From Neo-Marxism to Democratic Theory

Essays on the Critical Theory of Soviet-type Societies

Andrew Arato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780873328821
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315487717
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays in this volume trace an intellectual odyssey, a search for a genuinely critical theory. The book begins with the question of why the Frankfurt School as well as other neo-Marxist and post-Marxist analysts, both in the West and in dissident circles in the East, failed to produce a critical theory of Soviet socialism or to establish a dynamic relationship with contemporary social movements. As the political struggle in Eastern Europe intensified, the author of this book disengaged from his own efforts to reconstruct a critical Marxism. Instead, he attempts a reconstruction of democratic theory based on civil society rather than class categories, and with a critical relevance not only to the transition from state socialism but more generally to the universal goal of emancipation.

Part I
Western Marxism and Soviet-Type Societies

1
Authoritarian Socialism and the Frankfurt School

History continues. Not only on the mountains of Kurdistan and in the cities of Russia, but every day and in every country of the Western world we confront the ravages of instrumental and strategic reason gone wild. Who can believe now that we can plan, manage, control through the use of instrumental reason alone the effects and the side-effects of "rational" planning, management, and control? How long do we have to take (or rather, undo) the steps necessary to keep our fully enlightened planet livable? At the same time, do we have the intellectual and moral resources to resist the omnipresent forms of counterenlightenment?

These questions, raised by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School fifty years ago, especially by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment,¹ have not fallen victim to the growing obsolescence of the Marxist tradition. Today, when all of the various Marxisms and neo-Marxisms have lost their credibility one way or another because of the disaster of revolutionary socialism,² the radical theses of The Dialectic of Enlightenment seem unaffected even by the cataclysmic events of 1989. The same would be hardly true of the works of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, representing "only" a sophisticated variety of the type of Hegelian-Marxism introduced by György Lukács. But around 1940, in my view in important part under the impact of their final and definitive rejection of the Soviet model, the critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno was radicalized: The earlier desideratum of the intensification of the instrumental control of nature was now seen as a global tendency leading, if unchecked, to new forms of oppression and to destructive mythology. Instead of providing the solution to the anarchy of the market, the idea of scientific planning championed by all socialisms was now understood as the fulfillment of the destructive possibilities of capitalist rationality.³ Finally, the commanding heights of the modern state were seen as the locus of a new form of domination, rather than supposedly neutral and transitional instruments of emancipation.

The three critiques, the critique of the domination of nature, of scientism including the fetish of planning, and finally of the state, are the reasons for the philosophical and political strength of the impulse of the Frankfurt School in our present situation. The first critique points to the ecological terrain where human solidarity will be tested through the twenty-first century. The apparently victorious Western capitalist economies of our time have on the whole shifted their destructiveness (primarily though not exclusively) into their natural environment. The second two critiques block the way toward dead-end socialist and statist solutions, which have managed to exacerbate all problems of modern society, including the ecological one. Speaking politically, after the collapse of state socialism, the critiques of the state and of global planning provide the entry tickets into critical discussions to come. The tradition founded by Adorno and Horkheimer does not have to apologize for having apologized for a new destructive form of domination created in the twentieth century.

And yet, this same tradition is not in position today to provide even the main elements of the theory we need to carry out its own critical intentions. Amazingly enough, the moment of philosophical breakthrough, namely 1940 or 1941, was the last time that the narrow circle around Adorno and Horkheimer produced social theoretical analyses of global social formations, capitalism and state socialism. By the time The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944-45) was written, the analysis moved to the level of a negative philosophy of history, where it was to stay except for some forays into micrology and culture criticism. By omission rather than by commission Adorno and Horkheimer were to fall into the trap of all of the neo-Marxisms of their time: They never produced (even or especially when living in the Western part of a country whose Eastern part was Sovietized) a single important, critical work dealing with what I call (in part following their earlier terminology) authoritarian state socialism, a formation that, as we all should have known for forty years or more, has accounted for a good part of the horror of our century.⁴ Not even the experience of Hungary in 1956 (that motivated some of the best efforts of Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort and Hannah Arendt) was to affect the strategy of "critical silence."⁵

Here my interest is not primarily in the reasons, political and biographical, that led to impasse. A terrible, and understandably unforgiving, hatred for the German Right, which would supposedly benefit from an unavoidably uncompromising critique of the East, was undoubtedly a major factor. I am more interested in trying to make the apparent silence speak after all. Thus, I wish to focus on the relationship of the central philosophical impulse of the Frankfurt School and the more or less peripheral critical models for the study of Soviet society that can be arguably treated as its complements. These are: (a) models based on hints of the main figures but before the philosophical shift of 1940, (b) a significant model produced during this shift mainly by Friedrich Pollock, (c) a version of immanent critique worked out by Herbert Marcuse, who was an adherent of the thesis of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, and (d) a model that can be generated from some elements of the work of Habermas, the most important student of Adorno and Horkheimer.⁶

I

In the long history of the Frankfurt School amazingly enough only two major books and two significant essays were actually dedicated to the study of the Soviet Union. This is an astonishing fact given the School's almost permanent interest in authoritarianism and authoritarian social formations. Indeed, the first book, Pollock's 1929 Habilitationsschrift,⁷ actually predated the term critical theory as well as any coordinated intellectual work that was to go under this term. It was almost thirty years later that the second book, Marcuse's Soviet Marxism,⁸ was published.

But the story is more surprising still. The first major intellectual effort of the group around Horkheimer was the production of the Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung (1932-41), one of the best social scientific and theoretical journals of our century; one with genuinely global intentions.⁹ Astonishingly enough, not only did this journal in its nine years of existence publish only three insignificant articles, all by a relative outsider (Rudolf Schlesinger), on any topic directly concerning the Soviet Union, but direct references to Russia, the Soviet Union, or the Bolsheviks were extremely rare. Indeed, in 1941 when the two major articles dealing (at least in part) with the Soviet Union were published, one of them, Horkheimer's "Autoritarer Staat," was printed only in a more or less private Gedächtnisschrift (for Walter Benjamin), while the other, Pollock's "State Capitalism," published in the Zeitschrift, implausibly maintained that it had nothing to do with the Soviet Union. Thus, the questionable purity of the journal was preserved to the end.

Nevertheless, as Helmut Dubiel has carefully shown, their relation to the Soviet Union represented a "central background element for the political theoretical self-understanding of the circle."¹⁰ How are we to explain the paradox? The deep interest in Soviet developments by Marxist theorists who participated in many debates with members of the KPD and the SPD needs in fact little demonstration. More importantly even, in the context of the Great Depression when the possibility of a transition to a planned economy became a major recurring topic of the journal, the experience of economic planning in the Soviet Union remained for many of the participants in the discussion, especially Pollock, a crucial if hidden reference point. Why were the relevant issues not clearly articulated?

Let us leave aside all the very real issues such as the desire not to take a stand in the destructive conflicts of Social Democrats and Communists, the desire not to attack the Communists as political victims of Nazism, as well as caution in French and American exile. Why should all the different political causes and contexts always, even in 1940-41 when Stalin and Hitler were de facto allies, lead to one outcome, namely the suppression of the topic? I believe that at all times a fundamental theoretical ambivalence was also at work; a suspicion that not only politics but Marxist theory itself was at stake. This was to be later confirmed by Horkheimer and Pollock, as we will see.

To be sure, the political attitude to the Soviet Union itself was initially ambivalent. In my view, only in 1937 was an attitude generally or diffusely favorable to the Soviet Union abandoned.¹¹ Admittedly, Pollock already in his Habilitationsschrift expressed a carefully worded but certainly unorthodox doubt concerning the possibility of socialism in one highly underdeveloped country.¹² Nevertheless, he showed no particular sympathy¹³ to the Left and Right critics of the First Five-Year Plan (which he knew at that time only in a version that did not yet contain the drastically elevated targets of forced industrialization.)¹⁴ And while he did not think that the Soviet government could dare to abolish private peasant agriculture, it is not possible to deduce from this that he had therefore had to oppose the policy a year later when it was nevertheless initiated.¹⁵ Clearly enough, he too identified a genuine socialist agrarian policy with the abolition of all market-oriented production.¹⁶ The most one could say about the critical dimension of his overall attitude was that he did not think that the road to socialism of this "transitional" society could be accelerated. There was no conception here of the entirely negative consequences of such an effort if undertaken. Of course, in 1929, with the exception of some surviving Mensheviks and the Right opposition, not many people could anticipate the results of the Stalinist "revolution from above." But this is not the issue here. In a 1932 reference,¹⁷ Pollock seems to characterize Soviet planning ("from which the theory and practice of a planned economy has much to learn")¹⁸ in a generally positive way, even if according to him the historically backward conditions of Russia do not allow a clear demonstration of the economic superiority of this system over private capitalism. Thus Pollock's "ambivalence" does not go as far as a negative attitude to Soviet politics, and involved only a juxtaposition of the government's policies with Russia's backwardness, which may limit their success.

Horkheimer's own position on the eve of his assuming the leadership of the Institute and the Zeitschrift was even more supportive toward the Soviet Union.¹⁹ Although he admits some uncertainty concerning the actual developments and points to the universal misery of the population, he expresses deep contempt for all those who do not realize, in the context of the injustice of the imperialist world, the continued, painful attempt in Russia to overcome this injustice. Three years later, to be sure, he must have had Russia in mind when he spoke of an enlightened, revolutionary despotism whose hardness and injustice may be explained only if the general level of the ruled masses is taken into account.²⁰ But the historical character of this despotism, "its progressive or reactionary significance," he argued, could be decided only on the basis of whether it represented the general interest or a particular one. All the assumptions of Leninist and Lukácsian substitutionism are built into this idea. The language as well as the conception also very much resemble Gramsci's contemporary thoughts on "totalitarianism"²¹ (Horkheimer was not in jail, but in exile.) Nevertheless, that he indeed judged (on the basis of the representation of a general interest?) revolutionary despotism "progressive" is clear enough from another Aesopean reference of the same year when he spoke of "the great experiences ... that mankind currently made with attempts at economic planning."²² The interest involved was not only general but apparently universal.

To be fair, it is unlikely that Horkheimer had any real notion of the extent of the horrors perpetrated by Stalin's regime in this period. The same linking of authoritarianism and progress appears in a much stronger form as late as the great 1936 essay "Authority and Family." After rejecting the "indiscriminate condemnation of authoritarian regimes without regard for the underlying economic structure," Horkheimer proceeds to define, on the abstract theoretical level, the hierarchical position of expert and manager vis-à-vis labor, the authoritarian dimension of planning (as long plans have their link to class interest), and the "disciplined obedience of men who strive to bring this state of affairs to pass" as progressive forms of authority in history.²³ Since the first statement clearly defends the Soviet Union against an odious comparison with Nazi Germany, we have every reason to surmise that the authoritarian elements of the "underlying economic structure" in the former were defined as progressive in the sense of the stated abstract considerations derived from the Marxist tradition.

Because the evaluation of Soviet developments by critical theory was on the whole positive through 1936, there is no need to adopt Dubiel's explanation for the rarely broken silence of the Zeitschrift, according to which the Soviet Union could not be openly attacked because it represented the foremost antagonist of Fascism. This explanation, far more relevant to the positions of critical theory 1937-39, needs to be deemphasized in favor of another; one that would explain why both the negative and positive dimensions of the circle's ambivalent position were kept hidden. I believe that Dubiel is closer to the truth when he points out the fact that while Horkheimer and his closest associates were in the early 1930s closer to the spirit of the KPD than to the SPD of that period, he felt nevertheless, especially in uncertain exile, the need to distinguish themselves from both.²⁴ An open if critical defense of the Soviet Union could not have sufficiently distinguished the group from the Communists in the eyes of the audience of the journal, with the exception of KPD members themselves who demanded nothing less than total orthodoxy. Only this ambiguous political position explains Horkheimer's intellectual tactics.

Those kindred spirits whose politics were different had no need to censor themselves. For a left Social Democrat like Otto Kirchheimer, a future collaborator of the Institute and the Zeitschrift, it was far easier to openly attack Soviet authoritarianism. In an important 1933 article in his party's theoretical journal, Die Gesellschaft,²⁵ Kirchheimer argued that the implicit tendencies of the Bolshevik organizational model led to the identification of the party with bureaucratic administration, destroying thereby both intraparty democracy, and earlier democratic links to the population. For a centralized and centralizing party this loss of contact with their popular base could only mean Jacobinism and terror.

Kirchheimer's comparison of Leninism and Jacobinism, so much more worthwhile and precise than the Trotskyist attempts to link terror to "Thermidor" or "Bonapartism," was all the more interesting because Horkheimer himself produced in 1938 a major critique of Jacobinism, its structure ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Western Marxism and Soviet-Type Societies
• Part II. The Rise of Civil Society and Democratic Theory
• Index