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The Negation of the Negation
One-Dimensional Man is thus, of all Marcuse's works, the closest to the main-stream of the Frankfurt School. Yet it is also the book that has had the most political influence, more, probably, than anything else produced by the School in all its forty years of existence. Despite its pessimism, this book has become one of the standard texts of the student revolt of the late 1960's. But before examining the link between the views of the Frankfurt School and the recent student revolt, we must examine the concepts which underly these political positions. The most important one arises directly from the hyper-radicalism of the School's critique of capitalist society. Critical theory rejects any positive presence in capitalist society (such as the proletariat) and seeks the purest negation, the negation of the negation, as the essence of revolution. This Hegelian notion of revolutionary change has played a central and disastrous role in Frankfurt thought. In their search for the absolute negation of the prevailing theoretical and ideological discourse, the thinkers of the Frankfurt School feel forced to go outside both science, concrete social analysis, and formal logic. Horkheimer's 1937 programme for a critical theory tried to find an Archimedean point outside society in order to uproot itself from the process of social reproduction. In the 1940's, Horkheimer and Adorno considered it necessary to go even further, formulating their social critique only in philosophical fragments, because any continuous discourse was bound to lapse into positivity. The search for an absolute negation of the negation is also the rationale for Marcuse's retreat from Marxism in One-Dimensional Man: 'An attempt to recapture the critical intent of these categories (society, class, individual, etc), and to understand how the intent was cancelled by the social reality appears from the outset to be regression from a theory joined with historical practice to abstract, speculative thought; from the critique of political economy to philosophy. This ideological character of the critique results from the fact that the analysis is forced to proceed from a position "outside" the positive as well as the negative, the productive an well as the destructive tendencies in society' (odm, pp. 12 ff.).
This attempt by the theory to pull itself up by the hair does not make it more revolutionary, but rather more philosophical. The same attitude can be detected in the denial that the economic class struggle can play a revolutionary role in the developed capitalist countries. [45] The historical experience of revolutions shows that they have not been sustained by the absolute negativity of the revolutionaries' demands, but by the determination with which concrete immediate demands have been urged in particular historical situations. Practical revolutionaries—Rosa Luxemburg as well as Lenin—have therefore always stressed the dialectical link between the various types of class struggle. None of them bothered to look for the absolute negation. On the contrary, Lenin's theory of revolution has two key moments. One is the building up of an organized revolutionary force and leadership. The other is the emergence of a revolutionary situation. This is characterized by a fusion of different contradictions such that the question of State power is put on the immediate agenda. The revolutionary situation can be ushered in by the most diverse, and apparently banal causes, including even a parliamentary crisis. The conception of the revolutionary situation as a fusion of different contradictions is not an ad hoc explanation, but follows logically from the anlysis of society as a complex social formation with mutually irreducible elements. [46] Now we have already seen that, far from conceiving society as a complex structure, historicist theories of society look for an inner essence revealed in all its parts. If this essence is oppressive, the source for a transformation cannot be found inside society, for all its manifestations share the oppressive nature of the essence. The agent of transformation can only be an external Negating Subject. The first historicist versions of Marxism thought that this external negating subject was the proletariat, thrust out of capitalist society as the object of all its oppressions, incarnating the capitalist negation of humanity. Both Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and Horkheimer's Traditional and Critical Theory contain this conception of the working class. But the proletariat no longer seems 'absolutely' miserable and excluded in the so-called welfare state. The only groups who could still be so described are racial minorities and other outcasts. That is why, in his later works, Marcuse has tried to penetrate deeper into other human needs than economic ones, for he claims that the latter have now become means of integration and oppression. He has therefore turned his attention to the 'biological dimension', to vital instinctive drives, to 'erotic' needs in the broad sense of the term. In doing so he has found a new Negating Subject in the student movement and its refusal of the performance principle, its rejection of an economy based on exchange and competition, and its practice of sexual liberation.
But was the role of the proletariat in Marx's theory ever that of an absolute negation of capitalist society? On the one hand, Marx says explicitly that the social polarization resulting from the immiseration of the working class is crucial to the proletarian revolution (though this need not necessarily take the form of a strictly literal economic pauperization). On the other hand, Marx characterizes the epochal crisis of capitalism by a structural rather than a simply political contradiction, a contradiction between the social character of the productive forces and the private character of the relations of production. In this context, the term 'productive forces' refers to the organizational/technical conditions under which production proceeds—handicrafts, manufacture, machine industry, and automated process industry are different levels of the productive forces. These productive forces, which come into contradiction with the private mode of their appropriation, include the increasing use of science, developed communications, a high educational level and an internalized discipline in the work force. Their effects on the working class are not immiseration but rather the provision of greater facilities for organization and a greater capacity to replace the capitalist regimentation of production by social appropriation and working-class control from below. There is always a social polarization between the working class and the bourgeoisie which arises directly from the fact of exploitation: this is intensified by economic crises induced by the contradiction between the productive forces and relations of production: a revolutionary situation then makes it explosive. Hence Marxist theory does not need a conception of the proletariat as the incarnation of the negation of human existence. A revolutionary situation is a function of the complex development of the social formation, whose different contradictions suddenly fuse in a 'ruptural unity', not of the simple degree of wealth or poverty of the proletariat. [47]
The Marxist concept of the contradiction between the social character of the productive forces and the private character of the relations of production has never been incorporated into historicist interpretations of Marx in a way which preserves the objective character of both aspects of this contradiction as structures of the capitalist mode of production. For the young Lukács, the 'decisive weight' is attached to whether '"the greatest force of production" in the capitalist order of production, the proletariat, experiences the crisis as a mere object of the decision, or as its subject'. [48] Here the analysis of the structural preconditions for revolution has been spirited away, reducing the forces of production to the proletariat. In fact, this makes the concept itself superfluous: all that matters is the proletariat and its degree of insight into its historical mission, its relationship to class consciousness. The Frankfurt School, on the other hand, has used the concept of the productive forces in another way. They are seen as representing the objective possibility of a new and better society. 'This idea is distinguished from abstract utopia by the proof of its real possibility given by the present level of human productive forces' (kt ii, p. 168). The productive forces are not part of a structural contradiction, a contradiction between social and private systems, which affects class relationships, but are seen as the stage of human evolution which now enables the Negating Subject to abolish poverty and misery from the human condition. [49] It is in this sense that the productive forces are 'neutral', a raw material of potentiality. This neutrality is later denied: from a raw material of potentiality, technology becomes a means of oppression. But in neither case are the forces of production seen in their Marxist structural context. Rather, the analysis slips away from any positive identification of the structures of the capitalist social formation, or of the forces within it capable of transforming that social formation; from Marxist science and politics to philosophy as Ersatz science and Ersatz politics. Even when apparently anchored in the social structure, the Negating Subject was a philosophical concept; as Révai long ago pointed out in a review of History and Class Consciousness, the 'assigned proletarian class consciousness' was merely substituted by Lukács for the Hegelian Geist. [50] In the Frankfurt School, this reduction of politics to philosophy has come directly out into the open.
forrás: Göran Therborn: The Frankfurt School. in New Left Review Nr. 63. pp. 65-96.
http://www.newleftreview.org/?getpdf=NLR06205&pdflang=en
csaba gyory
From: Jelinek Csaba <jeline...@gmail.com>
Date: 2008/5/30
Subject: Re: próbafordítás
To: csaba gyory <csaba...@gmail.com>
szia Csaba
csatolva küldöm a fordítást.
én holnap külföldre utazok, és csak június 10-én jövök haza, úgyhogy lehet, hogy nem tudok majd reagálni a válaszodra, csak utána.
de nagyon kíváncsi vagyok, mi a véleményed róla!
üdv:csaba