The Frankfurt School as Anti-Marxist?

[TheOneWhoKnocks]

So I'm reading Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. In the first chapter of the book, which examines the "ideology of nature," Smith critiques the Frankfurt School as fundamentally anti-Marxist:


The political struggle [to the Frankfurt School] is not aimed at the capitalist use and production of nature, but at the general misuse and domination of nature by the human species. The 'human condition,' not capitalism, becomes the historic villain and political target . . . [the Frankfurt School] brought a schizophrenic politics in which hope for humanity . . . lay in making reforms to the present system (since it was not capitalism at such that was at fault).

Thoughts?

[Rurkel]

From what I know, official Soviet historiography always portrayed the Frankfurt School theoreticians as bourgeios pro-capitalists who insist on the First World workers being content and sedated due to capitalism's cultural hegemony, whereas they are nothing but.

[blake 3:17]

Their Marxism was a little strange, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. It sounds like Smith is really referring to Adorno and Horkeimer, both a bit politically suspect.

I don't think it so much a question of them not being anti-capitalist, as being too pessimistic at times.

[Red Economist]

From what I know the criticism stands I think in so far as the Frankfurt school looked at the failure of the revolution wave of 1919-1923 (ish) and the rise of Fascism as the failure of communism; they dealt with questions regarding the failure of class consciousness in the west and are supposed to be a pretty pessimistic bunch.

I.e. they were marxists who had given up on a revolution happening. the quote sounds like a standard marxist-leninst attack on 'metaphysical' thinking regarding original cause (society as caused by 'human nature') as a opposed to a dialectical processes of internal change by conflict within society and therefore a revolutionary process.

[Hit The North]

So I'm reading Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. In the first chapter of the book, which examines the "ideology of nature," Smith critiques the Frankfurt School as fundamentally anti-Marxist:


The political struggle [to the Frankfurt School] is not aimed at the capitalist use and production of nature, but at the general misuse and domination of nature by the human species. The 'human condition,' not capitalism, becomes the historic villain and political target . . . [the Frankfurt School] brought a schizophrenic politics in which hope for humanity . . . lay in making reforms to the present system (since it was not capitalism at such that was at fault). Thoughts?

I think there is a pervasive pessimism at the root of much Frankfurt School writing - particularly after the Second World War - and they view the rise of mass consumer societies in North America and Western Europe as proof of the further triumph of capitalist relations (and not without good reason).

As for them abandoning a critique of capitalism in favour of one based on the explanatory power of the 'human condition', I can't think of one FS thinker who wouldn't see the 'human condition' as being largely determined by capitalist social relations, so I don't think the criticism is correct. I'd also like to see the passage in Adorno's or Horkheimer's or Marcuse's work where they explicitly (or implicitly) argue that capitalism wasn't the root of all that was rotten in human affairs.

[blake 3:17]

Robert Sinnerbrink's Understanding Hegelianism has a good chapter on Adorno that offers some very challenges to his thought.

Sorry to be mister reading list, but I'd also recommend Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism and Nancy S. Love's Marx, Nietzsche, and Modernity.

Love concludes that the attempts to synthesize Marx and Nietzsche are interesting, but ultimately failures. I'm not sure I agree.

[ckaihatsu]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/bren-j02.html

Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component

By Adam Haig
2 January 2009

As a supporter of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) who has been following the political and philosophical charges of Alex Steiner and Frank Brenner, the author of this paper is interested in addressing their embrace of critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). While the said opponents of the ICFI present their ideas as Marxism and Trotskyism, their thought is more in line with the attempts of numerous middle-class intellectual radicals who have tried to innovate Marxism with cultural theory. These figures range widely from Theodor Adorno to Slavoj Zizek. The author's formal background is in literary and cultural studies, academic fields in which the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory has been influential and where it has undergone various theoretical hybridizations.

[...]

The ICFI maintains that Steiner and Brenner, who left the Workers League (the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party) thirty years ago, have drifted into the anti-Marxist orbit of the petty-bourgeois Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and that they cannot be regarded as Marxist-Trotskyists. This is not demonization, but a well-grounded assessment of their theoretical and political conceptions.

[...]

Steiner and Brenner's perspective is an emphatic rejection of the materialist conception of history, which ascribes a decisive and determining role to objective socioeconomic processes in the development of social consciousness. Like many petty-bourgeois ex-Marxists, they are convinced that the central issues of revolutionary consciousness relate to individual psychology and sexuality.

[...]

[thethinveil]

That criticism of "Dialectic of Enlightenment" that nature has become enslaved to rationality was a criticism of modernism as emancipatory which the advent of fascism had also complicated. When prior to fascism there was had always been the feeling that history was leading towards liberation. Here they used the lessons learned from the rise of fascism and began investigating how the U.S and USSR had become two sides of the same state monopoly capitalism problem. This was a radical critique of both not a call for just a reform of both. "The human condition" is a problem of the renaissance idea of man and while it helped for the enlightenment idea of humanity it is not what they are precisely attacking with their work. The Frankfurt school concentrated on the expansion of marxism to other areas such as aesthetics and psychoanalysis and were primarily concerned with the failures of theory and the realities of the day. This includes even many criticisms of marx but never an abandonment, either, of revolutionary vision.

[Astarte]

Pretty much all modern post Marxist-Leninist Marxian historiography of any real merit owes its heritage to the Frankfurt school. While it and its progeny are a theoretically heterogeneous group of writers which are alternatively shamed or exalted by various Marxist sects their ultimate influence on Marxism as a historiographic methodology in the world today cannot be understated.

[ellipsis]

Moved to Theory.

[thethinveil]

"Like many petty-bourgeois ex-Marxists, they are convinced that the central issues of revolutionary consciousness relate to individual psychology and sexuality."

I think these are registers that refer back to and is in mediation of same materio-social relations. I guess what I am trying to say they reinforce each other and change with one another dialectically. The idea was that consciousness could be analysed through the disciplines of psychology, history, culture, economics and sociology. They never left their criticism of capitalism behind and went on to develop a criticism of Soviet society as well. This was just another step further towards radicalization, not a necessarily a retreat.

[sixdollarchampagne]

Just a question, if I may: Someone, a knowledgeable prof, once told me that the base/superstructure rhetoric, which was, at least in what I read, a big component of official Soviet Marxism was also part of the thinking of the Frankfurt School. Is that accurate?

[ckaihatsu]

The idea was that consciousness could be analysed through the disciplines of psychology, history, culture, economics and sociology.


Compared to Marxism and a class analysis of society these disciplines are merely memes.

[thethinveil]

I not sure if I get your point. I haven't read up on the theory behind memes all that much. In my personal opinion marx was dealing with these interelated fields throughout his career using philosophy as a catch-all phrase. Then again he was never a "Marxist" as the Frankfurt school were.


"Economism is reduction of all social facts to economic dimensions. The term is often used to criticize economics as an ideology, in which supply and demand are the only important factors in decisions, and outstrip or permit ignoring all other factors. It is believed to be a side effect of neoclassical economics and blind faith in an "invisible hand" or "laissez-faire" means of making decisions, extended far beyond controlled and regulated markets, and used to make political and military decisions. Conventional ethics would play no role in decisions under pure economism, except insofar as supply would be withheld, demand curtailed, by moral choices of individuals. Thus, critics of economism insist on political and other cultural dimensions in society.

The term of "economism" has been widely used in the Marxist discourse since Lenin who criticized Karl Kautsky. Marxist theorists have also often criticized "vulgar Marxism" for its economism about ideological discourse. It was also used by economist Charles Bettelheim, and is sometimes used today to criticize neoliberalism (as the term "single thought"). " wikipedia

[ckaihatsu]

I not sure if I get your point. I haven't read up on the theory behind memes all that much.


Memes aren't so much a component of a *theory* as they are just generic elements of any (cultural) communication. In this way they're more *granular* than more-characteristic, component pieces of any given overarching theory.





A meme (pron.: /ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures.[3]




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme


The bourgeois disciplines you mention are woefully compartmentalized and circumscribed -- each of them on their own, or all of them in combination, are too limited in scope to reach the extents that a class analysis can.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/01/bren-j02.html

Steiner, Brenner and Neo-Marxism: The Marcusean Component

By Adam Haig
2 January 2009

In my opinion, Haig's article is nothing but a slander of both Steiner and Brenner, as well as the Frankfurt School's relationship to Marxism. I would suggest you begin by reading Steiner and Brenner's direct reply (http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf), as well as their polemics with the SEP.

[ckaihatsu]

In my opinion, Haig's article is nothing but a slander of both Steiner and Brenner, as well as the Frankfurt School's relationship to Marxism. I would suggest you begin by reading Steiner and Brenner's direct reply (http://www.permanent-revolution.org/polemics/haig_smokescreen.pdf), as well as their polemics with the SEP.


Ehhhh, after skimming the article you've provided, I'm seeing these exchanges as glorified sectarian flame wars -- I've provided my own characterizations, so I'll stand by those.

[MEGAMANTROTSKY]

Ehhhh, after skimming the article you've provided, I'm seeing these exchanges as glorified sectarian flame wars -- I've provided my own characterizations, so I'll stand by those.
But the point is that your "characterization", based on Haig's article, is entirely inaccurate. So I'm not just going to stand by and watch you endorse the SEP's slander/smear campaign against Steiner and Brenner without a fight. Do you have any other evidence to back up your (Haig's) "characterization" besides that article?

[ckaihatsu]

But the point is that your "characterization", based on Haig's article, is entirely inaccurate. So I'm not just going to stand by and watch you endorse the SEP's slander/smear campaign against Steiner and Brenner without a fight. Do you have any other evidence to back up your (Haig's) "characterization" besides that article?


No, my characterizations of the Frankfurt School, at posts #13 and #15, do *not* depend on Haig whatsoever.

[Astarte]

Like I mentioned above, the Frankfurt School and their theoretical descendants, the Critical Theorists, Neo-Marxists and really most post-Leninism Marxists are an extremely heterogeneous group of thinkers - to sloppily reduce all of their writings down to a lack of class analysis and a reliance solely on "memes" just proves that one who levels these claims is either largely ignorant of the vast array of thought and historical ground the Frankfurt School and Critical Theorists have covered, or is purposely taking something a Frankfurt School or Critical Theorist said at one point (probably completely out of context) and applying it to the whole lot of them ... or both. Obviously they all do not reach revolutionary agitational conclusions as one would find in a pamphlet by Lenin, but when you read Marcuse, or Hobsbawm, or Ste. De Croix, or even Wittfogel you would be hard pressed to find any absence of a historical materialist class analysis of society - even if interpretations of the psychological or Weberian varieties are also employed as a secondary, complimentary and auxiliary method of analysis to historical materialist historiography.

[thethinveil]

I didn't want to say anything but I think reducing disciplines to themselves and only themselves or claiming that a discipline is a meme and a meme is not a theory is flat out wrong and is huge conceptual misunderstanding. But anyways.

[blake 3:17]

Just a question, if I may: Someone, a knowledgeable prof, once told me that the base/superstructure rhetoric, which was, at least in what I read, a big component of official Soviet Marxism, back in the sixties of the last century, was also part of the thinking of the Frankfurt School. Is that accurate?

They didn't work with that model. Their tendency towards some types of idealism or culturalism meant that they often ignored the base.

I know very little about Soviet Marxism past the early 30s, so can't comment on that. Within Western Marxism, it was largely Althusser which revived it.

Some of the Cultural Studies folks in England have explored it more usefully, especially Williams and Hall.

[Astarte]

They didn't work with that model. Their tendency towards some types of idealism or culturalism meant that they often ignored the base.

Again though, it depends on which writer you are talking about. For example it would be ridiculous to say that Wittfogel "ignored the base" in his "Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power" since he does nothing but talk about how corvee labor used to build vast irrigation systems are at the very basis of the economic activity of the non-Western ancient world.

[Noa Rodman]

Marcuse was a contributor to the SPD's theoretical organ Die Gesellschaft; here (http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/d-man/4374/literature-random-comments#comment-3142)are some titles. You also find there other Frankfurt theorists (like Neumann, Pollock and even a couple by Benjamin). They feature next to articles by Kautsky ("pope" of Marxism). Arkadij Gurland's dissertation engaged with Kautsky's magnum opus on the materialist conception of history (http://archive.org/details/DieMaterialistischeGeschichtsauffassung).

[ckaihatsu]

I didn't want to say anything but I think reducing disciplines to themselves and only themselves or claiming that a discipline is a meme and a meme is not a theory is flat out wrong and is huge conceptual misunderstanding. But anyways.


I'm speaking relatively, or comparatively.

It could be argued that, without a complete and all-encompassing frame of reference -- that of class analysis -- the concepts people are using to describe objective reality are thus incomplete and may be likened to cultural signifiers within an identity-based grouping, more than being rigorous and fully-objective examinations of the actual world.

(The degree to which this is the case will vary on a case-by-case basis, of course.)





Their tendency towards some types of idealism or culturalism meant that they often ignored the base.

[sixdollarchampagne]

They didn't work with that model. Their tendency towards some types of idealism or culturalism meant that they often ignored the base.

I know very little about Soviet Marxism past the early 30s, so can't comment on that. Within Western Marxism, it was largely Althusser which revived it.

Some of the Cultural Studies folks in England have explored it more usefully, especially Williams and Hall.

First of all, thanks to Astarte and blake 3:17 for graciously answering my question.

I once acquired a thick book in English, published in the USSR, about Marxism. I was always very grateful to Soviet Marxism for the base/superstructure model, since I thought it clarified an awful lot about society and materialism. Based on my limited exposure to Soviet Marxism (i.e., that one, official book), I think that the base/superstructure model was influential, something that schools in the USSR taught to their students. Probably the entire Soviet population was exposed to it. I still think in those terms.

[blake 3:17]

When I was going to college in the sixties, I acquired a thick book in English, published in the USSR, about Marxism. I was always very grateful to Soviet Marxism for the base/superstructure model, since I thought it clarified an awful lot about society and materialism. Based on my limited exposure to Soviet Marxism in the 1960's (i.e., that one, official book), I think that the base/superstructure model was influential, something that schools in the USSR taught to their students. Probably the entire Soviet population was exposed to it. I still think in those terms.

I'd be curious to read that book! I'm quite curious about the Soviet Union in the time between 1950 to the 1980s. There's also a Western bias to think of the USSR as kind of stupid or backward which is unfortunate.

There've been theoretical and practical problems related to divorcing the base and superstructure. I think on some issues we absolutely need to look at the economic base. In my regional context there's been huge economic losses, primarily in the loss of manufacturing jobs that were pretty capital intensive.


I'd like to rethink the question of base and superstructure in ecological terms, or eco-socialist or whatever, recognizing the role of both labour and nature in the production of wealth. With the loss of industrial manufacturing jobs, we're being pushed more and more to resource extraction, often in the worst possible ways for workers, communities, air and water.

[sixdollarchampagne]

I'd be curious to read that book! I'm quite curious about the Soviet Union in the time between 1950 to the 1980s. There's also a Western bias to think of the USSR as kind of stupid or backward which is unfortunate.

There've been theoretical and practical problems related to divorcing the base and superstructure. I think on some issues we absolutely need to look at the economic base. In my regional context there's been huge economic losses, primarily in the loss of manufacturing jobs that were pretty capital intensive.

I'd like to rethink the question of base and superstructure in ecological terms, or eco-socialist or whatever, recognizing the role of both labour and nature in the production of wealth. With the loss of industrial manufacturing jobs, we're being pushed more and more to resource extraction, often in the worst possible ways for workers, communities, air and water.

Unfortunately, since I got the book over four decades ago, I no longer have it. I can still see the book, big, hardbound, with a green paper cover. Someone must have labored over it, since the English in it was certainly passable.

I think there must be academic treatments of official Soviet Marxism, that would have notes and bibliographies, in research libraries. Another resource is a magazine that used to be published monthly, while there was still a Soviet Union, called "Soviet Life," which may contain some popularizations of Marxism, from the standpoint of the CP of the Soviet Union.

The one concrete thing I remember from the book, aside from base and superstructure, and the observation that, by and large, our perceptions are accurate, was the official theory that the USSR was a "state of the whole people," which must, surely, have stood Marxism on its head. I don't remember the details of that theory, since I greatly preferred Lenin's "State and Revolution."

[Astarte]

Unfortunately, since I got the book over four decades ago, I no longer have it. I can still see the book, big, hardbound, with a green paper cover. Someone must have labored over it, since the English in it was certainly passable.

I think there must be academic treatments of official Soviet Marxism, that would have notes and bibliographies, in research libraries. Another resource is a magazine that used to be published monthly, while there was still a Soviet Union, called "Soviet Life," which may contain some popularizations of Marxism, from the standpoint of the CP of the Soviet Union.

The one concrete thing I remember from the book, aside from base and superstructure, and the observation that, by and large, our perceptions are accurate, was the official theory that the USSR was a "state of the whole people," which must, surely, have stood Marxism on its head. I don't remember the details of that theory, since I greatly preferred Lenin's "State and Revolution."

A lot of well renowned Western academic Marxists do take official Soviet Marxism seriously. I am currently reading "The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World" by G.E.M. De Ste. Croix which was written in the early 1980's and he mentions and refers to in the footnotes several Soviet articles which deal with various pre-capitalist economic modes. Funny you should mention "State and Revolution"; I was just rereading a bit of it earlier tonight and the "state of the whole people" idea reminds me of the part where Lenin discusses Engels's earlier use of the term "free peoples' state", and how it is actually incorrect as a technical term, but rather was employed by Engels merely for its agitational phraseology.


The “free people's state” was a programme demand and a catchword current among the German Social-Democrats in the seventies. this catchword is devoid of all political content except that it describes the concept of democracy in a pompous philistine fashion. Insofar as it hinted in a legally permissible manner at a democratic republic, Engels was prepared to “justify” its use “for a time” from an agitational point of view. But it was an opportunist catchword, for it amounted to something more than prettifying bourgeois democracy, and was also failure to understand the socialist criticism of the state in general. We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism. But we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people's state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch01.htm#s4

[sixdollarchampagne]

Thanks to Astarte, for a quotation from my favorite political book, State and Revolution, which IMHO is essential reading for everyone.


... we have no right to forget that wage slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic. Furthermore, every state is a “special force” for the suppression of the oppressed class. Consequently, every state is not “free” and not a “people's state". Marx and Engels explained this repeatedly to their party comrades in the seventies.

That is the crux of the matter, the perfect answer to every lesser-evil leftist enthusiast for the imperialist, pro-war Democratic Party. If only there were a way to popularize the idea that there is no progress possible, no rebuilding of society, this side of the destruction of the bourgeois state!

Now that I think about it, a book that goes hand in hand with State and Revolution is Eddie Boorstein's wonderful text, The Economic Transformation of Cuba.

[blake 3:17]

As much as I admire State and Revolution, in terms of a socially scientific approach I think Engels view of the state is more accurate. Rather than a simply repressive body representing the dominant class, the state is a product of class struggle, and while overwhelming favouring the dominant class there are provisions for the subordinate classes -- rights at work, consumer safety, access to education, and so on.

Revolutions break out when the state in power is made illegitimate through its own actions or inactions.

[Astarte]

As much as I admire State and Revolution, in terms of a socially scientific approach I think Engels view of the state is more accurate. Rather than a simply repressive body representing the dominant class, the state is a product of class struggle, and while overwhelming favouring the dominant class there are provisions for the subordinate classes -- rights at work, consumer safety, access to education, and so on.

Revolutions break out when the state in power is made illegitimate through its own actions or inactions.

Indeed, essentially "the state arose from the need to hold class antagonisms in check", I just wanted to add it is important to remember that these provisions are hard won via the struggles of the oppressed classes and only were sanctioned by the state so that those oppressed classes would "settle back down" and allow the ruling class to get back on with the business of exploitation and accumulation without being "hassled". Also, it is clear, especially in this day and age of austerity, and also here in the States with the astro-turf petty bourgeois Tea Party movement (created by the most ultra-reactionary elements within the ruling class) that these provisions are not fundamentally guaranteed and whatever concessions gained and addended to the state's primary purpose as the defender of ruling class privilege and property can be taken away. To a large extent - these provisions or "addended functions" as I am referring to them as do have some slight precedents in pre-capitalist state apparatuses, such as some of the Greek city-states, the Roman Republic in it's earlier years, and a few others, but from a broad global historical perspective, are largely not the norm. I mostly regard these "provisions" as symptoms of the epoch of the broad and long transitional phase towards socialism - as Social Democracy's rise really only happened as a tactic for staving off Stalinist encroachment.

[Lord Hargreaves]

To the extent that Marxism is a product of 19th century enlightenment thinking, then Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critique of Marxism. But that doesn't make it "anti-Marxist" by any means. It does, in a certain sense, go beyond traditional Marxism.

The attitude of many Marxists at the time toward humanity's relationship with nature, their attempt to shoehorn the understanding of all human ideas, ideology, culture and unconscious processes and emotions into the fit of the dubious concept "false (class) consciousness", and their almost will full blindness to power and domination that wasn't directly linked with class, was wholly and painfully inadequate. We should admit that,

Remember the time when they were writing too, confronting the Second World War, fascism, the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. It should be clear to everyone with half a functioning brain that simply dismissing both fascism and Soviet communism as the same "state capitalism" is just not good enough. How does reading Lenin and Kautsky help us to understand the extermination of six million Jews? Lets be serious here.

Of course Frankfurt School thinkers were *too* pessimistic about the chances of political change, and they had virtually nothing to say in favor of the Party, or about organisation or even class struggle. But given the state of our world, even acknowledging how much it has changed since the '40s and '50s, and we really sure all of their pessimism was misplaced? Do we really see a drastic human revolution coming just around the corner? I think not.

[Noa Rodman]

Remember the time when they were writing too, confronting the Second World War, fascism, the Holocaust and the Soviet Union. It should be clear to everyone with half a functioning brain that simply dismissing both fascism and Soviet communism as the same "state capitalism" is just not good enough. How does reading Lenin and Kautsky help us to understand the extermination of six million Jews? Lets be serious here.
I'm not sure the Frankfurt school only dismissed nazism and Soviet communism as the same "state capitalism", but the proposition that the state has become more dominant in capitalism in general is very common also in traditional marxism (decline of capitalism, monopoly phase of capitalism, etc.). Dominant to the point where the term "state capitalism" no longer makes sense because it is no longer even capitalism, as Hilferding wrote: http://www.marxists.org/archive/hilferding/1940/statecapitalism.htm
The liberal Austrians of course talks about the same trend, e.g. money is nationalized.

But on the other hand, why did Adorno and Horkheimer want to respond against the Godesberg Program, if they didn't see Marx's analysis of capitalism continue to be valid (also they thus seem to take the SPD in the 1950s still to be a socialist party).

About WW2 it was clear to everyone already in WW1 that it would happen and be more terrible, unless there was a revolution to stop it.