Hence, it is deeply revealing that Adorno’s visions of utopian life keep returning to the idea of a state in which we would not have to do anything. “The animal phase in which one does nothing at all cannot be retrieved,” Adorno says with an almost audible sigh of lament.82 One wonders which kind of animal he could possibly be thinking of, since being an animal—indeed being alive in any way at all—means that one always has to do something to stay alive. Not heeding any such questions, Adorno affirms that “none of the abstract concepts come closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.”83 He tries to give concreteness to such an abstract idea of fulfilled utopia by imagining a state of “doing nothing like an animal, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition and fulfillment.’ ”84
Now, it can certainly make sense to take time to float on water and look at the sky. For the activity to be something that matters to me and that expresses my freedom, however, it must be something that I am doing. Even when I am “doing nothing” I am doing something (e.g., taking a break, appreciating a precious day in my life, absorbing the gentle movement of the water, beholding the beauty of the cloud formations). If I were truly doing nothing—if it were an experience of “pure being” or “eternal peace”—it would not be an experience at all and I would not be there. There would be a corpse floating on the water and not a person, since there would not be anyone for whom anything matters. No one would suffer from anything while floating on the water, no one would become bored with the activity of looking at the sky, and no one would ask herself what to do with her life in light of death, but only because no one would be alive. This is why visions of eternal peace are indistinguishable from eternal indifference and why Adorno’s notion of utopian “life” makes no sense. Pure being is nothing.85
Accordingly, we must carefully distinguish the two levels of analysis that Adorno conflates. On the one hand, there are historically and socially specific forms of suffering that we should seek to overcome. We do not have to suffer from the injustices of capitalism, we do not have to be subjected to the opposition between worktime and leisure time that makes a certain form of boredom pervasive, and we do not have to die from many of the causes that currently wreck our lives. We can and should do better. On the other hand, if we conflate historically or socially specific forms of suffering, boredom, and death with the existential categories of suffering, boredom, and death per se, we deprive ourselves of the ability to identify the actual forms of suffering that we are committed to overcoming. Instead of engaging the problem of how to identify and transform the pernicious ways in which we are leading our finite lives, the problem is conflated with the fact that we are leading a finite life at all. We are thus led to the dead end of religious despair over finite life itself and saddled with the religious longing for a redemption from the condition of finitude.
Such is the dead end to which Adorno leads us. In the finale to his Minima Moralia, he declares: “The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”86 From such a contemplative standpoint of redemption, the world would appear “as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”87 Adorno concedes that it is “utterly impossible” for us to occupy such a perspective on the world, since it “presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence.”88 Yet Adorno laments the impossibility of such a standpoint and thinks that it testifies to a negative inability on our part. If only we were able to overcome the conditional in favor of “the unconditional,”89 we would be able to occupy the contemplative standpoint of redemption that is removed from existence and let the world be illuminated by messianic light.
Adorno thereby betrays the most fundamental insights regarding emancipation in Marx. For Marx, a contemplative standpoint that is removed from existence is not only utterly impossible but also utterly undesirable and a truly incoherent idea, since the world can matter only to someone who is engaged in the fragile activity of leading a life. Rather than turn us toward an unintelligible promise of redemption, Marx seeks to make us recognize that everything depends on what we do with our finite time and our shared lives. This is why Marx’s critique of capitalism from the beginning is intertwined with his critique of religion and why one cannot understand one without the other. “The critique of religion,” Marx writes, “is the premise of all critique.”90
Capitalism and religion have proved to be highly compatible, which from Marx’s perspective is no accident. He keeps returning to how both capitalism and religion are forms of self-alienation. Both capitalism and religion prevent us from recognizing in practice that our own lives—our only lives—are taken away from us when our time is taken away from us. While capitalism alienates us from our own time by subordinating it to the purpose of profit, religions offer the consolation that our time ultimately is insignificant and will be redeemed by eternity. While capitalism makes poverty perennial and distorts the meaning of wealth, religions promote poverty as a virtue and as a path to salvation. While capitalism disables our capacity to lead free lives, religion teaches us that submission leads to liberation. In short, both capitalism and religion make us disown our lives, rather than enabling us to own the question of what we ought to do with our finite time.
Accordingly, Marx famously argues that religion is “the opium of the people.”91 The suffering caused by social injustice is alleviated by the promise of a religious redemption. Religions serve as a form of “opium” both by diminishing the pain of our not being able to lead flourishing lives and by pacifying us, making us dream of an impossible bliss rather than waking up and taking action to transform the conditions of our only life. As Marx emphasizes, “the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of human beings” must therefore be understood as “a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their conditions is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.”92 If we merely criticized religious beliefs as illusions—without being committed to overcoming the forms of social injustice that motivate these illusions—the critique of religion would be empty and patronizing. The task is rather to transform our social conditions in such a way that people no longer need to have recourse to the opium of religion and can affirmatively recognize the irreplaceable value of their own lives. As Marx explains in one of his most beautiful and important formulations, his critique of religion “has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chain, not in order that human beings shall bear the chain without caprice or consolation but so that they shall cast off the chain and pluck the living flower.”93
The “living flower” can here be read as a figure for the time of our lives. Like all living organisms, we generate a surplus of time by virtue of our own activity of self-maintenance. What distinguishes us as spiritual beings, however, is that we can seize (“pluck”) our surplus of time as free time to lead our lives. By the same token, we can also exploit and alienate ourselves (put ourselves in chains). Under capitalism, our chains consist in that we have to convert the surplus time of our lives into surplus value. We are thereby dominated by a purpose (profit) that is inimical to the actualization of our own freedom. Even our technological means for nonliving production—which should serve our ends as living beings—are employed for the sake of exploitation rather than emancipation.
In contrast, the purpose of democratic socialism is to transform the surplus time of our lives into socially available free time. This transformation is achieved by founding and sustaining institutions that promote our spiritual freedom, as well as by developing the means of nonliving production in order to decrease our socially necessary labor time and increase our surplus of lifetime. While capitalism and religion make it seem as if we depend on a transcendent principle (whether profit or God), we must grasp the democr
atic truth that only we can put ourselves in chains and only we can set ourselves free. The power of our lives is inseparable from what we do—inseparable from the power of the people. To cast off our chains and seize our time we must grasp that all we have—who we are—is inseparable from the material and social practices through which we reproduce and transform our lives.
Such democratic emancipation requires that we remove “the imaginary flowers” which make our current chains seem bearable. Whether the imaginary flowers are the promises of the free market or the religious promises of eternal life, they serve to make us accept or forget the injustices of this life. As Marx recalls, the fact that many people have recourse to the opium of religion can be seen as “an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.”94 Yet the religious understanding of finitude makes us misrecognize the suffering we seek to overcome. What we are missing is not eternal life but social and institutional forms of being together that enable us to lead flourishing lives.
The flourishing of an emancipated life—the living flower that is actively cultivated—is itself finite and will require our continued care even in its fullest actuality. But when we remove the imaginary flower of eternity—when we recognize that eternal life would be death, would not be a form of life at all—we can see that our finitude is not in itself a restriction. Rather, the finitude of flourishing is an essential part of why we are devoted to making flourishing actual and keeping it alive.
The critique of religion—like the critique of capitalism—must therefore be an immanent critique. We must locate the resources for overcoming the religious understanding of finitude within the practice of faith and its commitment to a shared social life. The practice of religious faith has often served—and still serves for many—as an important communal expression of solidarity. Likewise, religious organizations often provide services for those who are poor and in need. Most importantly, religious discourses have often been mobilized in concrete struggles against injustice. None of these social commitments, however, requires religious faith or a religious form of organization. For these commitments to fulfill their promise of emancipation, religious faith must be converted into secular faith and be devoted to social justice as an end in itself. If we are committed to abolishing poverty rather than promising salvation for the poor, the faith we embody in practice is secular rather than religious, since we acknowledge our life together as our ultimate purpose. This argument—which brings together secular faith and spiritual freedom in the pursuit of actual emancipation—leads us to the concluding movement of this book.
Conclusion: Our Only Life
I
On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., landed at the airport in Memphis, Tennessee. It was raining, and there were warnings of an upcoming storm. After a disrupted public protest march the week before, King had returned to Memphis to support the ongoing strike of the black sanitation workers in the city. By evening a tornado was sweeping through western Tennessee, leaving twelve people dead, and the civil defense sirens rang out across Memphis, with lightning and thunder rolling through the city.
King was exhausted from traveling on behalf of his Poor People’s Campaign. Owing to a fever and a sore throat, he wanted to cancel his speaking engagement, but at the last minute he was persuaded to keep his promise to the local union. King drove through the storm and made it to the meeting at the Mason Temple. Despite the forbidding weather that prevented many from attending, more than two thousand union members and strike supporters had come to listen to King, who delivered what would turn out to be his last public speech. He addressed the assembled crowd at 9:30 p.m., without notes but carried forward by the committed response of his audience. No one could have known that King had less than twenty-four hours left to live, but there had been persistent rumors about an impending attempt on his life. The plane that carried King and his associates from Atlanta had been held at the gate because of a bomb threat. When King arrived in Memphis, there were further reports of threats to his life but no reliable information. Such rumors were a commonplace by then and it could have been just another day in King’s political campaign for social justice.
Threats to his life had been frequent ever since King emerged as a leader of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956. In Montgomery his house was bombed by white segregationists, nearly killing his wife, Coretta, and daughter Yolanda. At mass meetings in Birmingham and Selma, he was beaten and punched in the face. On a march through an all-white neighborhood in Chicago, he was hit by a rock. Local authorities arrested him at least eighteen times and those close to King knew that he lived constantly with the imminent risk of being killed for his political work.
Yet the last year of King’s life had seen an unprecedented level of hostility against him. The liberal establishment—which supported King when he focused on acquiring formal civil rights for African Americans—became increasingly antagonistic to King as he turned his attention to the systematic forms of economic injustice underpinning and informing the racial forms of injustice. With King publicly declaring his strong opposition to the Vietnam War and highlighting what he called “the hard-core economic issues” of the United States, both the media and the Johnson administration turned against him. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (who had been wiretapping King since 1961) created a new “racial intelligence” section, with a mission to “publicize King as a traitor to his country and race.”1 Through infiltration, violent disruptions of protest marches, and dissemination of compromising claims, the racial intelligence section of the FBI planned ways to sabotage the Poor People’s Campaign headed by King. President Johnson, the attorney general, the Pentagon, and the Secret Service—as well as prominent members of the media—continuously received FBI memos with the title: “Martin Luther King, Jr.—Security Matter—Communist.”2
At the same time, both the New Left and the emerging Black Power movement tended to dismiss King as outdated. Especially in the wake of the riots that began in the mid-sixties, King’s nonviolent methods and his coalition politics were derided as inadequate to the demands of the time. While the establishment regarded King as too radical, the avant-garde regarded him as not radical enough and criticized him for being essentially a middle-class preacher who pursued middle-class goals.
The view of King as a mere reformist, however, is deeply misleading. King himself distinguished between two phases of the civil rights movement, with the second phase requiring increasingly radical measures. The first phase lasted from the Montgomery boycott in 1955 until the passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. The main aim of this phase was to secure basic rights and forms of liberty for the black population in the South. As King pointed out, the cost of these reforms was negligible for the political establishment and involved no direct economic demands. “The practical cost of change for the nation up to this point has been cheap,” King wrote in Where Do We Go from Here (1967).3 “The limited reforms have been obtained at bargain rates. There are no expenses, and no taxes are required, for Negroes to share lunch counters, libraries, parks, hotels, and other facilities with whites.”4 Moreover, “even the more significant changes involved in voter registration required neither large monetary nor psychological sacrifice. Spectacular and turbulent events that dramatized the demand created an erroneous impression that a heavy burden was involved.”5 We can add—as Marxist historians have done—that there were structural and economic incentives for the political establishment to support desegregation in the South. The maintenance of dual labor markets (black and white) is economically irrational under capitalism, since it creates an artificial barrier to labor recruitment and prevents each unit from being treated as abstractly equivalent for the sake of efficiency. A simple but illuminating example (which I borrow from Adolph Reed, Jr.) is the economic wastefulness of having to maintain two different sets of toilets—for blacks and whites respectively—in the plants.6 More generally, the violent instability of the se
gregationist South was itself inefficient and an obstacle that needed to be removed for capitalist enterprise to expand.
After the civil rights victories culminating in 1965, King knew that the most difficult challenges were still to come. “The real cost lies ahead. The stiffening of white resistance is a recognition of that fact,” he wrote in Where Do We Go from Here. “The discount education given Negroes will in the future have to be purchased at full price if quality education is to be realized. Jobs are harder and costlier to create than voting rolls. The eradication of slums housing millions is complex far beyond integrating buses and lunch counters.”7 These questions of substantial economic justice were for King at the center of the second phase of the civil rights movement.
Following King, we can date the beginning of the second phase to August 11, 1965, only five days after Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. On August 11, riots broke out in the Watts neighborhood and spread rapidly through South-Central Los Angeles. Such riots were to continue for the remaining years of King’s life, and he grasped directly that the urban ghettos were the new frontier of the civil rights movement. “The flames of Watts illuminated more than the Western sky,” King maintained only days after the riots, “they cast light on the imperfections of the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.”8 The militant but nonviolent struggle for emancipation must now, King concluded, expand from the South to the North and resolutely cut across class divisions. As King recognized, “the civil rights movement has too often been middle-class oriented” and it needed to move toward “the grassroots levels of our communities,”9 with the aim of ending poverty, preventing labor exploitation, and creating economic justice.
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