1. Louis Proyect -- Sunday, 15 December 1996
2. James Farmelant -- Monday, 16 December 1996
3. Hinrich Kuhls -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996
4. Louis Proyect -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996
5. Doug Henwood -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996
6. Chris Burford -- Wednesday, 18 December 1996
7. Louis Proyect -- Wednesday, 18 December 1996

Louis Proyect -- Sunday, 15 December 1996

Date:    Sun, 15 Dec 1996 18:45:36 -0500 (EST)
From:    Louis N Proyect 
Subject: M-I: A Critique of Adorno-Horkheimer:
              In Defense of Donald Duck

Instead they question the possibility of proletarian revolution since modern capitalism has found a way to lull people into passive acceptance of the system. The heroic proletariat of the age of Marx and Engels that created the Paris Commune has disappeared. What we have today is well-fed, movie-going consumers who are too dull to even know that they are slaves to the capitalist system. The Frankfurter's idea of a working-class bears strong resemblance to the likes of Homer and Marge Simpson, Ralph and Alice Kramden, and Archie and Edith Bunker. The children are like Bart Simpson and Beavis and Butthead. (Soulful and intelligent Lisa Simpson, on the other hand, may be a throwback to the English Chartists.)

Of course there were some fitful attempts at revolution in Western Europe in the good old days prior to the 1940s when "Dialectics of Enlightenment" was written, but these seem to have gone nowhere. Since Adorno and Horkheimer are so fixated on the triumphal Nazi state and its second cousin, American capitalism, there is little attempt to understand how the German working-class found itself in the fascist straight-jacket. Adorno and Horkheimer seem much more interested in an exegesis of the Odyssey or De Sade than this rather boring history stuff. (Of course, I will be taking a look at Erich Fromm's rather close study of the Nazification of the German working-class in my next post.)

Let me try to fill in a little bit of this history so that we can understand how little there was in the world of the 1940s to cheer these philosophers.

The German working-class in its majority was for socialism in the 1920s. Try to think of what this means. If we were in similar circumstances today, this would represent electoral victories for socialist parties everywhere. There would be socialist mayors of cities like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, etc. The Congress would have a big representation of socialists. Morning newspapers printed by socialist parties would have circulation in the millions.

So how did a tiny gang of fascists take power?

Part of the reason of course is that the big bourgeoisie needed a powerful weapon against socialist revolution. Hitler and his brown- shirts stepped forward. In exchange for cash payments from industrialists, they broke into socialist and trade union meetings and beat people into unconsciousness. This was what historical fascism looked like, rather than some form of Kantian philosophy run amok as argued by Adorno and Horkheimer.

There were two socialist parties in Germany in the 1920s. One, the Socialist Party, was a reformist party whose leaders had supported WWI and who had killed the revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the upsurge following the war. The other main party was the Communist Party, which was much smaller but much better organized. It also, of course, had far more revolutionary-minded workers in its ranks than the SP.

Unfortunately both parties were tied to bureaucracies. In the case of the SP, it was the trade union and parliamentary bureaucracies. In the case of the CP, it was the Soviet bureaucracy. In each instance it was difficult for the voice of the ordinary worker to be heard. The ruling bodies would choose to ignore them even if democratic channels existed in these bodies, which they didn't.

The ruling body of the SP in the 1920s chose to align itself with bourgeois parties against Hitler. It advocated votes for "lesser evil" candidates like Hindenburg. It played somewhat of the same role as liberals in the Democratic Party in the United States. They both advocate class-collaboration.

The ruling body of the CP took ultraleft positions in the 1920s in compliance with the so-called "third period" Comintern strategy. In its essence this meant treating the SP as being no better than Nazis. There was "social fascism" and "Hitlerite fascism" and the workers should oppose both.

This was a terrible mistake. It reached tragic depths when the Communists advocated a vote for a Nazi referendum to unseat the local Socialist government in Saxony in the year 1931. This would be a little bit like Gus Hall urging a vote for a ballot initiative sponsored by the Vermont White Aryan Resistance to recall Bernie Sanders.

Trotsky's articles detailing the errors of the SP and the CP are in "The Struggles Against Fascism in Germany," an indispensable book. Why did so few workers rally to the Trotskyist banner (god, I hate using that type of language nowadays) when he was so correct? The reason is because Trotskyism is a hopelessly sectarian current. Trotsky founded a movement that was never able to become a mass movement since its approach to politics was that of a religious order rather an aspiring mass movement. Trotskyists only know how to preach. Trotsky had an abundance of correct ideas about strategy but he lacked the one correct organizational idea to carry them out successfully: the need for a Bolshevik Party. Instead he promoted a particularly sectarian version of the Zinovievest model that by definition repelled genuine workers. Instead he attracted cranky intellectuals like James Burhham or hardened ex-CPers like James P. Cannon or Gerry Healy.

The failure of all three left tendencies to put together an effective strategy against Hitler meant that Nazism could prevail. When Nazism prevailed, it excluded the possibility of a socialist republic to inspire intellectuals like Adorno and Horkheimer, leaders of the Frankfurt School.

When this school relocated to the United States, Adorno and Horkheimer found little to inspire them there. Instead of finding a massive worker's movement, they found a society steeped in "mass culture." People listened to the radio, went to the movies, listened to jazz bands, read pop fiction and even began watching TV. All this mass culture prevented them from discovering the roots of their oppression.

Does this all sound a little familiar?. It should since it was the prevailing wisdom of the New Left in the 1960s. The German left embraced the Dialectics of Enlightenment, a long-neglected and unpublished text and took it as a guide to understanding the passive working-class of Germany. The American student movement fell in love with another Frankfurter text, Herbert Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man." Activists held up these texts to explain why American workers supported the war in Vietnam or why German workers seemed more interested in the consumer culture than in fighting against the capitalists.

These ideas, of course, are still out there. It is necessary for us to examine them in some detail in order to prepare a reinvigorated Marxism geared to the battles that approach us in the future.

                             *******

Isn't our objection to the capitalist system based on its tendency to act irrationally? What could be more irrational than imperialist war or economic depression? Aren't these the products of a capitalist system in decay?

Adorno and Horkheimer don't see things this way. They view the ills of the modern world as a function of the rationalist mode of thinking that the Enlightenment introduced. The Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries tended to introduce a way of viewing the world that tended to objectify nature. Once we objectify nature, the next step is to dominate it. The domination of nature is the first step toward the domination of humanity by states that view society as being just one more realm to "engineer."

I recommend Martin Jay's "The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950" for some first-rate analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer. The final chapter "Toward a Philosophy of History: The Critique of the Enlightenment" is particularly helpful in understanding how this hostility toward the Enlightenment originated. The rather abstruse prose of "The Dialectics of Enlightenment" practically shouts out for some type of clear commentary such as Jay's. I spent the years 1961 to 1967 grappling with the types of problems that D&E tries to solve. I am also well acquainted with the philosophical context in which their analysis is situated. Despite this, I found Jay's commentary nearly indispensable.

Jay points out that the Frankfurters reject the notion that class conflict is the locomotive of history, a basic Marxist theory. While this might have been true at one point in the history of capitalism, the main characteristic of capitalism in the 20th century was non-economic. The main conflict was not between ruling classes and the ruled but between humanity as a whole and nature.

It appears that Horkheimer was much more insistent on this question than any other Frankfurter. Jay points out:

"Perhaps most clearly, this motif surfaced in Horkheimer's 'Habilitationsschrift, The Origins of the Bourgeois Philosophy of History'. Horkheimer directly related the Renaissance view of science and technology to political domination. The new conception of the natural world as a field for human manipulation and control, he argued, corresponded to a similar notion of man himself as an object of domination. The clearest exponent of this view in his eyes was Machiavelli, whose political instrumentalism served the rising bourgeois state. [Hint to all you enterprising graduate students out there. Wouldn't this be a fabulous topic for a dissertation? A comparison of Gramsci and Horkheimer's understanding of Machiavelli?] Underlying Machiavelli's politics, Horkheimer maintained, was the undialectical separation of man from nature and the hypostatization of the distinction. In fact, he argued against Machiavelli, 'nature' was dependent on man in two ways: civilization changes it and man's concept of what it is itself changes. Thus history and nature were not irreconcilably opposed."

By the time of the Adorno-Horkheimer collaboration of the 1940s, this anti-Enlightenment stance deepened to the point of irrationalism. Horkheimer himself really began going off the deep end during the depths of WWII. He wrote a letter to a fellow Frankfurter by the name of Leo Lowenthal in 1942. It stated "Enlightenment here is identical with bourgeois thought, nay, thought in general, since there is no other thought properly speaking than in cities...". Furthermore, in his "Eclipse of Reason" he went so far as to say that "this mentality of man as the master [which was the essence of the Enlightenment view] can be traced back to the first chapters of Genesis." Oh, I get it now. The creation myths of the Hebrew tribe are responsible for all of the ills of modern capitalist society. Good gracious. I'm glad now that I never went back to the Synagogue after I was bar-mitzvahed.

                             *******

You can imagine how much Adorno and Horkheimer sympathized with the hero of Sturges' "Sullivan's Travels." This is the story of a leftish film director who wants to make a "Grapes of Wrath" type film to stir the masses. The masses, Goshdarn them, seem only interested in the screwball comedies he is so good at. These comedies are also what Hollywood studios pay him so lavishly for, not social protest movies.

Adorno and Horkheimer must have walked out of the theater disgusted with the ending of the film. This scene shows Sullivan watching an audience laughing their heads off at one of his comedies. These are the poor, homeless and unemployed in a federal settlement. Sullivan concludes from this that his job in life is to amuse people rather than preach revolution to them. Leave politics to politicians. Bah, what a sell-out, the Frankfurters must have said as they gave this film two thumbs down while stomping out of the Loews Criterion.

I recommend that people take a look at the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in the "Dialectics of Enlightenment." This will give you a belly-laugh as hardy as the one that the poor people in "Sullivan's Travels" enjoyed. This chapter is just a slight cut above William Bennett's teeth-gnashing attack on Hollywood of today, except in the case of our Frankfurters it is from the left rather than the right. Listen to what they have to say about one of my favorite Hollywood actors Donald Duck:

"Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures and objects they electrified, by giving the maimed specimens a second life. [Could this be a reference to the cat's nine lives in Sylvester the Cat-egorical Imperative?] All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological truth reason over truth. A few years ago they had a consistent plot which only broke up in the final moments in a crazy chase, and thus resembled the old slapstick comedy. Now, however, time relations have shifted. In the very first sequence a motive is stated so that in the course of the action destruction can get to work on it: with the audience in pursuit, the protagonist becomes the worthless object of general violence. The quantity of organized of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self- electors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment."

                             *******

Joel Kovel is a noted Marxist philosopher and ecologist who used to be a psychiatrist. He had the reputation of being one of the most serious Marxist-oriented psychiatrists in the nation. This led me to make an appointment with him in the early 1980s for an evaluation. Shortly after this session, Joel wrote an article in Z Magazine explaining why he was quitting the psychiatry profession. It was an exercise in futility basically he confessed. I always wondered if my one session with him factored into his decision.

Joel has always described himself as a Frankfurter but I wasn't sure what that means. Now that I have studied Adorno and Horkheimer, it all makes sense. This Frankfurter stuff would naturally tend to make one open to all sorts of green-green foolishness.

I sent Joel an attack I made on Deep Ecology last year and he thought I was much "too sectarian." When you look at his article in the collection "Environmental Philosophy," you can see the heavy hand of the Frankfurters on his thinking.

The title of the article is "The Marriage of Radical Ecologies." In it he extols the English Romantic Poet William Blake and tries to show the Deep Ecologists that the Marxists are not as bad as they're cracked up to be. He says that they can unite around the notion of the "sacred." So what's this "sacred" business about anyhow. I enjoy a Gregorian Chant as much as the next person but everything in its place, you know. Joel says:

"In a money economy, nothing can be sacred, since to be sacred means to be nonexchangeable, while a fully developed 'market' puts everything on the block. Social movements that seek to restore a sense of the sacred are already undertaking, therefore, a potentially powerful critique of capitalism. No doubt, this is easily co-optable and often squandered. It easily becomes irrational, self-indulgent posturing when not connected with real social critique. It is especially galling to witness the comfortable, empty-headed spectacles of the New Age when one recognizes the emancipatory power in their originating impulse. However, those who only have room for a 'real social critique', with no sense of the sacred, no drive, that is, to overcome the ontology of capital as well as its political economy, are certainly no less stunted in their politics, nor can they overcome the domination of nature."

Furthermore, Marxists must advance a precise, scientific and level- headed answer to these problems. We are scientific thinkers not Shamans. Since there is nothing that is intrinsically "sacred," let's leave that sort of notion to the green-greens. The "sacred" like everything else is a social construction. With enough literacy, people will leave the "sacred" behind them. We should find a way to make an alliance around concrete issues with them, but Deep Ecology as an ideology is deeply reactionary.

The heritage of the Frankfurter School hangs heavily on the green movement, including the Marxist wing. We need to sharpen our Marxist analysis. The Frankfurt School and post-Modernism only get in the way. Marxism has to be as relentless in its criticism of existing class relations as capitalism is in its drive to maximize profits everywhere it can. Fuzzy notions of the "sacred" just get in the way. They lead to the sort of reactionary sentiments expressed by Shiva and her co-thinkers that subsistence agriculture is the only meaningful way of life for the Third World. The people of the Third World should make that decision, not people jet-setting from conference to conference advising Westerners that post-colonial people should reject science and technology.

(Next Monday I will have a look at Erich Fromm's "The Working Class in Weimar Germany". This of course will bear more directly on the question of the revolutionary potential of the working-class.)

Louis Proyect

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James Farmelant -- Monday, 16 December 1996

Date:    Mon, 16 Dec 1996 07:46:47 PST
Subject: Re: M-I: A Critique of Adorno-Horkheimer
From:    farmelantj@juno.com (James Farmelant)

In assessing the place of the Frankfurters within Marxism we should keep in mind that Marx (and Engels) kept one foot in the Enlightenment and one foot in the romantic era that followed. Prior to Marx, Hegel had attempted to synthesize the legacies of the Enlightenment and of the romantics and Marx followed him in this while replacing Hegel's metaphysics with a scientific analysis of history.

The problem with Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse is that they privileged the romantic heritage of Marxism over its Enlightenment ancestry. As Louis P correctly points out there is a pretty direct line of descent from Adorno or Marcuse to contemporary pomo Marxists.

Hopefully, Louis P will address in future posts the role of psychoanalysis in Frankfurt Marxism. (Freud too was a figure with one foot in the Enlightenment and one foot in the romantic era).

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Hinrich Kuhls -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996

Date:    Tue, 17 Dec 1996 08:28:07 +0100
From:    kls@unidui.uni-duisburg.de (Hinrich Kuhls)
Subject: Re: M-I: A Critique of Adorno-Horkheimer:
                  In Defense of Donald Duck

1. This current cyberseminar is devoted - I hope I am recalling it correctly - to the analysis of the political situation of the working class of the United States of America and of its reluctance to act more politically. I think you do not necessarily have to know the writings of Horkheimer/Adorno or even Fromm in order to understand either the current nor the historical [Weimar republic] situation of the German working class - economically, politically, or culturally. Hence I just don't see the connection of criticizing the writings of this school of left social scientists and philosophers to an inquiry into the current state of the US working class. - Here I should like more clarification.

2. When criticizing the theory of cultural institutions by Horkheimer/Adorno it is not sufficient to ridicule a specific part of their study, but some sketches on a marxist theory of cultural industries or rather institutions would be helpful and desirable.

3. In 1941 - during their New York exile - the Institute for Social Research under the chairmanship of Horkheimer outlined a research Proyect on antisemitism. This outline of an economic theory of antisemitism is still of relevance to the present situation. Further: this research Proyect has still to be completed by the socialist left. This failure of the left - including the marxists - has been painfully obvious once again in the discussions that followed the publication of David Goldhagen's Hitlers Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust earlier this year.

In this respect the socialist left has inherited a piece of homework from the Institute of Social Research resp. the Frankfurt School that is still to be done. I append the formulation of the question of inquiry and a brief comment on it - just for the record. [I have to apologize for not translating it into English and not retrieving the cite of an English translation of the quote.]

Hinrich Kuhls

              [appended remarks deleted--Ben 12-21-96]

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Louis Proyect -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996

Date:    Tue, 17 Dec 1996 09:06:12 -0500 (EST)
From:    Louis N Proyect 
Subject: M-I: Reply to Hinrich

1. This current cyberseminar is devoted - I hope I am recalling it correctly - to the analysis of the political situation of the working class of the United States of America and of its reluctance to act more politically. I think you do not necessarily have to know the writings of Horkheimer/Adorno or even Fromm in order to understand either the current nor the historical [Weimar republic] situation of the German working class - economically, politically, or culturally. Hence I just don't see the connection of criticizing the writings of this school of left social scientists and philosophers to an inquiry into the current state of the US working class. - Here I should like more clarification.

2. When criticizing the theory of cultural institutions by Horkheimer/Adorno it is not sufficient to ridicule a specific part of their study, but some sketches on a marxist theory of cultural industries or rather institutions would be helpful and desirable.

As far as study of cultural industries is concerned, I am all for it. I simply reject the methodology of the Frankfurt School and those who they have influenced like Social Text. They study films or television shows the way that Doug Henwood studies interest rates. In isolation from an analysis of the "primary contradictions" as Comrade Mao used to refer to them, this doesn't advance our understanding very much. The hope I have for Marxism is that the two approaches can be synthesized in a Gramscian manner.

One of the great damages of Stalinism and Trotskyism both has been its tendency to force intellectuals to look at society in a one-dimensional manner. The rebirth of classical Marxism has the potential to restore Marxism to its original multifaceted character (David Harvey, Mike Davis, James O'Connon, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Leo Panitch, etc.)

3. In 1941 - during their New York exile - the Institute for Social Research under the chairmanship of Horkheimer outlined a research Proyect on antisemitism. This outline of an economic theory of antisemitism is still of relevance to the present situation. Further: this research Proyect has still to be completed by the socialist left. This failure of the left - including the marxists - has been painfully obvious once again in the discussions that followed the publication of David Goldhagen's Hitlers Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust earlier this year.

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Doug Henwood -- Tuesday, 17 December 1996

Date:    Tue, 17 Dec 1996 15:21:46 -0500
From:    dhenwood@panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: M-I: Rate of Profit

Or to put it another way, the capitalist class becomes a overweening, parasitic oligarchy, sucking the blood of the working class through usury.

Has more of an agitational ring, don't you think?

And as more Ford Fairlanes develop, that is how more and more workers will see it.

"The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big money-lenders and userers that surround them, is one enormous centralization and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner -- and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it."
--Marx, Capital, vol. 3, chap. 33

Why they think that way - aside from its ground in material reality - is why the Frankfurters that Lou Proyect doesn't like are worth reading. I don't get why Lou is so hostile to the idea of studying movies and TV in a serious way: they shape consciousness. And as the old man said, when an ideology grips the mind of the masses it becomes a material force. The Frankfurters didn't study them the way lots of pomos do, as somehow containing the germs of critique or even liberation, or the way Suck.com does, with a wiseass smirk, but in the culture industry's relation to the ruling class and the ideas by which it rules. Adorno may have been a bit of a stick-in-the-mud in his phrase-turning, but Donald Duck as a character is not unrelated to the institutions of American capitalism. Or Beavis and Butt-head, even.

Doug

Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
250 W 85 St
New York NY 10024-3217
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+1-212-874-4020 voice
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Chris Burford -- Wednesday, 18 December 1996

Date:    18 Dec 96 03:56:34 EST
From:    Chris Burford <100423.2040@CompuServe.COM>
Subject: M-I: Monlithic state (was Red Feminism)

and added:

M&E would appear to stand against the notion of the state as a monolithic class instrument...M, for example, called the 10hrs bill passed by the British parliament in 1864 a victory for the political economy of the working class...this suggests that the legislature is an arena of political struggle - "contested terrain"...Michael

Although some of Lenin's followers are more zealous than others I think there is little doubt that in forging the highly successful Bolshevik Party intent on seizing state power, be bent the wand in appearing to describe the state as only an instrument by which one class oppresses another.

As parties founded by Lenin and the 3rd International, matured they of course did engage very much with many forces in the state, in its wider sense, including cultural ones, especially after the united front against fascism line of 1935 ended the class against class line.

Other marxist tendencies of the 20th century have tended to emphasise the wider state and ideological issues. Gramsci is seen as emphasising that the struggle for hegemony of ideas in many fields is inseparable from getting to the position of where the executive decisions of the state are under the control of the working class.

The difficulty is when some of these tendencies are seen as much too diffuse or intellectual, as various people have criticised the Frankfurt School, the Althusserians, and the post modernists.

I think the extremely broad conclusion is that in marxist thinking the state is rightly seen as both a very complex structure embedded in society, and a system that ensures the continuation of the oppression of one class by another. It is of course, a contradiction. Also not something separate from how individuals reproduce themselves in their own lives.

I feel increasingly therefore that some of the most fruitful debates would be about figures that try to straddle this apparent gap perhaps like the author of the Red Feminism article, and like writers such as Adorno, whether one comes to them mainly from critical point of view or not.

Chris Burford
London.

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Louis Proyect -- Wednesday, 18 December 1996

Date:    Wed, 18 Dec 1996 08:32:35 -0500 (EST)
From:    Louis N Proyect 
Subject: Re: M-I: Monlithic state (was Red Feminism)

Although some of Lenin's followers are more zealous than others I think there is little doubt that in forging the highly successful Bolshevik Party intent on seizing state power, be bent the wand in appearing to describe the state as only an instrument by which one class oppresses another.

As parties founded by Lenin and the 3rd International, matured they of course did engage very much with many forces in the state, in its wider sense, including cultural ones, especially after the united front against fascism line of 1935 ended the class against class line.

Other marxist tendencies of the 20th century have tended to emphasise the wider state and ideological issues. Gramsci is seen as emphasising that the struggle for hegemony of ideas in many fields is inseparable from getting to the position of where the executive decisions of the state are under the control of the working class.

The difficulty is when some of these tendencies are seen as much too diffuse or intellectual, as various people have criticised the Frankfurt School, the Althusserians, and the post modernists.

I think the extremely broad conclusion is that in marxist thinking the state is rightly seen as both a very complex structure embedded in society, and a system that ensures the continuation of the oppression of one class by another. It is of course, a contradiction. Also not something separate from how individuals reproduce themselves in their own lives.

I feel increasingly therefore that some of the most fruitful debates would be about figures that try to straddle this apparent gap perhaps like the author of the Red Feminism article, and like writers such as Adorno, whether one comes to them mainly from critical point of view or not.

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