{"id":1604,"date":"2012-09-17T00:00:22","date_gmt":"2012-09-17T05:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=1604"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:23","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:23","slug":"on-horkheimer-and-adornos-marxism-in-1956","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=1604","title":{"rendered":"On Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxism in 1956"},"content":{"rendered":"

Marxism became a \u201cmessage in a bottle\u201d — can we yet receive it?<\/h2>\n

Response to Todd Cronan’s review of Towards a New Manifesto<\/em><\/a><\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

The first version of the following essay is available here<\/a>. Posted on Facebook August 11, 2012<\/a>.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s 1956 conversation 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 Marcuse\u2019s estimation in his 1947 \u201c33 Theses\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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. .\u00a0.\u00a0. 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 Europe\u2019s .\u00a0.\u00a0. communist parties.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s conversation in Towards a New Manifesto<\/em> 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. Verso\u2019s title was not misleading: this was the time of the founding of New Left Review<\/em>, to which C. Wright Mills wrote his famous \u201cLetter to the New Left\u201d<\/a> (1960), calling for greater attention to the role of intellectuals in social-political transformation.<\/p>\n

As Adorno put the matter, \u201cI have always wanted to .\u00a0.\u00a0. develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin.\u201d Horkheimer responded laconically, \u201cWho would not subscribe to that?\u201d (103). It is necessary to understand what such statements took for granted.<\/p>\n

The emphasis on Marxism as an account of \u201cexploitation,\u201d rather than of social-historical domination<\/em>, is mistaken. Marx called \u201ccapital\u201d the domination of society by an alienated historical dynamic of value-production (M\u2013C\u2013M' [Money\u2013Commodity\u2013Money]). At stake here is the proletarianization of bourgeois society after the Industrial Revolution, or, as Luk\u00e1cs put it in History and Class Consciousness <\/em>(1923), how the fate of the workers becomes that of society as a whole. This went back to Marx and Engels in the 1840s: Engels had written a precursor to the Communist Manifesto<\/em>, a \u201cCredo\u201d<\/a> (1847), in which he pointed out that the proletariat, the working class after the Industrial Revolution, was unlike any other exploited group in history, in both its social being and consciousness. The danger was that the working class would mistake their post-Industrial Revolution condition for that of pre-industrial bourgeois society, with its ethos<\/em> of work. As the Abb\u00e9 Siey\u00e8s had put it, in his 1789 revolutionary pamphlet What is the Third Estate?<\/em><\/a>, while the Church\u2019s First Estate with its property of communion with Divinity \u201cprays,\u201d and the aristocratic Second Estate with its property of honor in noble chivalry \u201cfights,\u201d the commoner Third Estate \u201cworks,\u201d with no property other than that of labor. Bourgeois society was the result of the revolt of the Third Estate. But the separate classes of increasing numbers of workers and ever fewer capitalists were the products of the division of bourgeois society in the Industrial Revolution, over the value of the property of labor, between wages and capital. This was, according to Marx, the \u201ccrisis\u201d of bourgeois society in capital, recurrent since the 1840s.<\/p>\n

At issue is the \u201cbourgeois ideology\u201d of the \u201cfetish character of the commodity,\u201d 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<\/em> (1867), the workers exchanged, not the products of their work as with the labor of artisans, but rather their time<\/em>, the accumulated value of which is capital<\/em>, the means of production that was the private property of the capitalists. But for Marx the capitalists were the \u201ccharacter-masks of capital,\u201d 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 \u201cThe Authoritarian State\u201d<\/a> (1940), the Industrial Revolution made \u201cnot work but the workers superfluous.\u201d The question was, how had history changed since the earlier moment of bourgeois society (Adam Smith\u2019s time of \u201cmanufacture\u201d) with respect to labor and value?<\/p>\n

Adorno\u2019s 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 workers\u2019 movement was bound up. Adorno did not think that the workers were no longer exploited. See Adorno\u2019s 1942 essay \u201cReflections on Class Theory\u201d<\/a> and his 1968 speech \u201cLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?<\/a>,\u201d which he published in the U.S. under the title \u201cIs Marx Obsolete?\u201d<\/a> In \u201cReflections on Class Theory,\u201d Adorno pointed out that Marx and Engels\u2019s assertion that the entire history of civilization was one of \u201cclass struggles\u201d was actually a critique<\/em> of history as a whole; that the dialectic of history in capital was one of unfreedom<\/em>; and that only the complete dehumanization of labor was potentially its opposite, the liberation from work. \u201cLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?\u201d 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<\/em>, granted to them for political reasons, to prevent revolution. The ramifications of this process were those addressed by the split in the socialist workers\u2019 movement \u2014 in Marxism itself \u2014 that Lenin represented.<\/p>\n

The crisis of Marxism was grasped by the Frankfurt School in its formative moment of the 1920s. In \u201cThe Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom\u201d<\/a> (in D\u00e4mmerung<\/em>, 1926\u201331) Horkheimer explained how the \u201cpresent 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 don\u2019t, have a share in the creation of contemporary reality.\u201d This followed Luk\u00e1cs\u2019s History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, which prominently quoted Marx and Engels from The Holy Family <\/em>(1845)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the necessary corrective was not the feeling of this oppression, but the theoretical and practical consciousness of the historical potential for the transformation of \u201cbourgeois social relations,\u201d at a global scale: \u201cWorkers of the world, unite!\u201d This could only take place through the growth and greater accumulated historical self-awareness of the workers\u2019 movement for socialism. But the growth of the workers\u2019 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 \u201creification\u201d of bourgeois ideology in seeking to preserve the workers\u2019 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 \u201cMarxism\u201d itself, now become barbarized bourgeois ideology, the affirmation of work, rather than its dialectical Aufhebung <\/em>(negation and transcendence through fulfillment and completion).<\/p>\n

To put it in Lenin\u2019s terms, from What is to be Done?<\/em><\/a> (1902), there are two \u201cdialectically\u201d interrelated \u2014 potentially contradictory \u2014 levels of consciousness, the workers\u2019 \u201ctrade union\u201d consciousness, which remains within the horizon of capitalism, and their \u201cclass consciousness,\u201d which reveals the world-historical potential beyond capitalism. The latter, the \u201cHegelian\u201d critical self-recognition of the workers\u2019 class struggle, was the substance of Marxism: the critique<\/em> of communism as the \u201creal movement of history.\u201d As Marx put it in his celebrated 1843 letter to Ruge<\/a>, \u201cCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction .\u00a0.\u00a0. infected by its opposite, private property.\u201d And, in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts<\/em><\/a>, Marx stated unequivocally that,<\/p>\n

Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and is hence the actual <\/em>phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and rehabilitation. Communism <\/em>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Marx, communism demanded an \u201cimmanent critique\u201d according to its \u201cdialectical\u201d contradictions, heightened to adequate historical self-awareness.<\/p>\n

The issue is the potential abolition of wage-labor by the wage-laborers, the overcoming of the social principle of work by the workers. Marx\u2019s \u201cHegelian\u201d question was, how had history made this possible, in theory and practice?<\/p>\n

While Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s historical moment was not the same as Marx\u2019s or Lenin\u2019s, 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 \u201cImaginative Excesses\u201d<\/a> (orphaned from Minima Moralia<\/em> 1944\u201347 \u2014 the same time as the writing of Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em>), Adorno argued that the workers \u201cno 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmessage in a bottle\u201d they hoped could still yet be received. It is unfortunate if their conversation isn\u2019t. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published at <\/em>nonsite.org<\/a><\/strong> [PDF]<\/a> September 17, 2012.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marxism became a \u201cmessage in a bottle\u201d — can we yet receive it? Response to Todd Cronan’s review of Towards a New Manifesto Chris Cutrone The first version of the following essay is available here. Posted on Facebook August 11, 2012. Horkheimer and Adorno\u2019s 1956 conversation took place in the aftermath of the Khrushchev speech […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33,18,35,19,16],"class_list":["post-1604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-33","tag-adorno","tag-lenin","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1604"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3199,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1604\/revisions\/3199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}