting correction, either by the state or by the market itself. Turning over the issues of production and consumption, we find that capitalism is also a problem of an overconsumption of resourcesâMarx called it the wearing-out of both the worker and natureâand an underconsumption of value, for instance in an overabundance of money without outlet as capital investment. It is also, however, an underproduction of resourcesâa wastage of nature and laborâand an overproduction of value. It is, as Marx called it, a problem of surplus-valueâof its production and consumption.
The pathology of capitalism is a metabolic disorder. As capitalism is usually addressed by contemporary commentators, it is not however a disorder of scarcity or of (over-)abundance, nor of hierarchy or of equalityâfor instance, a problem of leveling-down. But, rather, as a problem of what Marx called the âsocial metabolism,â it exhibits all of these symptoms, alternately and, indeed, simultaneously.
In the way that Nietzsche regarded capitalist modernity as an illness, but an illness the way pregnancy is an illness, it is not to be cured in the sense of something to be eliminated, but successfully gone through, to bring forth new life.
Is it a chronic or an acute condition? Capitalism is not well analogized to cancer because that would imply that it is a terminal condition. No. Rather than socialism waiting for capitalism to die, however, the question is whether socialism is merely a fever-dream of capitalism: one which chronically recurs, occasionally, but ultimately passes in time. Capitalism is not a terminal condition but rather is itself a form of life. A pathological form of life, to be sure, but, as Nietzscheâand Christianity itselfâobserved, life itself is a form of suffering. But what if capitalism is not merely a form of lifeâhence a form of sufferingâbut also a potential form of new life beyond itself? What if the recurrent symptom of socialismâthe crisis of capitalismâis a pregnancy that we have failed to bring to term and has instead miscarried or been aborted? The goal, then, would be, not to eliminate the pregnancy of socialism in capitalism, not to try to cure the periodic crises of capitalism, but for capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism.
This would mean encouraging the health of capitalism in a certain sense. Perhaps humanity has proven too ill when undergoing capitalism to successfully give birth to socialism; but the pregnancy has been mistaken for an illness to be cured, rather than what it actually was, a symptom of potential new life in the process of emerging.
Past Marxists used the metaphor of ârevolution as the midwife of history,â and they used this very precisely. Socialist revolution would make socialism possible, but would not bring forth socialism ready-made. An infantâmoreover one that is not yet bornâis not a mature form of life.
These are the stakes of properly recognizing capitalism for what it isâthe potential for socialism. If we mistake capitalism for an illness to be eliminated, then we undergo its pathology periodically, but fail to bring forth the new life that capitalism is constantly generating from within itself. The point then would be, not to avoid capitalism, not to avoid the pregnancy of socialism, but to allow capitalism to give birth to socialism. Bourgeois ideology denies that there is a new form of life beyond itselfâthat there is socialism beyond capitalismâand so seeks to terminate the pregnancy, to cure the ailment of capitalism, to eliminate the potential that is mistaken for a disease, whether thatâs understood as infection by a foreign body, or a metabolic imbalance to be restored. But capitalism is not a malignant tumor but an embryo. The recurrent miscarriage of socialism, however, makes capitalism appear as a tumor, more or less benign, so long as it passesâor is extracted or otherwise extirpated.
As a cancer, capitalism appears as various kinds of cancer cells running rampant at the expense of the social body: whether of underclass criminals, voracious middle classes, plutocratic capitalists, or wild âpopulistâ (or even âfascistâ) masses, all of whom must be tamped down if not eliminated entirely in order to restore the balanced health of the system. But capitalism does not want to be healthy in the sense of return to homeostasis, but wants to overcome itselfâwants to give birth to socialism. Will we allow it?
For this would mean supporting the pregnancyâseeing the symptoms through to their completion, and not trying to stop or cut them short.
Diagnosis
What is the prognosis of socialism?
Socialism is continuous with the ârights of human beings and citizens,â according to the principles of âliberty, equality and fraternity,â that âall men are created equal,â with âinalienable rightsâ of âlife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.â Socialism seeks to realize the bourgeois principle of the âfree association of producers,â in which each is provided âaccording to his needâ while contributing âaccording to his ability.â The question is how capitalism makes this both possible and impossible, and what it would take to overcome its impossibility while realizing its possibility.
Moishe Postone, in his 2006 essay on âTheorizing the Contemporary World: Brenner, Arrighi, Harveyââa companion-piece to his other well-known essay from 2006, âHistory and Helplessnessââgrasped this contradiction of our time as that between islands of incipient post-proletarian life surrounded by seas of superfluous humanityâpostmodernist post-humanism and religious fundamentalist defense of human dignity, in a world simultaneously of both post-proletarian cities of abundance and sub-proletarian slums of scarcity.
Peter Frase, in an early foundational article for the Democratic Socialists of Americaâs Jacobin magazine in 2011, wrote of the âFour Possible Futuresââthis was later expanded into the 2016 book subtitled âLife after Capitalismââon the supposed âinevitable endâ of capitalism in four potential outcomes: either in the âcommunism of abundance and egalitarianism;â the ârentism of hierarchy and abundance;â the âsocialism of egalitarianism and scarcity;â or the âexterminism of hierarchy and scarcity.â The future was supposed to lie between two axes of contradiction: egalitarianism vs. hierarchy; and scarcity vs. abundance.
Unlike Postoneâwho, like Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek around the same moment, grasped the simultaneous existence of postmodernism and fundamentalism as two sides of the same coin of late capitalismâFrase neglects the dialectical proposition that all four of his âpossible futuresâ will come trueâindeed, that all four are already the case in capitalism. They are not merely in the process of coming true, but have been the actual condition of capitalism throughout its history, ever since its inception in the Industrial Revolution. There has been the coexistence of hierarchy and egalitarianism and of scarcity and abundance, and each has been the precondition for itsâdialecticalâopposite.
One could say that this has been the case since the early emergence of bourgeois society itselfâthat capitalist contradiction was always the caseâor, indeed, since the beginning of civilization itself. One could say that this has been the condition of âclass society as a whole,â the condition of the existence of a âsocial surplusâ throughout history.
This is the perspective of Alain Badiouâs âcommunist hypothesis,â for example. Badiou has mobilized a rather literal reading of Marx and Engelsâs Communist Manifesto, and a straightforward, if rather naĂŻve, interpretation of communism or socialism from Babeufâs âconspiracy of equalsâ onwardsâindeed perhaps all the way back from Jesus and His Apostles onwards. âCommunismââin Peter Fraseâs terms, âegalitarian abundanceââis the âland of milk and honey,â where the âlast shall be first, and the first shall be last.â
Capitalism, understood undialectically, then, is, by contrast, the exterminism of rentism, the inhumanity of exploitation, in which scarcity and hierarchy rule through elite appropriation of the surplus. But this has been true since the dawn of civilization, since the beginningâin terms of Engelsâs clever footnote to the Manifestoâs assertion that âhistory is the history of class struggleââof ârecorded history.â
So what is different with capitalism? What has changed is the form of the social surplus: âcapital.â To say, as Marxists did, that, as the possibility for socialism, capitalism is the potential âend of prehistoryâ is to say that all of history is the history of capital: the history of civilization has been the development of the social surplus, until it has finally taken the form of capital.
Ancient civilizations were based on a specific kind of social surplus, however. The surplus of grain beyond subsistence produced by peasant agriculture allowed for activity other than farming. Peasants could tighten their belts to feed the priests rather than lose the Word of God, and so that some knights could protect them from the heathen. But for us to return to the religious basis of civilization would also mean embracing values quite foreign to the bourgeois ethos of work, such as that âthe sick are blessed,â with the divine truth of the vanity of life, whereas we rightly consider sickness to be a curseâat the very least the curse of unemployability in society.
So what is the social surplus of capital? According to Marx, capital is the surplus of labor. It is also, however, the source of possibilities for employment in production: the source of social investment. Does this make it the source of hierarchy or of equality, of scarcity or of abundance, of post-humanism or of ontologicalâfundamentalâhumanity? It is the source of all these different apparently opposed values. It is their common condition. It is society itself, albeit in âalienatedâ form. As such, it is also the source of societyâs possible change.
Socialism aims at the realization of the potential of society. But it will be achievedâor notâon the basis of capitalism, under conditions of capital. The social surplus of capital is the source of potential societal change, of new forms of productionâmanifold new forms of human activity, in relation to others, to Nature, and to ourselves. Changes in capital are changes in our social relations. Capital is a social relation.
Capital is the source of endless new forms of social scarcity and new forms of social abundanceâof new forms of social expropriation and of social productionâas well as of new forms of social hierarchy and of new forms of social equality. Capital is the source of all such changes in society over the course of the last two centuries, since the Industrial Revolution.
Hillary Clinton, in an interview during her failed campaign for President of the U.S., said that what keeps her âawake at nightâ is the problem of figuring out policy that will encourage the investment of capital to produce jobs. Indeed, this is precisely what motivated Trumpâsâsuccessfulâcampaign for President as well. Interestingly, it is unclear whether this is what properly motivated Bernie Sanders as an alternative to Clinton, or if this now motivates Jeremy Corbyn as the head of the U.K. Labour Party. In the case of Corbyn and Sanders, it seems that they have been motivated less by the problem of capital and labor than by a more nebulous concern for âsocial justiceââregardless of the latterâs real possibilities in capitalism. In the U.K., for example, Theresa Mayâs âRed Toryismââby prioritizing the circumstance of the âBritish worker,â like Trumpâs stated priority for the âAmerican workerââis actually more realistic, even if it presently has a rather limited organized political base. Corbyn, as a veteran New Leftist âsocial justice warrior,â is actually closer to the criteria of neoliberal politics than May, whose shifting Conservative Party is not (yet) able to support her agenda. By contrast, it is a solidly neoliberal Blairite Labour Party that Corbyn leads. But Brexit, and the crisis of the EU that it expressed, is changing the landscape. May is still, however, leading the way. As is, of course, Trump.
In this sense, the issue of socialism was closer to the actual concerns of Clinton and Trump than to Sanders. Sanders offered to his followers the Obama Presidency that never was, of a ânew New Dealâ that is never going to be. By contrast, both Clinton and Trump were prepared to move on from the 2008 economic crisis: How to make good of the crisis of neoliberalism, now a decade old? For every crisis is an opportunity for capitalism. This is what must be the concern of politics.
This is the ageless question of capitalism: How is society going to make use of its crisis of overproduction, its surplus in capitalâits surplus of labor? How are the social possibilities of capital going to be realized? What is the actual potential for society in capitalism?
Of course, the narrow horizons of the perspectives of both Clinton and Trump and of May for realizing the potentials of capitalism are less appealing than the apparent idealism of Corbyn and Sanders. But, realistically, it must be admitted that the best possible outcomeâwith the least disruption and dangerâfor U.S. and thus global capitalism at present would have been realized by a Clinton Presidency. If Trumpâs election appears to be a scary nightmare, a cruise into the unknown with a more or less lunatic at the helm, then, by contrast, a Sanders Presidency was merely a pipe-dream, a safe armchair exercise in idealism. Today, the stock market gambles that, whatever Trumpâs gaffes, the Republican Party remains in charge. The captain, however wild-eyed, cannot actually make the ship perform other than its abilities. The question is whether one trusts a CEO trying to build the company by changing it, or one trusts the shareholders who donât want to risk its profitability. Trump is not a safe bet. But he does express the irrepressible impulse to change. The only question is how.
Prognosis
So the question of the future of socialism is one of potential changes in capitalism. The question is how capitalism has already been changingâand will continue to change.
What seems clear is that capitalism, at least as it has been going on for the past generation of neoliberalism, will not continue exactly the same as it has thus far. There has been a crisis and there will be a change. Brexit and the fall of David Cameron as well as Trumpâs victory and Hillaryâs defeatâthe successful challenge by Sanders and the rise of Corbyn alongside Mayâs Premiershipâcannot all be chalked up to the mere accidental mistakes of history.
In the face of historical change, continuity must be reckoned withâprecisely as the basis for this change. How is neoliberal capitalism changing out of its crisis?
Neoliberalism is old and so is at least in need of renewal. The blush has gone off the rose. Its heroic days are long behind us. Obama rallied it to a certain extent, but Hillary was unable to do so again. The Republicans might be stuck in vintage 1980s Reaganism, but Trump is dragging them out of it. In the face of Trump, the question has been posed: But arenât we all good neoliberals? Not only Nancy Pelosi has said that, all respect to Bernie, we need not try to become socialists but remain capitalists. The mainstream Republican contender Marco Rubio said the same about Trump, while Ted Cruz retired to fight another day, against what he indicatively called Trumpâs âsocialism.â But the Tea Party is over. Now, the specter of âfascismâ in the crisis of neoliberalismâwhich, we must remember, regards any and all possible alternatives to itself as more or less fascistâis actually the specter of socialism.
But what does the actual hope for socialism look like today? Does it inevitably appear as nationalism, only with a difference of style? Must the cosmopolitanism of capitalism take either the form of unmediated globalization (which has never in fact existed) or rather inter-nationalism, relations between nations? These apparent alternatives in themselves show the waning of neoliberal optimismâthe decline of Clintonâs âglobal village.â We are now livingâby contrast with the first Clinton era of the 1990sâin the era of neoliberal pessimism, in which all optimism seems reckless and frightening by comparison: Hillaryâs retort that âAmerica is great already!â raised against Trumpâs âMake America Great Again!â Trump was critical of, and quite pessimistic about, existing conditions, but optimistic against Hillaryâs political pessimismâto which Hillary and Obama could only say that things arenât so bad as to justify (either Sanders or) Trump.
Were the Millennials by contrast too optimistic to accept Hillaryâs sober pragmatismâor were they so pessimistic as to eschew all caution of Realpolitik and embrace Sanders and Corbyn? Have they clung, after the election of Trump, now, to the shreds of lip-service to their concerns, as the best that they could hope for? Does Sandersâlike Corbyn in the U.K.âmerely say, better than Hillary or Obama, what they want to hear? By comparison, Hillary and Trump have been a salutary dose of realityâwhich is bitterly resented. Obama was the âchange we can believe inââmeaning: very little if any. Clinton as the continuation of Obama was the sobriety of low-growth ârealism.â Now Trump is the reality of changeâwhether we like it or not. But it is in the name of the optimism for growth: âJobs, jobs, jobs.â
The problem of capitalismâthe problem that motivates the demand for socialismâis that of managing and realizing the possibilities of a global workforce. This is in fact the reality of all politics, everywhere. All countries depend on international and, indeed, global trade, including the circulation of workers and their wages. Even the âHermit Kingdomâ of North Korea depends not only on goods in trade but on remittances from its workers abroad. This issue of the global workforce is the source of the problem of migrationâthe migration of workers. For instance, wars are waged with the problem of refugees foremost in mind. Political crisis seeks alleviation in either benign ways such as the âbrain drainâ of the emigrating middle-class, or malignantly in ethnic cleansingâin either case the exodus of restive surplus populations that cannot be integrated. International aid as well as military intervention is calculated in effects on migration: how to prevent a refugee crisis? The U.S. has paid countries such as Egypt and Pakistan to subsidize their unemployed through bloated militaries. What is to be done with all those seeking work? Where will they find a job? It is a global problem.
Capital is the social form of this surplus of laborâthe social surplus of production. Capital is the way society tries to manage and realize the potential of that surplus. But the source of that surplus is no longer so much human activityâlaborâas it is science and technology. The problem is that, politically, we have no way of marshaling this surplus other than through possibilities for laborâfor instance, through managing nation-states as labor markets. The question is realizing the potential possibilities of the social surplus beyond the reproduction of an increasingly redundant laboring workforce. Will they be starved or exterminated? Or will they be freed?
The only alternatives capitalism offers is in freedom to workânot the worst form of freedom the world has ever known, but its possibilities in capitalism are increasingly narrow. The question is the freedom from work. How will this be realized? There has been mounting evidence of this problem ever since the Industrial Revolution: unemployment. Social Darwinism was not a program but a rationalization for the crisis of capitalism. It remains so today. Will humanity free itself from the confines of capitalâthe limits of labor?
Future
Were Jacobinâs Peter Fraseâs four possible alternative futures merely alternatives in rhetoric? Nearly no one claims to favor exterminism, scarcity, or inequality. The real future of capitalism does not actually belong to such expressions of pessimism. Fortunately, it will be appreciably better than our worst fearsâeven if, unfortunately, it will be much worse than our best desires. Capitalism for better or worse does indeed have a future, even if it will be different from what we are now used to. It will also be different from our dreams and nightmares.
Jacobinâs Frase seems to assume that not what he calls âcommunismâ but âsocialismââthe combination of egalitarianism and scarcityâis both more possible and more desirable: for Frase, abundance carries the danger, rather, of continued capitalist ârentismâ and hierarchy. For Frase, among others, the future of social conflict seems to be posed over the terms of scarcity: equality vs. âextermination;â for instance, egalitarianism vs. racism.
Both Moishe Postoneâs and Peter Fraseâs antinomiesâof postmodernism and fundamentalism, and of scarcity and egalitarianism (the latter combination as Fraseâs formula for âsocialismâ)âare expressions of pessimism. They form the contemporary face of diminished hopes. But capitalism will not tarry over them. It will move on: it is already moving on.
What is the future of abundance, however with hierarchyâthat of continued capitalism, that is, of âcapital rentsââin society, and how does this potential task any future for socialism? Where will the demand for socialism be raised? And how is it to be realized?
We should not assume that capitalist production, however contradictory, is at an end. No. We are not at an end to forms of scarcity under conditions of abundance, or at an end to hierarchies conditioned by social equality.
Citizen Trump shows us this basic fact of life under continued capitalism.
As Walter Benjamin observed in conversation with Bertolt Brecht during the blackest hour of fascism at the midnight of the last century, we must begin not with the âgood old daysââwhich were in fact never so goodâbut with the âbad new ones.â We must take the bad with the good; we must take the good with the bad.
We must try to make good on the reality of capitalism. As Benjamin put it, we must try to redeem its otherwise horrific sacrifices, which indeed are continuous with those of all of civilization. Historyâthe demand for socialismâtasks us with its redemption.
The future of capitalism is the future of socialismâthe future of socialism is the future of capitalism.
Addendum
Perhaps capitalism is the illness of bourgeois society, and socialism is the potential new form of life beyond the pregnancy of capitalism. Bourgeois society does not always appear as capitalism, but does so only in crisis. We oscillate in our politics not between capitalism and socialism but between bourgeois ideology and anti-capitalismânowadays usually of the cultural ethno-religious fundamentalist communitarian and identitarian type: forms of anti-bourgeois ideology. But socialism was never, for Marxism at least, simply anti-capitalism: it was never anti-bourgeois. It was the promise for freedom beyond that of bourgeois society. The crisis of capitalism was regarded by Marxism as the tasking of bourgeois society beyond itself by socialism. It was why Lenin called himself a Jacobin; and why Eugene Debs called the 4th of July a socialist holiday. Socialism was to be the realization of the potential of bourgeois society, which is otherwise constrained and distorted in capitalism. So long as we live in bourgeois society there will be the promiseâand taskâof socialism. |P
[1] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Seabury Press, 1973), 143â144.
The Frankfurt School approached the problem of the political failure of socialism in terms of the revolutionary subject, namely, the masses in the democratic revolution and the political party for socialism. However, in the failure of socialism, the masses had led to fascism, and the party had led to Stalinism. What was liquidated between them was Marxism or proletarian socialism; what was liquidated was the working class politically constituted as such, or, the class struggle of the working class — which for Marxists required the goal of socialism. The revolutionary political goal of socialism was required for the class struggle or even the working class per se to exist at all. For Marxism, the proletariat was a Hegelian concept: it aimed at fulfillment through self-abolition. Without the struggle for socialism, capitalism led the masses to fascism and led the political party to Stalinism. The failure of socialism thus conditioned the 20th century.
The legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is a decidedly mixed one. This variable character of 1917âs legacy can be divided between its actors — the masses and the party — and between the dates, February and October 1917.
The February 1917 revolution is usually regarded as the democratic revolution and the spontaneous action of the masses. By contrast, the October Revolution is usually regarded as the socialist revolution and the action of the party. But this distorts the history — the events as well as the actors involved. What drops out is the specific role of the working class, as distinct from the masses or the party. The soviets or workersâ and soldiersâ councils were the agencies of the masses in revolution. The party was the agency of the working class struggling for socialism. The party was meant to be the political agency facilitating the broader working classâs and the massesâ social revolution — the transformation of society — overcoming capitalism. This eliding of the distinction of the masses, the working class and the political party goes so far as to call the October Revolution the âBolshevik Revolutionâ — an anti-Communist slander that Stalinism was complicit in perpetuating. The Bolsheviks participated in but were not responsible for the revolution.
As Trotsky observed on the 20th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution in his 1937 article on âStalinism and Bolshevismâ — where he asserted that Stalinism was the âantithesisâ of Bolshevism — the Bolsheviks did not identify themselves directly with either the masses, the working class, the revolution, or the ostensibly ârevolutionaryâ state issuing from the revolution. As Trotsky wrote in his 1930 book History of the Russian Revolution, the entrance of the masses onto the stage of history — whether this was a good or bad thing — was a problem for moralists, but something Marxism had had to reckon with, for good or for ill. How had Marxists done so?
Marx had observed in the failure of the revolutions of 1848 that the result was âBonapartism,â namely, the rule of the state claiming to act on behalf of society as a whole and especially for the masses. Louis Bonaparte, who we must remember was himself a Saint-Simonian Utopian Socialist, claimed to be acting on behalf of the oppressed masses, the workers and peasants, against the capitalists and their corrupt — including avowedly âliberalâ — politicians. Louis Bonaparte benefited from the resentment of the masses towards the liberals who had put down so bloodily the rising of the workers of Paris in June 1848. He exploited the massesâ discontent.
One key reason why for Trotsky Stalinism was the antithesis of Bolshevism — that is to say, the antithesis of Marxism — was that Stalinism, unlike Bolshevism, identified itself with the state, with the working class, and indeed with the masses. But this was for Trotsky the liquidation of Marxism. It was the concession of Stalinism to Bonapartism. Trotsky considered Stalin to be a Bonapartist, not out of personal failing, but out of historical conditions of necessity, due to the failure of world socialist revolution. Stalinism, as a ruling ideology of the USSR as a ârevolutionary state,â exhibited the contradictions issuing out of the failure of the revolution.
In Marxist terms, socialism would no longer require either a socialist party or a socialist state. By identifying the results of the revolution — the one-party state dictatorship — as âsocialism,â Stalinism liquidated the actual task of socialism and thus betrayed it. Claiming to govern âdemocratic republicsâ or âpeopleâs republics,â Stalinism confessed its failure to struggle for socialism. Stalinism was an attempted holding action, but as such undermined itself as any kind of socialist politics. Indeed, the degree to which Stalinism did not identify itself with the society it sought to rule, this was in the form of its perpetual civil-war footing, in which the party was at war with societyâs spontaneous tendency towards capitalism, and indeed the party was constantly at war with its own members as potential if not actual traitors to the avowed socialist mission. As such, Stalinism confessed not merely to the on-going continuation of the ârevolutionâ short of its success, but indeed its — socialismâs — infinite deferral. Stalinism was what became of Marxism as it was swallowed up by the historical inertia of on-going capitalism.
So we must disentangle the revolution from its results. Does 1917 have a legacy other than its results? Did it express an unfulfilled potential, beyond its failure?
The usual treatment of 1917 distorts the history. First of all, we would need to account for what Lenin called the âspontaneity of spontaneity,â that is, the prior conditions for the massesâ apparent spontaneous action. In the February Revolution, one obvious point is that it manifested on the official political socialist party holiday of International Working Womenâs Day, which was a relatively recent invention by Marxists in the Socialist or Second International. So, the longstanding existence of a workersâ movement for socialism and of the international political party of that struggle for socialism was a prior condition of the apparent spontaneous outbreak of revolution in 1917. This much was obvious. What was significant, of course, was how in 1917 the masses seized the socialist holiday for revolution to topple the Tsar.
The October Revolution was not merely the planned coup dâetat by the Bolshevik Party — not alone, but in alliance, however, we must always remember, with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries or SRs. This is best illustrated by what took place between February and October, namely the July Days of 1917, in which the masses spontaneously attempted to overthrow the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks considered that action premature, both in terms of lack of preparation and more importantly the moment for it was premature in terms of the Provisional Government not yet having completely exhausted itself politically. But the Bolsheviks stood in solidarity with the masses in July, while warning them of the problems and dangers of their action. The July rising was put down by the Provisional Government, and indeed the Bolsheviks were suppressed, with many of their leading members arrested. (Lenin went into hiding — and wrote his pamphlet on The State and Revolution in his time underground.) The Bolsheviks actually played a conservative role in the July Days of 1917, in the sense of seeking to conserve the forces of the working class and broader masses from the dangers of the Provisional Governmentâs repression of their premature — but legitimate — rising.
The October Revolution was prepared by the Bolsheviks — in league with the Left SRs — after the attempted coup against the Provisional Government by General Kornilov which the masses had successfully resisted. Kornilov had planned his coup in response to the July uprising by the masses, which to him showed the weakness and dangers of the Provisional Government. As Lenin had put it at the time, explaining the Bolsheviksâ participation in the defense of the Provisional Government against Kornilov, it was a matter of âsupporting in the way a rope supports a hanged man.â Once the Provisional Government had revealed that its crucial base of support was the masses that it was otherwise suppressing, this indicated that the time for overthrowing the Provisional Government had come.
But the October Revolution was not a socialist revolution, because the February Revolution had not been a democratic revolution. The old Tsarist state remained in place, with only a regime change, the removal of the Tsar and his ministers and their replacement with liberals and moderate âsocialists,â namely the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, of whom Kerensky, who rose to the head of the Provisional Government, was a member. To put it in Leninâs terms, the February Revolution was only a regime change — the Provisional Government was merely a âgovernmentâ in the narrow sense of the word — and had not smashed the state: the âspecial bodies of armed menâ remained in place.
The October Revolution was the beginning of the process of smashing the state — replacing the previously established (Tsarist, capitalist) âspecial bodies of armed menâ with the organized workers, soldiers and peasants through the âsovietâ councils as executive bodies of the revolution, to constitute a new revolutionary, radical democratic state, the dictatorship of the proletariat.
From Lenin and the Bolsheviksâ perspective, the October Revolution was merely the beginning of the democratic revolution. Looking back several years later, Lenin judged the results of the revolution in such terms, acknowledging the lack of socialism and recognizing the progress of the revolution — or lack thereof — in democratic terms. Lenin understood that an avowedly ârevolutionaryâ regime does not an actual revolution make. 1917 exhibited this on a mass scale.
Most of the Bolsheviksâ political opponents claimed to be ârevolutionaryâ and indeed many of them professed to be âsocialistâ and even âMarxist,â for instance the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries.
The Bolsheviksâ former allies and junior partners in the October 1917 Revolution, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, broke with the Bolsheviks in 1918 over the terms of the peace the Bolsheviks had negotiated with Germany. They called for overthrowing the Bolsheviks in a âthird revolution:â for soviets, or workersâ, soldiersâ and peasantsâ councils, âwithout parties,â that is, without the Bolsheviks. — As Engels had correctly observed, opposition to the dictatorship of the proletariat was mounted on the basis of so-called âpure democracy.â But, to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, their opponents did not in fact represent a âdemocraticâ opposition, but rather the threatened liquidation of the revolutionary-democratic state and its replacement by a White dictatorship. This could come about âdemocraticallyâ in the sense of Bonapartism. The opponents of the Bolsheviks thus represented not merely the undoing of the struggle for socialism, but of the democratic revolution itself. What had failed in 1848 and threatened to do so again in 1917 was democracy.
Marx had commented that his only original contribution was discovering the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat was meant by Marxists to meet the necessity in capitalism that Bonapartism otherwise expressed. It was meant to turn the political crisis of capitalism indicated by Bonapartism into the struggle for socialism.
The issue of the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, the political rule of the working class in the struggle to overcome capitalism and achieve socialism, is a vexed one, on many levels. Not only does the dictatorship of the proletariat not mean a âdictatorshipâ in the conventional sense of an undemocratic state, but, for Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the social as well as political rule of the working class in struggling for socialism and overcoming capitalism, could be achieved only at a global scale, that is, as a function of working-class rule in at least several advanced capitalist countries, but with a preponderant political force affecting the entire world. This was what was meant by âworld socialist revolution.â Nothing near this was achieved by the Russian Revolution of 1917. But the Bolsheviks and their international comrades such as Rosa Luxemburg in Germany thought that it was practically possible.
The Bolsheviks had predicated their leading the October Revolution in Russia on the expectation of an imminent European workersâ revolution for socialism. For instance, the strike wave in Germany of 1916 that had split the Social-Democratic Party there, as well as the waves of mutinies among soldiers of various countries at the front in the World War, had indicated the impending character of revolution throughout Europe, and indeed throughout the world, for instance in the vast colonial empires held by the European powers.
This had not happened — but it looked like a real, tangible possibility at the time. It was the program that had organized millions of workers for several decades prior to 1917.
So what had the October Revolution accomplished, if not âsocialismâ or even the âdictatorship of the proletariatâ? What do we make of the collapse of the 1917 revolution into Stalinism?
As Leo Panitch remarked at a public forum panel discussion that Platypus held in Halifax on âWhat is political party for the Leftâ in January 2015, the period from the 1870s to the 1920s saw the first as well as the as-yet only time in history in which the subaltern class organized itself into a political force. This was the period of the growth of the mass socialist parties around the world of the Second International. The highest and perhaps the only result of this self-organization of the international working class as a political force was the October Revolution in Russia of 1917. The working class, or at least the political party it had constituted, took power, if however under very disadvantageous circumstances and with decidedly mixed results. The working class ultimately failed to retain power, and the party they had organized for this revolution transformed itself into the institutionalized force of that failure. This was also true of the role played by the Social-Democratic Party in Germany in suppressing the revolution there in 1918â19.
But the Bolsheviks had taken power, and they had done so after having organized for several decades with the self-conscious goal of socialism, and with a high degree of awareness, through Marxism, of what struggling towards that goal meant as a function of capitalism. This was no utopian project.
The October 1917 Revolution has not been repeated, but the February 1917 Revolution and the July Days of 1917 have been repeated, several times, in the century since then.
In this sense, from a Marxist perspective what has been repeated — and continued — was not really 1917 but rather 1848, the democratic revolution under conditions of capitalism that has led to its failure. — For Marx, the Paris Commune of 1871 had been the repetition of 1848 that had however pointed beyond it. The Paris Commune indicated both democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat, or, as Marx had put it, the possibility for the ârevolution in permanence.â 1871 reattained 1848 and indicated possibilities beyond it.
In this sense, 1917 has a similar legacy to 1871, but with the further paradox — actually, the contradiction — that the political agency, the political party or parties, that had been missing, from a Marxist perspective, leading to the failure of the Paris Commune, which in the meantime had been built by the working class in the decades that followed, had, after 1917, transformed itself into an institutionalization of the failure of the struggle for socialism, in the failure of the world revolution. That institutionalization of failure in Stalinism was itself a process — taking place in the 1920s and continuing up to today — that moreover was expressed through an obscure transformation of âMarxismâ itself: avowed âMarxistsâ (ab)used and distorted âMarxismâ to justify this institutionalization of failure. It is only in this self-contradictory sense that Marxism led to Stalinism — through its own failure. But only Marxism could overcome this failure and self-distortion of Marxism. Why? Because Marxism is itself an ideological expression of capitalism, and capitalism must be overcome on its own basis. The only basis for socialism is capitalism. Marxism, as distinct from other forms of socialism, is the recognition of this dialectic of capitalism and the potential for socialism. Capitalism is nothing other than the failure of the socialist revolution.
So the legacy of 1917, as uniquely distinct from other revolutions in the era of capitalism, beginning at least as early as in 1848 and continuing henceforth up to today, is actually the legacy of Marxism. Marxism had its origins in taking stock of the failed revolutions of 1848. 1917 was the only political success of Marxism in the classical sense of the Marxism of Marx and Engels themselves and their best followers in the Socialist or Second International such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky, but it was a very limited and qualified âsuccessâ — from Lenin and his comradesâ own perspective. And that limited success was distorted to cover over and obscure its failure, and so ended up obscuring its success as well. The indelible linking of Marxism with 1917 exhibits the paradox that its failure was the same as in 1848, but 1917 and so Marxism are important only insofar as they might point beyond that failure. Otherwise, Marxism is insignificant, and we may as well be liberals, anarchists, Utopian Socialists, or any other species of democratic revolutionaries. Which is what everyone today is — at best — anyway.
1917 needs to be remembered not as a model to be followed but in terms of an unfulfilled task that was revealed in historical struggle, a potential that was expressed, however briefly and provisionally, but was ultimately betrayed. Its legacy has disappeared with the disappearance of the struggle for socialism. Its problems and its limitations as well as its positive lessons await a resumed struggle for socialism to be able to properly judge. Otherwise they remain abstract and cryptic, lifeless and dogmatic and a matter of thought-taboos and empty ritual — including both ritual worship and ritual condemnation.
In 1918, Rosa Luxemburg remarked that 70 years of the workersâ struggle for socialism had achieved only the return to the moment of 1848, with the task of making it right and so redeeming that history. Trotsky had observed that it was only because of Marxism that the 19th century had not passed in vain.
Today, in 2017, on its hundredth anniversary, we must recognize, rather, just how and why we are so very far from being able to judge properly the legacy of 1917: it no longer belongs to us. We must work our way back towards and reattain the moment of 1917. That task is 1917âs legacy for us. | §
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.
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. | §
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:
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.
[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.
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.
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. | §
