Adorno\u2019s last writing published during his lifetime, the 1969 essay \u201cResignation,\u201d a critique of the New Left student movement, which became his political testament, paraphrased Lenin\u2019s 1920 pamphlet \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism \u2014 An Infantile Disorder<\/em>, as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even political undertakings can sink into pseudo-activities, into theater. It is no coincidence that the ideals of immediate action, even the propaganda of the [deed], have been resurrected after the willing integration of formerly progressive organizations that now in all countries of the earth are developing the characteristic traits of what they once opposed. Yet this does not invalidate the [Marxist] critique of anarchism. Its return is that of a ghost. The impatience with [Marxian] theory that manifests itself with its return does not advance thought beyond itself. By forgetting thought, the impatience falls back below it.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Lenin had written that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n [D]riven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism . . . anarchism is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another \u2014 all this is common knowledge. . . . Anarchism was not infrequently a kind of penalty for the opportunist sins of the working-class movement. The two monstrosities complemented each other.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Adorno paralleled Lenin\u2019s discussion of the \u201cphantasms,\u201d stating that, \u201cThought, enlightenment conscious of itself, threatens to disenchant the pseudo-reality within which actionism moves.\u201d Immediately prior to Adorno\u2019s comment on anarchism, he discussed the classic Marxist antinomy of spontaneity and organization:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pseudo-activity is generally the attempt to rescue enclaves of immediacy in the midst of a thoroughly mediated and rigidified society. Such attempts are rationalized by saying that the small change is one step in the long path toward the transformation of the whole. The disastrous model of pseudo-activity is the \u201cdo-it-yourself.<\/em>\u201d . . . The do-it-yourself approach in politics is not completely of the same caliber [as the quasi-rational purpose of inspiring in the unfree individuals, paralyzed in their spontaneity, the assurance that everything depends on them]. The society that impenetrably confronts people is nonetheless these very people.[3]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Why did Adorno invoke Lenin in his critique of the New Left? Wouldn\u2019t this confirm the New Left suspicion that Adorno had nothing new to offer, and that the perspectives of prior generations of Marxists had become an impediment to the desired emancipatory social transformation? Wasn\u2019t Adorno\u2019s invocation of Lenin akin to the Communist Party of France\u2019s apparently conservative opposition to student protestors in 1968?<\/p>\n\n\n\n In arguing that, \u201cThe society that impenetrably confronts people is nonetheless these very people,\u201d Adorno reiterated a central concern of what he had said about Lenin in conversation with Max Horkheimer in 1956, that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marx was too harmless; he probably imagined quite na\u00efvely that human beings are basically the same in all essentials and will remain so. It would be a good idea, therefore, to deprive them of their second nature. He was not concerned with their subjectivity; he probably didn\u2019t look into that too closely. The idea that human beings are the products of society down to their innermost core is an idea that he would have rejected as milieu theory. Lenin was the first person to assert this.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Moreover, Adorno had earlier written to Horkheimer that, \u201cIf one is concerned to achieve what might be possible with human beings, it is extremely difficult to remain friendly towards real people . . . a pretext for approving of precisely that element in people by which they prove themselves to be not merely their own victims but virtually their own hangmen.\u201d[5]<\/a> Whatever one may make of Adorno\u2019s invidious comparison between Marx and Lenin, nonetheless the centrality of Lenin to Adorno\u2019s thought is clear, despite the unfamiliar and apparently jarring political implications of Adorno\u2019s \u201cLeninism.\u201d So, who and what was Lenin to Adorno? Adorno said to Horkheimer that, \u201cI have always wanted to . . . develop a theory that remains faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin,\u201d to which Horkheimer responded laconically, \u201cWho would not subscribe to that?\u201d[6]<\/a> In considering rewriting Marx and Engels\u2019s Communist Manifesto<\/em> for the 20th century, Adorno insisted that it be \u201cstrictly Leninist.\u201d It is necessary to understand what such statements took for granted. So, the question becomes, in what way was Adorno \u201cfaithful\u201d to Lenin? Especially since in 1956 or 1969 most avowed \u201cLeninists\u201d would have dismissed such claims to \u201cLeninism\u201d by Adorno. Horkheimer said to Adorno that such a rewritten Manifesto<\/em>, calling for what he called the \u201cre-establishment of a socialist party,\u201d \u201ccould not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless.\u201d Nonetheless, Horkheimer felt it was necessary to show \u201cwhy one can be a communist and yet despise the Russians.\u201d The occasion for this dialogue was Khrushchev\u2019s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin and calling for a return to authentic \u201cLeninism.\u201d This event signaled a possible political opening to Adorno and Horkheimer, not in the Soviet Union so much as for the international Left. Indeed, this marked the beginnings of the New Left of the 1960s, provoked by the greater crisis of official Communism in that year\u2019s uprising in Hungary, emergence of the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement, and split between the USSR and Communist China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A key to Adorno\u2019s understanding of Lenin\u2019s importance can be found in a letter to Benjamin from 1936 about Benjamin\u2019s essay \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,\u201d which states that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n The proletariat . . . is itself a product of bourgeois society. . . . [T]he actual consciousness of actual workers . . . [has] absolutely no advantage over the bourgeois except . . . interest in the revolution, but otherwise bear[s] all the marks of mutilation of the typical bourgeois character. . . . We maintain our solidarity with the proletariat instead of making of our own necessity a virtue of the proletariat, as we are always tempted to do\u2014the proletariat which itself experiences the same necessity and needs us for knowledge as much as we need the proletariat to make the revolution. I am convinced that the further development of the . . . debate you have so magnificently inaugurated . . . depends essentially on a true accounting of the relationship of the intellectuals to the working class. . . . [Your essay is] among the profoundest and most powerful statements of political theory that I have encountered since I read [Lenin\u2019s] The State and Revolution<\/em>.[7]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Adorno likely had in mind as well Lenin\u2019s 1902 What is to be Done?<\/em> or 1920 \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder<\/em>. In the former, Lenin (in)famously distinguished between \u201ctrade union\u201d and \u201csocialist consciousness.\u201d But in the latter work, Lenin described the persistent \u201cbourgeois\u201d social conditions of intellectual work per se that would long survive the proletarian socialist revolution, indeed (reiterating from What is to be Done?<\/em>) that workers became thoroughly \u201cbourgeois\u201d by virtue of the very activity of intellectual work (such as in journalism), including and perhaps especially in their activity as Communist Party political cadre. For Lenin, workers\u2019 political revolution meant governing what would remain an essentially bourgeois society. The revolution would make the workers, for the first time, entirely bourgeois, which was the precondition of their leading society beyond bourgeois conditions. As Lenin himself wrote in \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder<\/em>: \u201cThe most shameless careerism . . . and vulgar petty-bourgeois conservatism are all unquestionably common and prevalent features engendered everywhere by capitalism, not only outside but also within the working-class movement. . . . [T]he overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the conquest of political power by the proletariat \u2014 [creates] these very same difficulties on a still larger, an infinitely larger scale.\u201d[8]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lenin\u2019s conception of proletarian socialist revolution was a moment, the next necessary step, in the workers\u2019 self-overcoming, in the emancipatory transformation of society in, through and beyond capitalism. As Lenin put it, Marxists sought to overcome capitalism \u201con the basis of capitalism itself.\u201d[9]<\/a> Marxism was not extrinsic but intrinsic to this process, as the workers\u2019 movement itself was. This was because the form of social solidarity in modern, bourgeois society was the mutual exchange of labor.[10]<\/a> As Adorno put it to Horkheimer, \u201cIt 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.\u201d[11]<\/a> Georg Luk\u00e1cs had singled out this about Lenin, in a footnote to his 1923 essay in History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,\u201d that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lenin\u2019s 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 \u201cnext link\u201d in the chain with all one\u2019s might, that link on which the fate of the totality depends in that one moment, his dismissal of all utopian demands, i.e. his \u201crelativism\u201d and his \u201cRealpolitik:\u201d all these things are nothing less than the practical realization of the young Marx\u2019s Theses on Feuerbach<\/em>.[12]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n One clear explanation for Adorno\u2019s \u201cLeninism\u201d was the importance of the problem of \u201cconsciousness\u201d in Adorno\u2019s estimation of the potential for emancipatory social-political transformation. For instance, in a letter to Horkheimer critical of Erich Fromm\u2019s more humane approach to Freudian psychoanalysis, Adorno wrote that Fromm demonstrated \u201ca mixture of social democracy and anarchism . . . [and] a severe lack of . . . dialectics . . . [in] the concept of authority, without which, after all, neither Lenin\u2019s [political party of the] avant-garde nor dictatorship [of the proletariat] can be conceived of. I would strongly advise him to read Lenin.\u201d Adorno thought that Fromm threatened to deploy something of what he called the \u201ctrick used by bourgeois individualists against Marx,\u201d and wrote to Horkheimer that he considered this to be a \u201creal threat to the line . . . which [the Frankfurt Institute\u2019s] journal takes.\u201d[13]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Adorno concept of \u201cconsciousness\u201d was Hegelian and involved a dialectic of theory and practice: consciousness was not merely theoretical but also practical, just as there was, in terms of Marxism, a dialectic of \u201csocial being\u201d and consciousness. Adorno\u2019s take was at odds with what Marxism had become in the 20th century, after the failure of the proclaimed \u201cworld revolution\u201d of 1917\u201319 in Russia, Germany, Hungary, and Italy. This in retrospect abortive revolution was inspirational for intellectuals such as Luk\u00e1cs and Karl Korsch, whose avowedly \u201cLeninist\u201d works circa 1923 (History and Class Consciousness<\/em>, and \u201cMarxism and Philosophy,\u201d respectively) were foundational for the Frankfurt School. (Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch were each approached to be the first director of the Institute.) In Luk\u00e1cs and Korsch\u2019s view, seminal for the Frankfurt School Critical Theorists, the emphasis on Marxism as an account of \u201cexploitation,\u201d rather than of social-historical domination<\/em>, was mistaken.[14]<\/a> Marx called \u201ccapital\u201d the domination of society by an alienated historical dynamic of value-production (M\u2013C\u2013M’). At stake here was 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 (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>, 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 new division of bourgeois society itself 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. This historical condition produced a specific issue regarding consciousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Adorno wrote to Benjamin, regarding Benjamin\u2019s Arcades Project<\/em>, on Baudelaire\u2019s work, about which Benjamin wrote that, \u201cThe commodity itself is the speaker here,\u201d \u201cThe fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness.\u201d For Adorno, the commodity form of subjectivity was the very source of consciousness, of \u201cself-consciousness\u201d in the Hegelian sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\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>, 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 \u201ccapital<\/em>,\u201d 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 (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\n\n\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. On this point, it is useful to refer to Adorno\u2019s 1942 essay \u201cReflections on Class Theory\u201d and his 1968 speech \u201cLate Capitalism or Industrial Society?,\u201d which he published in the U.S. under the title \u201cIs Marx Obsolete?\u201d 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>;[15]<\/a> 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\n\n\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 (in D\u00e4mmerung<\/em>, 1926\u201331), which had been profoundly influential for Adorno (Adorno\u2019s 1947 book Minima Moralia<\/em> was inspired by Horkheimer\u2019s D\u00e4mmerung<\/em>, and Adorno dedicated it to him), 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):<\/p>\n\n\n\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>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The necessary corrective was not the feeling of this oppression, but rather 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\n\n\n To put it in Lenin\u2019s terms, from What is to be Done?<\/em> (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. Lenin emphasized the importance of the \u201ctheoretical struggle\u201d in Marxist participation in the workers\u2019 movement. \u201cClass consciousness,\u201d or the consciousness of the historical significance of the existence of the proletariat and its politics, was the \u201cHegelian\u201d critical self-recognition of the workers\u2019 class struggle, the substance of Marxism. Marxism was the critique<\/em> of communism as the \u201creal movement of history.\u201d As Marx put it in his celebrated 1843 letter to Ruge, \u201cCommunism is a dogmatic abstraction . . . infected by its opposite, private property.\u201d And, in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts<\/em>, Marx stated unequivocally that,<\/p>\n\n\n\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>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n For Marx, communism demanded an \u201cimmanent critique\u201d according to its \u201cdialectical\u201d 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. Marx\u2019s \u201cHegelian\u201d question was, how had history made this possible, in theory and practice? Marxism aimed to be the critical historical self-consciousness of the workers\u2019 movement for socialism. <\/p>\n\n\n\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 (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 Adorno and Horkheimer are thus potentially helpful for recovering the true spirit of Marxism that they associated with Lenin. 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. Their \u201cmessage\u201d was in dispute with official \u201cLeninism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marcuse had written, in Soviet Marxism<\/em> (1958) that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the Revolution, it became clear to what degree Lenin had succeeded in basing his strategy on the actual class interests and aspirations of the workers and peasants. . . . Then, from 1923 on, the decisions of the leadership increasingly dissociated from the class interests of the proletariat. The former no longer presuppose the proletariat as a revolutionary agent but rather are imposed upon the proletariat and the rest of the underlying population.[16]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This echoed Marcuse\u2019s unpublished \u201c33 Theses\u201d (1947) that he had circulated privately to Horkheimer. In the penultimate thesis (32), Marcuse wrote that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n [T]he political workers\u2019 party remains the necessary subject of revolution. In the original Marxist conception, the party does not play a decisive role. Marx assumed that the proletariat is driven to revolutionary action on its own, based on the knowledge of its own interests, as soon as revolutionary conditions are present. . . . [But subsequent] development 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 today are not this subject, but it is just as true that only they can become it. Only in the theories of the communist parties is the memory of the revolutionary tradition alive, which can become the memory of the revolutionary goal again.[17]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Horkheimer and Adorno noted the potential of the Communist Parties in France and Italy,[18]<\/a> paralleling Marcuse\u2019s estimation in the final of his \u201c33 Theses\u201d that,<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 . . . communist parties.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Marcuse acknowledged, however, that, \u201cto uphold without compromise orthodox Marxist theory . . . [i]n the face of political reality . . . would be powerless, abstract and unpolitical, but when the political reality as a whole is false, the unpolitical position may be the only political truth.\u201d[19]<\/a> This is a good summary of the political and theoretical orientation of the post-WWII Frankfurt School.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hegel scholar Gillian Rose, in one of her first published writings on Frankfurt School Critical Theory, a review of publication of the English translation of Adorno\u2019s Negative Dialectics<\/em>, described Marxism as a \u201cmode of cognition sui generis<\/em>,\u201d which she found Adorno to follow.[20]<\/a> Despite Rose\u2019s Hegelian critique of the \u201csociological Marxism\u201d of Adorno which Rose thought followed from Simmel and Luk\u00e1cs,[21]<\/a> here Rose echoed Durkheim\u2019s formulation of society as an \u201cobject of cognition sui generis<\/em>.\u201d Durkheim was deeply influential for Adorno. Indeed, Adorno provided a German translation of one of Durkheim\u2019s most important writings.[22]<\/a> If for Durkheim \u201csociety\u201d was an \u201cobject of cognition sui generis<\/em>,\u201d and for Adorno \u201csociety is a concept of the Third Estate,\u201d[23]<\/a> that is, a projection of specifically bourgeois society, then this was even more the case for Marxism, in that modern, capitalist society was a very peculiar object of attempted cognition, self-contradictory and \u201cnon-identical\u201d to itself, moreover subject to a process of disintegration historically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Adorno considered Lenin to be true to Marxism in this sense. For Marxism was a phenomenon of the problem of the relation of theory and practice: the \u201cpragmatic\u201d revolutionary politician Lenin attempted to grasp and transform the sui generis<\/em> object of modern society not only in theory but in practice. If Horkheimer said to Adorno in their 1956 conversation that they were threatened with forgetting the very \u201cmemory of socialism,\u201d then Lenin as a historical figure was tied to that disappearing memory. Lenin remained crucial, indeed critical, in their view of history. This meant that for them Lenin was not reducible to what was to their mind his unfortunate legacy in the 20th century: they recognized that Lenin was not the ideologist he became posthumously in Stalinism or state-centric forms of capitalism that emerged and developed in the Frankfurt School\u2019s own time. This has been mistaken for a 19th century mandarin intellectualism nostalgic for the preceding liberal era that does not sit well with the image of Lenin in the 20th century as a \u201ccommitted intellectual.\u201d But perhaps Lenin was a figure of a bygone era in a different yet very specific sense: the history of Marxism and how this still transmitted, however obscurely, the \u201cmemory of socialism.\u201d The attempt to change the world through socialism was a sui generis<\/em> project, however one that failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Frankfurt School Critical Theorists are notorious for their cryptic writings that have proved defeating for straightforward interpretation. A forbidding labyrinth of history is presented by their thought. But Lenin is not the Minotaur waiting to devour the children thrown there: Lenin is at the center of historical Marxism to which the Frankfurt School, above all Adorno, provides access, however obscurely. Following the certain red Ariadne\u2019s thread provided by Lenin, back into the history of Marxism and the memory of socialism, and thus, perhaps, back out into the light of a better illuminated present, is not impossible, however pessimistic Adorno himself may have been about its chances. Adorno\u2019s writings can serve as guide. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a>* Certain passages in this article were originally published in \u201cMarxism became a \u2018message in a bottle\u2019 \u2014 can we yet receive it?,\u201d as part of the symposium \u201cDo We Need Adorno?,\u201d Nonsite.org<\/em>, September 17, 2012, available online at <http:\/\/nonsite.org\/feature\/do-we-need-adorno>. Thanks to editor Todd Cronan for his feedback. Thanks to Moishe Postone, Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, Kenneth Warren, Jim Lastra and Spencer Leonard for their feedback.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] Adorno, \u201cResignation,\u201d (1969), in Critical Models<\/em>, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 292.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [2]<\/a> Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology<\/em> (New York: Norton, 1975), 559\u2013560. Also available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1920\/lwc\/>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [3]<\/a> Adorno, \u201cResignation,\u201d Critical Models<\/em>, 291\u2013292.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [4]<\/a> Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, \u201cDiskussion \u00fcber Theorie und Praxis\u201d (1956), in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften<\/em>, vol. 19, Nachtr\u00e4ge, Verzeichnisse und Register (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1996), 71, quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 233.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [5]<\/a> Adorno to Horkheimer, June 2, 1941. Quoted in Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance<\/em>, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994 [1986]), 268.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [6]<\/a> Horkheimer and Adorno, Towards a New Manifesto<\/em> (New York: Verso, 2011), 103.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [7]<\/a> Theodor W. Adorno, \u201cCorrespondence with Benjamin,\u201d New Left Review<\/em> I\/81 (September-October 1973): 66-68.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [8]<\/a> Lenin, \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [9]<\/a> Lenin, \u201cLeft-Wing\u201d Communism: An Infantile Disorder<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [10]<\/a> See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations<\/em>; and Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [11]<\/a> Horkheimer and Adorno (2011), 54.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [12]<\/a> Georg Luk\u00e1cs, \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,\u201d in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics<\/em>, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 221n60.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [13]<\/a> Adorno to Horkheimer, March 21, 1936. Quoted in Wiggershaus (1994), 266.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [14]<\/a> For instance, Luk\u00e1cs pointed out, in \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat\u201d part 1, \u201cThe Phenomenon of Reification,\u201d quoting Marx in volume III of Capital<\/em>, that, \u201cthe conditions of direct exploitation [of the laborer], and those of realizing surplus-value, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n [15]<\/a> Moishe Postone provides a good summation of this traditional Marxist view of history in his interview with Timothy Brennan, \u201cLabor and the Logic of Abstraction\u201d (South Atlantic Quarterly<\/em> 108.2 [Spring 2009], 305\u2013330), as follows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marx refers to history until now, including capitalism, as \u201cprehistory.\u201d My reading of this passage is that, beginning with the so-called neolithic revolution, there has been an enormous expansion of human productive capacity. This expansion, however, has always been at the cost of the many. All so-called historical forms of society are based upon the existence of an ongoing surplus, and that surplus has always been created by the many. . . . I said after the \u201cneolithic revolution.\u201d This is not the case, to the best of my knowledge, with hunters and gatherers. Generally, [\u201c]historical[\u201c] refers only to post-neolithic societies. This development may have been a giant step for humanity as a whole, but it certainly was a negative step for a lot of people. The problem with historical societies is not only that an upper class oppresses and lives off those who produce the surplus, but also that the good of the whole and the good of each (or, at least, of most) are opposed. The growth and development of social productivity may benefit or be ripped off by an upper class, but the real problem is that the toil of the many is the condition for the wealth and culture of the whole. I think that, for Marx, capitalism could be the last form of prehistory, because it creates the conditions whereby an ongoing surplus could exist that wouldn\u2019t depend on the labor of the many.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n [16]<\/a> Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 149.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [17]<\/a> Herbert Marcuse, \u201c33 Theses,\u201d in Technology, War, and Fascism<\/em>, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998), 226\u2013227.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [18]<\/a> \u201c[Horkheimer:] [S]uch a [revised, \u2018strictly Leninist\u2019 communist] manifesto could not appear in Russia, while in the United States and Germany it would be worthless. At best, it might have some success in France and Italy\u201d (NLR<\/em> 2010, 57); and, \u201c[Adorno:] Any appeal to form a left-wing socialist party is not on the agenda. Such a party would either be dragged along in the wake of the Communist Party, or it would suffer the fate of the SPD or [U.K.] Labour Party\u201d (NLR<\/em> 2010, 61).<\/p>\n\n\n\n [19]<\/a> Marcuse, \u201c33 Theses,\u201d 217.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [20]<\/a> Rose, review of Adorno, Negative Dialectics <\/em>trans. E.B. Ashton (Continuum, 1973), The American Political Science Review<\/em> <\/em>70.2 (June, 1976), 598\u2013599.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [21]<\/a> See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology<\/em> (London: Verso, 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nAdorno\u2019s Lenin<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Lenin in history<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Adorno and Lenin\u2019s Marxism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Adorno and the crisis of Marxism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Marxism sui generis<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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