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THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL AND ANTONIO GRAMSCI
“Cultural Marxism”
In addition to its political and economic aspects, socialism has had a wide cultural impact on modern thinking. Many conservative commentators have even accused higher education in the United States and elsewhere of being permeated with “cultural Marxism.” They place the blame for this largely on one person and one institution: the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and the research institute commonly referred to as the Frankfurt School.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a leader of the Italian Communist Party, although his most important work was done behind bars. After some years of activity in union struggles in Turin, he became a founder and the leader of the Italian Communist Party. However, he was imprisoned by Mussolini’s government in 1926 and spent the next decade in prison. This was particularly difficult for him because since childhood he had suffered from a variety of medical conditions. He was hunchbacked, probably due to a childhood accident, had a weak heart, and had recurring tuberculosis. In prison his health problems were exacerbated, and by the time he was released from a prison clinic he had only days to live.
Stopping the Brain
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The officials who ordered Gramsci’s arrest were aware of his importance in the socialist movement in Italy. In his final speech at Gramsci’s trial the prosecutor thundered, “We must stop this brain from working for twenty years!” Sadly, Gramsci did not last even that long.
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The Prison Notebooks
While in prison Gramsci struggled to work out a comprehensive theory of Marxism and culture. This was challenging, since very little had previously been written on the subject. Gramsci filled notebook after notebook with jottings, thoughts, and essays. The result was a complex and at times confusing set of ideas.
Coded Language
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Understanding Gramsci’s thoughts is made more difficult by the fact that his notebooks were subject to prison examination and censorship. Gramsci was thus forced to use code words for various concepts. Fortunately, edited and annotated versions of the notebooks have been published, making their study much easier.
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Cultural Hegemony
One of Gramsci’s central ideas is that social systems such as capitalism retain power not just through force exercised by the state but also by developing a set of ideas and cultural practices that, over time, become normalized. Gramsci thus distinguished between “political society”—meaning the part of the state that exercises physical control over the populace (the armed forces, police, and so forth)—and “civil society,” meaning those institutions, primarily educational, that produce the ideology that is accepted by everyone as the basis of society. In this he assigns an important role to intellectuals. Capitalism, he argues, has produced a set of intellectuals who justify its existence. The struggle to create a socialist society, therefore, takes place on two levels: the political and the intellectual. Socialists must create their own cultural norms that, over time, will conquer and replace the cultural hegemony of capitalism.
Economic Determinism
Given his views on cultural hegemony and the importance of ideas in social struggle, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Gramsci resisted what he saw as the economic determinism of traditional Marxism. An overreliance on economics and a purely economic understanding of society would lead one to miss the equally important cultural factors. Gramsci viewed the Marxism expounded by the Communist Party in the Soviet Union as crude, but he generally downplayed this criticism in his notebooks.
Rediscovery
Gramsci remained a relatively obscure thinker until the 1970s. By that time excerpts from the prison notebooks had been published and translated into many languages. Volumes had also been published containing his letters from prison, his political writings from before his imprisonment, and a number of biographies and commentaries. As a result, Gramscian studies are very much alive today, and he is regarded as one of the most important thinkers of twentieth-century socialism.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
The Frankfurt School refers to a group of intellectuals associated with the Institute for Social Research, a group affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt. Although many of its members were exiled from Germany during World War II, it continued to function, largely in America, where many of its members had fled.
Although there were a good many differences between them, virtually all those who were part of the Frankfurt School considered themselves socialists. Most thought of themselves as Marxists, albeit extremely unorthodox ones. Generally they had no affiliation with political parties, preferring to operate in the realm of pure theory. Insofar as they had an approach to socialist issues, they attempted to find a synthesis between Marx, Freud, and other elements of Modernism. The end result was called Critical Theory, although its parameters remained somewhat hazy.
Adorno and Horkheimer
The two principal leaders of the Institute during its first few decades were music critic Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and sociologist Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). Together they produced a body of work including Dialectic of Enlightenment, the most complete exposition of the Frankfurt School’s thought.
Their theory was essentially pessimistic—not surprising since it was written in the shadow of Hitler’s rise to power. They argued that the Enlightenment, far from being a source of political advance, became the underlying theory of totalitarianism in the twentieth century. They believed that modern culture had essentially become an “industry” to mass produce cultural goods with the purpose of lulling the masses into security.
Radio
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Adorno and Horkheimer lived in an age in which mass communication was just becoming possible through radio. Others, including Roosevelt in the United States and Hitler in Germany, took advantage of this fact and used it to their advantage. After that, of course, mass communication spread, first through television and then, in the age of the Internet, through social media.
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THE BROADER IMPACT OF THE SCHOOL
Other members of the Frankfurt School had a significant impact on modern cultural thinking. These included Eric Fromm, whose work dealt primarily with psychology; Franz Neumann, whose book Behemoth marked a significant high point in the study of fascism in Germany; Friedrich Pollock, who examined the USSR’s attempts to create a planned socialist economy; and others.
Herbert Marcuse
Among the most influential members of the Frankfurt School was Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who came to the United States after the rise of Hitler. Marcuse worked at a number of different schools, winding up at the University of California, San Diego. During the last decade of his life he became a leading influence on the New Left in the United States, largely as a result of his book One-Dimensional Man. In it, Marcuse argued that the Western working class had largely lost its revolutionary potential, and that this potential now lay with young people, especially students—a viewpoint highly appealing to the leaders of the student-based New Left. It was said in some leftist circles, especially in California, that revolutionaries needed to study the three Ms: Marx, Mao, and Marcuse.
Marcuse’s Major Works
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Marcuse was the member of the Frankfurt School who offered the most systematic study of Freud and attempted to fuse Freud and Marx in Eros and Civilization. He also authored an important study of Hegel’s relationship to Marx, Reason and Revolution.
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Following the end of the war most of the leaders of the Institute returned to Germany and continued their work. The most significant leader of this socialist tendency in recent years has been Jürgen Habermas, a sociologist whose ideas, in the views of many, have diverged very far from the original leaders of the Frankfurt School.
Walter Benjamin
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One of the most interesting and complex of the figure
s associated with the Frankfurt School was Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who didn’t fit into any of the categories associated with the school but was nonetheless part of it. He wrote on a vast number of subjects, but his masterwork, The Arcades Project, remained uncompleted at his death. He believed that in the study of Parisian life in the nineteenth century he had found a subject that could support a socialist cultural criticism. When the Nazis rose to power, he fled from Germany to France; when German troops marched into France, he and others tried to escape over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain. He was stopped at the Spanish border, and in despair he committed suicide.
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UTOPIAN SOCIALIST MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN
Luddites and Chartism
Even though Karl Marx spent the most productive years of his career studying in the British Library, he had little influence on the development of British socialism. Unlike their European counterparts, British socialists drew their inspiration from a homegrown radical tradition built on religious nonconformity, the concept of British liberties, and Robert Owen’s Cooperative Movement. Whether based on labor, economics, or an outraged sense of beauty, British socialism leaned toward reform rather than revolution.
CHARTISM: THE FIRST MASS WORKING-CLASS MOVEMENT
Chartism was a movement for parliamentary reform that grew out of working-class protests against the economic injustices caused by the Industrial Revolution. In 1815 the passage of the Corn Laws made it clear to working-class radicals that the people who controlled Parliament made laws that primarily benefited themselves. It was a classic Catch-22. The only way the working classes could improve the conditions under which they worked was to get the vote so they could send their own representatives to Parliament. In order to get the vote, they had to change the laws.
The Chartist movement was named after the People’s Charter, drafted by London radical William Lovett in May 1838. The Charter contained six demands for political change:
1. Universal manhood suffrage
2. Equally populated electoral districts
3. Vote by secret ballot
4. Annually elected Parliaments
5. Payment of stipends to members of Parliament
6. Abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament
When the Charter was first distributed to popular groups for discussion, many radicals dismissed it as too moderate, but it clearly fired the popular imagination. All over the country working-class institutions of all types—trade unions, educational societies, and radical associations—transformed themselves into Chartist centers.
Equal Populations in Voting Districts
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Population growth, internal migration, and new industrial cities meant parliamentary representation no longer reflected population distribution. Growing cities, like Manchester, had no representatives, while boroughs with declining populations had two. The most notorious of the “rotten boroughs” was Old Sarum, which had a representative but no town.
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Taking the slogan “Political power our means, social happiness our end,” the first Chartist convention met in London in February 1839, to prepare a petition to present to Parliament. Their leaders were arrested, and leadership shifted to the more radical element of the movement. In November a group of “physical force” Chartists staged an armed uprising at Newport. It was quickly suppressed. While the majority of the Chartists concentrated on petitioning for the Newport leaders to be released from jail, others led small uprisings in Sheffield, East London, and Bradford. The principal leaders were transported to the penal colony in Australia. Other Chartist leaders were arrested and served short jail sentences.
The Power of Moral Force
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The original leaders of the Chartist movement had no interest in violence, preferring to rely on “moral force” to persuade Parliament to accept the Charter. Others, known as “physical force” Chartists, reserved the possibility of force as an alternative means of persuasion.
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The first stage of the Chartist movement was a loose federation of working-class organizations held together by a common goal. With many of the original leaders in jail, a second generation came forward who had a new emphasis on efficient organization and moderate tactics. Using skills learned in the trade union movement, they formed the National Charter Association of Great Britain, complete with constitution, quarterly dues, and membership cards. Under their leadership, Chartists collected more than three million signatures on a second petition, which they presented in 1842. Parliament paid no more attention to the second petition than it had to the first.
The last great burst of Chartism appeared in 1848: Britain’s response to the “Hungry Forties.” On April 10 a new Chartist convention held a mass meeting in Kennington Common in preparation for a march to present yet another petition to Parliament. The army refused to allow the procession to cross the Thames, forcing the leaders to deliver the document in a hansom cab. The petition itself had only 1.9 million signatures, including presumed forgeries from Queen Victoria and Mr. Punch of Punch and Judy, a popular puppet show. Even the Queen’s signature wasn’t enough; Parliament ignored the Charter for a third time.
The Charter Lives On
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The Chartist movement died, but the ideas behind it did not. Between 1858 and 1918 Parliament adopted five of the six points of the Charter. The only point that was never adopted was the annual election of Parliament; presumably members of Parliament couldn’t face the idea of annual campaigning.
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CHRISTIAN SOCIALISM
The Christian socialism movement began shortly after the failure of the final Chartist effort in April 1848. In many ways, Christian socialism was the flip-side of Chartism: a largely middle-class movement that attempted to ameliorate the problems caused by the Industrial Revolution by applying the social principles of Christianity to modern industrial life.
The main force behind the movement was Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872). In 1838 Maurice laid out the central principles of Christian socialism in The Kingdom of Christ. He proclaimed “socialism’s true character as the great Christian revolution of the nineteenth century.” He argued that the competition that lies at the heart of capitalism is fundamentally un-Christian and the source of society’s ills. The answer was to replace competition with cooperation.
In practical terms Christian socialism meant the creation of Owenite cooperative societies, which Maurice saw as a modern application of the communal tradition of early Christianity. Christian socialists joined forces with the cooperative movement and founded several small cooperative societies that promoted co-partnerships and profit sharing in industry. The longest lasting of the movement’s social experiments was the formation of the Working Men’s College in London in 1854.
The Opiate of the People
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Christian socialists occasionally took positions that upset more conservative Christians. Four years after Marx declared that religion was the opiate of the people, the most well-known Christian socialist, novelist Charles Kingsley, warned readers in Politics for the People that the Bible was used as an “opium-dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they were being overloaded.”
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The original adherents of Christian socialism drifted away from the movement in the late 1850s. The 1880s saw a more formal revival of the movement, with different denominations founding officially sanctioned Christian socialist groups.
WILLIAM MORRIS
Poet and craftsman William Morris (1834–1896) is best known today for his wallpaper designs and his often-quoted dictum that a person should have nothing in his home that he does “not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Long before he made his way to socialism, Morris began what he described as a “campaign against the age,” rejecting the commercial, industrial, and scientific society of his time for its visual squalor and social complacency. Part o
f the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, with its romantic yearnings for the medieval, Morris designed wallpaper, textiles, rugs, and furniture. Morris’s design company was originally an artistic cooperative with seven members who led the international design revival known as the Arts and Crafts movement. The company served as a pattern for Morris’s vision of small artisanal studios as the economic base for society.
Morris came to socialism through his belief that without dignified, creative work, people become disconnected from life. Building on Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present (1843) and John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), Morris looked at bleak industrial cities and an impoverished proletariat and questioned whether either constituted real progress.
As a socialist, Morris rejected industrialism and capitalism because they degraded human beings and undervalued craftsmanship. The transition from workshop to factory meant that men were put to work making shoddy goods and needless gadgets. Morris wanted mankind to find fulfillment in the production of beautiful objects. His version of socialism was intended to liberate the average man from drudgery and restore beauty to his life.
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