notes to Marx and Horkheimer - ruthless criticism and dialectical critique
Christopher Cutrone
Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) and Max Horkheimer's essay on "The Authoritarian State" (1940) both exemplify how Marx started out, in the youthful writings with which our summer syllabus began, with a "ruthless criticism of everything existing," and a "dialectical" critique, in which philosophy sought to simultaneously "realize" and "abolish" itself, "making the world philosophical."
Karl Korsch's 1922 introduction to Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program is a wonderfully concise contextualization and exploration of the document. For Korsch, it was Marx's avant la lettre critique of the Second International Marxism, or "vulgar Marxism" that radicals of Korsch's generation had to struggle to overcome to attempt to make anticapitalist revolution in the 20th century.
It was not the case, simply, that Marx's epigones, Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, didn't "get" or understand Marx. Rather, in critiquing the founding program of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) at their inaugural conference at Gotha in 1875, Marx was fulfilling his own agenda of the "ruthless criticism of everything existing," including first and foremost, the "Left" and "socialist" politics.
The SPD's Gotha Program was an occasion and opportunity for a clarification and advancement of a Marxian "proletarian socialism," and it would have been wrong for Marx *not* to have critiqued the program. (Indeed, later, Engels -- who survived Marx by 12 years -- would himself dutifully critique Bernstein and Kautsky's subsequent -- and ostensibly more rigorously "Marxist" -- new SPD program adopted at their conference in Erfurt in 1891.)
Some, such as the Dunayevskaya Marxist-Humanists, and Martin Nicolaus (translator of Marx's Grundrisse, in his essay on "The Unknown Marx"), et al., would claim that the "mature" Marx's politics were only ever succinctly given, in however elliptical form, in his Critique of the Gotha Program.
Our approach in Platypus is quite different. Rather than searching for the "break" between the youthful and mature Marx's writings, we seek the inner coherence of continuity in development, how the later Marx fulfills the early Marx's agenda. This is not because there are no differences whatsoever, but because Marx didn't feel the need to repeat himself and took his own past work for granted in ways that we need to recover.
Apart from the details of Marx's critique of the 1875 SPD program, we should note Marx's willingness to characterize the SPD's program at points as being "reactionary," i.e., *conservative*. This goes for his critical characterization of the SPD program as being to the Right of the liberal German Free Trade Party on internationalism.
The recipients of the critique dismissed it in terms of it being impossible to "satisfy" Marx and Engels, as if the latter were just cantankerous "old men." Liebknecht and Bebel really dodged the issue. And it wasn't simply a matter of making inevitable concessions in founding a new organization, but rather what Marx emphasized, the bad self-understanding that the 1875 program both expressed and propagated further. Marx is correct to point out that it was written as if Marx had never written and published his book Capital.
The issue of Ferdinand Lassalle, who had died by the time of the union of "Marxists" and "Lassalleans" that gave birth to the SPD, is something we've touched upon very briefly and obliquely in some of our past readings. Lassalle, like Proudhon, scorned workers' organizations that sought to press "economic" demands, for thus "buying into the system" of capitalism, and emphasized "political" struggles instead.
As Lukacs, in "The Standpoint of the Proletariat" (the 3rd part of the essay "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History and Class Consciousness) quotes Lassalle,
"There is no social way that leads out of this social situation. The vain efforts of *things* to behave like *human beings* can be seen in the English [labor] strikes whose melancholy outcome is familiar enough. The only way out for the workers is to be found in that sphere within which they can still be human beings."
That sphere was "politics." Marx rightly castigated the "state socialism" of Lassalle for its one-sidedness. But this did not mean some economism on Marx's part, but rather treating the relation between economy and politics, or civil society and the state, not as the distortion of politics or the state by capitalism, but rather as symptomatic: socialism would be the overcoming of the distinction between economy and politics that would neither be the simple politicization of the economy or the reduction of politics to economics (in the interests of the workers). Rather, Marx and Engels's dialectical formulation was to replace the "governing of men by the administration of things."
This is to be found in Marx's enunciation of the earlier principle articulated by Louis Blanc, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," enshrined in Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.
But the most important lesson to be learned from Marx's critique was about the historical regression to which even Marxism was subject. The only possible response was, not fidelity to orthodoxy, but further critique.
Max Horkheimer, director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, wrote his 1940 essay on "The Authoritarian State" as part of a collection in honor of the recently deceased Walter Benjamin, whose posthumously published 1940 "Theses on the Philosophy of History" were profoundly inspirational for both Horkheimer and Adorno, who went on to write Dialectic of Enlightenment in response to and further elaboration of Benjamin's ork.
Horkheimer was writing 100 years after the writings by the early Marx with which we began our summer syllabus of readings. -- What did the Marxian agenda look like 100 years on?
The historical force of Marxism had an ambiguous outcome: reformist Social Democracy and Stalinism in the USSR, the result of the first (and only) successful workers' revolution. Horkheimer called this outcome the "authoritarian state" (of which fascism was only one, and perhaps derivative form).
Many at this time -- in the immediate aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact that postponed the Nazi invasion of the USSR -- despaired of Marxism and renounced it as a "totalitarian" ideology. Trotskyism suffered the first of many splits at this time -- the renegade tendency led by Max Shachtman coined the term "red fascism" to describe Stalinism.
Most conventional narratives of the Frankfurt School's development assimilate it to such phenomena of this "totalitarian" historical moment. But they are wrong, as Horkheimer's essay clearly shows.
Adorno had protested, against fellow Frankfurt School colleague and close personal friend of Horkheimer Friedrich Pollock's earlier "State Capitalism" thesis, that it was necessary to find even in fascist capitalism "contradiction" -- as it was necessary, as Trotsky pointed out, to recognize the contradiction of Stalinism as a historical phenomenon.
What was called for was not despair, but a *dialectical* critical approach, seeking potential possibilities.
As Marx had pointed out in the selections from his dissertation published by Robert Tucker in his Marx-Engels Reader under the title "To Make the World Philosophical," the "inner light" of philosophical dissention had to become an "outward flame" in the attempt to change the world.
Horkheimer refused apologetics in the face of the historical phenomena of fascism, Stalinism and Nazism. He refused to be either blindsided or intimidated by history, to deny or accommodate it. Instead, he critiqued it. For Horkheimer, the "authoritarian state" needed to be approach in terms of its being a real historical outcome of capital, but that harbored further possibilities within it. As such, he approached it as perhaps the legitimate historical outcome of the workers' movement, even if it seemed to negate its aspirations in certain respects, it fulfilled them in others.
The thought-figure here important to Platypus is regression. Regression in consciousness and regression in practice. If the authoritarian state was the outcome of Marxism, then this only pointed to the need for a more ruthless criticism of Marxism -- but from a dialectical approach that recognized how Marxism itself, and not merely the workers' movement, was an integral part of the history of capital.
If Marxism had brought forth the authoritarian state through its leading the politics of the workers' movement, then this called for the further development -- the immanent critique -- of Marxism itself, in both theory and practice. The Frankfurt School took up the "critical theory" aspect, but in the absence of effective immanent critical development of Marxist political practice. Trotskyism held out that brief possibility, but by the time of Horkheimer's essay even this was cut short, as Trotsky was killed that same year.
Horkheimer's perspective is an attempt at a retrospective appraisal of 100 years of Marxism, in both theory and practice, and what it would mean to own -- take responsibility for the course of -- the world in and through that history. What would it mean to understand the world has the historical outcome of Marxism and its failure, but not in terms of turning away from the project of conscious human emancipation in and beyond capital, but by recommitting to it, as Horkheimer did in 1940? -- This is what it means to "return to Marx," again.
This is Platypus's project, 70 years later.
-- Chris