Critical Theory Lecture 5: (cont) Theory and Praxis and Socialism in the Second Version of Critical Theory & Lecture 6: Background To the Frankfurt School

Theory and Praxis and Socialism in the Second Version of Critical Theory

14. In discussing the E and P Manuscripts it was pointed out that Marx lacked a practical strategy for the working class. He nominates it as the class that bears all the burdens of society without enjoying any of its advantages. The alienation experienced by the proletariat gives it the practical motive to overthrow bourgeois society and abolish class rule. But it is unclear from this scenario how this transformation of the proletariat is to come about. How is a pauperised, uneducated mass of deprived workers to become self-conscious revolutionary subjects?

15. The change in Marx's views on this question - the growing concreteness of his conception of the working class and of his notion of socialism is nowhere as dramatic as the other theoretical changes I have returned to in this second version of critical theory. At various points in the German Ideology Marx simply repeats the view of the proletariat I have outlined from the Paris Manuscripts. However by the time of the Poverty of Philosophy Marx has begun to re-evaluate the role of workers combinations or trade unions in such a way as to construct a long-range strategy towards workers revolution. In short, the trade unions initiate the process of transforming the workers from a class in itself into a class for itself. From atomisation, disunity, competition and lack of knowledge of their own situation, trade union activity results in collective organization, unity and growing conscious recognition of its own position. Unions cannot alter the iron law of wages that keep the workers at a subsistence level. However, the common experience of struggle raises their consciousness against the whole capitalist system. At this time, Marx believed that the workers derived no economic gain from union organization. But he argued that from the perspective of a growing political self-consciousness, the unions were indispensable in the necessary process of the workers self-education. Trade unions express the fact that in the capitalist society the worker is not tied to any set of given relations. This divorce of the worker from his/her trade, which had formerly determined his/her social position and life possibilities, constitutes a liberating moment in capitalist production. The worker is formally free from his/her productive activity and union organization and agitation expresses the fluid framework of this arrangement.

16. In keeping with this new developing practical realism in respect to strategy, Marx's concept of socialism is also slowly modified. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx appears to reject the earlier view that socialism involved a realised identity or unification between the individual and society. Socialism now signifies an institutional structure in which the material needs of the population will be provided for on the model of a factory. In this new conception, planning appears to play a major role:

"Society as a whole has this in common with the interior of a workshop, that it too has its division of labour. If one took as a model the division of labour in a modern workshop, in order to apply it to the whole society, the society best organised for the production of wealth would undoubtedly be that which had a single chief employer, distributing tasks to the different members of the community according to a previously fixed rule. But this is by no means the case. "(Vol 6, p184).

Although society is divided into small productive units, all economic decisions are to be made by the general will of the associated producers. Use will be determined not by necessary labour costs but by social need. This emphasis on planning is naturally tied to a radical reinterpretation of the idea of a division of labour. Despite other formulations, Marx retains division of labour but argues workers develop many-sided abilities and are confronted with work simplified by technology. 

Lecture 6: Background to the Frankfurt School

1. Before we leave the Marxian version of critical theory, I want to say a few more words about the direction of Marx’s own theoretical development and specifically of the shape of his later critical theory. I have argued that although his thought went through a number of phases, a conception of critical theory remains constant. We have seen that the concept of critique originally pertains to the idea of a judgment made in relation to the resolution of a crisis. Marx’s gives this idea his own distinctive formulation with the idea of an immanent critical theory. Against Hegel and the Young Hegelians he wants a theory that repudiates the roles both of speculative reflection on history or that of mere critical consciousness. When he speaks of immanence, what he implies is not only that thought see itself as an expression of historical dynamism, but that this thought is an active combatant in the great social struggle of his time: class struggle. Thus Marx views his own theory as the enlightened consciousness of one of the major social forces in this struggle. The truth of the theory in not simply a function of its cognitive insights into the structural dynamics of bourgeois society but also of its communicative capacity to transform the agents of this historical struggle and therefore contribute to the transformation the society.

2. We have seen that in the first two versions of critical theory Marx makes real advances in concretising this conception of immanent critique. One index of this is methodological advance away from philosophical critique towards what he calls the science of history. Marx builds the critical, normative dimension of his perspective on history into the conceptual heart of his theory. Last time we saw how the concepts of ‘forces of production’ and ‘relations of production’ carry Marx’s critical intentions right in the structural core of his understanding of the social reproduction of the bourgeois social totality. We do not have the time to follow the further evolution of this process of concretisation in the later Marx. However, I do want to at least point the direction in which this process leads. Already in arguing that there are various versions of critical theory as Marx proceeds, I maintained one measure of these was his changing methodology. And I especially stressed the relation between critical-cognitive aspects, between philosophical and economic elements. In the later versions of critical theory, Marx’s further efforts at concretising his conception will focus on the category of the commodity as the secret key to the dynamics of bourgeois society. Marx goes on to build his immanent critical perspective into his analysis of the commodity. For him, commodification is the key to understanding the peculiar alienation of bourgeois society. At the heart of this phenomenon is the commodification of labour. The special characteristics of labour power as a commodity allows an exchange of equivalents (wages for labour) that still provides the capitalist with a surplus that can be the basis for profitability, for the realisation of capital: this is his theory of surplus value. In his analysis of the dynamics of the world of commodities, the normative dimension of Marx’s critique of bourgeois society is internalised within an immanent analysis of the commodity form itself in terms of the distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”. Marx’s later presentations of the critique of political economy are essentially alternative attempts to present this immanent critical perspective.

3. I now what to move forward almost one hundred years to consider the theoretical work that introduced the concept of critical theory into the vocabulary of contemporary philosophy. As I’ve already mentioned, this recovery was the work of Max Horkheimer, who in 1931 was installed as the Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt and the Director of the Frankfurt based Institute for Social Research. Horkheimer’s main works are a series of essays written in the 1930’s for the institute journal (published in English in two collections: Critical Theory and Between Philosophy and Social Science, his joint most famous work with Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment and two post war collections: The Eclipse of Reason and The Critique of Instrumental Reason. But before saying something about these works, the Institute and its programme under Horkheimer, I want to briefly say a few words about the fate of Marxism and critical theory in the intervening years.

4. Marx died in 1883. His major work Capital was never completed and its was left to Engels to publish the manuscripts for the incomplete Vols 2 and 3. At this point Marx was relatively unknown with only a few adherents within the vanguard of working class organizations in Europe. Despite Marx’s own identification of his theory as the enlightened consciousness of the working and his conviction that immanent critique has to grasp the masses, he had only occasionally been able to effect anything like the unification of theory and praxis in the direct sense. For the most part, the émigré Marx had devoted himself to the development of his critique of political economy believing that the times were not yet ripe to recommence the direct revolutionary activities with which both he and Engels had been engaged up to 1848. So at the time of his death, although his theories had a few staunch advocates in Germany, France and Russia, they had little mass support amongst the workers.

5. All this begins to change soon after. The lapsing of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist legislation in 1890 and the establishment of the Second Workingman’s Internationale in 1889 coincided with the growing influence of Marxist ideas within the working class movement. Although this influence remained uneven, it was, nevertheless, spectacular. In Germany the Social Democrats, at least nominally a Marxist party, by the First World War has become the dominant oppositional party in the Reichstag. Despite differences between national organizations, there were significant Marxist parties in most Western European societies committed to Socialism and there was also an impressive appearance of international working class unity through the Second International. It is well known that this appearance of unity did not survive the outbreak of the First World War. The majority of socialists were swept up by patriotism and the German Social Democrats eventually voted for war credits. This led to a split between the minority Sparticists and the majority who went on to form the first Weimar government after the First World War.

6. On the theoretical level, the period of the Second International saw the popularisation of Marxist theory. Under the auspices of Engels, who survived until 1895, Marx’s ideas were widely propagated and became the basis of an alternative working class culture, especially in Germany. But this popularisation was also accompanied by a certain vulgarisation. Its point of departure was Engel’s view of Marx as the “Darwin of human history”. The theorists of the Second International, the main one being Karl Kautsky, understood Marx’s theories on the model of the natural sciences. According to this view, Marx had discovered the laws of social development and especially the laws of the evolution of bourgeois society towards socialist society. This reading is usually deemed “positivist”, “mechanist” or “evolutionary”. The former because the emphasis fell on scientific method as an entirely new and superior way of understanding that reduced social reality to “facts” and denied cognitive value to value judgements, “mechanist” because social-economic laws were viewed on the contemporary model of the natural sciences as mechanical systems with connotations of necessity and inevitability and “evolutionary” because the development towards socialism was viewed as a slow, gradual process operating according to its own autonomous laws. For socialists this interpretation of Marx was reassuring after many years of marginalisation. Socialism was viewed as the historical goal of an evolutionary process that was proceeding according to automatic, socio-economic laws. Socialists could be optimistic in the knowledge that they possessed a scientific account of their own society that predicted the evitable triumph of their own cause. As a result of this interpretation, the leaders of the Second International played down the practical question of preparing for the ultimate goal of workers revolution. As this outcome was ensured by economic laws and followed the inexorable rise of the Social Democrats as a parliamentary force, such preparation took a back seat to the day to day strengthening and organization of the existing party. While such historical optimism today seems naïve, to Kautsky and Bebel it seemed no less plausible than the rapid political rise of Social Democracy they had witnessed with their own eyes.

7. The failure of the German Social Democrats to oppose rearmament helped to precipitate the First World War and the disastrous social and economic consequences that ensued. However, the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the revolutionary risings in Hungary and Germany at the end of the war were reasons for optimism and forced Marxists in the post-war period to reassess Second International Marxism. Not surprisingly, thinkers like Lukacs who had participated in the Hungarian revolution felt that it was the Marxism espoused by the Second International that was largely responsible for the socialist parties’ failure to take full advantage of the crisis of capitalism registered by the war. For Lukacs, contemporaries were witnesses to the final crisis of European capitalism. This bourgeois society had revealed itself to be totally bankrupt. The bloody imperialist war and its catastrophic socio-economic aftermath of social dislocation, and unemployment seemed to confirm this diagnosis. Even the failure the Communist revolutionary putsches were viewed by many radicals as only temporary lulls in an ongoing revolutionary historical wave. Against this messianism, Lukacs maintained that the orthodox Marxist faith in the inevitability of revolution had engendered a debilitating complacency in the Communist movement. Socialist revolution would not result “automatically” through the agency of impersonal economic laws. Instead, Marxist theory had to stress the role of human praxis, ideological struggle and class consciousness in effectively marshalling the workers towards a revolutionary commitment.

The Frankfurt School

8. At this point we can insert the Frankfurt School into this historical narrative. This School had begun as a research Institute-The Institute for Social Research in 1923. Although affiliated to the University of Frankfurt, it was an independent research centre funded by the radical son of a wealthy merchant—Felix J Weil—who was interested in supporting the development of critical, leftist thought. Initially headed Carl Grünberg and concerned with the working class movement and its history, he was succeeded by Max Horkheimer who became head in 1931. Both Horkheimer (1895-1973) and Adorno (1903-1969), who came to prominence later but who was to eventually head the Institute in the 1950’s, came from well- to- do Jewish middle class families. Horkheimer had been interested in radical politics since the end of the war and Adorno was much influenced by the early cultural critique of Lukacs. In his inaugural lecture ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute of Social Research’ Horkheimer defines social philosophy as ‘the philosophical interpretation of the vicissitudes of human fate… not of mere individuals…but as members of a community. It is thus concerned with phenomena that can only be understood in the context of human social life: with the state, law, economy, religion—in short with the entire material and intellectual culture of humanity’ (BP&SS p1). He goes on to outline the Institute’s basic commitment to interdisciplinary research that expressed the group’s dissatisfaction with the narrow specialisation characteristic of the contemporary German university. The basic idea behind Horkheimer’s project was to marry sophisticated theoretical work in a number of disciplines with major empirical studies of various aspects of contemporary society. In providing a rationale for this approach, Horkheimer argues that while the social sciences are capable of objective judgement, they ‘have nothing to say about the degree of reality or about the value of these phenomena. Such issues are matters for social philosophy.’ (BP&SSp.8) by which he means Marx’s critical theory. Therefore, what is required is that philosophy, which is orientated to the essential and general, provide particular studies with their animating impulses while, at the same time, remaining sufficiently open to be influenced and changed by these concrete studies’ BP&SS p.9. This achieves a continuous dialectical penetration that overcomes the dual tendency of philosophy to think that it can announce its wide ranging conclusions without concern for empirical control and of the empirical sciences to get bogged down in chaotic and minute specialist studies (BP&SS, p.9) without any sense of the whole. Horkheimer here seems to both take on board Max Weber’s strictures about the need to specialisation owing to ‘the volume of material’ and the multiplication of specialised auxiliary sciences BP&SS, p.10 while, at the same time, reiterating that these sciences themselves require guidance from a general diagnosis of the epoch supplied by social theory.

The contradictions, which arise when parts of the theory are taken as independent entities, are thus not due to errors or to the neglect of clear definitions. They are due to the fact that the theory has a historically changing object, which, however, remains identical amid all the changes. The theory is not a storehouse of hypotheses on the course of particular events in society. It constructs a developing picture of society as a whole, an existential judgement with a historical dimension (CT, 239).

9. Apart from Horkheimer who was the Director and formulated the basic programme and tenor of the new critical theory, the other major contributors to the Institute and its journal: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschuung, were Frederick Pollock (economist), Leo Lowenthal (literary critic), Eric Fromm (psycho-analysis), Franz Neumann (political theorist), Adorno (musicologist& philosophy), Herbert Marcuse (Philosophy), Walter Benjamin (literary critic& philosophy). The idea was that the combination of a variety of talents from different disciplines would allow the Institute to cover a wide area and attempt a truly comprehensive analysis of the specific character of contemporary bourgeois society.