notes to Horkheimer, "The Authoritarian State" (1940)
Christopher Cutrone
I wrote previously about Marx and Horkheimer, in terms of "ruthless criticism" and "dialectical critique."
I now wish to comment specifically on the Horkheimer essay, which responds to Walter Benjamin's 1940 "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and presages themes in Horkheimer and Adorno's subsequent book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944-47).
Apart from what I wrote earlier, about the role of Marxist politics in the workers' movement, including through the Bolshevik Revolution, contributing to the history of the rise of "state capitalism"/the authoritarian state beginning in the late 19th but fully blossoming in the 20th century, which according to Horkheimer called for a dialectical critique, exploring the emancipatory possibilities of capital in and through the authoritarian state and its (crisis of) social politics, I want to now focus on the central historical exposition Horkheimer provides, of the history of bourgeois society leading to the authoritarian state.
Horkkeimer raises the antinomies of bourgeois society -- as both emancipatory and giving rise to new and more complete forms of domination -- through several historical figurations, such as Luther vs. Munzer, etc. This brings us full circle to the early Marx, who posed the emergence of bourgeois society or capital as a partial emancipation that left incomplete would be the catastrophic dead-end of humanity, or, pushed further to completion through socialism, would be the end of pre-history and beginning of true human history.
Bourgeois society in its fundamental ambivalence thus has two histories, a history of emancipation and a history of (perfected) domination. Horkheimer is trying to grasp 20th century realities as expressive of both.
Hence, the preceding several centuries of history -- of, in Marx's terms, the emergence/constitution and then crisis of capital -- came to contain this ambivalence in all its moments. The crisis of capital is projected back into the Protestant Reformation, etc. -- and even into the pre-history of capital, in Classical Antiquity, etc.: the totality of the history of civilization, going back millennia, if not eons.
If all of human history has culminated in capital, then, for Horkheimer, humanity is faced with determining the overall character of its history -- including as natural history. Humanity at the crossroads of capital determines the totality of meaning of natural history. Hegel, a figure of the emergence of capital, returns in the mid-20th century midnight witching hour of capital. Horkheimer is casting the mid-20th century as the crossroads of cosmic history.
We have retreated, through "postmodernism," from this "go-for-broke game of history" that characterized the mid-20th century for the Frankfurt School thinkers. One way of recovering the moment of their thought is grasping its unprecedented character, and how subsequent history has been derivative of this, rather than bringing forth anything truly new in social history.
If the authoritarian state, according to Horkheimer, was the completion of capital without being its dialectical Aufhebung, its simultaneous fulfillment and negation, in an emancipatory sense, then what if it was so, but in a non-emancipatory sense. -- This is what Benjamin and Adorno meant by "dialectics at a standstill." What did it mean that regression took place at the threshold of emancipation?
1940 represents the end of Marxist politics in the sense understood by Horkheimer, Benjamin and Adorno. This is exemplified, as Richard pointed out in his talk on "1933" in our Decline of the Left in the 20th Century presentation at the Left Forum and our 1st annual international convention in 2009, by Trotsky's murder -- and Benjamin's suicide -- in 1940.
Today, living not in Fordism but "post-Fordism," means recognizing how social history has remained stuck in 1940. So the character of 1940 remains in doubt, if not controversy. In a certain sense, Horkheimer's essay registers the "too late" character of the epic struggles of the 1930s that had been resolved in a certain sense by issuing into the 2nd World War in 1940.
1917-19 to 1939-40 was both the great pivotal period of recent history, and the aftermath and counterrevolutionary repression of the possibilities of the preceding era that culminated in the crisis of war and revolution 1914-19.
The concept of the "authoritarian state" is tied to the history of the post-1848 world in two phases: first, the era of Marxism at its height (in the 2nd International) and into its crisis; and secondly, the aftermath of the crisis of Marxism. Post-1940 Marxism was always pseudo-Marxism. The historical phenomenon of the authoritarian state thus poses the historical meaning of Marxism. Was Marxism the most capitalist/bourgeois (because "proletarian") ideology of all, or was it the clearest historical self-consciousness of the "pointing beyond" of capital, as it liked to think of itself? In a sense it was both, which is how Horkheimer is posing the historical significance of the authoritarian state as Marxism's product/result.
But in the post-1940 world this character of history was lost. Or, at least, it became more indistinct, which Horkheimer already anticipates. Rather than post-1848 history, or history from the standpoint of Marxism, the history of capital becomes more indeterminate and ambiguous in its emancipatory character, which is why this ambivalence seems to reach back so far, not merely to the Jacobinism in the process of the 1789 Great French Revolution, but also the philosophical Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and Protestant Reformation -- and through the Renaissance of "Western Civilization," reaching all the way back to the Socratic/Platonic turn of enlightenment in Classical Antiquity.
With postmodernism post-WWII, this history was disenchanted rather than its crisis being realized. This is what gives the Frankfurt School thinkers their specific purchase for us today. We share their moment circa 1940 more so than that of the 2nd Intl. radicals Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, from the crisis of Marxism, let alone that of Marx himself. But this is clearly to our disadvantage and not advantage, as Horkheimer recognized. We can only access Marxism through FS Critical Theory, which registered the transformed meaning of Marxism, in all its ambiguity.
It is Platypus's task to make the most of what this configuration of Marxism in history has to offer. With Horkheimer et al., we can, unlike virtually all other "Marxists" recognize the world-historic tragedy of the demise of Marxism, recognizing, without avoiding/repressing this (as most "Marxists" do), that it may mean the permanent foreclosure of human emancipation.
If the FS thinkers issued "messages in a bottle," then we are their recipient. As Benjamin put it, our coming was foretold. For if we can still recognize the problem Horkheimer et al. posed, despite the fact that the New Left generation could not, perhaps it is not quite too late.
-- The challenge is that we are faced with the historical crossroads of the authoritarian state without having it before us in its most acute form. The fact that post-Fordism was able to come up with no better names for itself than postmodernism and neoliberalism may tell us that the challenge still remains.
Despite Foucault et al. a post-Fordism that is post-capitalism in the sense of escaping the historical task posed by Horkheimer in 1940 has not been forthcoming. Instead, we come back around to the unsolved problem of the mid-20th century, which has "progressed" only in its senescence. Its terror has been repressed, which may just allow us to see it more clearly than the New Left generation was able to do.
Perhaps we can make use of the exhaustion of history and not succumb to it. This can be seen in how Horkheimer's supposedly most "pessimistic" moment in 1940 can strike us today in its comparative optimism relative to what has come since then. That Horkheimer did not resign in 1940 -- of all historical moments to retain any semblance of optimism -- should tell us just how wrong it would be to resign from the unfulfilled tasks of Marxism today, when the obstacles are so much less formidable.
As Marx put it, in his 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge calling for the "ruthless criticism of everything existing," 100 years before Horkheimer, the "internal difficulties" and "lack of clarity" among the purported "reformers" are indeed even greater than the "external obstacles." This characterizes our time in certain ways more so than any other time since Marx.
-- Chris