adorno and marcuse in 1969

7/30/2019 Adorno and Marcuse in 1969

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Adorno and Marcuse in 1969: the separation of theory andpractice

Chris CutronePresented on a panel with Peter-Erwin Jansen and Sarah KleebatCritical Refusals: the 4th biennial conference of the InternationalMarcuse Society, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, October27, 2011.

PrcisThe last letters between longtime colleagues and friends Theodor W.

Adorno and Herbert Marcuse in 1969, in which they debated the

difficulties of their perspectives in the face of the 1960s New Left,help to situate Frankfurt School Critical Theorys Marxism and itscontinued legacy. On the one hand, Adorno is notorious for callingthe police on student demonstrators. But Adorno insistednonetheless that Marx was not obsolete and socialism remainedpossible, if not immediately. On the other hand, Marcuses lecturesof the time, such as The End of Utopia (1967), his interview inNewLeft Reviewon The Question of Revolution (1967), and hisDecember 4, 1968 speech On the New Left (in Herbert

Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of HerbertMarcuse vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner [New York: Routledge,2005],122127) made important concessions to the historicalmoment, against which Adorno sought to warn, in his final writings,Marginalia to Theory and Praxis and Resignation, which weredeveloped directly from his correspondence with Marcuse.Responding to Adorno, Marcuse acknowledged the fatal mixture,Rational and irrational, indeed counter-revolutionary demands areinextricably combined. Marcuse thought that prominent New Left

activists like Danny the Red Cohn-Bendit, who tried to scandalizeMarcuse for his past work for the U.S. government during WWII,were isolated and ultimately minor figures. But Adorno grasped thesignificance of the kind of action advocated by those like Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke, especially in their self-conception, anintransigence of ethical posturing rather than self-recognition. As

Adorno put it to Marcuse, [T]here are moments in which theory is
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pushed on further by practice. But such a situation neither existsobjectively today, nor does the barren and brutal practicism thatconfronts us here have the slightest thing to do with theory anyhow.

Adorno and Marcuses prognoses on the 1960s New Left thus

forecast on-going problems faced by political practice and theorywith emancipatory intent, casting subsequent history into criticalrelief.

Theory and practice: the historicalmoment of the 1960s

Adorno and Marcuse differed in their estimations of the New Left, butthis difference is misunderstood if it is taken to be between opposing

and supporting the student and other protests of the 1960s. Rather,the difference between Adorno and Marcuse was in their estimationof the historical moment. Where Marcuse found a potential preludeto a future rather than an actual reinvigoration of the Left, let alonepossible revolution, in the 1960s, Adorno was more critical of thedirection of the New Left. Marcuse was also critical of the New Left,but accommodated it more than Adorno did. While Adorno might bemistaken for the more pessimistic of the two, it was actuallyMarcuses pessimism with respect to current and future prospects

for Marxism that facilitated his greater optimism towards the NewLeft.

The late divergence of Marcuse from Adorno took place in thecontext of the turn in the New Left in 1969. Adorno grasped a waningof the moment and lowering of horizons that brought forthdesperation from the students, whereas Marcuse thought that futureprospects remained open. The separation of theory from practicewas both the background for and the result of the turn in the NewLeft by 1969. Where Marcuse tried to theoretically discern the

potential, however obscure, in the New Left, Adorno prioritized acritical approach, and emphasized not merely the lack of theoreticalself-awareness, but also the lack of political practices that could leadout of the crisis of the New Left by 1969.

Adorno emphasized the historical affinity of the late New Leftmoment with that of the crisis of the Old Left in the late 1930s.


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A commonplace misunderstanding, owing to vulgar socialistsloganeering, such as calling for production for human needs notprofit, is that capitalism is motivated by profit-seeking. For Marx,capital may be facilitatedby profit-seeking, and thus enlist the greed

of capitalists, but this is for capitals, that is, societys ownself-alienated ends, namely, the preservation of value in the system.Where capitalism was supposed to be a means to serve the ends ofhumanity, humanity became the means for serving the ends ofcapital. But this is something that workers, in struggling against theirown exploitation, also motivate. Marxs point was that the value oflabor had become self-contradictory and self-undermining in thepost-Industrial Revolution society of capital: workers struggle for thevalue of their labor was self-contradictory and self-undermining. This

was for Marx the contradiction of capital: labor was sociallynecessary only in a self-contradictory sense, in that workers can onlyacquire their needs through earning a wage, while human labor andthus the workers themselves become increasingly superfluous in thesocial system. This was why Marx articulated freedom and necessityin the way he did, not because he assumed the material necessity ofhuman labor as the basis for society.

Marcuse and the New Left:

changes in capitalism?Marcuse, on the other hand, did assume such a necessity, if notmaterially, then socially and politically, in the sense of the necessarydignity of humanity that thesurpluspopulation of the Third Worldcontradicted by the superfluity of their labor, which contrastedstarkly, and with a politically invidious effect, against the abundanceof the more industrially developed countries.

Thus, also in 1967, Marcuse gave an interview for the journal New

Left Reviewtitled The Question of Revolution, in which he statedthat the conception of freedom by which revolutionaries andrevolutions were inspired is suppressed in the developedindustrialized countries with their rising standard of living. This wasno mere matter of redistribution of goods at a global scale, but aturning away from work for material abundance and accumulation.


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Furthermore, Marcuse made much of the brute oppression andstark life-and death struggle of the people of Vietnam and others inthe Third World as a salutary factor for emancipatory politics: therevolutionary concept of freedom coincides with the necessity to

defend naked existence: in Vietnam as much as in the slums andghettos of the rich countries. By characterizing the militarycampaigns of the North Vietnamese Communist regime and theNational Liberation Front in South Vietnam in terms of a defense ofnaked existence, Marcuse evacuatedpolitics, with the result ofeliminating any potential basis for a critique of these struggles, andcrudely instrumentalizing the horror of their realities. Similarly,

Adornos student Oskar Negt had characterized the war in Vietnamas the abstract presence of the Third World in the metropolis.

The German New Leftist Rudi Dutschke, in his 1968 essay onHistorical Conditions for the International Fight for Emancipation,wrote of the war in Vietnam as an intellectual productive force in theprocess of the development of an awareness of the antinomies ofthe present-day world. Dutschke went so far as to say that it wasthrough lectures, discussions, films, and demonstrations thatVietnam became a living issue for us, thereby blurringcontemplative imagery and brute realities.

Adornos recovery of Marx: laborin capitalAdorno questioned the direct connection between the anti-imperialistpolitics of the Vietnamese Communists and the discontents of thestudents. In his 1969 essay on Marginalia to Theory and Praxis(included as the last selection, one of the two DialecticalEpilegomena toCritical Models: Catchwords, the last collection ofessays he edited for publication), Adorno remarked that it would be

difficult to argue that Vietnam is robbing anyone of sleep, especiallysince any opponent of colonial wars knows that the Vietcong for theirpart practice Chinese methods of torture, repeating language hehad used in one of his last letters to Marcuse questioning Marcusesless-than-critical support for late-60s student radicalism.


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The center of Adornos Marginalia to Theory and Praxis was theargument that the separation of theory and practice wasprogressive, that is, emancipatory. Adorno contrasted Marx withRomantic socialism, which considered the division of labor and not

the self-contradiction of the value-form of labor in capital, as thesource of alienation.

The recently translated conversation between Adorno andHorkheimer in 1956, Towards a New Manifesto, about theimpossibility of critical theory divorced from political practice, beginsby addressing labor as mediation. Here, Adorno and Horkheimeraddressed labors ideological function in advanced capitalism, thatits social necessityis both true and false. For instance, Adornosays that if socialism means, at least at first, an equitable division of

labor such that he must work as an elevator attendant for a coupleof hours each day, he wouldnt mind. In a fragmentary reflection from1945, Adorno wrote of the law of labor under which contemporaryreality is constrained and distorted: not the law of capital, but thelaw oflabor(quoted in Detlev Claussen,Adorno: One LastGenius [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], 48).

Andrew Feenberg has pointed out in Horkheimer and Adornosconversation the specter of Marcuse haunting them. But onlyHorkheimer mentioned Marcuse, trying to chastise Adornos political

speculations. Adorno didnt take the bait: evidently, he didnt mindthe association with Marcuse. Adornos differences with Marcusedeveloped as a function of the New Left. But Adornos disagreementwith Marcuse was over the character of capitalism, not the New Left.

Coda: Beyond labor?The difference today, more than 40 years after Marcuse and

Adornos conflict over the New Left in 1969, is precisely the waycapitalism has developed since then. Today, while in certainrespects like the 1960s, the question of the possibility of a societybeyond the compulsion to labor looms, however differently. This iswhy Adornos recovery of Marx, rebutting Marcuses late doubtsabout historical Marxism, can still speak meaningfully and criticallytoday. The problem with capitalism today is not overabundance inconsumer goods, as Marcuse along with other New Leftists thought,


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but rather the continued compulsion to labor that distresses society.This is why, in contrast to Marcuse, and with Adorno and Marx, wemust still consider emancipation to lie beyondand not in labor.

Adornosrecovery of Marxs original conception of alienation is

important, not because the issues Marcuse raised were wrong, butrather because Marcuses perspective is liable to be assimilated topolitical perspectives, after the New Left, with which Marcuse himselfwould not have agreed. Marcuses assumptions about capitalismremain esoteric and hidden, taking too much for granted thatremains invisible to his readers, whereas by contrast Adorno isexplicit enough to earn his works rejection by the post-New Leftpolitics whose problems he sought to critique. The basis ofMarcuses apparent amenability to the New Left and its aftermath,

however, is falsely assumed. |
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adorno and marcuse in 1969

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