Walter Benjamin
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia,
including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I
described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel,
equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of
absurdity.
Georg Lukács’
“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The
causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923,
the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was
approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and
self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.
Leon Trotsky
"A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the
world, in his will he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do
research on the source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself,".
Bertolt Brecht
“Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world
has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
Bertolt Brecht, referring to Arturo Ui (representing Adolf
Hitler), in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941)
Grand Hotel Abyss is a useful, if somewhat idiosyncratic,
examination of the Frankfurt School. The founding of the school was in direct
response to the failure and betrayal of the German revolution of 1918/23. Leon
Trotsky posed the question :
“Why did the German Revolution fail to lead to victory? The
causes for this lie wholly in tactics and not in objective conditions… In 1923,
the working masses realised or sensed that the moment of decisive struggle was
approaching. However, they did not see the necessary resolution and
self-confidence on the side of the Communist Party.”[1]
The so-called “Marxist intellectuals”, centred around the
Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, drew extremely pessimistic
conclusions from the defeat of the German revolution. To a man, they blamed the
working class for the defeat, not the German Communist Party. As Jeffries puts
it: “It was as if the proletariat had been found wanting and so had to be
replaced as revolutionary agent by critical theorists.”[2]
Grand Hotel Abyss – takes its name from the Marxist philosopher
Georg Lukács’s derisive term for the Frankfurt school :
“A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia,
including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I
described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel,
equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of
absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or
artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts
offered.’ (Die Zerstörung der Vernunft, Neuwied 1962, p. 219).
The fact that Ernst Bloch continued undeterred to cling to
his synthesis of ‘left’ ethics and ‘right’ epistemology (e.g. cf. Philosophische
Grundfragen I, Zur Ontologie des Noch-Nicht-Seins, Frankfurt 1961)
does honour to his strength of character but cannot modify the outdated nature
of his theoretical position. To the extent that an authentic, fruitful and
progressive opposition is stirring in the Western world (including the Federal
Republic), this opposition no longer has anything to do with the coupling of
‘left’ ethics with ‘right’ epistemology.”[3]
This book is a group biography. The early part of the book
describes the origins of the school. From the very beginning, the school was
financed heavily by sections of the German bourgeoisie. As Bertolt Brecht once quipped,
"A rich old man dies; disturbed at the poverty in the world, in his will
he leaves a large sum to set up an institute which will do research on the
source of this poverty, which is, of course, himself,". These financiers
had such a significant influence on the institute that the words
"Marxism" or "revolution" were not mentioned in the early
papers issued by the institute's members. It is fair to say that the Institute
for Social Research was compromised from the start.
Economist Henryk Grossman dominated the school’s early work.
As the Marxist writer Nick Beams explains “In 1929 Henryk Grossmann publication
of his book The Law of Accumulation and the Breakdown of the Capitalist System
explained that it was the “great historical contribution” of Rosa Luxemburg
that she adhered to the basic lesson of Capital and sought to prove that “the
continued development of capitalism encounters absolute economic limits.” The
problem with Luxemburg’s analysis, however, was that it shifted the crucial
contradictions of capitalism from the sphere of production to the sphere of
circulation. “Realisation” was not the problem for the long-term development of
capitalism. Rather, the problem was the insufficient extraction of surplus
value to sustain capitalist accumulation, which expressed itself in the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall.[4]
It is extraordinary that the Institute had little or no
contact with the two main parties of the working the Social Democratic and
Communist parties. Towards the end of the 1920s, the work of the institute came
to be dominated by one of its leaders, Max Horkheimer.[5].
As Martin Jay writes “In one of the very few concrete
political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The
Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of
aphorisms and short essays known as Dämmerung (the German word means both dawn
and twilight), he expressed his reasons for scepticism concerning the various
workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated
working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced
by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding
dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a
Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness.”
The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often
relied on coercion, too few. The prospects for reconciling the two positions,
he concluded pessimistically, were contingent “in the last analysis on the
course of economic processes.... In both parties, there exists a part of the
strength on which the future of mankind depends.” At no time, therefore,
whether under Grünberg or Horkheimer, was the Institute to ally itself with a
specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterised
its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms: “It is a neutral
institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its
significance lies in the fact that for the first time, everything concerning
the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered.
Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and
periodicals) ... Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of
the worker's movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for
it.[6]
Horkheimer was the father of “Critical Theory”. Most, if not
all, leaders of the Institute, including
Adorno, had no faith in the revolutionary capacity of the working class.
Rolf Wiggerhaus writes “None of them [the leaders of the Frankfurt School] put
any hopes in the working class…Adorno expressly denied that the working class
had any progressive role to play.” (The Frankfurt School—Its History, Theories,
and Political Significance, MIT Press, 1992, p. 123)
“The Frankfurt School transformed Marxism from a theoretical
and political weapon of the proletarian class struggle into a form of
supra-class cultural criticism, expressing the political pessimism, social
alienation and personal frustration of sections of the middle classes. Max
Horkheimer and his closest collaborator, Theodor Adorno, reverted to
philosophical traditions that Marxism had opposed—the critical theory of Kant,
the “critical criticism” of the Young Hegelians and various forms of
philosophical subjectivism from Schopenhauer to Heidegger.
Traumatised by the experience of National Socialism, they
denied the revolutionary potential of the working class. Contrary to Marx, in
whose view the development of the productive forces blew apart capitalist
property relations and unleashed an epoch of social revolution, in their
opinion, the development of the productive forces plunged society into
barbarism and solidified capitalist rule. “The powerlessness of the workers is
not merely a ruse of the rulers, but the logical consequence of industrial society”,
they claimed, and further: “The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible
regression”. The only way out of this social dead end was critical thinking:
“It is the servant which the master cannot control at will”. The revolutionary
subject, therefore, according to these theorists, was the “enlightened
individual” and not the proletariat.”[7]
This leads me to another leading member of the Institute,
Walter Benjamin. Benjamin, although a gifted writer, led a torturous life and
committed suicide at an early age. He too succumbed to the pessimism of the age
and, like his co-thinkers, opposed orthodox Marxism and wrote off the working
class as a revolutionary force for the overthrow of capitalism.
Before his death, he wrote the following: “The angel of
history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”[8]
As Bernd Rheinhardt writes “Some time after writing these
lines, Benjamin, fleeing the Nazis, took his own life in 1940. His situation
was desperate, stranded on the French-Spanish border, he anticipated his
immediate arrest by the Nazis. On the one hand, the pessimistic viewpoint expressed
in that citation stemmed from personal despair. At the same time, it was
nourished by confusion arising from unresolved questions concerning the rise of
fascism in Europe and the political degeneration of the Soviet Union under
Stalinism.”
It is safe to say that Benjamin was not the only one of the
Frankfurt School who had a pessimistic outlook stemming from an incorrect
perspective regarding the rise of German fascism. The leading representatives
of the Frankfurt School lived most of their adult lives in a state of political
prostration.” The maestros of 'critical theory' and the “negative dialectic”
were, when it came to political analysis, incompetent and perennially
disoriented. The rise of fascism and defeats of the working class in the 1930s
shattered whatever confidence they may have had at some time in the possibility
of socialist revolution. Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer and
Adorno—published in 1947 and generally considered the founding philosophical
statement of the Frankfurt School—pronounced the downfall of all prospects for
human progress.”
The analysis on the Frankfurt School by the Fourth
International and particularly one of its leaders, David North, has come under
sustained attack by several pseudo-left organisations and individuals, such as Javier-sethness
who writes.
“In his “Marxist Critique” of The Frankfurt School,
Postmodernism, and The Politics of the Pseudo-Left, David North, a high-ranking
member within the Trotskyist Fourth International, chairman of the U.S.
Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and editor of the World Socialist Web Site
(WSWS), reprints polemical essays (2003-2012) voicing the response of the
International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the heterodox
theoretical suggestions made by fellow travellers Alex Steiner and Frank
Brenner to incorporate greater concern for psychology, utopia, gender, and
sexuality into the ICFI’s program. Whereas Steiner and Brenner sought to open
the Fourth International to the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and
Wilhelm Reich’s sex-pol approach, North repudiates any such suggestion as
beyond the pale and communicates his revulsion with the Frankfurt School as an
alternative to Marxism-Leninism. To rationalise his dismissal of Critical
Theory, he rather baselessly ties its legacy to the rise of postmodernist
irrationalism. North essentially claims any left-wing intellectual “deviation”
from the ICFI’s Trotskyism irredeemably to espouse “pseudo-left,” “petty
bourgeois,” “anti-Marxist,” even “anti-socialist” politics. To sustain such
fantasies, North presents a highly dishonest, even unhinged analysis of the
Frankfurt School theorists and theories.”[9]
There is not much point in answering this facile argument,
and doing so would only encourage further stupidity, and I am pretty sure North
can defend himself against this infantile attack.
While Jeffries' book is well researched and readable, it
suffers from a major weakness. At no time does he examine what orthodox
Marxists have said on the subject of the Frankfurt School. North’s book is not
mentioned, and I doubt Jeffries has read any of the articles in it or, for that
matter, contacted any leading writers from the World Socialist Website.
Also, the most important Marxist of the 20th
century, Leon Trotsky, gets no mention. Trotsky wrote numerous articles and
pamphlets on Germany in the fire of events. The German edition of his writings
on Germany, published in the 1970s, contains 76 articles written between 1929
and 1940, the overwhelming majority in 1932 and in 1933. Unlike members of the
Frankfurt School, Trotsky aimed to change the course of the Communist Party.
With a correct policy, this party would have been able to stop the rise of
National Socialism and prevent Hitler’s victory.
The thinkers of the Frankfurt School -- Adorno, Horkheimer,
Habermas, Benjamin, Wellmer, Marcuse -- were all for theorising capitalism and
barbarism and thought little about changing it. The residents in the Grand
Hotel Abyss were about theory, not action.
[1]
Trotsky, Leon, 1972, The First Five Years of the Communist
International, Volume 1 (Monad Press), www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1
[2]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/03/grand-hotel-abyss-frankfurt-school-adorno-benjamin-stuart-jeffries-review
[3]
Preface to The Theory of the Novel-
www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/theory-novel/preface.htm
[4]
Marxism and the political economy of Paul Sweezy-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2004/04/ps3-a08.html
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Horkheimer
[6]
The Creation of the Institut für Sozialforschung and Its First Frankfurt Years-
www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/jay/ch01.htm
[7]
From the student movement to the Greens-
www.wsws.org/en/special/library/foundations-ger/23.html
[8]
On the Concept of History-https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html
[9]
The Marx and Philosophy Review of Books-marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/8113_the-frankfurt-school-postmodernism-and-the-politics-of-the-pseudo-left-review-by-javier-sethness/
