Critical Theory
Page 5
The writings by the young Marx evidence a utopian quality. They give precedence to the anthropological and existential elements of human misery rather than capitalist exploitation of a purely economic sort. Alienation has its roots in an inability to grasp the workings of history and subject them to human control. The division of labor expresses this situation. It leaves workers increasingly divorced from the products they produce, their fellows with whom they work, and—ultimately—their possibilities as individuals. Eliminating private property is thus not an end unto itself but only a stepping stone to claiming control over history.
The young Marx offers an apocalyptic vision. Political emancipation in the liberal state is subordinated to the ideal of human emancipation in a classless, free association of producers. Fostering individual autonomy—perhaps the ethical aim of the revolutionary bourgeoisie—is assimilated into a concern with realizing the new communal and organic notion of “species being.” Improving working conditions in a world of scarcity, or “necessity,” makes way for a “leap into the realm of freedom.” Alienation and, implicitly, reification now become the targets of radical activity. Ideas such as these transformed the popular understanding of Marxism, gravely embarrassed the communist regime, and inspired the Frankfurt School no less than the intellectual radicals of 1968.
The roots of unhappiness
Alienation has a long history. Its connection with utopia already appears in the biblical expulsion of from Eden. The story of paradise lost precedes the loss of objects to the world of commodity exchange. The biblical allegory justifies the fallen state of humanity and explains why people are condemned “to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow.” It also shows why trust between individuals has been lost, nature appears as an enemy, and—interestingly enough—redemption becomes possible. Unity and harmony are forfeited. Adam and Eve exhibited free will. They brought about their expulsion from Eden—by succumbing to evil. Perhaps different choices might bring about the re-creation of paradise. Prometheus may have sought to make good on that hope: there is a reason why he was Marx’s favorite mythical character. But Prometheus was condemned for his hubris by a wicked god as surely as those who sought to build the Tower of Babel.
Paradise has always been identified with the pastoral. The garden was the world in which the organic connection between humanity and nature was secured. The arts and sciences, wealth, and technology may foster civilization but—as Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously argued in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)—they fragment the organic community and produce an antagonistic relationship between humanity and nature. Artificial needs are thereby created that corrupt the natural virtues like decency, simplicity, kindness, and honesty. Only a thoroughly regenerated society might restore these values and overcome the loneliness and sense of meaninglessness experienced by individuals—as well as the prospect of death.
A host of thinkers from St. Augustine to Rousseau, and especially Rousseau’s followers among the Romantics, explored these themes. The basic idea is perhaps best expressed by Friedrich Hölderlin—a close of friend of the young Hegel and much beloved by later critical theorists—who wrote in Hyperion (1795):
You see craft-workers, but no genuine people; thinkers but no people; priests, but no people; lords and servants, youths and persons of property but no people. Is this world not like a battlefield on which hands, arms, and limbs of all sorts lie strewn amid one another while their spilled life-blood runs into the sands?
Yet, it was G. W. F. Hegel who offered the first systematic analysis of alienation. He believed that alienation exists insofar as humanity is estranged from its normative ends, and its creations escape its conscious control. World history is the stigmata suffered by consciousness whose purpose is to appropriate anew what humanity has unwittingly produced. Rooting alienation within the structure of consciousness can be seen as insulating it from reality. But Hegel’s recognition of the subjective powers lurking behind the world of objects expressed the fundamental desire of idealism that the estranged world should be transformed into a human one. Hegel’s principal concern was the way in which social action escapes conscious direction and history occurs, so to speak, behind the back of humanity.
Entire civilizations appear and disappear, consequences are turned against intentions, and the finest achievements of intellectual life and politics are paid for in blood. Hegel understood history as a “slaughter-bench” even though the realization of human freedom is pre-ordained. Such a realm can be defined as one in which each individual is fully recognized as a subject in his or her own right. Universal reciprocity ultimately becomes incarnated in a bureaucratic state under the rule of law, a civil society based on the market in which all enter freely and equally, and a nuclear family in which each subject is emotionally embraced as such. Reason projects such a realm of all-inclusive reciprocity because philosophy, the highest incarnation of reason, was believed by Hegel to embody a sense of universality from the time of Socrates.
Abolishing alienation thus involves redeeming the miseries of history, which Hegel called the “Calvary of the absolute spirit.” But he was no utopian. Realizing freedom is the culmination of a teleological process wherein the arbitrary exercise of power is negated in a new state governed by the rule of law. Conflict and existential alienation remain even at the “end of history” insofar as individuals must still confront their own mortality. The constitutional state simply creates the space in which they can finally concentrate upon their most private concerns free of external interference. Alienation and reification continue to exist in the exploitative class relations of civil society.
Hegel’s thinking remains stuck at the level of the state. This is due not merely to class interest. His inability to deal with alienation in terms of its roots in the capitalist production process also has an existential component: to engage the material character of alienation would involve denying the bourgeois aims of his entire project. Alienation thus finds its way into the philosophy seeking to abolish it. Workers councils, the classless society, and the end of what Marx termed “pre-history” are not on the agenda. Even the greatest bourgeois philosophers were incapable of envisioning political institutions capable of subordinating the workings of society to those who produce it.
Hegel noted in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) that the lords and masters of every historical epoch have an existential and material interest in preventing such consciousness from coming about. They seek to make their servants and slaves believe in their dependence upon them, their masters, through ideological and institutional means. This was the point of departure for Hegel and the young Marx. The critical method becomes the tool by which the servants and the slaves—and the masses of the proletariat—realize their power as producers of the particular order from which the lords and masters alone genuinely benefit. Abolishing alienation thus depends upon the consciousness of the slave—or, better, the worker.
The young Marx believed that talk about the virtues of the state, or realizing some prefabricated idea of freedom through imprecise categories like master and slave, or rich and poor, only stunts consciousness about the source of alienation and how it is maintained. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, therefore, Marx insisted that “only when the objective world becomes everywhere for man in society the world of man’s essential powers—human reality, and for that reason, the reality of his own essential powers—can all objects become for him the objectification of himself, become objects which confirm and realize his individuality.”
Hegel claimed that the whole is true. He argued that freedom had been realized in the bourgeois state under the liberal rule of law. According to Marx, however, the proletariat contests this assumption. The very existence of this disenfranchised and exploited class demonstrates how freedom has been truncated. The structural domination of this class is ignored. Capitalism is understood by the bourgeois as resting on egoistic assumptions with the individual as the primary unit of productive activity
. But this view makes it become impossible to conceptualize the constitution of social reality and the contradictions of its economic production process. If religion produces a situation in which humanity is dominated by the products of its brain, which is what Marx learned from Ludwig Feuerbach, then, under capitalism, humanity is dominated by the products of its hands.
Marx believed that the working class was growing poorer even while bourgeois society was growing richer. The proletariat was also becoming more spiritually impoverished. It was becoming an appendage of the machine. Individuality, creativity, solidarity were all being eroded for the great bulk of humanity. The imperatives of capitalist production call for viewing it merely as a cost of production that must be kept as minimal as possible. Maximizing profits also requires the division of labor whereby each member of the working class is separated from others on the assembly line, kept from learning other tasks and developing his or her full potential, and conceptualizing the product that is ultimately being produced. This same division of labor infects the modern state. Mathematical formulae define profitability and efficiency in transhistorical terms without recognizing structural conflicts of class interest. Society is thereby robbed of its historical, fungible, and changeable character.
Alienation defines the totality whose perpetuation rests on turning people into things—or reification. Capitalism increasingly strips human beings of their humanity. It treats the real subject engaged in the production of commodities (the proletariat) as an object even as it turns the real object of its productive activity (capital) into the fictive subject of modern life. Inverting this “inverted world”—an idea that Marx borrowed from Hegel—is possible only by abolishing what in Das Kapital is termed “commodity fetishism.” Or putting it somewhat differently, abolishing alienation calls for abolishing reification. This requires consciousness of what is to be transformed. The world must be thought anew.
4. Alienation and reification destroy subjectivity and turn the worker into a cost of production.
The young Marx raised the revolutionary stakes. Human misery is the target of radical action even if capitalism increasingly brings it to fruition. Bureaucracy, money, and instrumental thinking have anthropological roots even if the new production process intensifies their dominance. The lowly and the insulted have been treated instrumentally since time immemorial. The commodity form and bureaucracy reach back to the stock exchange of ancient Rome and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. The implication is clear. Workers cannot remain content with the desire for liberal democracy, social reform, and narrow calculation of economic interest, The proletariat must now understand itself as the subject of historical action—not merely the object of external forces—whose purpose is the abolition of alienation and class society.
The young Marx had sketched this vision. Insofar as his writings were unknown prior to 1932, however, the seminal influence on Lukács and later on other critical theorists in formulating (if not solving!) the problems of alienation and reification was Max Weber. A tortured academic who authored the classic Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), a liberal with nationalist and imperialist sympathies, Weber’s famous lecture “Science as a Vocation” (1918) envisioned a world in which the hopes of the Enlightenment were “irretrievably fading” and society was increasingly dominated by “specialists without spirit” and “sensualists without heart.” Instrumental rationality employs a mathematically defined notion of efficiency predicated upon rendering all tasks routine. Modern life would increasingly privilege the use of expertise and narrowly circumscribed areas of responsibility within a hierarchical chain of command. The ability to grasp the whole would vanish; what the Germans call the disciplinary idiot would supplant the intellectual; and ethics would be relegated to a domain outside of science and political life. Weber imagined the future as a bureaucratic iron cage—even if he never explicitly used the term so often associated with him—that would ever more surely marginalize authentic subjectivity.
Apocalypse and metaphysics
As young men, Bloch and Lukács frequented Weber’s famous salon in Heidelberg where they came to know Emil Lask, Heinrich Rickert, and Georg Simmel. All of them were concerned with the alienated structure of modern society and the implications of reification as well. The influences of Weber and his circle became apparent in the first version of Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (1918) and Lukács’s Theory of the Novel that was written in 1915 and published in 1920. Indeed, Bloch liked to say that that wrote half of the one while Lukács wrote half of the other. Both works exemplify what Lukács later called “romantic anti-capitalism.”
The term was meant to identify a critical encounter with capitalism whose ignorance about how it actually functions produces either apocalyptic visions or a withdrawal into the self. That is because romantic anti-capitalism tends to blend left-wing politics with right-wing epistemology. This was surely the case with Theory of the Novel and Spirit of Utopia. Yet they remain seminal works.
Reflection upon the alienation of modern life, an apocalyptic sensibility, and a withering critique of modernity constitute their intellectual legacy for critical theory. Each stressed the increasing fragmentation of life and that human relations between people were breaking down. Each anticipates a new form of solidarity based on the quest for authentic experience (or better its loss) and an apocalyptic sensibility. Each offers a new philosophy of history that contests positivism and the infatuation with science. Each also champions a kind of aesthetic-philosophical outlook and a new beginning for a Western world that has been plunged into barbarism.
In his little study Lenin (1924), Lukács stressed that the Bolshevik leader was marked by his commitment to the “actuality of revolution.” What Is To Be Done? (1902) by Lenin had championed the idea of a vanguard party of dedicated political intellectuals to preserve the revolutionary ideal from reformist temptations. In 1914, he was alone in calling for the transformation of a war between nations into an international class war. “All Power to the Soviets!” was Lenin’s revolutionary slogan in 1917, and his State and Revolution (1918) envisioned a communist state that is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word. Lenin’s Bolsheviks appeared to usher in a “wind from the East” that was destined to sweep away a decadent civilization. His organizational vision seemed part and parcel of a politics in which everything seemed possible. The proletariat—or, better, the proletariat under the auspices of the vanguard party—might just prove to be the new subject-object of history.
History and Class Consciousness expressed the longing for regeneration and renewal that accompanied the Russian Revolution. It was the same with the writings of Korsch, and also Gramsci, though they lacked the metaphysical apparatus and apocalyptic language. All of them projected the vision of a liberated world arising from the Russian Revolution and the accompanying European uprisings that occurred in its wake from 1918 to 1923. Liberal republicanism paled in comparison with the drama surrounding the participatory democracy of workers’ councils, the elimination of money and rank, and the manifold cultural experiments with a utopian flavor. Only a communist vanguard, whatever the empirical consciousness of the actual proletariat, was considered capable kind of bringing the world of alienation to an end.
Following its appearance in 1923, however, History and Class Consciousness became the target of intense criticism. Viewing the proletariat (or, better, the communist party) as the subject-object of history was considered a utopian outgrowth of idealism—not Marxism. It was generally believed that Lukács had exaggerated the role of consciousness to the detriment of economics and that his work took little account of concrete goals and the institutional constraints on action. With the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, however, many of Lukács’s arguments received belated justification. The Communist International was particularly embarrassed, since its leaders had forced Lukács to renounce his masterpiece in 1924. The writings of the young Marx revivified interest in what
most intellectuals tended to consider a rigid and unyielding political ideology.
Alienation became a truly popular concept, however, through Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm. Nazism had become the chief enemy for liberal and progressive intellectuals following the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Fromm showed how the egoistic acquisitive attributes of the “market character” associated with capitalism in the Weimar Republic, was transformed by the new fascist regime into a “sado-masochistic character” predicated on the explicit elimination of autonomy. Its subversion of all public institutions capable of resisting the propaganda of the new regime—that is, mass media, schools, religion, and even the family—left the individual utterly isolated or atomized.
Extreme alienation of this sort is untenable. An identification with authority (i.e., the Fuhrer) is thereby generated that leaves the individual filled with hate and yet intent upon avoiding ethical responsibility. A specific confluence of sociological and psychological influences thus gives rise to a uniquely authoritarian personality structure.
Max Horkheimer took a more over-arching approach. His essay “The Authoritarian State” (1940) analyzed the conflation of modern liberalism, communism, and fascism. All of them rely on bureaucratic administration and control, hierarchy and subservience, propaganda and mass culture, the division of labor and mechanized work. The individual is alienated from the product of labor, other workers, and a broader and more encompassing notion of individuality. The totality everywhere escapes from view and reification is the norm insofar as the individual is little more than a cog in the machine. Differences between regime-types might still exist, but, ultimately, the form is the content. With the dashing of teleological hopes once associated with the proletariat, indeed, resistance loses its political referent. The authoritarian state calls the ability to frame a theory of practice into question.