{"id":230,"date":"2009-08-06T00:00:48","date_gmt":"2009-08-06T05:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=230"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:57","slug":"adorno-in-1969","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=230","title":{"rendered":"Adorno in 1969"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adorno’s Marxism and the problem and legacy of the 1960s Left in theory and practice<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Presented at the one-day conference \u201cAdorno <\/em>\u2014 40 Years On<\/em>,\u201d commemorating the 40th anniversary of Adorno’s death, University of Sussex, U.K., August 6, 2009. Prior versions were presented at the <\/em>Rethinking Marxism<\/strong> 2006 conference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, October 26, 2006, and at the University of Chicago Social Theory Workshop, October 23, 2006. <\/em>Draft: not to be cited in present form.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Introduction \u2014 pr\u00e9cis<\/em><\/h2>\n

A certain legend of the 1960s New Left has it that the Marxist critical theorist Theodor [Wiesengrund] Adorno had been hostile to student radicalism.\u00a0 This placed Adorno’s legacy for progressive politics in doubt for at least two decades after 1969.\u00a0 Adorno had defended his junior colleague J\u00fcrgen Habermas’s warning of \u201cleft fascism\u201d among 1960s student radicals, and challenged Herbert Marcuse\u2019s support for student radicalism, questioning its emancipatory character.\u00a0 Adorno\u2019s collaborator Max Horkheimer commented about the \u201960s radicalism, \u201cBut is it really so desirable, this revolution?\u201d\u00a0 Infamously, Adorno called the police to clear demonstrators from the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1969.\u00a0 Students protested that \u201cAdorno as an institution is dead.\u201d\u00a0 Some months later, while hiking on vacation, Adorno suffered a heart attack and died.<\/p>\n

Eulogizing Adorno in 1969, Habermas raised two issues for the post-1960s reception of Adorno’s work: 1.) Adorno\u2019s work was both inspiring and frustrating for the critique of modern society; and 2.) Adorno left little to suggest directions to take beyond a \u201cmeager reprise of Marxism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fredric Jameson and others began revisiting Adorno\u2019s legacy around 1989, the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to challenge the politics of \u201cpostmodernism\u201d and its relation to \u201cneo-liberal\u201d capitalism: ironically, it was the seemingly \u201cout-of-date\u201d character of Adorno\u2019s Marxism in the 1960s that now made his critical theory relevant again, after the passing of the administered, \u201cone-dimensional\u201d society of the Fordist\/welfare state.\u00a0 The controversy over Adorno since the 1960s has been over the nature and character of Adorno’s Marxism, formed in the 1920s\u201330s, which has not been given a proper account.\u00a0 For now there are two registers for the problem of recovering Adorno\u2019s Marxism: the 1960s \u201cNew\u201d Left; and the 1920s\u201330s \u201cOld\u201d Left, obscured behind the \u201960s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Habermas, \u201ccalling into his master\u2019s open grave\u201d<\/h2>\n

Soon after Adorno died in 1969, Habermas wrote a eulogy to him titled \u201cThe Primal History of Subjectivity \u2014 Self-Affirmation Gone Wild.\u201d\u00a0 The title itself says quite a bit.\u00a0 Habermas took this opportunity to offer a critique indicative of the problems in the reception of Adorno\u2019s work in the 1960s.\u00a0 It was as if Adorno had represented something of the block with which one was always struggling but failing to overcome.<\/p>\n

For Habermas, Adorno was exemplary of \u201cthe bourgeois subject, apprehended in the process of disappearance,\u201d \u201cwhich is still for itself, but no longer in itself.\u201d\u00a0 Habermas introduced Adorno\u2019s character in order to explain the possibility for real insights \u2014 but also \u201cenchanting analyses:\u201d<\/p>\n

In psychological terms .\u00a0.\u00a0. Adorno never accepted the alternatives of remaining childlike or growing up. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 In him there remained vivid a stratum of earlier experiences and attitudes.\u00a0 This sounding board reacted hyper-sensitively to a resistant reality, revealing the harsh, cutting, wounding dimensions of reality itself.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this characterization, Habermas rehearsed the idea that Adorno, as a last \u201cMandarin\u201d intellectual, was grounded in an earlier historical epoch, the liberal capitalism of the 19th century.\u00a0 However, this fails to consider that the formative experiences for Adorno\u2019s thought were those that defined 20th century history.<\/p>\n

Habermas concluded Adorno\u2019s \u201caid [had been] indispensable\u201d to understanding the \u201csituation\u201d of the present.\u00a0 Habermas was anxious to defend Adorno against the criticisms of some of his more \u201cimpatient\u201d students in 1969 \u2014 for, as Habermas put it, \u201cthey do not realize all that they are incapable of knowing in the present state of affairs.\u201d\u00a0 This was the basis for Habermas\u2019s defense of the \u201crational core\u201d of Adorno\u2019s critical theory.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll that they are incapable of knowing\u201d \u2014 for Habermas, Adorno\u2019s critical theory had failed to render the social world of 1969 critically intelligible.\u00a0 At best, Adorno\u2019s work brought to manifest and acute presentation what had yet to be understood; at worst, it contributed to false understanding, that \u201cthe theory that apprehended the totality of society as untrue would actually be a theory of the impossibility of theory.\u00a0 The material content of the theory of society would then also be relatively meager, a reprise of the Marxist doctrine.\u201d\u00a0 For Habermas, Marx\u2019s critical theory of capitalism might have been adequate to its 19th century moment, but had become outdated.<\/p>\n

The \u201cmeager reprise of Marxism\u201d \u2014 this was Habermas\u2019s way of addressing the theoretical tradition from which Adorno\u2019s thought originated, and which was experiencing a certain (if ambiguous) renaissance during the final years of Adorno\u2019s life: the \u201cNew\u201d Left.\u00a0 For the late 1960s saw the beginning of the last important \u201creturn to Marx,\u201d which regained the saliency of Adorno\u2019s critical theory, even if this was confronted by the demand from his students not only for social theory<\/em> but, more emphatically, for social transformation <\/em>and emancipation<\/em>.\u00a0 Cautioning against the conclusion that Adorno\u2019s critical theory had resigned from the task of social emancipation, Habermas wrote that \u201cafter Adorno\u2019s opening talk to the sixteenth German Congress of Sociology in 1968 on \u2018Late Capitalism or Industrial Society\u2019 [translated and published in English that same year in the journal Diogenes<\/em> under the title \u201cIs Marx Obsolete?\u201d], one could not maintain this [criticism of Adorno] in the same fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Habermas added that \u201cthe point [of this criticism] remains.\u201d\u00a0 Habermas cited contemporary criticism of Adorno, for instance by Adorno\u2019s student Albrecht Wellmer, of<\/p>\n

the danger that arises when the dialectic of enlightenment is misunderstood as a generalization[,] in the field of [the] philosophy of history[,] of the critique of political economy[,] and tacitly substituted for it.\u00a0 Then .\u00a0.\u00a0. the critique of the instrumental spirit can serve as the key to a critique of ideology, to a depth hermeneutics[,] that starts from arbitrary objectifications of the damaged life, that is self-sufficient and no longer in need of an empirical development of social theory.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Such a misunderstanding was one into which, however, Habermas maintained, \u201cAdorno never let himself fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

Habermas did object to the fact that it \u201cwas [seemingly] sufficient for [Adorno] to bring in a little too precipitously the analyses handed down from Marx,\u201d adding that \u201cAdorno was never bothered by political economy.\u201d\u00a0 Habermas resolved that \u201cthe decodifying of the objective spirit by ideology critique, to which Adorno had turned all his energy in such a remarkable way, can be easily confused with a theory of late-capitalist society,\u201d a theory to whose lack Habermas attributed the problems and character of social discontents and rebellion in 1969 \u2014 \u201call that they are incapable of knowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Habermas expressed sympathy with the gesture of Adorno\u2019s student who had \u201ccalled into his master\u2019s open grave, [that] \u2018He practiced an irresistible critique of the bourgeois individual, and yet he was himself caught within its ruins\u2019.\u201d\u00a0 Habermas ventured \u201cthat praxis miscarries may not be attributed to the historical moment alone.\u201d\u00a0 Instead, Habermas considered \u201cthe imperfection of [Adorno\u2019s Marxist] theory,\u201d and wished to caution against any possible direct appropriation of Adorno\u2019s work, what could only be a \u201cmeager reprise\u201d of Marxism.<\/p>\n

However, thought-figures seeking to elaborate Marx\u2019s critique of social modernity \u2014 capital \u2014 permeate literally every phrase in Adorno\u2019s corpus.\u00a0 To grasp this requires more direct attention to the formative moment of Adorno\u2019s thought than has been attempted.<\/p>\n

The origins of Adorno\u2019s Marxism<\/h2>\n

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 was the formative event of the 20th century.\u00a0 The emancipatory moment of the Russian Revolution was the lodestar for all subsequent Marxism.\u00a0 From a decade after 1917, in Horkheimer\u2019s late Weimar Republic-era writings [from D\u00e4mmerung<\/em> (1926\u201331)], we read that,<\/p>\n

The moral character of a person can be infallibly inferred from his response to certain questions. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 In 1930 the attitude toward Russia casts light on people\u2019s thinking. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 I do not claim to know where the country is going; there is undoubtedly much misery. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 [But] [a]nyone who has the eyes to see will view events in Russia as the continuing painful attempt to overcome [the] terrible social injustice [of the imperialist world].\u00a0 At the very least, he will ask with a throbbing heart whether it is still under way. .\u00a0.\u00a0.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When Kant received the first news of the French Revolution [of 1789], he is said to have changed the direction of his customary stroll from then on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1919 Horkheimer had been in Munich during the short-lived Munich Council\/Soviet Republic that was inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, and he had to flee from the violence of its counterrevolutionary suppression.\u00a0 The trajectory of revolution, counterrevolution and reaction, of world war and civil war, formed the substance of the concerns of Marxism in the 20th century, including that of the Frankfurt School.<\/p>\n

At the time of the October Revolution, Adorno (b. 1903) was 14 years old.\u00a0 He did not experience directly the radicalization that the German defeat in the war brought in 1918\u201319, as, for instance, Horkheimer and Marcuse had.\u00a0 During this time the teenage Adorno was still living in his relatively quiescent hometown of Frankfurt, being tutored in philosophy by his family\u2019s friend Siegfried Kracauer, with whom he discussed Kant\u2019s Critique of Pure Reason<\/em>.<\/p>\n

However, Adorno became the thinker in Frankfurt School Critical Theory whose work most consistently incorporates the concerns and critically reflects upon the legacy of the emancipatory potential expressed by the moment of 1917\u201319; such concerns and reflections were sustained in Adorno\u2019s work through his very last writings of 1968\u201369.<\/p>\n

The writings of Adorno\u2019s last year, [1968\u201369,] the time of the climax and crisis of the 1960s \u201cNew\u201d Left, help to define and evaluate the terms of the late reception of Adorno\u2019s work, after his death.\u00a0 The politics informing Adorno\u2019s work is obscured behind the 1960s, for Adorno\u2019s Marxism was formulated in the 1920s\u201330s, the period of social and political crisis in the wake of the revolutions of 1917\u201319.<\/p>\n

The Bolshevik Revolution and the radicalism of its historical moment had prompted a \u201creturn to Marx\u201d in the early 1920s whose most brilliant expositions were made by Georg Luk\u00e1cs in History and Class Consciousness <\/em>(1923) and Karl Korsch in \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d (1923).\u00a0 Both these sought to recover the critical intent and purchase of Marx\u2019s theory and politics in the aftermath of the collapse of international Social Democracy with WWI and the failure of international anticapitalist revolution in 1917\u201319.\u00a0 Their work, inspired by and picking up from the radical Left of pre-war international Social Democracy that informed the Bolshevik Revolution, the politics of both the Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxemburg\u2019s Spartacists, provided the departure for subsequent, \u201cFrankfurt School\u201d critical theory.\u00a0 The ultimate failure of the anticapitalist revolution that had opened most fully in Russia, but also manifested significantly elsewhere, prompted critical reflection on the social-emancipatory content of Marxist politics, in hope of its further development.\u00a0 However, because of the contrast of such radically searching work with the stifling repression of Stalinist reaction in Russia under the rubric of \u201corthodoxy\u201d, this critical Marxism came to be known by the misnomer of \u201cWestern\u201d Marxism.\u00a0 Beginning in the 1920s\u201330s, and extending through the 1960s, Adorno\u2019s work sought to sustain this critical \u201creturn to Marx\u201d in the period of triumphant counterrevolution that characterized the high 20th century.<\/p>\n

In this period, Marxism itself became an affirmative ideology of reactionary, \u201cadvanced\u201d capitalism, for its emancipatory content \u2014 and hence its profoundest critique of modern society \u2014 was lost.\u00a0 Just as Marx\u2019s thought originated in the attempt at the progressive critique of the Left of the 19th century, Adorno\u2019s thought, his sustained engagement with the critical theory of 20th century capitalism, necessarily pursued the immanent critique of Marxism, to register the disparity between theory and practice, not only how Marxism had failed, but how it might yet point beyond itself.<\/p>\n

The \u201creturn to Marx\u201d that occurred in the two periods of the 1920s\u201330s and the 1960s\u201370s can be characterized well by referring to certain seminal statements, such as found in writings by Korsch from the early 1920s, and by C. Wright Mills, Martin Nicolaus, and Leszek Kolakowski from the 1960s.\u00a0 Bringing these into communication with Adorno\u2019s work from the 1960s illuminates the social-political desiderata of Adorno\u2019s Marxism through his very last writings and helps situate Adorno\u2019s Marxism and the state of its legacy today to the extent that we might recognize the history for problems of any possible \u201cLeft\u201d for our present in Adorno\u2019s critical prognosis on the 1960s.<\/p>\n

The \u201cNew\u201d Left of the 1960s (1): motivations for a return to Marx<\/h2>\n

In 1960, [C. Wright] Mills wrote a letter to the newly founded British journal New Left Review<\/em>, <\/em>delivering a series of suggestions and caveats to the younger generation of self-styled Leftists.\u00a0 Mills accounted for the emergence of a \u201cNew\u201d Left in the crisis of liberalism, at the levels both of ideology and practical politics, manifesting in a combination of what he termed the \u201cliberal rhetoric and conservative default\u201d that amounted to political \u201cirresponsibility.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, directing his comments specifically to his British readers and their Labor Party, Mills took issue with the attenuated politics of contemporary socialism\/social democracy, afflicted by, as he termed it, a \u201clabor metaphysic.\u201d\u00a0 The politics of this \u201clabor metaphysic,\u201d while apparently privileging the working class as \u201cthe<\/em> historic agency of change,\u201d in actuality treated the workers merely as \u201cThe Necessary Lever,\u201d really the object and not, as was claimed, the subject of socialist politics. So what would<\/em> be the adequate \u201csubject\u201d of emancipatory politics?\u00a0 For Mills, it was precisely discontented consciousness, in the ideological forms it takes.\u00a0 For this reason, Mills\u2019s greatest ire was reserved for \u201cend of ideology\u201d Cold War liberalism (and social democracy).\u00a0 Mills castigated \u201cend of ideology\u201d writers like apostate Marxist (and Adorno\u2019s former research assistant) Daniel Bell for their \u201cattack on Marxism .\u00a0.\u00a0. in the approved style.\u201d\u00a0 Citing Marx repeatedly throughout his \u201cLetter,\u201d Mills encouraged his readers to the return to Marx, if not to \u201cVulgar Marxism.\u201d\u00a0 Most remarkably, Mills inveighed in favor of the most radical politics of 20th century Marxism:<\/p>\n

Forget Victorian Marxism [i.e., the late 19th century Marxism of social democracy], except whenever you need it; and read Lenin again (be careful) \u2014 Rosa Luxemburg, too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The thrust of Mills\u2019s \u201cLetter\u201d is its emphasis on the importance of ideology for Leftist politics.\u00a0 Mills\u2019s acute term for this was \u201cutopianism.\u201d\u00a0 Mills suggested attention to the forms of discontent that had manifested in the post-WWII period, which he found among \u201cintellectuals.\u201d\u00a0 It was in this spirit that Mills encouraged reconsideration of prior generations of radicalized intellectuals, such as the Marxists Luxemburg and Lenin, against the quiescent \u201clabor metaphysic\u201d of the late \u201cVulgar Marxism\u201d in Western Social Democracy and Soviet-inspired Communism that had become uncritical, and hence implicated in political \u201cirresponsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

The recognition of the importance of critical<\/em> consciousness had been formative for the thinkers like Adorno in the 1920s\u201330s.\u00a0 As pointed out by the historian of the Frankfurt Institute Helmut Dubiel [in Theory and Politics<\/em> (1978)], as regards the role of consciousness, there had been no difference between Luxemburg and Lenin.\u00a0 From early on, the Frankfurt School critical theorists shared this perspective with their more directly political Marxist forebears:<\/p>\n

[The] ascription of a continuum \u2014 that is, of a mediated identity \u2014 between proletarian class consciousness and socialist theory \u2014 united even such [apparently] divergent positions as those of Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 Georg Luk\u00e1cs formulated this conception in History and Class Consciousness<\/em> (1923).\u00a0 Although this idea was traditionally held by the socialist intelligentsia .\u00a0.\u00a0. [this] speculative identity of class consciousness and social theory formed the self-consciousness of those socialist intellectuals who were not integrated into the SPD [German Social-Democratic Party] and KPD [German Communist Party] in the 1920s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By comparison, the Marxist \u201corthodoxy\u201d of both Stalinized international Communism and rump, post-WWI Social Democracy became ensnared in the antinomy presented by the contradiction \u2014 the important, constitutive non-identity \u2014 of social being and consciousness, practice and theory (or, as in debates around historic Bolshevism, spontaneity and organization), whose dialectic had motivated the critical consciousness of practice for Marx, as well as for the radicals in pre-1914 Social Democracy like Luxemburg and Lenin.\u00a0 Marxists had become stuck on the question of why the workers were not making the revolution.\u00a0 But, as Karl Korsch put it in \u201cMarxism and Philosophy\u201d (1923),<\/p>\n

As scientific socialism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels remains the inclusive whole of a theory of social revolution .\u00a0.\u00a0. a materialism whose theory comprehended the totality of society and history, and whose practice overthrew it. .\u00a0.\u00a0. \u00a0The difference [now] is that the various components of [what for Marx and Engels was] the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice are further separated out. .\u00a0.\u00a0. \u00a0The umbilical cord has been broken.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Left is tasked with discovering the basis for its own discontents.\u00a0 Usually, this has taken the form of imputing interests to classes, but in the 20th century this became an evasion and abdication of critical consciousness, and Marxism became an affirmative ideology for society based on and social existence justified through \u201clabor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the thinkers who tried to break out of this quandary of self-understanding for critical consciousness that beset \u201corthodox\u201d Marxism in the 20th century was the dissident Polish Marxist philosopher Leszek Kolakowski.\u00a0 Their critical Marxist dissidence came after the crisis of international Communism in 1956 that had come with the Khrushchev \u201crevelations\u201d of Stalin\u2019s crimes, and with the suppression of the Hungarian revolt (in which Marxist radicals of the preceding generation like Luk\u00e1cs had also participated).<\/p>\n

Kolakowski\u2019s essay \u201cThe Concept of the Left\u201d (1968) emphasizes the productive role of ideology for the Left, stating that<\/p>\n

The concept of the Left remains unclear to this day. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 Society cannot be divided into a Right and a Left. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The Left must define itself on the level of ideas .\u00a0.\u00a0. the Left must be defined in intellectual and not class terms.\u00a0 This presupposes that intellectual life is not and cannot be an exact replica of class interests. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The Left .\u00a0.\u00a0. takes an attitude of permanent revisionism toward reality .\u00a0.\u00a0. the Left strives to base its prospects on the experience and evolutionary tendencies of history [rather than] capitulation toward the situation of the moment.\u00a0 For this reason the Left can have a political ideology. .\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0 The Left is always to the left in certain respects with relation to some political movements .\u00a0.\u00a0. the Left is the fermenting factor in even the most hardened mass of the historical present.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Against the naturalization of \u201cclass interests\u201d Kolakowski maintained that it was not society that was divided into Right and Left but ideology<\/em>.\u00a0 Kolakowski recognized the Left as the critical element in progressive politics at the level of consciousness, and as such destined to remain always a spirited \u201cminority.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such recovery of the essentially critical, intellectually provocative role of the Left was motivated precisely by the attempt to see beyond the \u201cpresent,\u201d and conditioned by Kolakowski\u2019s recognition that Soviet Communism had long since become implicated and responsible for the status quo.\u00a0 The reconsideration of Marx that could be motivated through the emphasis on ideology, on the critical aspects of his work for provoking consciousness of unfulfilled emancipatory potential, was marked by the writings of dissident French Communist Louis Althusser and others such as Andr\u00e9 Gorz and Martin Nicolaus, those who had been termed (for instance by the president of the U.S. Students for a Democratic Society Carl Oglesby) \u201cneo-Marxists.\u201d\u00a0 Modern Marxism, to remain critical, was tasked with pursuing recognition of its constitutive conditions, the conditions of possibility for critical social consciousness.<\/p>\n

Nicolaus\u2019s 1968 essay on \u201cThe Unknown Marx\u201d (1968) sought to recover neglected aspects of Marx\u2019s thought on the basis of the Grundrisse<\/em>, a collection of unpublished writings from Marx\u2019s notebooks that had garnered little substantial attention.\u00a0 Nicolaus arrayed Marx\u2019s mature writings such as Capital<\/em>, using the Grundrisse<\/em> to inform his approach, against interpretations derived primarily from Marx\u2019s more influential early writings such as the Manifesto of the Communist Party<\/em>, and concluded that \u201cthe most important Marxist political manifesto remains to be written.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cNew\u201d Left of the 1960s (2): the political and intellectual pitfalls of post-Marxism<\/h2>\n

Examples of the similar kinds of obscuring of the social-emancipatory content of Marxian critical theory, and the blind alleys in which contemporary Marxists had found themselves can be drawn from writings of the late 1960s by Adorno\u2019s colleague Herbert Marcuse.\u00a0 For instance, \u201cThe End of Utopia\u201d begins with a broadside against Marx, that<\/p>\n

Marx says .\u00a0.\u00a0. that the only thing that can happen .\u00a0.\u00a0. is for labor to be organized as rationally as possible and reduced as much as possible.\u00a0 But it remains labor in and of the realm of necessity and thereby unfree.\u00a0 I believe that one of the new possibilities, which gives an indication of the qualitative difference between the free and the unfree society, is that of letting the realm of freedom appear within the realm of necessity \u2014 in labor and not only beyond labor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Marcuse was influenced here by Schiller\u2019s account of the \u201cplay drive:\u201d work was to become play.)\u00a0 Thus Marcuse\u2019s articulation expresses precisely the kind of \u201clabor metaphysic\u201d about which Mills had warned, the political incoherence that manifested with the attenuation of historical agencies of social change like the socialist working class movement \u2014 and the dearth of political imagination that Nicolaus marked, what stood in need of commensuration with Marx\u2019s mature insights into the implications of the surplus-value dynamic of capitalism found in the Grundrisse<\/em>.\u00a0 Concomitantly, in \u201cThe Question of Revolution,\u201d Marcuse stated that \u201cthe conception of freedom by which revolutionaries and revolutions were inspired is suppressed in the developed industrialized countries with their rising standard of living,\u201d confusing economics and social politics.\u00a0 Marcuse\u2019s late writings thus belied the kind of conflation Kolakowski had critiqued, the inadequate conception of the Left that derived principally from the status of empirical social groups (\u201cclasses\u201d) rather than from the very ideological dynamics of social consciousness.\u00a0 Hence, Marcuse manifested precisely the failure of social imagination decried by Mills.<\/p>\n

For example, Marcuse made much of the brute oppression and stark life-and-death struggle supposedly motivating political movements in Vietnam and other parts of the Third World as a salutary factor for emancipatory politics:<\/p>\n

[T]he revolutionary concept of freedom coincides with the necessity to defend naked existence: in Vietnam as much as in the slums and ghettos of the rich countries.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By characterizing the military campaigns of the North Vietnamese Communist regime and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam \u2014 not to say the Civil Rights Movement! \u2014 in terms of a defense of \u201cnaked existence,\u201d Marcuse evacuated politics, eliminating any potential basis for progressive critique, and crudely instrumentalizing the horror of their realities.\u00a0 Adorno laconically remarked that \u201cit would be difficult to argue that Vietnam is robbing anyone of sleep, especially since any opponent of colonial wars knows that the Vietcong for their part practice Chinese methods of torture,\u201d questioning Marcuse\u2019s less than critical support for the Vietnamese and other Third World Communists \u2014 and the late-\u201960s student radicalism that saw itself acting in solidarity with them.<\/p>\n

Taking Marcuse to task on the issue of support for the student movement\/New Left, Adorno sums up their differences as follows:<\/p>\n

You think that praxis \u2014 in its emphatic sense \u2014 is not blocked today; I think differently. \u00a0I would have to deny everything that I think and know about the objective tendency if I wanted to believe that the student protest movement in Germany had even the tiniest prospect of effecting a social intervention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For Adorno, a critique of the Left was in order, no less in the 1960s than it had been in the 1920s\u201330s.\u00a0 For \u2014 especially for intellectuals \u2014 remaining critical is the most effective form of solidarity and participation in struggles against oppression and for emancipatory possibilities.<\/p>\n

Adorno, in his last major monograph, Negative Dialectic<\/em> (1966), argued for critical theory in the context of attenuated \u201cobjective\u201d conditions for emancipatory social-political transformative practice \u2014 as Mills had argued in his 1960 \u201cLetter to the New Left\u201d (e.g., decline of liberal civic associations and decline of the radicalism of the workers\u2019 movement).\u00a0 Adorno\u2019s work needs to be disenchanted and resituated in its specific critique of the crisis of the Left that had begun at least as early as the Stalinist degeneration of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s, but was in a terminal phase by the \u201960s.\u00a0 It was in this context that Adorno tried to steer the hard road between the Stalinophobia of Cold War liberalism and social democracy (for instance of the late Horkheimer), and the abdication of the critique of Third World-ist Stalinism (by Marcuse).<\/p>\n

While Adorno had indeed supported the earlier configuration of student protest in 1968, in tandem with workers\u2019 organizations, against the proposed \u201cemergency laws\u201d [Notstandgesetze<\/em>] in the Federal Republic of Germany, by late 1968 and 1969, as Adorno pointed out, the student movement was in crisis and sought infantile provocations to sustain its existence, as witnessed in the 1969 student takeover of the Frankfurt Institute organized by Adorno\u2019s doctoral student Hans-J\u00fcrgen Krahl that prompted Adorno to call the police.\u00a0 Among those evincing the regressive social-political consciousness of the \u201960s radicals was the French student leader Danny \u201cthe Red\u201d Cohn-Bendit.\u00a0 In his 1969 book Obsolete Communism: A Left-Wing Alternative<\/em>, Cohn-Bendit called for making the revolution \u201chere and now,\u201d reserving his most strident protests against the \u201cdeadly love-making on the [cinema] screen.\u201d\u00a0 While Marcuse insisted that those like Cohn-Bendit were marginal to the movement, Adorno knew that they were indicative of the greater problem.\u00a0 Even Marcuse acknowledged a fatal mixture, \u201cRational and irrational, indeed counter-revolutionary demands are inextricably combined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a combination should not have disqualified the student radicalism of the 1960s, but for the lack of their critical self-awareness.\u00a0 The critique and opposition Adorno had to the \u201960s radicalism was not due to the juxtaposition of the orthodoxy of the 1930s against the movements of the 1960s.\u00a0 As Adorno put it in his \u201cMarginalia to Theory and Praxis\u201d (1969),<\/p>\n

Praxis is a source of power for theory but cannot be prescribed by it.\u00a0 It appears in theory, merely, and indeed necessarily, as a blind spot, as an obsession with what is being criticized .\u00a0.\u00a0. this admixture of delusion, however, warns of the excesses in which it incessantly grows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hence, critical consciousness is tasked with reflexively recognizing this delusionary aspect of any possible emancipatory social-political practice: an unavoidable but constitutive <\/em>problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Adorno in 1969: the non-identity of subject and object<\/h2>\n

For Adorno, the subject mediates the object, or, in sociological terms, the individual mediates society, and, in philosophical terms, consciousness mediates reality.\u00a0 This mediation takes place in the commodity form, of which the human being is both subject and object.\u00a0 The non-identity of subject and object is a non-identity of social being and consciousness.\u00a0 Adorno\u2019s critique of the reconciliation philosophy of Hegel and others is based on the desideratum of subjectivity: as yet there is no subject, only critical consciousness of its possibility, there can be only a negative recognition, a recognition of the present absence of effective social subjectivity.<\/p>\n

For Adorno, it is precisely the non-identity of social being and consciousness and of theory and practice that is salutary for their critical relation.\u00a0 Capitalism is the dialectical source of the theory-practice problem, which is symptomatic and hence indicative of the potential for getting beyond it, but not as something that can be overcome in the here and now, as the \u201960s radicals (and those later) thought.\u00a0 As Adorno put it in the \u201cMarginalia to Theory and Praxis,\u201d<\/p>\n

If, to make an exception for once, one risks what is called a grand perspective, beyond the historical differences in which the concepts of theory and praxis have their life, one discovers the infinitely progressive aspect of the separation of theory and praxis, which was deplored by the Romantics and denounced by the Socialists in their wake \u2014 except for the mature Marx.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In his Negative Dialectic <\/em>(1966), in a section titled \u201cObjectivity and Reification,\u201d Adorno had written of the emancipatory aspect of the vision for \u201cplanning\u201d in a socialist society in preserving the non-identity of subject and object:<\/p>\n

In the realm of things there is an intermingling of both the object\u2019s [non]identical side and the submission of men to prevailing conditions of production, to their own functional context which they cannot know.\u00a0 The mature Marx, in his few remarks on the character of a liberated society, changed his position on the cause of reification [or alienation], [which he had attributed, earlier, to] the division of labor.\u00a0 He now distinguished the state of freedom from original immediacy.\u00a0 In the moment of planning \u2014 the result of which, he hoped, would be production for use by the living rather than for profit, and thus, in a sense, a restitution of immediacy \u2014 in that planning he preserved the alien thing; in his design for a realization of what philosophy had only thought, at first, he preserved its mediation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The \u201cfunctional context which [we] cannot know\u201d is capitalism, which generates not only (critical) subjectivity, but the theory-practice problem itself, as a non-identity of subject and object of practice.\u00a0 For Marx, \u201calienation\u201d is not empirical but social-contextual.\u00a0 By comparison, the 1960s radicals had anticipated overcoming the separation of theory and practice immediately through their own efforts at (personal) transformation.\u00a0 Such a mistaken configuration of the problem was to the detriment both of practice and of critical consciousness, including to the present.\u00a0 In this they had been encouraged by thinkers like Marcuse in their abandonment of the emancipatory desiderata of history accumulated in the most radical exponents of Marxist politics that the critical theory of the earlier Frankfurt School thinkers had sought to preserve against the \u201cvulgar Marxism\u201d of both Social Democracy and Stalinism in the 1920s\u201330s \u2014 in the aftermath of failed and betrayed revolution after 1917\u201319, the moment in which social-political possibilities for overcoming capitalism opened to their greatest extent to date.<\/p>\n

Following Adorno, properly accounting for the actual emancipatory contents of possible social-politics, as Marx and later Marxist radicals tried to do, continues to task the present.\u00a0|\u00a0\u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adorno’s Marxism and the problem and legacy of the 1960s Left in theory and practice Chris Cutrone Presented at the one-day conference \u201cAdorno \u2014 40 Years On,\u201d commemorating the 40th anniversary of Adorno’s death, University of Sussex, U.K., August 6, 2009. Prior versions were presented at the Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[14,11,18,8,17,16,9],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentations","tag-14","tag-11","tag-adorno","tag-conferences","tag-contra-anarchism","tag-marxism","tag-rethinking-marxism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","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=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}