My reading digest from Critical Social Theory on 17 October 2006.
Horkheimer, Max. “The State of Contemporary Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research.“ Translated by Peter Wagner. in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 25-36. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Marcuse, Herbert. “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society.“ Translated by Micheline Ishay. in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 119-127 New York: Routledge, 1989.
—. “Philosophy and Critical Theory,“ 1937. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 58-74. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Pollock, Frederick. “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations.“ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 95-118. New York: Routledge, 1989.
In class on Thursday Professor Orosco asked us if the Frankfurt School Marxists were bad Marxists because they were studying the superstructure of society rather than solely the base (economics) that Marx and Engels claimed were the causation of the superstructure. The readings we read this week get to the answer of that question. Why would Horkheimer make the call to study so much other stuff (music, art, literature, mass culture, politics, psychology, etc.)? This isn’t something that I thought too much about until Orosco asked this question. It seemed most obvious to me (which means that it is something to be questioned; always question the obvious). Perhaps it seems obvious is because, as Orosco pointed out, this Western Marxism that analyzes the whole of culture, was the groundwork that led to cultural studies and queer theory, studies that seem familiar and make sense to me.
But it does raise an interesting question of why make the change to study structures that Engels and Marx, while admitting that they changed the economic system, argued were caused by an economic system that demands our critical attention. Someone in class stated that the problem has changed from an economic one to a political one, based on Polluck’s essay, but now I’m having trouble grounding that in the text. I just skimmed Polluck’s essay looking for evidence of this, but everywhere I look, I see economics: setting labor wages, setting prices, controlling resources, controlling distribution, influencing trade, etc.
It makes sense for the shift from capitalism to state capitalism to cause a shift in emphasis from economics to politics; indeed, the dominant group (now the “bureaucrats in business, state, and party, allied with the remaining vested interests“ [113]) is a political one, but still, their interests and powers are economic ones. Polluck tells us, though, that the owners of capital “no longer have any necessary social functions“ and that they will become a “surplus population“ that become parasitic (113). So, the shift in power in totalitarian state capitalism moves from capitalist to this new specialized class of planners. The planners, I suppose, being either “elected“ or appointed, are done so for political reasons, often — reasons that will help certain people gain power more often than gain capital or profits. I suppose we see here a shift from the importance of gaining capital for those in power to an emphasis in gaining power (though perhaps capital is power prior to state capitalism). I am uncertain of this interpretation, for I am also concerned that I am bringing my own views into this reading and not interpreting what the authors meant (I am always considering power, often in a Foucauldian sense).
I think part of this new emphasis on the political instead of the economic relies on consent: how do people under totalitarian state capitalism (I do not refer just to state capitalism; I see Polluck’s essay as an indictment of many Western states as totalitarian or near-totalitarian) consent to this political system? What are the ways in which mass culture is used to manipulate the populace into consent? How does the rhetoric and affective and political pedagogy of a regime coerce its citizenship into consent? And of course, once again, I am concerned with how I am reading this. Is this what Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Pollock were getting at in the 1930s-50s? Or am I interpreting with the lens of Adorno (whom I’ve read in the past, unlike the other authors).
I think my reading is right when I read Pollock’s questions of state capitalism: “What ways and mans can be devised to prevent the abuse of the enormous power vested in state, industrial, and party bureaucracy under state capitalism? How can the loss of economic liberty be rendered compatible with the maintenance of political liberty?“ (115). He is also concerned with “political alliance between dissentient partial interests and the bureaucracy aiming to dominate the majority“ (115; and it is here that I see the Religious Right combining forces with Neoliberalism for the same goal of political domination while having different interests). These are questions of politics, not economics. Economic liberty might be gone with the power of the state, but how can we maintain political liberty? In what ways can we be politically free under state capitalism?
