Re: notes to Marx and Horkheimer - ruthless criticism and dialectical critique (revised)
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 is important to grasp properly the nature of Marx's critique.
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.
What otherwise might appear as pedantic points in Marx’s critique were instances of Marx taking the opportunity to go deeper into and elaborate upon issues raised by the "errors" of the Gotha Program, whose inadequate formulations Marx tried to use as occasions for clarification. The cranky tone of Marx's critique owed only to the relatively banal mistakes of the Gotha Program, the fact that it did not provide acute enough occasion for pushing further and advancing the needed clarification.
(This contrasts to Marx's apparently more generous tone in the 1864 Inaugural Address to the First International, which we read and discussed previously. But even there Marx was quick to point out that, as significant as the 10 hour day and the Factory Acts regulating labor conditions in Britain, and the growth of workers' and consumers' cooperative organizations, these could not keep pace with the by comparison "geometric" developments of capital in the same period. Such inadequate accomplishments could only point to the historical obsolescence of wage-labor, but not in themselves overcome it.)
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 includes Marx's critical characterization of the SPD program as being potentially to the Right of the liberal German Free Trade Party on internationalism.
The recipients of Marx's critique dismissed it in terms of it being supposedly impossible to "satisfy" Marx and Engels, as if the latter were just cantankerous "old men." Liebknecht and Bebel dodged the issue. For 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 was entirely correct to point out that the Gotha Program was written as if Marx had never written and published his book Capital, but this was not the point of his pique.
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."
For Lassalle, that sphere was "politics." Marx rightly castigated the "state socialism" of Lassalle for its one-sidedness. (It is significant that while Lassalle flirted with Bismark for an anti-capitalist political alliance, Proudhon, who also scorned workers' organizing merely in their "economic" interests, made overtures to Louis Bonaparte in the aftermath of 1848. 19th century socialism already showed the authoritarian tendencies that would blossom fully in the 20th century.) 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 work.
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: the simultaneous phenomena of reformist (counterrevolutionary) Social Democracy, on the one hand, and, on the other, Stalinism in the USSR, the perverse result of the first (and only) successful workers' revolution. Horkheimer called this combined outcome of social democratic and Stalinist reformist accommodation to the continuation of capitalism the "authoritarian state" (of which fascism was only one, and perhaps a derivative form of the broader historical tendency, which included the New Deal in the U.S.).
What if not only the workers' movement but Marxism itself was indeed responsible for fascism and Stalinism -- for the authoritarian state of the mid-20th century? Then the question would be, how so?
Many at the time of Horkheimer's essay -- 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 -- and pessimistic resignation in the face of it. But they are wrong, as Horkheimer's essay clearly shows. Horkheimer insisted upon the ambivalence of the history of bourgeois society, including up to the relatively bleak moment of 1940.
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 in Stalinism as a historical phenomenon.
What was called for was not despair, but a *dialectical* critical approach, seeking potential possibilities, specifically in the authoritarian state.
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 approached 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 the authoritarian state seemed to negate the workers' movement's 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 an effective immanent critical development of Marxist political practice. In the 1930s, Trotskyism held out such a (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 as 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 meant to "return to Marx," again. It meant preserving Marx's ruthlessly critical but *dialectical* approach to capital, in the face of but despite evident regression.
This is Platypus's project, 70 years later.
-- Chris