In the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and tha…
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IMT statement Read More 1 The Frankfurt school's academic 'Marxism': "organised hypocrisy" Details Daniel Morley 21 April 2023 Image: public domain Share TweetIn the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School.The idea that the working class has been bought off and is too conservative to carry through the socialist revolution has been widespread amongst the so-called left intelligentsia and its leaders for a long time. Such ‘Left’ intellectuals tell us that the socialist revolution is ‘unrealistic’, has been ‘tried before’, or better still, that the workers are too engrossed in material things to organise a revolution. This argument is always presented as if it is brand new. In reality, it has been rehashed by generation after generation of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Those who want to justify their own political opportunism have always found a way to blame the working class.The Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), is guilty of giving such bankrupt ideas the appearance of intellectual credibility and for spreading them far and wide. Its key thinkers – Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse – are often described as ‘Marxists’, even, if you can believe it, as some of the most innovative Marxists of the 20th Century. The fact that these so-called ‘Marxists’ argue that the working class is incapable of abolishing capitalism provides a quasi-theoretical cover for smug pseudo-left intellectuals to abandon their ‘radicalism’, as they accommodate themselves to bourgeois society.Their supporters point to the fact that capitalism is still around. They maintain that capitalism has changed a great deal since Marx’s day, and therefore, surely Marxism needs to be updated. They assert that the working class has lost at least some of its revolutionary ‘agency’, and that this is a result of the increasingly powerful role of mass culture, which Marx overlooked. They claim that the ‘superstructure’ of ideology and culture has gained a great deal of autonomy over the economic base, contrary to what Marx famously explained.To answer such critics, we must start by comparing the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy with that of the Frankfurt School. This will not be an easy task, since like all other 20th century petty-bourgeois philosophers, they appear to be allergic to explaining their ideas with any clarity.Historical MaterialismMarxism is first and foremost a materialist philosophy. There is only one universe, which is composed of matter. Consciousness does not exist independently of matter, rather it is an expression of matter organised in a particular way, namely the product of a material nervous system.Philosophical materialism when applied to the study of society is what is known as historical materialism. As Marx and Engels explained in the German Ideology:“[M]en must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life”.[1]The ‘production of material life’ obliges men and women to develop tools of production and enter into definite relations, ‘relations of production’ as Marx explained, which are independent of our will. In such conditions, the forms that society takes are not determined by our conscious desires, or by the ideas that we hold, but ultimately by the given development of the productive forces. It is on this material basis that different forms of consciousness arise. Thus, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.” [2]In other words, classes arise not from our ideas, but due to the development of the productive forces. In pre-capitalist class societies, we had patricians, plebians, slaves, lords, vassals and serfs. Under capitalism, society is divided into two main opposing classes; the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which produces all the wealth, but which itself owns nothing. In order to survive, workers must sell their labour power to the capitalists.For the Frankfurt School, modern society is one of sheer domination of the capitalist system over the masses / Image: Fred Romero, FlickrIn the final analysis, it is the property relations of capitalist society that determine the consciousness of the working class. This does not mean that ideologies play no role and are not worthy of consideration, but only that the main ideological characteristics of a given society can only be explained in the last analysis by the economic structure of that society.The Enlightenment was all a mistakeThe ‘Marxists’ of the Frankfurt School believed that such an explanation was too simplistic, ‘mechanical’ and reductionistic. According to them, Marx and Engels failed to take into consideration the impact of bourgeois culture and ideology, which they believed overrides the class interests of the working class, turning it into a class inherently servile to the interests of capitalism.The Frankfurt School wanted to present themselves as intellectuals who would accept nothing as it appears to be, but who instead mercilessly uncovered the contradictions to reveal something entirely different. This is why they referred to their School as ‘critical theory’. They and their followers think that in this way, they have improved Marxism, by freeing it of dogmatism. Their focus on culture and other elements of the ‘superstructure’ is also supposed to update Marxism for the 20th Century, which saw the birth of mass culture by means of the radio and television. The question is, did the Frankfurt School update and improve Marxism in order to better explain this new epoch of mass culture, entertainment and propaganda, or did they abandon it altogether?In Dialectic of Enlightenment, possibly the most important book of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Horkheimer explain their alternative to historical materialism. For the Frankfurt School, modern society is one of sheer domination of the capitalist system over the masses. According to them, the enormous increase in living standards in the West in the postwar period only produced a new, more insidious form of domination. The luxuries of modern life, and the mass culture these luxuries helped propagate, supposedly succeeded in creating an unparalleled conformism from which it was increasingly hard for any worker to escape. In other words, the working class had been brainwashed by popular culture and had thereby adapted to and to a large extent become a part of the dominant system. As a result, this meant that the socialist revolution could no longer happen, and if it did, it could only lead to a continuation of this same repression.At the most fundamental level, the conformism and repression of society were for Adorno and Horkheimer not products of capitalism, but the original sin of the period of Enlightenment – the epoch of rapid advances in art, science and philosophy in the early days of bourgeois society – or to be more specific, ‘enlightenment thought’. As they explain:“We have no doubt – and herein lies our petitio principii – that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.” [3]But, one may ask, what exactly is it about this ‘enlightenment thought’ that has ensnared society with such disastrous consequences? All we are told is that “Enlightenment is totalitarian”.[4] Indeed, “Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men”. [5] “For enlightenment is as totalitarian as any system”.[6]Despite the convoluted style and confused thinking that plagues this book, we have to commend Adorno and Horkheimer for their clarity on one point. They have abandoned all traces of historical materialism, in favour of the most blatant idealism. According to their worldview, history is governed by an all powerful, totalitarian idea. This idea does not express the interests of a definite class, but exists on its own account and has the power to oppress society. The defining trait of this idea, we are told, is that it wants to dominate, to systematically control and order the objects of the external world.Clearly, the ‘enlightenment thought’ referred to here is systematic and scientific thought, or what was called ‘reason’ in the philosophical vocabulary of the Enlightenment. Thus, for the Frankfurt School, reason or scientific thinking is the source of totalitarian domination, rather than the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. For Adorno and Horkheimer, reason is not produced by society at a given stage in history, but is a supra-historical force with special powers, something with an existence outside of society and time.It is abundantly clear that this is a fundamentally idealist standpoint, which boils down to this: all that is bad about capitalism, and the reason why socialism cannot emancipate humanity, is because of the supposed totalitarian character of scientific thought. The question they cannot answer is: whence cometh this all-powerful idea? When, and why, did it arise and enslave humanity? They provide no answers whatsoever to this decisive question, because they do not consider it important. Most likely, as far as they are concerned, even to pose such a question would be a sin of ‘enlightenment thought’ – that is, an attempt at explaining things in a rational and scientific manner.According to them, the Enlightenment wants to dominate things, by classifying knowledge scientifically. But why should this lead from the domination of things to the domination of man by man, as they claim? Adorno and Horkheimer merely assert that “[w]hat men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim … Power and knowledge are synonyms”. [7]Thus it is asserted, without any proof whatsoever, that the Enlightenment ‘dominates’ things, and therefore, it inevitably leads to a society in which people are dominated. Of course, it is never specified which people are dominating which other people. Why did some people manage to wield this power of the Enlightenment, and others not? Typical of idealism, their ‘theory’ is entirely abstract, vague and arbitrary. Having abandoned materialism, they do not deal with concrete classes exploiting other classes for definite, historically conditioned ends. There are no workers and capitalists, serfs and feudal lords or slaves and slave owners; instead, we have abstract ‘man’ dominating abstract ‘man’, all thanks to the miraculous power of abstract ‘reason’.The EnlightenmentIn reality, the Enlightenment stands as one of the greatest advances humanity has ever made – intellectually, politically and artistically. Far from ushering in hitherto unimaginable oppression, it began the process of casting off the servitude, dogmatism and religious obscurantism of feudal society and the Church. A gallery of heroes of thought and culture stepped forth to develop science and art to an unprecedented level and to challenge prejudice and privilege. The early materialists of the Enlightenment were not obsessed with ‘domination’, but were open-minded encyclopaedists attempting to free humanity from superstition.The Frankfurt School’s opposition to scientific thought means the defence of the same backwardness, ignorance and obscurantism that the Church defended at the time of the Enlightenment / Image: public domainFar from seeing this as a threat to the working class, Marx and Engels celebrated this rise of rational thought, and the development of science and technique in the early stages of capitalism, as a qualitative step forward for humanity. It is precisely here that the progressive character of capitalism is to be found because, by developing the productive forces, it lays the basis for socialism. Without scientific thought, socialism is impossible. The Frankfurt School’s opposition to this historic advance means the defence of the same backwardness, ignorance and obscurantism that the Church defended at the time of the Enlightenment.It is true that the Enlightement’s ideals of freedom and rationality could not be realised at that time. There was a contradiction between the lofty ideals of the greatest thinkers of this time, and the material reality of the capitalist society that they were helping to usher in. In the hands of the bourgeoisie, science and reason would be used to further profit, and therefore exploitation. Such an understanding was always integral to Marx and Engels’ ideas. As Engels explained in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:“We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie… that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law… and that the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. The great thinkers of the 18th century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”[8]There is nothing original in the Frankfurt School’s realisation that ‘the Enlightenment’ did not liberate humanity from exploitation and oppression. But whereas Marx and Engels understood that the real basis of this failure lay in the class character of society at the time, this fact eluded Adorno and Horkheimer entirely. In fact, they actually repeated the idealist error of many Enlightenment thinkers. The latter believed that ‘reason’ is something that all human beings are inherently endowed with, and that therefore, in principle, the ideas of the Enlightenment could have been developed at any point in history. Similarly, the Frankfurt School see ‘reason’ as a power independent of and superior to history. But instead of the optimism of the thinkers of the Enlightenment, they saw in reason only domination and death.Despite the abstractness of these ideas, it is not hard to see what really lies behind them. They are the ideas of demoralised petty-bourgeois intellectuals, who regard the development of capitalism as nothing but oppression and disaster. Adorno summed up his outlook in this way: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace, which organised mankind poses to organised men… the world spirit, a worthy object of definition, would have to be defined as permanent catastrophe.” [9]In their writings they routinely hark back to an earlier age of petty-bourgeois freedom, of ‘individual autonomy’, as they call it. Large-scale, scientifically organised production terrifies such petty-bourgeois individuals, as does mass culture. For them, it is scientific thought, not the capitalist class, that has ruined society.Such petty-bourgeois intellectuals are impotent. They have no control over capitalist society, but think they ought to have, given how educated they feel. At the same time however, they are loath to put themselves at the service of the only alternative to big business: the organised working class. The potential power of the working class is terrifying in their eyes. Workers appear as uneducated, obedient fools. They look down on the working class, who they see as complicit in the crimes of capitalism because of their alleged naive “conformism” to the mass-produced culture of big business. They assume that, should the workers ever take power, this would simply mean a continuation of the same oppressive, bureaucratically organised society we already have – all because the workers are trapped in the conformist mentality that scientific production and mass culture breed.In reality however, what these people reflect is the outlook of the petty bourgeoisie, a class at a historical dead end, which is squeezed between big business and the working class. The Frankfurt School associate Walter Benjamin admitted this candidly: “sooner or later, with the middle classes who are being ground to pieces by the struggle between capital and labour, the ‘freelance’ writer must also disappear.” That is what terrifies these gentlemen the most!Marcuse’s ‘Technical Rationality’The Frankfurt School, and Marcuse in particular, rose to prominence in the postwar period. This was a ‘golden age’ for capitalism, a period of unprecedented growth as the advanced capitalist economies rebuilt after the devastation of the Second World War. This sustained upswing was made possible not only by the massive destruction of the war, but also by the unique political conditions the end of the war produced. The revolutionary wave that swept western Europe was betrayed by the Stalinist and Social Democratic leaders, who were able to hold back the working class. It was a counte… truncated (35,728 more characters in archive)