The authors have just done an interview with Jen Pan and Paul Prescod, The Actual Legacy of the Frankfurt School & Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man Jacobin 10/06/2021.
The Frankfurt School and the "critical theory" associated with it has been an important stream of philosophy and social theory since the 1930s. In a weird twist, a cartoonish version of the Frankfurt School has been incorporated into the far-right narratives of "cultural Marxism" and now "critical race theory." It's a cartoonish version, but a dishonest, malicious, and anti-Semitic.
But to provide the background I wanted for the Cohan-Serby piece including the Franfkfurt School context, I decided to split this commentary into three parts.
Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, and their theory of social transformation
One of the issues Cohan and Serby discuss is Marcuse's relationship to Marxism, more specifically the classic Marxism of the Second International. The context is to what extent working-class people can be motivated to participate more actively in a left-progressive political agenda. Since the early 19th century, mobilizing the working class to press a left program to benefit themselves in opposition to the politics of conservative capitalists has been a central issue in politics in the West and now in the whole world. Obviously, the context varies greatly by location and time.
The book One-Dimensional Man addressed the American and European situation in the 1950s and 1960s which seemed to be marked by a kind of political stagnation in which important alternative answers to major problems like militarism and the nuclear arms race were being ignored and even suppressed by existing institutions through means direct and indirect. It fits broadly with other books of the period like John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), both of which challenged the self-satisfied and superficially optimistic "American Century" attitudes which prevailed during the early years of the Cold War.
Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt School of "critical theory" associated with the Institute for Social Research, the first generation of which also included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Henryk Grossmann, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Frederick Pollock, and Karl Wittfogel. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were known in America particularly for combining ideas from Marx and Freud into a broad social-psychological view. A project sponsored by the American Jewish Committee called Studies in Prejudice contributed heavily to that reputation in the US, particular one of the books that emerged from it, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That work is receiving renewed attention in recent years.
The thought-world of the Frankfurt School between the two World Wars generally fell somewhere between the views of the Communist parties of the Third International and the more reformist approach of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International. (The latter still has a shadow existence as the Socialist International.) After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the socialist movement split between supporters of those two camps.
There's an interesting analogy between the position of the Frankfurt School and that known as "Austromarxism," the interwar stance of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) idenfied with leaders like Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer. There was a small Communist Party in Austria, but there was no major Communist split-off from the SDAP after 1917. In 1921-23, a group of socialist parties including the SDAP formed the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (Vienna Union) to promote a strategy between those of the Second and Third Internationals. The Communists mocked it memorably as the Two and a Half International. In 1923, the Vienna Union was folded into the Second International.
1923 was also the year the Instiute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was founded with Carl Grünberg as its head until 1930, when Max Horkheimer took over that position. The Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, which Grünberg edited from 1911-1930 (and is better known now as the Grünberg Archive), became the main journal of the Institute during the 1920s.
So, what was Marcuse's particular version of Marxist-socialist theory of society and politics? Cohan and Serby assert that his understanding of capitalist society and the process of it transitioning to a socialist society was broadly in line with that of the pre-First World War Second International.
They are basically right about that. I would even go a bit further than they do and say that Marcuse operated from an traditional Marxist or even "Marxist-Leninist" framework in his broader perspective, although so far as I'm aware he never used the latter term for himself and was critical of official Soviet ideology.
But what I mean is that Marcuse proceeded from the assumption that capitalist society possessed basic contradictions within itself, particularly the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class, which would ultimately lead to a political revolution. That would enable to the working class to establish a socialist society based on centralized state ownership of the basic elements of the economy, "the means of production," as Marx called them.
In his famous/notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance" (1965 with a 1969 postscript), Marcuse also indicated that something like a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (though he didn't use that term) would be necessary, in which an elite vanguard group would seize power supported by a popular revolt. I mention this because it was very much a part of the thought-world in which Marcuse matured and which he applied in his philosophical work as part of the original Frankfurt School group associated with the Institute for Social Research.
But in 2021, that requires a bit of temporal translation.
The socialist movement and the working class
Without trying to rehash a century and a half of left polemics, the classic Marxist theory of the pre-First World War period understood capitalism as a class dictatorship of the capitalist class, not simply in terms of government but in terms of their social and economic power. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most influential in the Second International up until the First World War, envisioned taking power as the party representing the working class [proletariat] which they understood as being a majority of the people. Once in power, they would use state power to establish society on a socialist basis. This would represent the class "dictatorship" of the working class, which as a democratically legitimated power would dismantle the social and economic dictatorship of the capitalist class.
The Social Democrats expected and hoped to take power through some combination of electoral action, militant protest, and labor union power. In a era in which the French Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1848 loomed large in people's understanding of what it took to establish a democratic government, the advocates of socialism were no more ready to renounce violence as a necessary element of the transition than George Washington and the American Founders were in the 18th century.
But the Social Democrats expected that any violence in the transition was most likely to come in the form of violent resistance on the part of the capitalist class in opposition to a legitimate democratic government, which the workers' government - a democratic government of the majority - would use its legitimate state power to resist and suppress.
If this sounds like elaborate hair-splitting, it may be helpful to think of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol in Washington earlier this year. As we are learning in more detail as time goes by and the prosecutions proceed, we know that Trump and his circle were actively planning a coup. It's actually called a self-coup when a sitting government is resisting the results of a legitimate democratic vote for a change of government, which was the case with the Trump coup attempt. The Capitol police and, eventually, National Guard forces suppressed the violent revolt taking place on January 6.
The supporters of the coup, of course, are saying this was persecution of good Amurcan patriots by the evil "gubment" and the Deep State. So describing it as an instance of a democratic government using "dictatorial" means to suppress a revolt sounds a bit like a validation of that narrative.
But that is what a lot like what the the parties of the Second International in the 19th century understood by the "dictatorship of the proletariat," i.e., a democratically elected, legitimate government using (legitimate) force to suppress a reactionary attempt to seize the government by illegitimate means.
The Soviet version of the dictatorship of the proletariat first established in 1917 - in a country in which the working class was a distinct minority - was part of what divided the socialist movement between Social Democrats (2nd International) and Communists (3rd International). Karl Kautsky, one of the most important Marxist theorists of the Second International, wrote a polemic against the Soviet version, Terrorism and Communism (1919). "Terrorism" in that context was understood more as state repression than partisan-warfare style acts of sabotage and assassination. The concept harked back to the Terror, aka, Reign of Terror, of 1793-4 during the French Revolution. (What we know as partisan or guerrilla warfare in Europe also dates back to the Napoleonic Wars, although arguably a version of it was used in the American Revolution.)
The parties of the Second International eventually abandoned the phrase. But the notion of a democratic government led by the Social Democrats needing to be prepared to use legitimate force to defend itself against a violent counter-revolution didn't go away. Nor did the idea of socialists prior to taking power needing a option to defend themselves by force disappear among the Second International parties in the interwar period. In Germany and Austria, the Communists, the Socialists and the parties of the right had their own self-defense groups.
Marcuse and post-First World War Germany
Cohen and Serby note, "Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers’ council during the [1918 German] revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht." At the end of the war, military units began revolting and built workers' councils ("soviets" in Russian) as political action groups. The Kaiser fled Germany and the Social Democrats (SPD) took power. Friedrich Ebert, a moderate Social Democrat who had supported the war, declared the SPD government. (His level of zeal for social transformation was indicated by his reported comment at the time, "I hate the revolution like sin.”) But virtually simultaneously, Karl Liebknecht, a left SPD leader who had opposed the war, declared a workers' republic under his leadership.
In reality, Erich Ludendorff, the general who was de facto head of the German government at the end of the war, had a very conscious plan to pass the government to the SPD because he knew the war was lost and wanted to set up the SPD to take the blame for it. Ludendorff was setting up the Big Lie that Germany only lost because traitors at home undercut the military. An outbreak of protests among workers that became known as the Spartacist Revolt prompted a crackdown, described as follows by the stodgy-but-reliable Britannica Online:
The far right attempted a coup in 1920 against the new Weimar government headed by the SPD known as the Kapp Putsch. It was put down mainly by a general strike of German workers.
In the case of the Sparticist revolt and the violent suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that immediately followed, the Social Democratic-run government resorted to literally "dictatorial" measures to suppress a movement it feared would overturn its government. The workers themselves had more to do with defeating the Kapp Putsch, but the government was defending itself also in that case against a rightwing coup. The Kapp Putsch came closer to looking like the reactionary revolt against a Socialist government that the prewar SPD had envisioned. But these did all represent the SPD government acting as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the way the prewar Second International had understood the concept. Although even by 1919, they weren't calling it that.
The Austrian SDAP stuck with something like the traditional Second International concept. Anton Pelinka explains in Die Gescheiterte Republik: Kultur und Politik in Österreich 1918-1938 (2017):
Norbert Leser describes the concept of the Linz Program on the subject this way (Der Sturz des Adlers: 120 Jahre österreichische Sozaldemokratie, 2008):
I should note that Norbert Leser (1933-2014) was considered a part of the more conservative wing of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (now SPÖ, the current initials for the party). But he described that aspect of the history of the SPÖ's history well.
But to provide the background I wanted for the Cohan-Serby piece including the Franfkfurt School context, I decided to split this commentary into three parts.
Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, and their theory of social transformation
One of the issues Cohan and Serby discuss is Marcuse's relationship to Marxism, more specifically the classic Marxism of the Second International. The context is to what extent working-class people can be motivated to participate more actively in a left-progressive political agenda. Since the early 19th century, mobilizing the working class to press a left program to benefit themselves in opposition to the politics of conservative capitalists has been a central issue in politics in the West and now in the whole world. Obviously, the context varies greatly by location and time.
The book One-Dimensional Man addressed the American and European situation in the 1950s and 1960s which seemed to be marked by a kind of political stagnation in which important alternative answers to major problems like militarism and the nuclear arms race were being ignored and even suppressed by existing institutions through means direct and indirect. It fits broadly with other books of the period like John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), both of which challenged the self-satisfied and superficially optimistic "American Century" attitudes which prevailed during the early years of the Cold War.
Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt School of "critical theory" associated with the Institute for Social Research, the first generation of which also included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Henryk Grossmann, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Frederick Pollock, and Karl Wittfogel. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were known in America particularly for combining ideas from Marx and Freud into a broad social-psychological view. A project sponsored by the American Jewish Committee called Studies in Prejudice contributed heavily to that reputation in the US, particular one of the books that emerged from it, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That work is receiving renewed attention in recent years.
The thought-world of the Frankfurt School between the two World Wars generally fell somewhere between the views of the Communist parties of the Third International and the more reformist approach of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International. (The latter still has a shadow existence as the Socialist International.) After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the socialist movement split between supporters of those two camps.
There's an interesting analogy between the position of the Frankfurt School and that known as "Austromarxism," the interwar stance of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) idenfied with leaders like Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer. There was a small Communist Party in Austria, but there was no major Communist split-off from the SDAP after 1917. In 1921-23, a group of socialist parties including the SDAP formed the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (Vienna Union) to promote a strategy between those of the Second and Third Internationals. The Communists mocked it memorably as the Two and a Half International. In 1923, the Vienna Union was folded into the Second International.
1923 was also the year the Instiute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was founded with Carl Grünberg as its head until 1930, when Max Horkheimer took over that position. The Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, which Grünberg edited from 1911-1930 (and is better known now as the Grünberg Archive), became the main journal of the Institute during the 1920s.
So, what was Marcuse's particular version of Marxist-socialist theory of society and politics? Cohan and Serby assert that his understanding of capitalist society and the process of it transitioning to a socialist society was broadly in line with that of the pre-First World War Second International.
They are basically right about that. I would even go a bit further than they do and say that Marcuse operated from an traditional Marxist or even "Marxist-Leninist" framework in his broader perspective, although so far as I'm aware he never used the latter term for himself and was critical of official Soviet ideology.
But what I mean is that Marcuse proceeded from the assumption that capitalist society possessed basic contradictions within itself, particularly the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class, which would ultimately lead to a political revolution. That would enable to the working class to establish a socialist society based on centralized state ownership of the basic elements of the economy, "the means of production," as Marx called them.
In his famous/notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance" (1965 with a 1969 postscript), Marcuse also indicated that something like a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (though he didn't use that term) would be necessary, in which an elite vanguard group would seize power supported by a popular revolt. I mention this because it was very much a part of the thought-world in which Marcuse matured and which he applied in his philosophical work as part of the original Frankfurt School group associated with the Institute for Social Research.
But in 2021, that requires a bit of temporal translation.
The socialist movement and the working class
Without trying to rehash a century and a half of left polemics, the classic Marxist theory of the pre-First World War period understood capitalism as a class dictatorship of the capitalist class, not simply in terms of government but in terms of their social and economic power. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most influential in the Second International up until the First World War, envisioned taking power as the party representing the working class [proletariat] which they understood as being a majority of the people. Once in power, they would use state power to establish society on a socialist basis. This would represent the class "dictatorship" of the working class, which as a democratically legitimated power would dismantle the social and economic dictatorship of the capitalist class.
The Social Democrats expected and hoped to take power through some combination of electoral action, militant protest, and labor union power. In a era in which the French Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1848 loomed large in people's understanding of what it took to establish a democratic government, the advocates of socialism were no more ready to renounce violence as a necessary element of the transition than George Washington and the American Founders were in the 18th century.
But the Social Democrats expected that any violence in the transition was most likely to come in the form of violent resistance on the part of the capitalist class in opposition to a legitimate democratic government, which the workers' government - a democratic government of the majority - would use its legitimate state power to resist and suppress.
If this sounds like elaborate hair-splitting, it may be helpful to think of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol in Washington earlier this year. As we are learning in more detail as time goes by and the prosecutions proceed, we know that Trump and his circle were actively planning a coup. It's actually called a self-coup when a sitting government is resisting the results of a legitimate democratic vote for a change of government, which was the case with the Trump coup attempt. The Capitol police and, eventually, National Guard forces suppressed the violent revolt taking place on January 6.
The supporters of the coup, of course, are saying this was persecution of good Amurcan patriots by the evil "gubment" and the Deep State. So describing it as an instance of a democratic government using "dictatorial" means to suppress a revolt sounds a bit like a validation of that narrative.
But that is what a lot like what the the parties of the Second International in the 19th century understood by the "dictatorship of the proletariat," i.e., a democratically elected, legitimate government using (legitimate) force to suppress a reactionary attempt to seize the government by illegitimate means.
The Soviet version of the dictatorship of the proletariat first established in 1917 - in a country in which the working class was a distinct minority - was part of what divided the socialist movement between Social Democrats (2nd International) and Communists (3rd International). Karl Kautsky, one of the most important Marxist theorists of the Second International, wrote a polemic against the Soviet version, Terrorism and Communism (1919). "Terrorism" in that context was understood more as state repression than partisan-warfare style acts of sabotage and assassination. The concept harked back to the Terror, aka, Reign of Terror, of 1793-4 during the French Revolution. (What we know as partisan or guerrilla warfare in Europe also dates back to the Napoleonic Wars, although arguably a version of it was used in the American Revolution.)
The parties of the Second International eventually abandoned the phrase. But the notion of a democratic government led by the Social Democrats needing to be prepared to use legitimate force to defend itself against a violent counter-revolution didn't go away. Nor did the idea of socialists prior to taking power needing a option to defend themselves by force disappear among the Second International parties in the interwar period. In Germany and Austria, the Communists, the Socialists and the parties of the right had their own self-defense groups.
Marcuse and post-First World War Germany
Cohen and Serby note, "Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers’ council during the [1918 German] revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht." At the end of the war, military units began revolting and built workers' councils ("soviets" in Russian) as political action groups. The Kaiser fled Germany and the Social Democrats (SPD) took power. Friedrich Ebert, a moderate Social Democrat who had supported the war, declared the SPD government. (His level of zeal for social transformation was indicated by his reported comment at the time, "I hate the revolution like sin.”) But virtually simultaneously, Karl Liebknecht, a left SPD leader who had opposed the war, declared a workers' republic under his leadership.
In reality, Erich Ludendorff, the general who was de facto head of the German government at the end of the war, had a very conscious plan to pass the government to the SPD because he knew the war was lost and wanted to set up the SPD to take the blame for it. Ludendorff was setting up the Big Lie that Germany only lost because traitors at home undercut the military. An outbreak of protests among workers that became known as the Spartacist Revolt prompted a crackdown, described as follows by the stodgy-but-reliable Britannica Online:
The German army ... had recovered its nerve and was determined to prevent a further move to the left. In December [1918] the army had begun secretly to train volunteer units drawn from the sea of soldiers returning from the front. These so-called Freikorps (“Free Corps”) units formed dozens of small right-wing armies that during the next years roamed the country, looking for revolutionary activity to suppress. The Spartacist revolt, which was confined largely to Berlin, was put down within a week by some 3,000 Freikorps members. When Liebknecht and [Rosa] Luxemburg were captured on January 15 [1919], they were both shot at the initiative of Freikorps officers. Although sporadic revolutionary activity continued elsewhere in Germany during the following months, its failure in Berlin clearly marked its doom. The proclamation on April 4, 1919, of a Räterepublik [Soviet Republic] in Bavaria revived radical fortunes only briefly; Freikorps units put down the radical Bavarian republic by the end of the month.The Social Democrat immediately in charge of crushing the Sparticist protest was Gustav Noske. Ebert's SPD government's use of the Freicorps in this situation became a source of lasting resentment and was a major reason the SPD and the Communists (KPD) were unable to form an effective united front against the far right during the Weimar Republic. Ludendorff, who later became a Nazi, had done his nasty work well.
The far right attempted a coup in 1920 against the new Weimar government headed by the SPD known as the Kapp Putsch. It was put down mainly by a general strike of German workers.
In the case of the Sparticist revolt and the violent suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that immediately followed, the Social Democratic-run government resorted to literally "dictatorial" measures to suppress a movement it feared would overturn its government. The workers themselves had more to do with defeating the Kapp Putsch, but the government was defending itself also in that case against a rightwing coup. The Kapp Putsch came closer to looking like the reactionary revolt against a Socialist government that the prewar SPD had envisioned. But these did all represent the SPD government acting as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the way the prewar Second International had understood the concept. Although even by 1919, they weren't calling it that.
The Austrian SDAP stuck with something like the traditional Second International concept. Anton Pelinka explains in Die Gescheiterte Republik: Kultur und Politik in Österreich 1918-1938 (2017):
One wing [of the SDAP] was perceived as "left", whose representative was Max Adler. Adler was also the main person responsible for the fact that in the rhetoric of the party and the formulations of the "Linz Program" of 1926, concepts that seemed to emphasize a close relationship to Marxism-Leninism took a prominent place - such as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" put on the table as a defensive instrument. [my emphasis; my translation]Pelinka goes on to say, "Despite its ambivalence [toward the Austrian government of the 1920s], despite its tendency to distance itself from the real existing republic, Austrian Social Democracy was the only party to try to give the republic an affective basis."
Norbert Leser describes the concept of the Linz Program on the subject this way (Der Sturz des Adlers: 120 Jahre österreichische Sozaldemokratie, 2008):
While the Social Democracy [the SDAP] was self-confident enough to be convinced of its victory, it was also Marxist enough to fear that, as Marx had prophesied, even in the event of an election victory, the ruling classes would not voluntarily abandon the field of their positions and property rights but would resist. In trying to predict the opponent's behavior, two seemingly logical possibilities were envisaged: one would be to use force to prevent a party that won elections and possibly had an absolute majority from taking power legally; the second path, considered possible and feared, could be such that a capitalist class defeated in the elections would not only by sabotage make it more difficult for the socialist government to govern, but would make it impossible. In these two cases, there would be no other way out than the establishment of a "dictatorship" and the entry into a "civil war". As unwise as it was to paint hypothetical situations on the wall, so irresistible was the temptation to instill courage and confidence in one's own followers for an emergency and to put the capitalist class on notice. Basically, the pattern of behavior that the [Second] International had already practiced before the First World War was repeated: to speak of an emergency in the silent hope that it would never occur. [my emphasis; my translation]The notion that "in the event of an election victory, the ruling classes would not voluntarily abandon the field of their positions and property rights, but would resist," sounds something like the American January 6 of this year and the Trump coup plan behind it. Even though the Democratic Party - despite the hysterical accusations of the Republican Party and other hardline rightists - was far away from wanting to wipe out the capitalist economic system!
I should note that Norbert Leser (1933-2014) was considered a part of the more conservative wing of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (now SPÖ, the current initials for the party). But he described that aspect of the history of the SPÖ's history well.
The Austrian Social Democrats never faced the situation in which they took governmental power and faced a reactionary revolt. But in 1934, they faced something like the reverse. The leader of the conservative Christian Social Party, Engelbert Dollfuss, in 1933 established a Mussolini-style dictatorship, which was officially called the Standestaat and is often described as a "clerical-fascist" regime. In 1934, his regime carried out a crackdown to suppress the SDAP by force in a relative brief period that was nevertheless serious enough to go down in history as a civil war. One the SDAP lost.
In 1936, the democratic government of the Spanish Republic faced a reactionary revolt led by Francisco Franco that resulted in a much longer and dealier civil war. But the Spanish Republic in that situation faced the kind of emergency against which the SDAP held "the silent hope that it would never occur."
As distant and different as that period may seem, it was the historical framework in which Herbert Marcuse and others in the original Frankfurt School tradition formed their political and social outlooks. And since most of that first generation were Jewish intellectuals as well as leftists who had to leave Germany during the Third Reich. Understanding the reality of fascism, how to prevent it and how to overcome it, was defining for their political outlooks.
The experience of National Socialism (Nazism) and the longterm chronic threat they thought it represented was central to the Frankfurt School thinkers' view of the world. "For Marcuse, the totalitarian tendencies in the world had not disappeared with National Socialism." (Susanne Kailitz, Von den Worten zu den Waffen? Frankfurter Schule, Studentenbewegung, RAF und die Gewaltfrage 2007; my translation)
And for them, authoritarian tendencies were deeply rooted in capitalist societies. Max Horkheimer famously observed, "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."
In Part 2, I look more specifically at the Cohan-Serby article.
