File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-08-17.000, message 74


From: SUBTILE-AT-aol.com
Date: Sun, 07 Aug 94 01:26:54 EDT
Subject: Re: marxism-leninism/stalinism


This post is a response to Phil Goldstein who suggested that Marx is
complicit in Stalinism, and Jukka Laari who suggested that the Frankfurt
School has dissociated marxism from Stalinism.  Jukka Laari mentioned the
Frankfurt School without explaining what makes Frankfurt marxism different.

 1) The Frankfurt School loses any connection with Leninism/ Stalinism
through its rejection of the marxist teleological emphasis upon proletarian
revolution culminating in communism.  Max Horkheimer's main theoretical
project, the "Institute for Social Research," was dedicated to a nonsoviet
continuation of marxist analysis through a reliance upon dialectics that was
to explicitly reject Russian forms of economic determinism.  A short quote
from Horkheimer's opening speech:
Or one believes, contrariwise, that the economy as material being is the only
true reality; the psyche of human beings, personality as well as law, art and
philosophy, are to be completely derived from the economy, or mere
reflections of the economy.  This would be an abstractly and thus badly
understood Marx.  Such notions naively presuppose an uncritical, obsolete,
and highly problematic divorce between Spirit and reality which fails to
synthesize them dialectically.  (p. 12 of BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL
SCIENCE)
 On the other hand, Stalin used the theories of economic determinism and the
theory of the primacy of class struggle to justify genocide, arguing that the
class struggle was to heighten in the phase of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.
 Horkheimer and Adorno (DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, 1944) had a theory of the
CULTURE INDUSTRY that explained the longevity of capitalism and its possible
triumph over any social impulse that would destabilize the social order.
  Gramsci calls the net result of the culture industry "the war of position";
whether you use Gramsci or Adorno to analyze culture probably depends on what
cultural effect you want to look at.  Enrico Augelli and Joseph Collins have
adopted Gramsci to a great analysis of the success of Reaganism in a book
whose name escapes me now.  At any rate I would assert that real phenomena
can be attributed to the effects of the culture industry.
 The thesis of the culture industry looks especially viable here in the US in
the context of the domination of American politics by the oligopolies of the
news media, who ceaselessly manufacture a right-of-center "middle class
perspective" which leaves critical political issues unexamined.  Other
cultural effects, such as the domination of American culture by "technical
reason" (Marcuse, from Lukacs) and the reification of the culture (Lukacs),
which we see in the application of demographics in the business world and in
the culture produced by public schooling help solidify the mass inability to
imagine an alternative to the present society.  Marcuse, Lukacs, Adorno,
Horkheimer, all take their cue from the analysis of commodity fetishism
presented at the beginning of Volume 1 of CAPITAL.  
 The universal acceptance of the daily routine of consumerism (or the even
more authoritarian cultural alternatives of religious lifestyles) in America
leaves marxists with the question: where is the possibility of proletarian
revolution if the proletariat has been convinced by the system that it is the
middle class?  The universal impoverishment of the working class does not
necessarily insure its solidarity because of the increasing differentiation
of labor under late capitalism (we have all become "specialists" even if work
is still shit) and because of the multicultural and transnational nature of
the work force, but still these are things that marxist analysis can account
for and marxist organizing can overcome.  But what does one do about the
spells ceaselessly cast by advertising, which has become the dominant method
of social integration and social identification in America?  (Well, I have my
own answer to this question, but it is not a comprehensive one)
 2) Jurgen Habermas, currently the "heir" of the Frankfurt School, has a
useful explanation for the insufficiency of the theory of proletarian
revolution in achieving the goals of the principled utopianism of Marx.  (I
don't mean this in a derogatory sense; when I describe marxism as a
utopianism I don't mean to put it down but rather to contextualize it amidst
19th century schemes for the improvement of society.)  I will quote
Habermas's explanation (from p. 340 of part 2 of the THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE
ACTION) here:

 System and lifeworld appear in Marx under the metaphors of the "realm of
necessity" and the "realm of freedom."  The socialist revolution is to free
the latter from the dictates of the former.  It seems as of theoretical
critique has only to lift the spell cast by abstract labor (subsumed under
the commodity form).  The intersubjectivity of workers associated in large
industries is crippled under the self-movement of capital; theoretical
critique has only to free it of its stiffness (all the problems I mentioned
above- sdf) for an avant-garde (marxists -sdf) to mobilize living --
critically enlivened -- labor against dead labor and to lead it to the
triumph of the lifeworld (the revolution -sdf) over the system of deworlded
labor power .
 As against these revolutionary expectations, Weber's prognosis has proven
correct: the abolition of private capitalism would not at all mean the
destruction of the iron cage of modern industrial labor.

Thusly, I would argue, the application of marxism on planet earth became the
creation of the iron cage of Stalinist Russia.
 Habermas presents a framework of "system" and "lifeworld" to replace the
marxist framework of capital's subsumption of labor.  The "system" is
conceptualized (if I may oversimplify) in terms of the coordination of social
action by the steering systems of money and power.  The "lifeworld" (a
concept Habermas borrowed from the phenomenologist Husserl) is conceptualized
as our concept of the world as we would take it for granted.
 The two opposing forces within Habermas's world are what he calls a) the
"colonization of the lifeworld," which is the invasion of our everyday lives
by the imperatives of money and power, and the "rationalization of the
lifeworld," which is the coordination of social action through rational
argument oriented ideally toward the formation of unconstrained consensus.
 Through the concept of the "rationalization of the lifeworld" Habermas has
fashioned a Marx-inspired social theory that is immune from the imputation of
complicity of authoritarian marxist schemes.  It is really tough to call
Habermas an outright marxist because the theory of communicative action has
obscured one of the main goals of marxism -- as the quote above shows,
Habermas does not believe that a perfect revolution is possible.  The
"triumph of the lifeworld over the system of deworlded labor power" cannot
happen, according to the THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION; at best the marxist
champions of the rationalization of the lifeworld can contain the effects of
the system, for we will always need money and power (the essence of the
system) to get things done.
 Unfortunately, as Axel Honneth points out in his book THE CRITIQUE OF POWER,
Habermas does not explain in the THEORY OF COMMUNICATIVE ACTION how the class
struggle can accomplish anything in the world.  Critical theorists like
myself believe that the invention of such an explanation in marxist/Habermasia
n terms is the big work to be done with Habermas' comprehensive sense of
theory.
 3) I will explain why I think Lenin might be complicit in Stalinism (and why
I think Marx isn't) later.
 4) Does anyone know where I can get Axel Honneth in German?
 -Samuel Day Fassbinder




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