Haseeb Ahmed

Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius.

FOR YEARS Theodor Adorno’s theoretical work has suffered from either neglect or semi-hostile “interpretation.” It is therefore refreshing to see Detlev Claussen, who studied under Adorno at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt from 1966 to 1971, take a more sympathetic approach to the study of Adorno’s philosophy and intellectual life. In Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, Claussen attempts to track the historical and biographical factors that influenced Adorno’s critical theory and, in doing so, strives to carefully reconstruct both the changing context and the abiding problematic that Adorno was attempting to grasp in and through his work.

The late 1960s witnessed an upsurge of student activism that culminated in massive strikes and demonstrations worldwide beginning in 1968 and extending into 1969, the year of Adorno’s death. Though they had learned much from him, the student New Left in this period strongly counter-identified against their teacher, Adorno, who typified for them the old and impotent Left they sought to supersede. Following the lead of Herbert Marcuse, who said just after Adorno’s death that “there is no one who can represent Adorno or speak for him,” Claussen does not engage in a critique of Adorno’s students and contemporaries on behalf of his former teacher, but attempts instead to allow Adorno to speak for himself by drawing from a huge array of intimate correspondence, diary entries, and assorted works, many of them previously unpublished. Claussen makes the point straight away that Adorno’s criticism of the New Left and the parting of ways between Adorno and Marcuse over the latter’s support for it was not exceptional but consistent with Adorno’s lifelong history of remaining true to the Left by criticizing it. Claussen notes that Adorno’s lectures around this time attempted to clarify how “the new is the longing for the new itself: that is what everything new suffers from” (327). It is for this reason that there must be an unrelenting differentiation between “representation for the purposes of agitation and practical reality” (336), something that the students failed to realize as the situation in 1968 escalated, and to which both Adorno and the student movement ultimately fell victim.

Theodor Adorno in his youth.

For Claussen, Adorno’s childhood growing up in a Jewish bourgeois household in Frankfurt is crucial for understanding him, and Claussen returns to it throughout the book. Adorno is portrayed as the last generation to know the “broken promises of happiness” of the long Bourgeois era, which, at “the end of the nineteenth century denie[d] tradition by inventing it” (52), specifically through the cultivation of individual interests. For Adorno this meant chiefly musical pursuits. Claussen contrasts the relationship that Adorno and his family had to their Jewish origins with that of his colleague Leo Lowenthal and mentor Siegfried Kracauer. While Kracauer and Lowenthal would describe themselves as “hybrids,” unable to reconcile tradition and secularized life, Adorno appeared to be relatively untouched by this dilemma. However, this tension between the lived Jewish experience and enlightened liberalism was not entirely arbitrary since, on Claussen’s reading of Adorno, bourgeois ideology found its necessary conclusion with the rise of National Socialism. Claussen makes the point that this attitude towards “bourgeois” culture and society conditioned Adorno’s work throughout his life; after his return to Germany in 1953 Adorno wrote, “I consider the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be potentially more of a threat than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy” (335).

Before the Nazis took power, Adorno studied in Vienna under Arnold Schoenberg, the radical modernist composer, during which time Adorno had to reconcile his growing interests in philosophy and sociology with the pursuit of music. Claussen tracks how this tension remained constant and informed his work throughout his life. Adorno was repeatedly “forced to insist that social categories could not simply be applied to musical material from the outside but had to be generated from the material itself” (113). In this way, issues of technique in musical production could be potentially critical of the social situation that produced it, albeit never in a direct, unmediated way. The failure to recognize this capacity in art left it to the mere pathological function of “veiling” social reality. Furthermore, Claussen points out that the project of the institute was to query the character of a culture whose task “is to conceal the regression into barbarism” without having recourse to the tradition of Marxist categories that functioned also as signals for Stalinist and McCarthyite suppression (202). Claussen notes that, even today, much of the critique of Adorno internalizes the apparent contradistinction between theory and practice, by which Adorno is made to appear as a failed musician turned theorist. Claussen then goes on to quote Adorno as saying, “because of biographical destiny and assuredly also because of certain psychological mechanisms I have not achieved nearly as much as a composer as I believe I could have achieved” (133). But this was not merely a lament on Adorno’s part. Rather, it is the attempt to register the damage inflicted on individual life by a form of social organization that is not adequate to itself.

Beyond Adorno’s childhood and musical upbringing, Claussen illuminates the personal and professional difficulties that constantly confronted the intellectuals, grouped around Max Horkheimer, known as the Frankfurt School. Of Adorno’s exile in the United States during World War II, Claussen reports that Adorno found himself isolated and “out of the firing line” (the title of an essay he wrote), along with other Jewish intellectuals, as the systematic murder of Jews in Europe remained distant, if ever-present. In this context, friendship took on an even greater importance for Adorno as an essential way of knowing himself. Claussen describes personal relationships that shed light on different aspects of Adorno’s inner life and the potentials he wished to realize, since “for Adorno bourgeois society continued to live on in ‘the minds of intellectuals, who [were] at one and the same time the last enemies of the bourgeois and the last bourgeois’” (137). Adorno’s deep affection for his friends permeates the book: To his friend Fritz Lang, whom he nicknamed the Badger, Adorno was Hippopotamus King Archibald, while Horkheimer was the Soft Pear. In a birthday letter Charlie Chaplin became the Bengal Tiger as Vegetarian. Imagination was not reserved only for its use in creating work but as a way of shaping one’s inner life, as Adorno employed playful references to our animal origins to animate the characters closest to him. If the experience of living in the United States strengthened Adorno’s friendships with his fellow exiles, the political climate that led to their exile also complicated and strained these relationships. Living in the wake of the collapse of organized revolutionary Marxist politics, each member of this diverse and eclectic émigré intelligentsia had to decide for herself a relationship to the Soviet Union and “the Party.” Claussen details Adorno’s painful political partings with friends and comrades like Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht, whose attitude, for Adorno, prefigured the anti-intellectualism of the students in 1968. Adorno refused to heed the call for “unity” between theory and practice which was the official Communist Party line and later a slogan of the students in 1968. In both cases it resulted in the suppression of critical thought.

Furthermore, the Frankfurt School group was not exempt from pressures of economic survival, and Claussen offers detailed accounts of how friendships fell prey to rivalry in the competition for financial and moral support. The experience of suppression in both the GDR (East Germany) and America in the McCarthy period showed how easy it was to fall victim to inquisitorial campaigns (156). Adorno did not become a full professor until the 1950s upon his return to Frankfurt, with the help of his old friend and benefactor Max Horkheimer. Even then, he was contemptuously referred to by his colleagues, who had continued on the faculty through the Nazi era, as a “reparation-professor,” or someone who had achieved his position undeservedly through West Germany’s policy of making reparations for Nazism by appointing Jews to faculty positions. Adorno only reached popular audiences in Germany with the post-war publication of his book Minima Moralia. All this fits with Claussen’s image of Adorno as a “late bloomer,” an opinion shared by many of Adorno’s colleagues.

But while Claussen illustrates clearly how such friendships were formative for Adorno, at these points the identity between Adorno’s life and its presentation in the book become confused and Adorno’s own criticisms about biography as the bourgeois idealization of the individual, the topic with which Claussen paradoxically opens the book, seem applicable to the work itself. Nevertheless, Claussen’s careful and sympathetic rendering of various aspects of Adorno’s theory emerges as the greatest strength of One Last Genius.

Claussen identifies the most important thought-figures for Adorno, developed in different ways throughout his work, as being those of identity and non-identity. As Adorno puts it, “Freedom postulates the existence of something non-identical” (247). There is an integral link between individuals through a shared form of subjectivity.

The persistent contradictions of social life under capitalism point to the possibility beyond, but as generated from within capitalism itself. For Claussen it is this basis that shapes Adorno’s aesthetic writings from within and renders their ideological content. The attempt to superimpose political content onto aesthetic form, however, transforms it from an object of negative reflection into a tool for the affirmation of that which it seeks to critique. Claussen reports that in a radio talk prepared by Adorno in 1962 in honor of the death of Hanns Eisler, another one of Schoenberg’s students whom Claussen’s dubs Adorno’s “non-identical brother,” a small note appears: “Socially the relation of the intellectual to the proletariat amounts to a failed identification” (308). Referring to earlier sections of the book, we can understand that what Claussen is conveying is that certain Marxist intellectuals eliminated the standpoint of critical theory by attempting to collapse it into the ubiquitous standpoint of the proletariat in the name of unity; Eisler is now best known for his composition of East Germany’s anthem. To identify with a proletariat whose political consciousness had been seriously undermined by political failures of the 20th century and who had been barred from meaningful, organized political practice by the dominance of Stalinism in the international Left—this would be an abdication of the attempt to describe the conditions of life under capital, in the face of those conditions.

According to Claussen, the categories of identity and non-identity are essentially derived from psychoanalysis, and this appropriation is one of the Frankfurt School’s greatest contributions to Marxist critical theory. In texts such as The Authoritarian Personality, hailed by C. Wright Mills in 1954 as “the most influential book of the last decade,” Adorno and his colleagues anticipated the underlying authoritarianism of the supposedly “anti-authoritarian” Left of the 1960s, a character structure that is still with us today. In this text, Adorno labored to understand how people could act against their own interests, and on such a massive scale, while at the same time allowing for the potential critical recognition of such cathartic behaviors that proliferated with the rise of fascism globally. On this point Claussen quotes Adorno: “the capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to the self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself” (246). One can recognize oneself in advanced capitalism’s forms of mass mediation in both their apocalyptic and banal forms.

Claussen elaborates at length on the effect and meaning of Adorno’s most famous dictum, that “after Auschwitz to write poetry is barbaric,” a statement that curiously attracted poets and writers like Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett. Claussen makes the point that it is usually quoted without the following clarifying clause, from Adorno’s last major work, Aesthetic Theory: “After Auschwitz no further poems are possible, except on the foundation of Auschwitz itself” (330). However, in a review of Eisler’s work, Adorno admits that this argument “stems from politics, not aesthetic reflection.” A radical negative poetry can register the absence of both a collective that would be able to deliver a sense of meaning more authoritative than private attempts, and a personal poetry able to deliver “truth in itself in the interest of society” (300). In an effective synthesis of biographical research and theoretical analysis, Claussen shows how this dictum was developed as an attempt to challenge radical left-wing artists, such as Brecht and Eisler, to register the changing character of one’s social situation and to respond to it through aesthetic form. The failure of reason, which allowed itself to be instrumentalized in the systematic murder of millions of Jews, still also contains within it the kernel of individual thought, through which freedom can become generalizable. By overcoming its own form through consciousness of itself, it can make good on the promise that allows life to carry on. This is what formulating the non-identical would mean.

Conditions of life under capitalism are in constant flux and seem to deny the essential forms of social relations at their core. For that very reason such social relations must be approached as historically specific. Specifically, Claussen points out that anti-Semitism was “not the function of an authoritarian national character but… a historically determined manifestation of violence that could not be eliminated simply by an enlightened program of information.” In 1967, before the student uprising, this was the real point of contention between Adorno and Marcuse, something that remains a key factor in the reception of Adorno’s work, according to Claussen. Today we see Marcuse’s argument reproduced in a degenerate form in the criticism of mass media as the “manufacturing of consent” (Noam Chomsky, after Walter Lippmann), which assumes that culture, as the form of representation of society, and society itself are identical with one another. This eliminates the core of freedom, conceding it to the “totally administered world.” It is this core non-identity that Adorno never loses sight of in his writings and that Claussen traces throughout his work, revealing Adorno to be a far more “optimistic” theorist than colleagues like Marcuse. Claussen similarly shows how Bloch’s and Brecht’s work to “reconstruct a meaningful connection between reason and revolution… was irrevocably doomed after the Stalinist regression and the fact of Auschwitz” (327), because these thinkers allowed an idealized reason to obscure the reality of the historical moment they were hoping to address. This also differentiates them from Adorno, who was willing to register the effects of the cataclysm on himself and, in that way, on everyone else subject to the shared historical moment.

Benjamin argued through the dialectic of continuity and change that each historical moment up to and including the present has to be understood in the terms of its form of appearance (Schein), and it is for this reason that the categories of identity and non-identity offer a way of registering the character of an otherwise opaque form of subjectivity. The book Adorno: One Last Genius at times makes it difficult to differentiate between Adorno’s lived experience and the interpretation of it offered up by Claussen. Nevertheless, it offers a robust historical and theoretical foundation for understanding the categories of Adorno’s thought. The pleasure of seeing in such great detail how ideas were a way of living for Adorno and those around him, allowing them to understand, in and through their own lives, what it was that gave them form, is exhilarating. Thus revealed, Adorno’s critical categories retain their capacity to deepen our understanding of present social reality. Claussen’s contribution advances and broadens the potential use of these categories, even if it risks obscuring them even further by exploring them in a biographical form. |P

Ashley Weger

“It was not the economics of Communism, nor the great power of trade unions, nor the excitement of underground politics that claimed me; my attention was caught by the similarity of workers in other lands, by the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred peoples into a whole.”
— Richard Wright, Black Boy

Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35.

RANDI STORCH’S RED CHICAGO takes to task prevailing caricatures of American Communism during the so-called “Third Period” of the late twenties and early thirties, a period in the history of American Communism frequently criticized for its growing ideological rigidity, its organizational Stalinization, and its ultimate failure to revitalize the flagging world revolution and to check the threat of fascism. Against such views, Storch argues historians have been unfair to the early Chicago Communists, falsely constructing them either as mannequins manipulated by Soviet puppeteers, or else as heroic defenders of the city’s working class, a collection of hyper-romantic organic radicals whose every breath stood in defiance of both employers and the party itself. Storch, whose political imagination is less that of a historian than an anthropologist, attempts to resist these tendencies by uncovering the stories, personalities, and politics of Chicago’s Communists with more nuances in mind than the usual Stalinist, anti-communist, or anti-Stalinist histories. In place of the old preoccupations, Storch proposes parallel analyses of Soviet policy during the Third Period and local stories and practices of party organizers, members, and affiliates. In so doing, Storch postulates that party leaders, youth organizers, workers, and intellectuals each wished to paint the town red, albeit with different hues. Posing an inquiry as to how and why Chicago Communists’ crimsons, corals, roses, and maroons maintained their distinct character as part of a red Chicago offers an opportunity to interact with the fractures and complexities Communist politics assumed in its turn towards Stalinism.

In one sense, the combination offers insight into “the period’s broader social and political context and calls attention to the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shaped American working-class life from the 1920s through the mid-1930s… [and explains] why and how ordinary people became radicalized” (5). Some were born into socialism, others gravitated to it from other radical traditions, and still others shared Richard Wright’s perhaps simplistic aim of joining together “the poor, the downtrodden and oppressed people all over the world” (54). The manner in which Storch’s work illuminates the variety of inspirations Chicagoans found in Communism during these years is effective in her conception of her work as a community study, but misses the mark in evaluating the political underpinning of such a Communist culture. It asks rather than assumes, “who were Chicago’s Communists? How, when, and why did they implement Third Period policy? What did they actually do in the city’s neighborhoods and industries? How did they understand the party line? When and why did they reinterpret it?” (4) However, Red Chicago cannot resist understanding Stalinism as a force somehow alien to party membership, rather than as a nuanced ideological reality that they actively participated in constructing. Perhaps, then, the use of Storch’s text lies in its psychological analysis of party members, but it does not operate as a political history.

The volume of information Storch compiles in Red Chicago is considerable. The book usefully highlights key tendencies within the Communist Party during the Third Period, and delves into considerable detail regarding recruitment, party culture, relief initiatives, radical trade unionism (and its demise), youth organizing, women’s rights, and anti-racism. In some ways, Third Period organizing appeared to take a dramatic turn to the Left, adopting a quixotic rhetoric of revolution. A microcosm of such Stalinist ultra-Left tactics is found in the dual-unionism strategy epitomized by the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), which vilified the “moral capitalism” of organized labor under the AFL-CIO as a hazard and hindrance to working-class organizing. Under the Popular Front, the hyperbolically sectarian TUUL became passé, quickly forgotten in a rhetorical and political shift away from revolution towards unapologetic reformism, as groups previously described as “fascist” became close allies in the power shift inaugurated by the unfolding of the Second World War.

Storch claims these contradictions and paradoxes are partially products of the intense politicization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Chicago was no exception, as its radical past acted as a peculiar foundation for its vein of Communism. The site of the Haymarket Riots and of the struggle against the resulting bogus prosecutions, not to mention the home of a massive eight-hour movement, Chicago was also the backdrop to the Pullman Strike, and a major center in the founding, first, of the Industrial Workers of the World and, later, of the American Communist Party. The rich history of struggle amongst anarchists, socialists, and communists for leadership of Chicago’s labor movement was clearly evident in the earliest days of the American Communist Party, when party leaders maintained contacts and friendships with “an array of activists struggling to find their own answers to the problems they saw inherent in the capitalist system” (9). Leftists of all varieties were in frequent dialogue and dispute with one another, polemicizing in parks to crowds of thousands: a political landscape almost unimaginable to modern readers, and antithetical to policies of zero collaboration.

Chicago epitomized a particular imagination of the proletariat. Brawny and bustling, built by 19th century industrial manufacturing and mass transportation, it was home to many militant workers, including thousands of highly politicized immigrants and black migrants, each of whom came to the party “with their own newspapers, cultural groups, institutions, and willingness to quarrel” (19). Of Chicago’s Communists, nearly half spoke foreign languages, and a quarter were African American; the party also included an abundant unemployed population, though this often conflicted with its organizing strategies, which were based in the labor union. It is too easy, however, to distill the Chicago party culture to a fundamental essence, a tendency Storch does not entirely escape. It was cosmopolitan and traditional; it had communities propelled towards preserving ethnic identity, and those promoting Americanization; it grappled with issues of sexism and racism in the State and within the party, with limited degrees of success. Perhaps Chicago was the muscle of the Communist Party, but it hardly resigned itself to that alone: it was home to such radical spaces as the Dill Pickle Club, Bughouse Square, and the John Reed Club, where famous intellectuals, writers, and artists such as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren debated and created works of artistic and political significance. And yet, Storch’s portrait of the city supposes that intellectuals were (and, frighteningly, perhaps forever are) outside, looking in on the proletariat, rather than existing as an integral part of working-class politics. Striving to dismantle preconceptions of the early Communist Party, Storch falls short on recognizing her own problematic reproductions of certain historical fictions.

Storch’s fascination with cultural contexts, then, sometimes comes at the expense of fully characterizing a sober evaluation of the pervasiveness of Stalinist politics, which is frequently positioned as some sort of Soviet boogeyman rather than the worldwide reality of Communist politics that it actually was. This is exemplified by her treatment of the problem Trotskyism posed within the Third Period. From Storch’s claim that Chicago’s Trotskyist sympathizers and non-conformists were “infrequently expelled, not forever severed and, sometimes, even readmitted,” one might suppose that political intolerance was only a Soviet phenomenon (95). Storch produces an unfortunate historical imagination here: While Trotskyists in the Soviet Union are condemned to exile, work camps, and extermination, their American counterparts are assumed to be benignly tolerated by party members. It is a dangerous assumption, one that proposes that American Communists were not conscious agents in the repression of political dissidence. Albeit generally more amiable than the USSR, the Chicago Communist circles were hardly a space for internal polemicizing.

There were real political commitments and allegiances based on cues taken from Moscow, so that plenty of American Communists quickly came to assume the role of Stalinist counterparts in the Soviet Union. Chicago Communists tirelessly organized, recruited, and routinely burned themselves out for the party. Take, for instance, the 2,088 demonstrations that the Chicago Communists organized or participated in during the first five years of the Depression. Beyond protesting, organizing labor, and working on reform initiatives, the Communists formed party schools, hosted community functions, and created relief networks. The repression and economic depression of the time produced a steadfast, even uncritical belief in capitalism’s imminent demise—a belief guided in equal parts by eagerness, theoretical immaturity, and a collective memory of the October Revolution. So while retention was a serious problem for recruiters, membership increased four hundred percent nationwide and five hundred percent within Chicago during the Third Period. This is expressive of a central contradiction of the Third Period: revolutionary fervor, on the one hand, and on the other a dilution of strength, with size taking precedence over sustained, ideological commitment (36). While the Popular Front attracted even greater numbers, including formerly unresponsive white-collar workers and Marxist intellectuals, its emphasis on collaborative efforts surrounding anti-fascism emerged only after fascism had already gained momentum in Europe and, even then, occurred at the expense of clear ideological stances. The embodiment of such a betrayal exists in the apology made by Communists internationally for the Hitler-Stalin Pact. As international relations became confused by the rise of the right, along with the Second World War and its aftermath, the aims and ambitions behind ultra-Left tactics appeared as a misguided dream.

If the history of the Left is one ultimately of failure, the Communists of Red Chicago prove to be no exception. And yet, we must not be disillusioned or delusional in our disappointment, but instead admit that it is only in their confusions and missteps that we can find potential. Storch’s text is a microcosmic example of why we must re-evaluate our relationship with the past. While, practically, it teaches both of methods and mechanisms successful in engaging interest about communism and of the systems, structures, and spaces that can be used as support for inquiry, it also represents a certain intellectual and political poverty, one that Storch seeks to overcome, but cannot entirely escape. Red Chicago poses a challenge that it does not fully deliver upon: to seriously consider how a Marxist understanding has (d)evolved since the Third Period through a reconfiguration of imaginations regarding the Left’s past and its participants. In the scores of narratives found in Red Chicago, no one is totally exempt from or irredeemably victim to the particularities of Stalinism and the Soviet Union; by projecting fictions of helplessness and radical subjectivity onto the past, we negate the potentiality history has to offer our present. At the same time, optimism for our political future exists only in accurately pronouncing the failings of the historic Left in terms of a regression of the possibility in actualizing Marxist intents. |P

Greg Gabrellas

IF THE COLOR LINE WAS THE PROBLEM of the American 20th century, then the 20th century did not manage to solve it. De jure segregation ended some forty years ago, and American social norms mostly bar the public expression of racist sentiment or stereotype. Yet by any measure—access to quality healthcare and education, rate of incarceration, etc.—black Americans remain proportionally worse off than their white peers. There remains a color line, but why? This question has bred a whole genus of specious answers. Take the Bell Curve genetic inheritance theory: poor genes make for poor IQ, poor IQ makes for poor minds, and poor minds make for poor people. For slightly less controversial variations, substitute “welfare queen” or “single mothers.” Rightly uncomfortable with transferring blame for a social pathology onto its victims, anti-racism activists offer another explanation. Racism, they claim, persists—invisible, yes, but inherent in oppressive social structures caused by the instincts of white society. For instance, when faced with two equally qualified candidates, employers will hire the one with the white sounding name. Such unconscious discrimination stalks black Americans, dooming them to social death. The persistence of the color line, this “anti-racist” explanation suggests, is a problem of race relations. Change the race relations—through multicultural education, affirmative action, and supporting black-owned businesses—and the color line will vanish. Call this the “race relations paradigm.”

Michael Rudolph West, in his recent study, argues that the race relations paradigm begins with Booker T. Washington. This is an unusual suggestion: Few consider Washington as a theorist of much of anything, let alone the inventor of a paradigm. Depending on one’s viewpoint, Washington is either a pragmatic race leader, doggedly working for the advancement of his people, or an Uncle Tom, a race traitor who sells out to segregationists. But West neither glorifies nor excoriates his subject, nor does he portray Washington merely as the clever tactician he certainly was. West’s Washington appears as a theorist of the “Negro question,” struggling to find political possibility in the wake of Reconstruction’s failure. Like other theorists of the Negro question, for instance Thomas Jefferson or Gunnar Myrdal, Washington is out to understand and resolve the place of black people in America. But West also suggests that this may not be the right question, that there might be another, more fruitful way of understanding Washington as a theorist of the Negro question. Thinking race qua racial difference delinks the problem from broader questions of politics, class, and capitalism. The problem of race after this delinking appears susceptible to resolution without broader social change. Jefferson’s “solution” was simply to ship adult slaves back to Africa, and undo the whole problem. Although Jefferson’s idea of colonization never had broad appeal, Washington’s solution, by contrast, has had a real, lasting legacy. West calls this solution the theory of “good race relations.”

Lithograph commemorating Booker T. Washington’s 1901 White House dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt.

Unlike other biographies of its subject, West’s Education stands out as a unique synthesis of political and social history, psychology, and ideological critique. As West shows, Washington’s education was not the “industrial education” he later advocated for others. Rather, Washington’s theories of race and the meaning of history for understanding the “Negro question” must be understood with reference to the unfinished, but stymied, history of Reconstruction itself—what Eric Foner has called “America’s unfinished revolution.” West argues that the race relations paradigm, which he calls Washingtonianism, displaced the radical democratic aspirations of Reconstruction. Washington himself participated in Reconstruction electoral politics as a teenager. For example, he put radical Republican ideas into action as secretary of the Tinkersville, West Virginia Republicans (160). Before the collapse of the Freedman’s Bureau and, with it, black participation in Southern governments, black politicians overtly fought for mass political franchise, the redistribution of land and property, and social integration. Yet out of his disappointment with his experience as a freedman and Republican activist, Washington fashioned a new mission. In the wake of Reconstruction’s failure, instead of fighting for social power, Washington argued that blacks should work hard and whites should play nice.

There was a real appeal to the idea of “good race relations” in post-Reconstruction America. This way, despite the grim retrenchment of landlords and capitalists, progressives could still feel like one was advancing the cause of black people. Washington, a good-hearted opportunist to the core, did what opportunists usually do: He accepted defeat, while refusing to call it by that name. Reconstruction attempted, and failed, to bring real social equality to the emancipated slaves. Washington offered a comfortable solution that seemed to work; hard work and mutual respect might not fully substitute for the radical Republican agenda, but they could offer harmony and “progress.” Washington and his race relations paradigm helped to bury radical Reconstruction by claiming to share many of its goals. West argues, it was only in the context of this political failure that Washington found a broad hearing among sympathetic liberals, and established himself as de facto race spokesman and leader. But Washington not only reconciled blacks to their exclusion from the polls, he was complicit with it. “Progress” was Washington’s name for (and affirmation of) the diminished political horizons blacks faced after the collapse of Reconstruction: political disfranchisement and segregation. If American society is basically well-ordered, but segregated, and if emancipation had finally secured the precondition of black improvement despite the conflicts engendered by Reconstruction, then at least blacks could control their lives more by improving themselves and others’ perceptions of them. Washington himself, in his Atlanta Address of 1885, gives the best explication: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Separate and unequal, but working real hard.

West’s story of late 19th century radical defeat closely resembles another trajectory closer to our own time: the decline of Civil Rights and the rise of Black Power, the ideological consequences of which remain with us today. After ending de jure segregation, the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement attempted to address and resolve the social position of American blacks. Bayard Rustin urged cooperation with the labor movement, but the means of attack proved inadequate, and the attempt failed. Militant activists then turned to slogans such as “community self-determination,” and exhorted their colleagues to promote racially segregated cooperatives and institutions. The Black Panthers seem to have little in common with old Uncle Booker; like the race relations paradigm, however, the politics of Black Power marked a turn towards internal racial transformation rather than transforming the political and economic order. Today’s proponents of “good race relations” take a less militant tone, but they, too, look inwards. Multiculturalism views respect between racial communities as imperative to progress. Yet, capital accumulates among a wealthy few and social disparities between the rich and the poor continue to increase. When activists substitute “good race relations” for social politics, the entire working class—white and black—suffers.

If the ideology of “good race relations” obscures crucial aspects of anti-black racism and poverty, then the critique of this ideology should point toward the overcoming of racism. However, West leaves us critical of the race relations paradigm but unsure where to turn for a more adequate analysis of American racism. Most fundamentally, West leaves the long-term defeat of radical Republicanism largely undiagnosed. After all, post-Reconstruction politics were not solely dominated by Washingtonianism. Populist, socialist, and communist movements all tried and failed to eliminate racism through the late 19th and 20th centuries. The failure to ground his analysis of the race relations paradigm more firmly in the history of the Left thus leaves underspecified West’s implied critique of 20th century anti-racist politics. For instance, although he suggests that the civil disobedience strategies of the Civil Rights Movement were effective because they broke the shallow consensus of segregation endorsed by Washington and his followers, it is unclear where the forerunners to Civil Rights fit into the story. West’s work is therefore only a promising beginning to reassess the ideology of the Civil Rights Movement; nevertheless, it still performs a vital service. By tracing the race relations paradigm to the rise and ignominious defeat of Reconstruction, West calls attention to the historical roots of what has become common sense about race today. He challenges us to imagine the possibility of a movement for social reform that is not satisfied with the scraps the ruling classes are willing to throw its way. |P

Chris Cutrone

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[Marx wrote,] “[Humanity] always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or are at least understood to be in the process of emergence.”[1] This dictum is not affected by the fact that a problem which supersedes present relations may have been formulated in an anterior epoch.

As scientific socialism, the Marxism of Marx and Engels remains the inclusive whole of a theory of social revolution . . . a materialism whose theory comprehended the totality of society and history, and whose practice overthrew it. . . . The difference [now] is that the various components of [what for Marx and Engels was] the unbreakable interconnection of theory and practice are further separated out. . . . The umbilical cord has been broken.

— Karl Korsch, “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923)

The problem of “Marxism and Philosophy” — Korsch and Adorno on theory and practice

KARL KORSCH’S SEMINAL ESSAY “Marxism and Philosophy” (1923) was first published in English, translated by Fred Halliday, in 1970 by Monthly Review Press. In 2008, they reprinted the volume, which also contains some important shorter essays, as part of their new “Classics” series.

The original publication of Korsch’s essay coincided with Georg Lukács’s 1923 landmark collection of essays, History and Class Consciousness (HCC). While Lukács’s book has the word “history” in its title, it follows Marx’s Capital in addressing the problem of social being and consciousness in a primarily “philosophical” and categorial manner, as the subjectivity of the commodity form. Korsch’s essay on philosophy in Marxism, by contrast, is actually a historical treatment of the problem from Marx and Engels’s time through the 2^nd International to the crisis of Marxism and the revolutions of 1917–19. More specifically, it takes up the development and vicissitudes of the relation between theory and practice in the history of Marxism, which is considered the “philosophical” problem of Marxism.

Independently of one another, both Korsch’s and Lukács’s 1923 works shared an interest in recovering the Hegelian or “idealist” dimension of Marx’s thought and politics. Both were motivated to establish the coherence of the Marxist revolutionaries Lenin and Luxemburg, and these 2^nd International-era radicals’ shared grounding in what Korsch called “Marx’s Marxism.” Their accomplishment of this is all the more impressive when it is recognized that it was made without benefit of either of the two most important texts in which Marx explicitly addressed the relation of his own thought to Hegel’s, the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (first published in 1932) or the notes for Capital posthumously published as the Grundrisse (1939), and also without access to Lenin’s 1914 notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic (1929). Due to a perceived shortcoming in the expounding of revolutionary Marxism, the problem for Korsch and Lukács was interpreting Marxism as both theory and practice, or how the politics of Lenin and Luxemburg (rightly) considered itself “dialectical.” Both Lukács and Korsch explicitly sought to provide this missing exposition and elaboration.

Lukács and Korsch were later denounced as “professors” in the Communist International, a controversy that erupted after the deaths of Luxemburg and Lenin. (Another important text of this moment was Lukács’s 1924 monograph in eulogy, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought.) In the face of this party criticism, Lukács acquiesced and made his peace with Stalinized “orthodoxy.” Eventually disavowing History and Class Consciousness as a misguided attempt to “out-Hegel Hegel,” Lukács even attempted to destroy all the existing copies of the unpublished “Tailism and the Dialectic,” his brilliant 1925 defense of HCC. (Apparently he failed, since a copy was eventually found in Soviet archives. This remarkable document was translated and published in 2000 as A Defence of History and Class Consciousness.)

Korsch responded differently to the party’s criticism. Quitting the 3^rd International Communist movement entirely, he became associated with the “Left” or “council” communism of Antonie Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, et al. Though making a choice very different from Lukács and distancing himself from official “Marxism-Leninism,” Korsch also came to disavow his earlier argument in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Specifically, he abandoned the attempt to establish the coherence of Lenin’s theory and practice with that of Marx, going so far as to critique Marx’s own Marxism. Thus, in “The Present State of the Problem of ‘Marxism and Philosophy:’ An Anti-Critique” (1930), included in Marxism and Philosophy, Korsch argues that, to the degree Marx shared a common basis with Lenin, this was an expression of limitations in Marx’s own critical theory and political practice. Indeed, for Korsch it was a problem of “Marxism” in general, including that of Kautsky and Luxemburg. Ultimately, Korsch called for “going beyond” Marxism.

The complementary, if divergent, trajectories of Korsch and Lukács are indicative of the historical disintegration of the perspective both shared in their writings of 1923. Both had understood the “subjective” aspect of Marxism to have been clarified by Lenin’s role in the October Revolution. The figure of Lenin was irreducible, and brought out dimensions of the Marxian project that otherwise lay unacknowledged. As Theodor W. Adorno put it in private discussion with Max Horkheimer in 1956,

I always wanted to produce a theory that would be faithful to Marx, Engels and Lenin. . . . Marx was too harmless; he probably imagined quite naïvely that human beings are basically the same in all essentials and will remain so. It would be a good idea, therefore, to deprive them of their second nature. He was not concerned with their subjectivity; he probably didn’t look into that too closely. The idea that human beings are the products of society down to their innermost core is an idea that he would have rejected as milieu theory. Lenin was the first person to assert this.[2]

In this discussion, Adorno also proposed to Horkheimer that they “should produce a reworked [version of Marx and Engels’s] Communist Manifesto that would be ‘strictly Leninist’.”[3]

No less than Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” inspired the work of the Marxist critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School — Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Adorno. But the reputation of Korsch’s work has been eclipsed by that of Lukács. What the usual interpretive emphasis on Lukács occludes is that the Frankfurt School writers grappled not only with the problem of Stalinism but “anti-Stalinism” as well.[4] Both Korsch’s and Lukács’s post-1923 trajectories were critiqued by the Frankfurt School writers.[5] As Adorno put it in Negative Dialectics (1966),

First Karl Korsch, later the functionaries of Diamat [Dialectical Materialism] have objected, that the turn to nonidentity would be, due to its immanent-critical and theoretical character, an insignificant nuance of neo-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left; as if the Marxist critique of philosophy had dispensed with this, while simultaneously the East cannot do without a statutory Marxist philosophy. The demand for the unity of theory and praxis has irresistibly debased the former to a mere underling; removing from it what it was supposed to have achieved in that unity. The practical visa-stamp demanded from all theory became the censor’s stamp. In the famed unity of theory-praxis, the former was vanquished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics which it was supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory wins back its independence, is the interest of praxis itself. The relationship of both moments to each other is not settled for once and for all, but changes historically. Today, since the hegemonic bustle cripples and denigrates theory, theory testifies in all its powerlessness against the former by its mere existence.[6]

In this passage Adorno was addressing, not the Korsch of the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” but rather the later Korsch of the 1930 “Anti-Critique,” distanced from the problem Adorno sought to address, of the constitutive non-identity of theory and practice. Adorno thought, like Korsch and Lukács in the early 1920s, that Lenin and Luxemburg’s theoretical self-understanding, together with their revolutionary political practice, comprised the most advanced attempt yet to work through precisely this non-identity.[7]

In Adorno’s terms, both the later Korsch and official “Diamat” (including Lukács) assumed “identity thinking,” an identity of effective theory and practice, rather than their articulated non-identity, to which Korsch had drawn attention earlier in “Marxism and Philosophy.” Such constitutive non-identity was, according to Korsch’s earlier essay, expressed symptomatically, in the subsistence of “philosophy” as a distinct activity in the historical epoch of Marxism. This was because it expressed a genuine historical need. The continued practice of philosophy was symptomatic expression of the need to transcend and supersede philosophy. Instead of this recognition of the actuality of the symptom of philosophical thinking, of the mutually constitutive separation of theory and practice, Korsch, by embracing council communism and shunning Marxian theory in the years after writing his famously condemned work, succumbed to what Adorno termed “identity thinking.” By assuming the identity of theory and practice, or of social being and consciousness in the workers’ movement, Korsch sought their “reconciliation,” instead of discerning and critically grasping their persistent antagonism, as would necessarily be articulated in any purported politics of emancipation.

Just as Adorno tried to hold fast to the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness in the face of Lukács’s own subsequent disavowals, the first sentence of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics reiterated Korsch’s statement in “Marxism and Philosophy” that “Philosophy cannot be abolished without being realized” (97):

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed.[8]

Philosophy’s end was its self-abolition. What Korsch prefaced to his statement helps to illuminate what Adorno meant. Korsch specified precisely what “the realization of philosophy” involves:

Just as political action is not rendered unnecessary by the economic action of a revolutionary class, so intellectual action is not rendered unnecessary by either political or economic action. On the contrary it must be carried through to the end in theory and practice, as revolutionary scientific criticism and agitational work before the seizure of state power by the working class, and as scientific organisation and ideological dictatorship after the seizure of state power. If this is valid for intellectual action against the forms of consciousness which define bourgeois society in general, it is especially true of philosophical action. Bourgeois consciousness necessarily sees itself as apart from the world and independent of it, as pure critical philosophy and impartial science, just as the bourgeois State and bourgeois Law appear to be above society. This consciousness must be philosophically fought by the revolutionary materialistic dialectic, which is the philosophy of the working class. This struggle will only end when the whole of existing society and its economic basis have been totally overthrown in practice, and this consciousness has been totally surpassed and abolished in theory. (97)

This was the original Marxist “defense” of philosophy that Adorno reiterated in Negative Dialectics. Over four decades previously, in 1923, Korsch had explicitly tied it to Lenin’s treatment of the problem of the state in The State and Revolution (1917). Just as, with the overcoming of capitalism, the necessity of the state would “wither,” and not be done away with at one stroke, so too the necessity of “philosophical” thinking as it appeared in the epoch of capital would dissolve. This side of emancipation, “theoretical” self-reflection, thought’s reflecting on its own conditions of possibility, remains necessary, precisely because it expresses an unresolved social-historical problem.

In “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch analyzed Marxism as emergent from and historically continuous with the “revolt of the Third Estate,” of the “bourgeois” liberal-democratic revolutionary epoch that preceded it. Korsch was concerned with Marx’s continuity with Kant and Hegel. A problem that occurred to them, namely, of theory and practice, repeated itself, if in a more acute way, for Marx. It is a problem of the philosophy of revolution, or of the “theory of social revolution.” This problem presents itself only insofar as it is conceived of as part and parcel of the social-historical process of transformation and not as contemplation from without. As it was for Hegel, Marx’s fundamental “philosophical” issue is this: How is it possible, if however problematic, to be a self-conscious agent of change, if what is being transformed includes oneself, or, more precisely, an agency that transforms conditions both for one’s practical grounding and for one’s theoretical self-understanding in the process of acting?

Korsch addressed the question of revolution as a problem indicated by the liquidation and reconstitution of “philosophy” itself after the crisis and “decay of Hegelianism” (“Marxism and Philosophy,” 29). Why did philosophical development take a hiatus by 1848 and only appear to resume afterwards? What changed about “philosophy” in the interim? For Korsch recognized there was a curious blank spot or gap in the history of philosophy from the 1840s–60s, the period of Marxism’s emergence. Korsch divided the relation of Marx’s thought to philosophy roughly into three periods: pre-1848, circa 1848, and post-1848. These periods were distinguished by the different ways they related theory and practice: the first period was the critique of philosophy calling for its simultaneous realization and self-abolition; the second, the sublimation of philosophy in revolution; and the third, the recrudescence of the problem of relating theory and practice.

Korsch’s third period in the history of Marxism extended into what he termed the “crisis of Marxism” beginning in the 1890s with the reformist “revisionist” dispute of Eduard Bernstein et al. against the “orthodox Marxism” of the 2^nd International — when the “revolutionary Marxism” of Luxemburg and Lenin originated — and continuing into the acutely revolutionary period of 1917–19, from the Russian Revolution of 1917 through the German Revolution and civil war of 1918–19, to the Hungarian Soviet Republic (in which Lukács participated) and the workers’ council movement in Italy (in which Antonio Gramsci participated) in 1919.

It was in this revolutionary period of the early 20^th century that “Marx’s Marxism” circa 1848 regained its saliency, but in ways that Korsch thought remained not entirely resolved as a matter of relating theory to practice. In “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch found that while Lenin and Luxemburg had tried to better relate Marxian theory and practice than 2^nd International Marxism had done, they had recognized this as an on-going task and aspiration and not already achieved in some finished sense. In the words of the epigraph from Lenin that introduces Korsch’s 1923 essay, “We must organize a systematic study of the Hegelian dialectic from a materialist standpoint” (“On the Significance of Militant Materialism,” 1922). If Marxism continued to be subject to a “Hegelian dialectic,” thus requiring the “historical materialist” analysis and explanation that Korsch sought to provide of it, this was because it was not itself the reconciled unity of theory and practice but remained, as theory, the critical reflection on the problem of relating theory and practice — which in turn prompted further theoretical development as well as practical political advances. As Adorno put it to Walter Benjamin in a letter of August 2, 1935,

The fetish character of the commodity is not a fact of consciousness; rather it is dialectical, in the eminent sense that it produces consciousness. . . . [P]erfection of the commodity character in a Hegelian self-consciousness inaugurates the explosion of its phantasmagoria.[9]

Marxism was caught in the “phantasmagoria” of capital, while “exploding” it from within.

For the Korsch of “Marxism and Philosophy,” Lenin and Luxemburg’s “revolutionary Marxism” was bound up in the “crisis of Marxism,” while advancing it to a new stage. As Korsch commented,

This transformation and development of Marxist theory has been effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism. Yet it is easy to understand both the reasons for this guise and the real character of the process which is concealed by it. What theoreticians like Rosa Luxemburg in Germany and Lenin in Russia have done, and are doing, in the field of Marxist theory is to liberate it from the inhibiting traditions of [Social Democracy]. They thereby answer the practical needs of the new revolutionary stage of proletarian class struggle, for these traditions weighed “like a nightmare” on the brain of the working masses whose objectively revolutionary socioeconomic position no longer corresponded to these [earlier] evolutionary doctrines. The apparent revival of original Marxist theory in the Third International is simply a result of the fact that in a new revolutionary period not only the workers’ movement itself, but the theoretical conceptions of communists which express it, must assume an explicitly revolutionary form. This is why large sections of the Marxist system, which seemed virtually forgotten in the final decades of the nineteenth century, have now come to life again. It also explains why the leader of the Russian Revolution [Lenin] could write a book a few months before October [The State and Revolution, 1917] in which he stated that his aim was “in the first place to restore the correct Marxist theory of the State.” . . . When Lenin placed the same question theoretically on the agenda at a decisive moment, this was an early indication that the internal connection of theory and practice within revolutionary Marxism had been consciously re-established. (67–68)

Korsch thus established the importance for what Adorno called the “historically changing” relation of theory and practice, making sense of their vicissitudes in the history of the politics of revolutionary Marxism. Furthermore, by establishing the character of the crisis of Marxism as a matter of theoretical reflection, Korsch re-established the role of consciousness in a Marxian conception of social revolution, why the abandonment or distancing of the practical perspective of revolution necessitates a degradation of theory.

Korsch and the 1960s “New Left” — the problem of “Leninism”

The 1970 publication of Korsch was an event for the Anglophone New Left. As Adolph Reed wrote,

Leninism’s elitism and denigration of consciousness had increasingly troubled me, but I feared I had no recourse without sacrificing a radical commitment. Korsch opened an entirely new vista, the “hidden dimension” of Western Marxism, and led to Lukács, a serious reading of Marcuse, and eventually the critical theoretical tradition.[10]

Reed’s brief comment is cryptic and can be taken in (at least) two opposed ways, either that Korsch provided the redemption of Lenin or an alternative to Leninism.

Such 1960s-era “New Left” ambivalence about “Leninism” can be found in attenuated form in Fred Halliday’s Translator’s Introduction. In it, Halliday sticks closely to a biographical narrative of Korsch’s work, seeking to bring out the coherence of Korsch’s early and later periods, before and after “Marxism and Philosophy,” while acknowledging the “erratic” character of Korsch’s thought over the course of his life, and calling Korsch’s tragic trajectory away from Lenin and Luxemburg’s revolutionary Marxism a “fatal consequence” of the failure of the revolution (26). By casting the issue of Korsch’s work as “interesting” (if “erratic”), Halliday remained somewhat equivocal about the relevance of Korsch’s key text, “Marxism and Philosophy,” and thus about the continued pertinence of the revolutionary Marxism that Lenin shared with Luxemburg. What remained unresolved?

Halliday also suggests that Korsch’s pre-1917 interests in the “syndicalist movement,” the “positive content and actively democratic aspects of socialism, by contrast with the orthodox Marxism of the 2^nd International which he thought defined itself merely negatively as the abolition of the capitalist mode of production” (7–8), came to be expressed some years after the October Revolution, which witnessed “the decline in activity and the need for more critical reflection.” At that time, Korsch returned to his earlier concerns, but with the tragic consequence of “lapsing into ultra-leftism and becoming cut off from the working class” (26).

Perhaps the motivation for Halliday’s 1970 translation and publication of Korsch’s “Marxism and Philosophy” was an affinity, after 1968, with Korsch’s moment of “critical reflection” circa 1923. It may have expressed Halliday’s hope that Korsch’s further trajectory and fate might be avoided by the 1960s “New Left.” In the wake of 1968, Halliday and others wanted to avoid the choice of either ultra-Leftism (“Luxemburgism”) and “becoming cut off from the working class,” or official “Leninism,” and the 1923 Korsch seemed to provide a way out, through specific reflection on the problem of revolutionary political means and ends, in terms of articulating theory and practice.

Forgetting the theory-practice problem — Korsch on spontaneity vs. organization and 1848 vs. 1917

In his 1930 “Anti-Critique” of the 1923 “Marxism and Philosophy,” Korsch wrote,

When the SPD became a “Marxist” party (a process completed with the Erfurt Programme written by Kautsky and Bernstein in 1891) a gap developed between its highly articulated revolutionary “Marxist” theory and a practice that was far behind this revolutionary theory; in some respects it directly contradicted it. This gap was in fact obvious, and it later came to be felt more and more acutely by all the vital forces in the Party (whether on the Left or Right) and its existence was denied only by the orthodox Marxists of the Centre. This gap can easily be explained by the fact that in this historical phase “Marxism,” while formally accepted by the workers’ movement, was from the start not a true theory, in the sense of being “nothing other than a general expression of the real historical movement” (Marx). On the contrary it was always an ideology that had been adopted “from outside” in a pre-established form. In this situation such “orthodox Marxists” as Kautsky and Lenin made a permanent virtue out of a temporary necessity. They energetically defended the idea that socialism can only be brought to the workers “from outside,” by bourgeois intellectuals who are allied to the workers’ movement. This was also true of Left radicals like Rosa Luxemburg. (113–115)

According to Korsch, the Revolution of 1848 and the role of the workers’ movement in it had provided “a rational solution for all the mysteries” of the contradiction between theory and practice that later 2^nd International Marxists tried to sidestep by simply adopting Marxism as an ideology. Korsch commented that,

[A]lthough [Second International Marxism’s] effective practice was now on a broader basis than before, it had in no way reached the heights of general and theoretical achievement earlier attained by the revolutionary movement and proletarian class struggle on a narrower basis. This height was attained during the final phase of the first major capitalist cycle that came to an end towards 1850. (116)

Since the mid-19^th century, Marxism, according to the Korsch of the “Anti-Critique,” had grown ideological. Even Marx’s Capital expressed a certain degeneration:

[T]he theory of Marx and Engels was progressing towards an ever higher level of theoretical perfection although it was no longer directly related to the practice of the worker’s movement. (117)

In other words, the mature theory of Marx (and its development by Engels and their epigones) was itself “anachronistic” and thus unassimilable by the resurgent workers’ movement of the last third of the 19^th century.

Korsch abandoned his 1923 conception of Lenin and Luxemburg’s rearticulation of 1848 in the theory and practice of 1917–19, the “transformation and development of Marxist theory . . . effected under the peculiar ideological guise of a return to the pure teaching of original or true Marxism.” Marx’s Marxism, especially in his mature writings, could only be the elaboration of 1848, in isolation from the workers’ subsequent actual political practice, to which it became ideologically blind and blinding. No adequate “theory,” that is, no “general expression of the real historical movement,” had emerged since. This non-identity and divergence of theory and practice that began in the period of Marx’s maturity and continued into the 20^th century meant, for the Korsch of the 1930s, that Marxism, even in its most revolutionary forms, as with Lenin and Luxemburg, had developed, not to express, but rather to constrain the workers’ movement. Marxism had become an ideology whose value could only be relative, not qualitatively superior to others.[11] When he died in 1961, Korsch was working on a study of Marx’s rival in the 1st International Workingmen’s Association, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.[12] |P

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1. Karl Marx’s Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis” (1956), in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften (GAS) Vol. 19 (Nachträge, Verzeichnisse und Register) (S. Fischer, 1996), 69–71; quoted in Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 233.

3. Claussen, 233; Horkheimer, GAS 19, 66. Furthermore, while “Marx wrote his critique of the [SPD, German Social-Democratic Party’s] Gotha Programme in 1875[,] Adorno had for some time planned to write a critique of the Godesberg Programme [in which the SPD formally renounced Marxism in 1959]” (Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 598).

4. From Phil Slater, Origin and Significance of the Frankfurt School: A Marxist Perspective (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977):

[Horkheimer wrote, in “The Authoritarian State” (1940),]

“The concept of a transitional revolutionary dictatorship was in no way intended to mean the monopoly of the means of production by some new elite. Such dangers can be countered by the energy and alertness of the people themselves. . . . [The revolution that ends domination is as far-reaching as the will of the liberated. Any resignation is already a regression into prehistory. . . . The recurrence of political reaction and a new destruction of the beginnings of freedom cannot theoretically be ruled out, and certainly not as long as a hostile environment exists. No patented system worked out in advance can preclude regressions. The modalities of the new society are first found in the process of social transformation.] The theoretical conception which, following its first trail-blazers [such as Lenin and Luxemburg], will show the new society its way — the system of workers’ councils — grows out of praxis. The roots of the council system go back to 1871, 1905, and other events. Revolutionary transformation has a tradition that must continue.” (66)

The Frankfurt School’s respect for [Lenin] was due in large measure to his ability to retain the dynamic unity of party, theory and class, a unity subsequently lost. Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism [1958] is here representative of the entire Frankfurt School:

“During the Revolution, it became clear to what degree Lenin had succeeded in basing his strategy on the actual class interests and aspirations of the workers and peasants. . . . Then, from 1923 on, the decisions of the leadership increasingly dissociated from the class interests of the proletariat. The former no longer presuppose the proletariat as a revolutionary agent but rather are imposed upon the proletariat and the rest of the underlying population.” (66–67)

Looking round for a possible practical exponent of [the] views of the Frankfurt School, one immediately encounters the figure of Trotsky. . . . [Trotsky maintained that the bureaucratism of the USSR] completely disregarded Lenin’s conception of the dialectical interaction of party and class. . . . [Trotsky wrote that] the Marxist theoretician must still retain the concrete historical perspective of class struggle:

“[The causes for the downfall of the Social Democracy and of official Communism must be sought not in Marxist theory and not in the bad qualities of those people who applied it, but in the concrete conditions of the historical process.] It is not a question of counterposing abstract principles, but rather of the struggle of living social forces, with its inevitable ups and downs, with the degeneration of organizations, with the passing of entire generations into discard, and with the necessity which therefore arises of mobilizing fresh forces on a new historical stage. No one has bothered to pave in advance the road of revolutionary upsurge for the proletariat. [With inevitable halts and partial retreats it is necessary to move forward on a road crisscrossed by countless obstacles and covered with the debris of the past.] Those who are frightened by this had better step aside” [Trotsky, “To Build Communist Parties and an International Anew,” July 1933].

The Frankfurt School, while upholding a number of principles (which became “abstract” in their passivity and isolation), did indeed, in this sense, step aside. (68–70)

One is not without some justification in asking whether Council Communism could perhaps be a concrete embodiment of many of the principles of the Frankfurt School. . . . [But] the Council Communists did not point out the soviets’ [workers’ councils’] own responsibility for the collapse of the revolutionary wave of 1918–19. (73)

5. The reverse was also true. Korsch, in distancing himself from his 1923 work that was so seminal for the Frankfurt School writers, also came to critique them:

[Korsch] intended to try and interest Horkheimer and the [Frankfurt] Institute [for Social Research] in Pannekoek’s book Lenin as Philosopher (1938) [which traced the bureaucratization of the USSR back to the supposedly crude materialism of Lenin’s 1909 book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]. . . . [Either] Korsch [or, the Director of the Institute, Horkheimer himself] would write a review for [the Institute’s journal] the Zeitschrift. . . . Yet no such review appeared. . . . [Korsch suffered] total disillusionment with the Institute and their “impotent philosophy.” Korsch [was] particularly bitter about the “metaphysician Horkheimer” (Slater, 73–74).

The record for Korsch’s deteriorating relations with the Frankfurt Institute in exile is found in his private letters to Paul Mattick, editor of the journal Living Marxism: International Council Correspondence.

6. Translated by Dennis Redmond, 2001. The first sentence of this passage, mentioning Korsch, is inexplicably missing from the 1973 Continuum edition of Negative Dialectics translated by E. B. Ashton (see “Relation to Left-wing Hegelianism,” 143).

7. In a lecture of November 23, 1965, on “Theory and Practice,” Adorno said,

I should like to say that there is no intention here of advocating a relapse into contemplation, as was found in the great idealist philosophies and ultimately even in Hegel, despite the great importance of practice in the Hegelian system. . . . The late Karl Korsch . . . criticized Horkheimer and myself even more sharply, already in America and also later on, after the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment. His objection was that we had regressed to the standpoint of Left Hegelianism. This does not seem right to me because the standpoint of pure contemplation can no longer be sustained. Though we should note, incidentally, that the polarity Marx constructs between pure contemplation on the one hand and his own political philosophy on the other does only partial justice to the intentions of Left Hegelianism. This is a difficult question . . . although we cannot deny the impressive political instincts which alerted Marx to the presence of the retrograde and, above all, nationalist potential in such thinkers as Bruno Bauer, Stirner and Ruge. (Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics [Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2008], 52–53.)

8. Translated by Redmond.

9. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 3 (1935–38) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 54–56; Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980), 111–113.

10. Reed, “Paths to Critical Theory,” in Sohnya Sayres, Social Text Staff, eds., The 60s Without Apology (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 257–258; originally published in Social Text 9/10 (Spring–Summer 1984).

11. Such eclecticism on the Left has only deepened and become more compounded since Korsch’s time, especially since the 1960s. However Marx may come up for periodic reconsideration, certain questions central to the Marxian problematic remain obscured. As Fredric Jameson has written,

A Marx revival seems to be under way, predating the current [2007–09] disarray on Wall Street, even though no clear-cut political options yet seem to propose themselves. . . . The big ideological issues — anarchism, the party, economic planning, social classes — are still mainly avoided, on the grounds that they remind too many people of Communist propaganda. Such a reminder is unwanted, not so much because it is accompanied by the memory of deaths and violence . . . as simply and less dramatically because such topics now appear boring. (“Sandblasting Marx,” New Left Review 55 [January–February 2009].)

For further discussion of the fluctuating currency and fortunes of Marxian approaches as a feature of modern history, see my “Symptomology: Historical transformations in social-political context,” The Platypus Review 12 (May 2009).

12. A. R. Giles-Peter, “Karl Korsch: A Marxist Friend of Anarchism,” Red & Black (Australia) 5 (April 1973). (Available on-line at: http://www.geocities.com/capitolHill/Lobby/2379/korsh.htm.) According to Giles-Peter, Korsch came to believe that the “basis of the revolutionary attitude in the modern bourgeois epoch would be an ethic Marx would have rejected as ‘anarchist’,” and thus “explicitly rejected the elements of Marxism which separate it from anarchism.”

As Korsch himself put it, in “Ten Theses on Marxism Today” (1950), translated by Giles-Peter in Telos 26 (Winter 1975–76) and available on-line at: http://libcom.org/library/ten-theses-korsch,

Marx is today only one among the numerous precursors, founders and developers of the socialist movement of the working class. No less important are the so-called Utopian Socialists from Thomas More to the present. No less important are the great rivals of Marx, such as Blanqui, and his sworn enemies, such as Proudhon and Bakunin. No less important, in the final result, are the more recent developments such as German revisionism, French syndicalism, and Russian Bolshevism.

Whereas Korsch in 1923 had grasped the essential and vital if transformed continuity between Marx and his precursors in the “revolutionary movement of the Third Estate” of the bourgeois liberal-democratic revolutions, by 1950 he wrote,

The following points are particularly critical for Marxism: (a) its dependence on the underdeveloped economic and political conditions in Germany and all the other countries of central and eastern Europe where it was to have political relevance; (b) its unconditional adherence to the political forms of the bourgeois revolution; (c) the unconditional acceptance of the advanced economic conditions of England as a model for the future development of all countries and as objective preconditions for the transition to socialism; to which one should add; (d) the consequences of its repeated desperate and contradictory attempts to break out of these conditions.

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Ryan Hardy

Alberto Korda, Guerrillero Heroico (1960)

THE STORY ITSELF IS WELL KNOWN: Originally trained as a physician, Ernesto “Che” Guevara was an Argentine revolutionary who played a significant part in the Cuban Revolution. Later, Che tried to help incite revolution in the modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Bolivia, where he was eventually killed in 1967. In the more than four decades since his death, Che has been transformed from one among many icons of the revolutionary 1960s into the most recognizable political icon of the period. Indeed, it would be difficult to name a more obvious-or more ambiguous-symbol of that era’s supposedly revolutionary character than the ubiquitous photograph of Che taken by Alberto Korda, Guerrillero Heroico. This photo crystallizes a range of the period’s dominant preoccupations-with revolution, heroism, masculinity, and martyrdom-all of which continue to haunt us still. As the actual political significance of Che’s actions recedes into the past, and revolutionary Cuba, his chief living testament, is transformed into little more than an exotic tourist destination, we might expect that Che’s revolutionary glamour would fade. And yet, it remains very much an ongoing concern today. From giant murals in Cuba to the ubiquitous T-shirts bearing his image, the Che mystique persists, and with it a legacy that, whether endorsed or condemned, grows increas­ingly opaque in the present. Both that image and that legacy have now been brought to the screen by one of Hollywood’s leading directors, Steven Soderbergh. The resulting film raises the question of working through the history of the Left only to disavow this project as poten­tially paralyzing.

Che consists of two parts, which in some markets have been released as two separate films: The Argentine and Guerrilla. Taken together, it represents a significant con­tribution to the already substantial corpus of Che-derived media, not least because it is the first noteworthy encoun­ter between the icon and Hollywood. It is a complex film, an obvious labor of love on the part of one of American cinema’s finest directors, with an impressive performance by its leading man, Benicio del Toro. In terms of its formal achievement and realization, Che is a very good film and ranks with Soderbergh’s best work. But when the film’s subject is Che, this might not be enough.

Although a biopic, Che makes no effort to cinemati­cally recreate Guevara’s life story. Rather, it sticks to Che the Revolutionary, narrating the story of two guer­rilla campaigns: the successful insurgency against the Batista regime in Cuba (The Argentine), and the failed and ultimately fatal attempt to incite the peasants of Bolivia into revolution (Guerrilla). While some scenes are set in neither Cuba nor Bolivia, including a sequence that treats Che’s trip to New York City and address to the United Nations, Che remains fundamentally a tale of two wars. In consequence, Che’s complex career is synthesized into two relatively conventional war films. Eschewing the introspective approach taken by Brazilian director Walter Salles in Motorcycle Diaries (2004), this film has a differ­ent focus. As Soderbergh remarked, “I was interested in Che as a warrior, Che as a guy who had an ideology, who picked up a gun. [T]his [film] was the result.”

In explaining his attraction to Che, Soderbergh does mention ideology; still, it is clear that Che’s picking up of the gun is what genuinely captured the director’s imagi­nation. Alternatively, we might say that this film suggests that ideology is something people with guns are more likely to have. At any rate, for Soderbergh, Che is a mili­tary man first and a political man second; hence the near exclusive focus on military campaigns. As others have pointed out, this decision allows Soderbergh to omit from the film any serious treatment of the most controversial aspects of Che’s record, such as the notorious execu­tions at the La Cabana fortress or his stint as President of the National Bank of Cuba. No scene in this film shows Che executing political prisoners, bungling the national budget for the fiscal year, or speaking in glowing terms of Joseph Stalin. Apparently, these are not the aspects of Che’s career that Soderbergh thinks worthy of further exploration.

It comes as no surprise that in the hands of the direc­tor of Ocean’s 11 (2001), Out Of Sight (1998), and Traffic (2000), the leading impulse is to entertain. Battle scenes are tightly paced and genuinely suspenseful, even if we know how things will turn out. The acting of the en­semble cast is likewise superb. Catalina Sandino Moreno, who plays Che’s wife Aleida March, and Demián Bichir, who plays Fidel Castro to surprisingly comic heights, are particularly outstanding. In the leading role, Benicio del Toro forges a moving, complex performance from the sparse raw material of Che’s biography.

In one sense at least the film is right to give short shrift to Che’s politics. After all, as even the most cursory glance at his writings proves, Che was no great theo­retician. In virtually all cases, and definitely in the case of Cuba and Bolivia, his approach was little more than Robin Hood-style banditry gussied up as Marxist revolu­tion: His modus operandi was to take to the hills and start kicking ass, but make periodic reference to the work­ing class while he was at it. By treating Che chiefly as a military adventurer, the film does convey something es­sential about Che’s politics: its opportunism. Yet even this treatment, sympathetic in both form and content, cannot avoid bringing its hero into conflict with other, very differ­ent elements of the Left.

Film still, Che (2008)

In The Argentine, after Castro meets with the leaders of Cuba’s urban labor movement to conclude a vital cooperation pact, Che derides them as “clowns” and questions the value of dealing with them at all, since they are not fighting. Likewise, in Guerrilla, when Mario Monje, leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, tells Che that the party disagrees with his methods, Che’s response is a burst of invective and the continuation of an increas­ingly quixotic guerrilla campaign. Che seems almost hopelessly naïve in these encounters, such as when early on he responds quizzically to another guerrilla’s bitter remark about “Stalinists.” While Soderbergh clearly feels it is important to intro­duce these scenes into the film, his handling of them is uncertain. Ultimately, the film, like Che, seeks dramatic resolution through armed struggle, and thus implicitly endorses Che’s impatient preoccupation with “action.” This is never clearer than when Che and his fighters prepare for the Battle of Santa Clara, which represents both the climax of The Argentine and the death knell of the Batista regime. In preparation for this risky engage­ment, Che makes an effort to unite various rebel groups under his leadership. This is one of the most interesting parts of the movie, because it raises the spectre, for the first time, of serious political divisions between the vari­ous factions fighting Batista. There are several causes of discord between the factions, from tactical questions to strategic differences, but in the end it is Che’s charisma and seemingly unique martial abilities that resolve what are made to seem merely verbal disagreements. Che’s personality cements the Popular Front supposedly nec­essary to overthrow Batista’s detested lackey regime.

Watching Che, particularly The Argentine, it is difficult not to be reminded of David Lean’s memorable Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Both films tell the story of a foreigner who throws in his lot with an insurrectionary movement only to become one of that movement’s greatest leaders, both share the trope of the execution of a disobedient soldier as a sort of revolutionary baptism, and both are exceptionally entertaining Hollywood epics built around complex performances by great actors. But the achieve­ment of these films as works of art serves, perversely, to confirm the politically problematic character of the men they celebrate. Of course, there is no real comparison between Lawrence’s support for the House of Saud in the service of British imperialism and Guevara’s struggle against American imperialism in the Western hemi­sphere. Yet both films betray deep ambivalence towards politics, preferring instead to promote the myth that massive and systemic injustice can be rectified simply by recourse to personal courage and armed struggle. Though, unlike Lawrence of Arabia, Che does condescend to portray something of the real political content behind the events it displays, through its narrative structure it ultimately subverts and empties those scenes of content. It is because of this that, as an attempt to actually work through the past, Che must be judged a failure.

Soren Whited

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS‘S RECENT OFFERING, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, takes critical aim at two targets: what she identifies as Eurocentric models of universal history, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rejection of any notion of universality whatsoever in favor of the postmodernist “plurality of alternative models” (ix). What she proposes instead is “a universal history worthy of the name” (x), by which she means one that does not give the European Enlightenment and its direct heirs a monopoly on the historical project of freedom. It is refreshing to see the false choice of Eurocentrism vs. postmodernist pluralism identified as such, but if Buck-Morss opposes such a false choice, she fails to register and critique it as a contemporary historical symptom itself. She thus ends up with a theory that is universal in name, but which remains essentially postmodernist in content.

The short book reprints her essay “Hegel and Haiti,” originally published in 2000 in Critical Inquiry, together with a new essay, “Universal History,” in which Buck-Morss responds to the original essay’s critics, par­ticularly those for whom “the very suggestion of resur­recting the project of universal history from the ashes of modern metaphysics appeared tantamount to collusion with Western imperialism”(ix). The book also contains substantial prefaces to both essays.

In “Hegel and Haiti,” Buck-Morss’s central histori­cal claim is that Hegel’s discussion of freedom, gener­ally, and his formulation of the “master-slave dialectic,” specifically, were directly informed by his awareness of the Haitian Revolution. This argument, Buck-Morss asserts, has scarcely been made, much less thoroughly investigated, by mainstream Hegel scholarship. “One wonders why the topic Hegel and Haiti has for so long been ignored. Not only have Hegel scholars failed to answer this question; they have failed, for the past two hundred years, even to ask it” (56).[1] Buck-Morss sup­ports her claim that Hegel was aware of the Haitian Revolution by pointing out that the revolution was going on at the same time as Hegel was formulating his phi­losophy of history, and that he was reading periodicals such as Minerva and The Morning Post at the time, both of which closely covered the events in Haiti. The conclusion to be drawn, she argues, is that Hegel, who at the time was engaged in thinking through the historical project of freedom, was influenced, if not compelled, by his reading of journalistic accounts of a contemporary, actual slave rebellion that Buck-Morss regards as a concrete unfold­ing of this dialectic.

Hegel and his students

But if the Haitian Revolution inspired Hegel, his philosophy of freedom remains bound, for Buck-Morss, to a Eurocentric and racist worldview. In this way Hegel is representative of what Buck-Morss sees as the hypoc­risy of modern Europe in general, wherein the pursuit of freedom was carried out in theory but only partially and selectively in deed. Modern Europe, in other words, developed a theory of freedom that was simultaneously negated in practice.

The Haitian Revolution, on the other hand, repre­sents for Buck-Morss a break with this hypocrisy, and the first genuinely modern political struggle for freedom, by which she means that it first posed the problem of freedom in a truly universal, albeit not entirely unprob­lematic, manner. “The Haitian experience,” she asserts, “was not a modern phenomenon too, but first” (138). She also attributes to the Haitian Revolution a degree of singularity: “The radical anti-slavery articulated in Saint-Domingue was politically unprecedented” (138). Most importantly for her argument, the Haitian Revolution constitutes an example of a “historical rupture,” an event discontinuous with the trajectory of history (133).

It is in such ruptures that Buck-Morss sees the possibility of a universal humanity emerging. This is also where her affinities with postmodernism, a mode of thought she professes to contest, are clearly vis­ible. There is a shared hostility to dialectical theory, which would demand that the contradictions born of the European Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolution, including that of racism, be dealt with immanently. But for Buck-Morss such a treatment would, to use her language, be tantamount to collusion with European racism. Her hostility to dialectics is evident when, for ex­ample, she says, “any political movement that attempts to transform the death’s-head (the skeletal remains of the victims of history) into an angel’s face (history’s redeemer) is far more likely to unleash a human hell” (144). Thus, faced with the glaring contradiction between Europe’s philosophy of freedom and its brutal economic and political practices, Buck-Morss searches elsewhere for a practice that corresponds to the theory. Her ap­proach, then, is based on an understanding of theory and practice as autonomous, or at least semi-autonomous, phenomena.

“Revenge Taken by the Black Army,” engraving in Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805).

Rather than necessarily bound up with each other as part of a single historical practice, the pursuit of freedom in theory and its negation in practice remain for her distinct and incidental, if simultaneous, processes. This sundering of theory and practice, this failure to take account of their dialectical relationship, compels Buck-Morss to remain satisfied with merely condemning the brutality of Europe’s political and economic practices, to bracket them, and thus to fail in rooting the struggle for (and denial of) freedom within them

The model of historical rupture also has a distinctly Third-Worldist thrust, which comes out clearly when Buck-Morss states, “The greater the power a civilization wields in the world, the less capable its thinkers may be to recognize the naiveté of their own beliefs” (119). According to this logic, Buck-Morss is herself in no posi­tion to adequately grasp the world and her beliefs about it, which ironically becomes the case precisely because she holds this view. Several pages later she contin­ues, “It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our empathic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say” (133). Such romanticiza­tion, which represents the crux of Buck-Morss’s thought in this book, is nothing new. It has dominated radical thought for the last 40 years, in both its New Leftist and postmodernist strains. Buck-Morss frames her call for “a universal history worthy of the name” as a challenge to such thought, when really it is only its repackaging. | P

Sunit Singh

The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions.

— Karl Marx

DER BAADER-MEINHOF KOMPLEX (2008) dramatizes the violence that the Leftist group the Rote Armee Fraktion (“Red Army Faction” [RAF] aka the Baader-Meinhof) wreaked across West German cities in the 1970s. The film documents, or, rather, reenacts their streak of violence that started with petty vandalism against storefronts in Frankfurt but that soon escalated into more serious acts. In 1972, the RAF launched its notorious “May Offensive,” which consisted of a series of lethal attacks on U.S. military installations in Frankfurt and Heidelberg; a car bomb outside the Bavarian Federal Police Headquarters in Munich; another explosion at the offices of the Springer Press in Hamburg, which injured a number of workers inside; as well as an assassination attempt on the federal judge presiding over a case in which RAF members were the defendants. Later, in 1975, the group laid siege to the German Consulate in Stockholm. Then, in 1977, the RAF, in a futile last bid to secure the release of their imprisoned comrades, kidnapped the head of the German Employers’ Association and hijacked a Frankfurt-bound Lufthansa flight, in coordination with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. As such, the film asks its audience to consider what, beyond its spectacular or symbolic character, was politically salient about the violent swathe that the RAF hewed in its attempt to foment revolution. The movie also raises an intractable quandary for the Left: How efficacious is the use of violence?

The artist Gerhard Richter offered one answer to these vexations in a cycle of photo paintings 18. Oktober 1977 (1988)-the title refers to the date when the core RAF members committed suicide in a cultish final stand at Stammheim penitentiary in Stuttgart-which were in­tended as a meditation on our “impotence and helpless­ness” as modern capitalist subjects when faced with the inescapable dilemma “to work for revolution and fail.”1 For Richter, who had lived in communist East Berlin, the RAF represented an implausible utopianism. Their death thus marked their emancipation from “the illusion that unacceptable circumstances of life can be changed by this conventional expedient of violent struggle,” from “ideology,” and from the cycle of “deadly reality, inhuman reality; our rebellion; impotence; failure; death.” For Richter, the Baader-Meinhof represented a synthesis of thought and action that is “futile” and outmoded.2 Later, Richter gnomically remarked that the Left, in the late 1960s, failed to appreciate that the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” had already been realized under capitalism, albeit in a dystopic form.3 Yet what Richter treated as the historical failures of the New Left, the film renders purely aesthetic. It is a shift that marks a wider amnesia on the Left, an amnesia that, then as now, allows the Rightist character of politically motivated violence to be mistaken for progressive anti-capitalism. The film thus naturalizes the shift toward militant action in the late 1960s that Richter lamented as an intolerable solution to the stark dilemma that confronted the German New Left: Either dissolve into Cold War liberalism or social-democratic anti-Communism, or else follow the more drastic alternative and model a hardened militancy on the example of Che or Mao.

Director Uli Edel reanimates the politically fraught era of the 1960s in three staccato sequences. In the first sequence, students are seen protesting in the streets, their ire directed at the Shah of Iran as a patsy of U.S. imperialism. On June 2, 1967, as the Shah attends a rendition of The Magic Flute at the Deutsch Oper Berlin, the demonstration outside collapses into chaos. An undercover officer shoots a student, Benno Ohnesorg, in the melee. Gundrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek), another Freie Universität student, recoils at the scene. Thereafter, she is adamant that violent resistance is the answer when confronted by an ever more “fascist”-like state-”kill or be killed,” in the words of the RAF’s Amer­ican counterparts, the Weather Underground. In another scene, Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck) entertains visitors at a backyard party with selections from a column she is penning on the excesses of the Shah’s wife, Farah Diba, for the radical magazine konkret. Her expressions nonetheless belie the ambivalence she harbors toward her own parochially middle-class life as a writer. Meanwhile, the opera incident occasions a debate on precisely this question, What role should “intellectuals” play in relation to the (student-led) Left of the 1960s? As an aside, this is the immediate historical context in which Jürgen Habermas characterized student activism on the New Left, with its emphasis on voluntarist action, as portending fascist tendencies. And, indeed, as the film unfolds, the yearning that Meinhof experiences as a call to action eventually slides into a pathologically untenable antinomy of thought versus action.

Film still, The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008)

Later, when Ensslin is introduced to the volatile Andreas Baader at a hashish-fueled gathering of young Leftists, the new couple resolves to answer the call to arms sounded in a satirical leaflet prodding symbolic attacks on consumerism. Kommune I, the same Situ­ationist group that hatches “the pudding assassination” of Hubert Humphrey, takes its macabre inspiration to incite arson from news reports about a departmentstore inferno in Brussels that killed over three hundred people. A small, literal-minded group with the Ensslin-Baader pairing at its head sets off explosives at various high-street stores in Frankfurt am Main in April 1968. All of them are promptly arrested. At their trial, we see Ensslin, speaking also on behalf of the other arson­ists, remark that the attacks were intended to shake the commonplace “indifference” to the war in Vietnam. Her ex-boyfriend, Berward Vesper, then defends their actions in an article which argues that, in prosecuting these property crimes, commodities take on humanoid traits, while those killed in Vietnam are turned into mere statistics.4 In the pages of konkret, Meinhof similarly contrives to exculpate the property crimes insofar as they interrupt the ceaseless “logic of accumulation” shielded by a legal system based on private property. Still, as Meinhof concedes, “this type of arson does not revolutionize consumerism,” but, instead, “actually maintains the system,” since the destruction of such socially created wealth “contradicts the anti-capitalist intention.” Like the socialist theorist André Gorz, Mein­hof tries to argue that capitalism creates “microcosms” of ersatz satisfaction such that individuals “forget the conditions under which they are forced to work.” But, she also notes that “setting department stores on fire doesn’t raise their awareness about these [unsatisfied] needs [of the collective] either.”5 All of this occurs before Meinhof abandons dialectics in favor of actionism; that is, all this transpires before she ends up joining the Baader-Ensslin gang.

The various narrative threads in the film are braided together in a scene framed as the International Vietnam Kongress that was held in Berlin in 1968. Rudi Dutschke, who leads both the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (“Extra-parliamentary Opposition” or ApO) and the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund (“Socialist German Student Federation” or SDS), delivers a spirited address on Third World “liberation.” He expresses solidarity with the “wretched of the earth” in their role as anti-imperialist revolutionaries. His chants of “Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh!” crescendo over the lecture hall. The film then skips over the other speakers (Tariq Ali, Dale Allen Smith of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Com­mittee, and Ernest Mandel), who presumably repeated other shibboleths of the New Left, but the three main characters now all appear on screen, fated to cross one another. From the conference, the scene quickly shifts to the brutal assassination attempt on Dutschke, who is shot three times, once in the skull. The attack on Dutschke emboldens Meinhof to write “From Protest to Resistance,” in which she weaves the Vietnam Kongress in with the riotous demonstrations outside the tabloid publisher the Springer Press that had run the adver­tisement: “Stop Dutschke Now!” For the Left, a further radicalization in a militant direction seemed all but cer­tain. The newly formed RAF was only one of a panoply of hardened sects such as the Bewegung 2. Juni. (“2 June Movement”); the Schwarze Ratten (“Black Rats” aka Tu­pamaros West Berlin); and the Sozialistisches Patienten­kollektiv (“Socialist Patients’ Collective”), which had its own Timothy Leary-type figure in Dr. Wolfgang Huber.

The RAF articulated its discontents in a manifesto titled Das Konzept Stadtguerilla (“The Urban Guerilla Concept” [1971]), complete with its new trademark of resistance emblazoned on the title page: a Soviet star under an Uzi-like Heckler & Koch MP5.6 This manifesto voiced as dogma what the film is picking up on at an aesthetic level in the scenes in which Baader berates Meinhof as a feckless intellectual or when Ensslin de­scribes everyone but the Baader-Meinhof as an “authori­tarian personality,” to take but two salient examples. In these scenes the film shows the RAF’s anti-intellectualism coupled with the group’s own unreflective authoritarianism. As the group’s chief theoretical statement, the manifesto nevertheless merits a closer look than the film itself can provide. Given the “demoralization of internationalism” under the Old Left in the 1930s, as well as the lack of “revolutionary discipline” in the New Left, the Baader-Meinhof declares its intention to contribute to a “reconstruct[ed] Marxist-Leninism in an international context,” with the RAF as the new metropolitan vanguard. The manifesto then tacks between, on the one hand, identifying with the Old Left as the acme of the “primacy of praxis,” while, on the other hand, preserv­ing a central conceit of the New Left, which is that “the [theoretical] cul-de-sac of the Old Left could be avoided [in the future],” a cul-de-sac filled with the possibility of “resignation, provincializing isolationism, reformism, a Pop-Front strategy, and integration.” Thus, instead of problematizing the interrelation of theory and practice in its own determinate context, the RAF sets about putting their “concrete answers to concrete inquiries” into ac­tion, as if the retardation of objective historical condi­tions were irrelevant to the critical tasks of the Left-the sublation of capital and alienated labor. This Denkverbot (“thought-taboo”) explains why the manifesto chides those intellectuals who insist on pointing out aporias in the student-led New Left. Those who are questioning “the theoretical level of anti-capitalist critique achieved by the students,” remarks the manifesto, are involved in “a trivial competition over whose interpretation of Marx is better.” It should be noted that the manifesto’s own patronizingly ironic conclusion is that theoretical debate excludes workers with its “complicated jargon.”

Thus, even as the RAF admits its “Konzept” is “not based on an optimistic calculation of the prevailing cir­cumstances”-since “capitalism has not lost the ability to repress or integrate its own self-generated contra­dictions”-the manifesto nevertheless exclaims that “despite the weakness of the revolutionary” the aim is to effect revolution “Here and Now!” Yet their assertion that, “we are neither Blanquists nor are we anarchists” makes sense only when one realizes that the RAF, in fact, aims to spark a revolution through its prefigurative politics-that is, via an authoritarian attempt to stand outside capitalism by purging themselves of all of its symptomologies. The manifesto therefore counsels RAF recruits to shirk off the labels/accusations of “anti-Sem­itism/ criminals/ low-lives/ murderers/ arsonists” as “all the shit… applied to [besmirch] revolutionaries.” Still, in its vehement denial of these epithets, the manifesto represses these very tendencies within the RAF, tenden­cies that the film displays.

Film still, reenactment of International Vietnam Kongress, The Baader-Meinhof Complex

Screenwriter Bernd Eichinger, who wrote the ac­claimed film Downfall (2004) on the denouement of the Third Reich, depicts the RAF as a group susceptible to the virulent strain of anti-Semitism that afflicted much of the European New Left. That is, in spite of the RAF’s disavowal of any connection with Nazism, the film il­lustrates the fact that the group conflated attacks on Jews with concrete anti-capitalist action. Even before the RAF was formed, the so-called “Black Rats” had tried to sabotage a Jewish Community Center in West Berlin in 1969 on the night that services were to be held to commemorate Kristallnacht. Dieter Kunzelmaan, who helped found Kommune I, had remarked that the German Left must overcome its “Judenkanx” (“Jewish Complex”). “Palestine is for West Germany,” wrote Kun­zelmaan from Amman, “what Vietnam is for America.”9 And, in this vein, we witness the gang undertake a spree of bank heists in its frenetic bid to weaken the “system” as well as the mythical hold of “the Jews.” The cam­era then follows the gang on a stint to a PLO/al-Fatah campsite in Jordan where they seek to steel themselves for urban warfare, albeit in velvet britches in Baader’s case. The movie captures snippets of the absurd scenes in the desert, none more so than when the would-be German fidayeen sunbathe in the nude, much to the annoyance of their Islamist commandant, in response to whose remonstrations Baader retorts-I am paraphras­ing-that “the sexual revolution is inseparable from anti-imperialist struggle!” On a more gravely serious note, Ensslin, herself a mother-turned-militant, urges Meinhof to relinquish custody of her twin daughters to a Palestinian orphanage. Meinhof agrees but the scheme is ultimately thwarted. Yet their facilitator at the camp, Abu Hassan, reappears later as the mastermind behind the “Black September” attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Imprisoned after a frantic stint on the run in 1972, Meinhof rifles off a “communiqué” praising Black September’s deeds, which she describes as a step toward “the material annihilation of material rule” and “the destruction of the myth of the all-powerful system.”8 To this she adds: “Israel cries crocodile tears. It used its athletes as the Nazis used the Jews-as fuel to be burned for the imperialist policy of extermination.”9 Meinhof’s shrill cadence reflects the hardened attitude that thereafter marks the RAF. (For what it is worth, Horst Mahler (Simon Licht), a central RAF member who acted as defense counsel at the arson trial in Frankfurt, is now a neo-Nazi.) From 1971 onwards the RAF waged what the Nobel Laureate Heinrich Böll referred to as “the war of six against sixty million,” while the violence that the film underscores ultimately ratchets to a climax with the “May Offensive” of 1972.

If the film’s virtue is its unsentimental representation, which neither moralistically criticizes nor apologeti­cally condones the violence it portrays, its weakness is that the RAF remains merely symptomatic of histori­cal circumstances left unanalyzed in the film. The film remains fixated on the RAF’s violence itself since, in the absence of an analysis of the retardation of the objec­tive conditions for social revolution in the 1960s, there can be no analysis of the ways in which this affected the New Left subjectively. It is ironic to recall, there­fore, that the RAF cited the Frankfurt School studies of the “authoritarian personality” in its manifesto, since the Frankfurt School’s conception of the “authoritarian personality” refers precisely to a character structure tied to a weakened ego psychology and a compensatory narcissism which leaves it susceptible to reactionary politics. The film thus naturalizes the history of the New Left in such a way that it reproduces the condition that Freud describes as the narcissistic disorder of melan­cholia, when a fixation on the past occludes our ability to confront present reality or envision our future. However, on another level, the film suggests that, in the present and in the absence of the actual working through of the history of the Left, all we can do is endlessly reenact the pathological scenes of the past. To the extent that the film puts forth this suggestion, it pushes against its own limits and the limits of our condition of political helplessness. It is this sense of the contemporaneity of the New Left; its sense that the Left today is not so different from the Left of the 1960s and 1970s as some wish to imagine; its sense that the actors of today simply act out in color the black-and-white footage of the past; its sense, in other words, of the regression that marks what passes as the Left today-this, above all, is the achieve­ment of Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.

(Endnotes)

1 Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1960-1993 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 194.

2 Ibid., 178.

3 Ibid., 221.

4 Jeremy Voron, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Under­ground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 202.

5 Ulrike Marie Meinhof, Everybody Talks About the Weath­er-We Don’t : The Writings of Ulrike Meinhof, translated by Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), 244-246.

6 A number of RAF “communiqués” can be found at http://la­bourhistory.net/raf/browse.php. Some rough English transla­tions are also available online at http://www.baader-meinhof.com.

7 Jeffery Herf. “Ideology and Terror in Germany,” Telos 144 (Fall 2008): 23.

8 Stefan Aust. The Baader Meinhof Complex (London: The Bodley Head, 2008), 182.

9 Meinhof cited in Herf, “Ideology and Terror,” 28.

Book Review: Cottee, Simon and Thomas Cushman (eds.). Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left. New York: New York University Press, 2008.

Spencer A. Leonard

If it did not come to end in 1989, as conservative critic Francis Fukuyama expected, this is because, in Hegel’s sense, as freedom’s self-realization in time, History had already ceased. Long before the new geopolitical configurations and institutional forms of the post-Soviet world, a new and unprecedented, though scarcely recognized, political situation had taken shape: The last threads of continuity connecting the present with the long epoch of political emancipation were severed. In the second half of the 20th century the history that stretched back through modern socialism and the labor movement to the Enlightenment and the bourgeois revolutions that came before, became bunk. Yet, unlike Stalinism’s well-publicized (if exaggerated) collapse, the passing of History and the death of the long-ailing Left in our time has passed almost wholly unnoticed and unmourned. One exception to this is found in the writings of journalist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens, which, though they sometimes express it only unconsciously and symptomatically, nevertheless very often register awareness of the unprecedented circumstance that is the death of the Left.

When Hitchens publicly broke with the The Nation in the aftermath of 9/11, the break was based on chiefly moral grounds. The Left’s anti-war arguments were, Hitchens argued, “contemptible” and in “bad faith”; its authors were corrupt “masochists” [104-8]. While Hitchens’s defection was widely condemned by the Left, few attended closely to the moral form that it took, which is in many ways as revealing as the substance of the debates it occasioned. In Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left [hereafter CHHC], editors Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman provide a handy single-volume introduction to Hitchens’s tussle with the Left during those years, supplying both an ample selection of Hitchens’s writings and published interviews, as well as many criticisms by his erstwhile comrades. Through them we relive something of the disorientation and struggle for clarification on the Left that accompanied 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Though in some respects a replay of debates around western intervention in Bosnia in the 1990s, far more engaging is the near total discrediting of the existing Left that Hitchens has accomplished writing as a moralist since.

Enlightenment on the Left

A scourge of the establishment, Hitchens was one of the few journalists steeped in Marxism publishing in the mass circulation English press during the 1980s and 90s. Coming out of the International Socialist tendency of British Trotskyism, Hitchens did not simply admire Marx or sympathize with certain historical achievements of the socialist Left; rather, he brought to the pages of The New Statesman, Harper’s and The Atlantic the unique resources of a sectarian Marxist political education. With the familiarity he possessed of its prevailing intellectual habits and dispositions and also of the actual composition of the various popular front organizations that sprung up to oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hitchens possessed unique resources to undertake a thoroughgoing critique of the contemporary Left. It is the limitations of these same resources, however, that ultimately diminished the force of that critique. For while Hitchens was correct in his assessment of the conservative and one-sided character of the “leftist” critique of American hegemony, it was chimerical to imagine that one could both side with the Bush regime’s war and, at the same time, retain critical independence from it.

Taking the last ten years together, Hitchens has been remarkably prolific, producing a steady output of books and articles. This impressive written output has gained Hitchens a mass audience, further expanded by the steady schedule he maintains of television and radio appearances, as well as high-profile public debates. Neither specialized scholar nor think-tank wonk, Hitchens is a rare breed: one who lives not simply by his writing, but by a sustained attempt to analyze the present. By concentrating on the years 2001-2005, Hitchens and His Critics offers a valuable selection of writings from the time when Hitchens began to do what he does entirely freeform, that is with total independence from party or clique.

To describe Hitchens’s writings in CHHC as acts of “apostasy” from the Left is misleading. It is better to read them as authentic, if inadequate, responses to the intractability of contemporary circumstances. Out of their recognition of this, editors Cottee and Cushman locate Hitchens not among the God-that-failed liberals, but rather “in the tradition of Marx and the Frankfurt School.” As they explain: “It is our belief that in Hitchens’s recent political writings it is possible to discern one of the most powerful self-critiques of the Western Left today. Hitchens is. . . an essential reference point for the Left, and his criticisms demand to be engaged with” [3-4]. While one might balk at the phrase “Western Left” as foreign to Hitchens’s internationalist disposition, Cottee and Cushman are undoubtedly correct in pointing out that Hitchens did not so much abandon the Left, as he was abandoned by it.

Still, Cottee and Cushman’s introduction generates as much confusion as clarity respecting Hitchens’s leftism. For while Hitchens cannot but mourn the collapse of the revolutionary Left, insofar as it stood for the abolition of capitalist social domination and the realization of human freedom, his editors lack this understanding of the Left’s fundamental commitments. So, it is hard to see how they as non-Marxists can even comprehend Hitchens when he says, “there is no longer a general socialist critique of capitalism – certainly not the sort of critique that proposes an alternative or a replacement. . . . [Still] I don’t think that the contradictions, as we used to say, of the system are by any means all resolved” [169]. The sense Hitchens expresses here of the collapse of the Left is true now in a way that was not the case even for those who survived into the 1940s. Though certainly the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists recognized that the rise and consolidation of Stalinism and fascism in Europe prepared the ground for it, the total extinction of the Left had to wait till the second half of the 20th century. With unmistakable melancholy if not nostalgia Hitchens says, “I am in a strong position to promise you. . . [that] all talk [of a Trotskyist revival] is idle. It’s over” [181]. Just as they can imagine Jürgen Habermas’s liberalism to represent a continuation of the Frankfurt School’s mid-century project, Cottee and Cushman treat “the Left” as if it were a stable political category. Hitchens, on the other hand, makes no claim that he represents an alternative form of Leftism. Instead, as he says, “call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one” ["At Last Our Lefties See the Light" The Times of London online edition, 4/30/06].

Breaking Left

Viewed in retrospect, Hitchens’s break with the Left may be seen to have been foreshadowed by his 1990s tirades against Bill Clinton and his “lesser evilist” liberal supporters. In those polemics, Hitchens argued in effect that social democracy had utterly collapsed and, with it, so had the political salience of the distinction between the Democrats and Republicans. The Clinton presidency represented the triumph of fully managed, poll-driven, and lobbyist-directed politics. This failure of parliamentary democracy was accompanied by intellectual vulgarization and moral degradation. Changes such as these were not wholly explicable in their own terms, but were after effects of the Left’s collapse. But this last point Hitchens never made explicit. For this reason the 90s writings fail to register fully his dawning sense that what had occurred was an epochal shift, though this can be seen in the gradual alteration of Hitchens’s tone from that of political analysis proper to something more akin to 19th century moralism. Even prior to 9/11 Hitchens could remark, “I don’t have allegiances. . . anymore” [173]; but, because of the indirection of targeting Clinton rather than his Left supporters, writings from this period are only a prelude to what would come later.

In the weeks and months following 9/11, Hitchens’s criticism of what passes for the Left resounded loudly on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether in left-leaning organs such as The Nation and the Guardian or in more mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times and The Independent, in article after article Hitchens drove the point home that the issue of “imperialism,” as understood for decades on the Left, had ceased to be relevant. The enemies of American imperialism in no sense represented a more democratic future, nor would their victory be likely to indirectly produce politically desirable effects. Making the stakes plain, Hitchens asseverated, “capitalism, for all its contradictions, is superior to. . . what bin Laden and the Taliban stand for” [55]. As for U.S. military involvement in Iraq, Hitchens supplements the arguments about al-Qaeda’s Islamist fascism with arguments drawn from Iraqi Trotskyist Kanan Makiya to the effect that Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was not merely tyrannical but represented a variety of modern-day “totalitarianism.” Hitchens then adds to this the assertion that when, in the aftermath of the 1991 war, it left Saddam’s opponents in the lurch, the U.S. saddled itself with a “responsibility” to the people of Iraq. He condemned as both untenable and ill-conceived the continued enforcement of no-fly zones and a crippling sanctions regime. These punished the population while allowing Hussein to maintain his hold on power. Of course, nothing could be more predictable than the U.S. Army “failing” to fight Hitchens’s war in Iraq (nor could greater “pressure” from the Left have prompted it to do so). Still, the American military, as Hitchens pointed out in a debate with Tariq Ali, was “not militarily defeatable” in Iraq and “all moral and political conclusions to be drawn from that should be drawn” [http://www.democracynow.org/2004/10/12/]. Hitchens’s support for the war was, of course, opportunistic. But, as CHHC demonstrates, it served an important purpose — it distanced him once and for all from the pseudo-Left.

Taking up cudgels against the likes of Tariq Ali, Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, bell hooks, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone, Studs Terkel, and Howard Zinn, Hitchens recognized that Ba’athist Iraq’s steady disintegration and the emergence into plain view of Islamist fascism posed for such “leftists” a dilemma they could not resolve. The War on Terror is not Vietnam II. The character of the enemy of American imperialism is utterly changed as is the geo-political environment within which the conflict takes place. Yet, despite this crucial recognition, Hitchens does not possess critical resources the others lack. For, contrary to what he suggests, Hitchens’s support of America’s invasion of Iraq is no straightforward act of solidarity with secular-socialist political parties inside Iraq, such as the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Jalal Talabani. Still, his repeated insistence on the plight of the Kurds under Saddam did serve to effectively dramatize the disappearance of Left internationalism. “When I first became a socialist,” he writes,

[...] the imperative of international solidarity was the essential if not defining thing, whether the cause was popular or not. I haven’t seen an anti-war meeting all this year [2002] at which you could even guess at the existence of the Iraqi and Kurdish opposition to Saddam, an opposition that was fighting for “regime change” when both Republicans and Democrats were fawning over Baghdad as a profitable client and geopolitical ally. [105]

Those on the Left who tacitly defended Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein did so because of an inherited moral and intellectual rot. A consequence of this was that “instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism” [108], one manifestation of which was the anti-war movement’s willingness to bracket out of consideration the fate of Iraqi Leftist or oppositionist parties and trade unions, if not to condemn them outright as U.S. “stooges.” For their part, groups like the ISO and Spartacist League,  by simply dusting off the slogans of earlier struggles, ignore the historical gulf that separates the current anti-war movement from, say, the movement that opposed the Vietnam War. The claims of such groups that, as they would put it, blows struck against American imperialism are blows in the interests of workers and the oppressed worldwide, have become unmeaning mantras by the muttering repetition of which such groups on the left withdraw into insensibility. Others on the Left are more vulgar, hoping that an Iraqi quagmire would allow for the emergence of Europe as a substantial counter-hegemonic force (as, for instance, in Habermas and Derrida’s joint letter of May 31, 2003). Regarding such Leftism, Hitchens remarks, “I am very much put in mind of something from the opening of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. It’s not the sentence about the historical relation between tragedy and farce. It’s the observation that when people are learning a new language, they habitually translate it back into the one they already know” [55]. Unable to so much as describe the present, the Left has lost its currency for an entire generation. “Members of the Left, along with the far larger number of squishy ‘progressives,’ have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought” [57]. Today’s conservative leftism, with a long pedigree stretching back into the 1960s, first became dominant by couching itself in anti-imperialist language. But, as Hitchens comments, “My Marxist training tells me things don’t remain the same. [These new, openly] reactionary-left positions won’t hold for long. They will metamorphose into reactionary-right ones” ["'Don't Cross Over if You Have any Intention of Going Back'" Interview with Danny Postel The Common Review 4:1, 7]. The merits of this critique stand, regardless of Hitchens’s position on the Iraq War.

Rejecting the consensus view that the 1960s New Left represents a high-water mark of radical politics, Hitchens argues that, in fact, the conservativism of today’s pseudo-Left derives from precisely that period:

If you look back to the founding document of the 60′s left, which was the Port Huron statement . . . you will easily see that it was in essence a conservative manifesto. It spoke in vaguely Marxist terms of alienation, true, but it was reacting to bigness and anonymity and urbanization, and it betrayed a yearning for a lost agrarian simplicity. It forgot what Marx had said, about the dynamism of capitalism and ”the idiocy of rural life.”

All that endures today on “the Left” is precisely this anti-modern strain of the 1960s. Describing the route from Port Huron to Seattle, Hitchens notes, “the anti-globalization movement has started to reject modernity altogether, to set its sights on laboratories and on the idea of the division of labor, and to adopt symbols from Fallujah as the emblems of its resistance” ["Where Aquarius Went," New York Times (online edition) 12/19/04]. If we are in politically dire straits, this is not because the New Left betrayed the ideals of its youth, but because it upheld them. Hitchens captures the massive political and intellectual shift this has occasioned anecdotally: “Marx and Engels thought that America was the great country of freedom and revolution. . . [We] live in a culture where people’s first instinct when you say [that] is to laugh or to look bewildered” [176-77]. After years of Pop-Front coziness with his “comrades” in “the movement,” Hitchens finally broke rank. And yet, Hitchens’s defeat of his “Left” opponents, of which CHHC leaves its reader no doubt, never translated into what we might call a genuine political victory.

Hitchens’s Marxism

The force of Hitchens’s critique of the degenerate Left in the wake of 9/11 derives in large measure, as argued above, from his sectarian background which imparted to him a deep aversion to uncritical solidarity. It is this that lends his account its force. In other words, it is not simply a matter of familiarity breeding contempt, but of the precision that comes from long study of the enemy. And yet, the instincts that allow him to register his insights soon come up against their own limits. For the current crisis requires an active (and openly skeptical) re-engagement with the history of the Left and the theoretical categories of Marxism.

Hitchens’s greatest shortcoming is not the position he has taken on Iraq, as this amounts chiefly to a confession of political futility. Nor is it his bullying and hectoring tone, which, though it occasionally rings false, is typically reserved for those who deserve it. Rather, his greatest shortcoming is in his sclerotic Marxism, which is very often conceptually under-specified and indistinguishable from ahistorical liberalism. For what Hitchens terms the “tenets of the Left” require us only to recognize the truth of certain propositions, such as “there are opposing class interests” and “monopoly capitalism can and should be distinguished from the free market and that it has certain fatal tendencies” (LYC, 102). But, there is nothing specifically Marxist about these or any such propositions outside of dialectical analysis.

Discussing the anti-Stalinist Marxists of the 1930s, Hitchens says “these heroes. . . were forced to rely as much on their own consciences, if not indeed more, as on any historical materialist canon” [LYC 98]. But the likes of C. L. R. James, Victor Serge, and Trotsky are not merely moral exemplars, and the “crimes” to which they bore witness were not simply criminal. Stalin’s betrayals were political betrayals opposed politically by a Marxism rooted in a definite conception of capitalism as a form of social organization. Any full account must go beyond discussing the bravery of these tendencies to address that their emancipatory potential. Hitchens exhorts readers to question the obvious and the status quo, for which, he argues, intellectual honesty and a will to truth alone are required. While this is true as far as it goes, it only goes so far. Morality and “principles” alone, including “the conception of universal human rights” to which he points as guiding “the next phase or epoch” of Leftist politics are an inadequate basis on which to remount the sort of emancipatory politics to which Hitchens is unmistakably committed [LYC 136].

Hitchens’s etiolated conception of Enlightenment (under which rubric he subsumes Marxist “historical materialism”) causes him to fall below the level of his own insights. This can most readily be seen by a brief review of Hitchens’s 2002 treatment of George Orwell, Why Orwell Matters [WOM]. This book’s publication coincided with and may be seen as explicating much of the basis for his criticism of his former comrades. Hitchens’s Orwell, it is safe to say, stands in for the Trotskyism that came so late to Britain, where most of those who would become the beacons of the New Left did not actually break with Stalinism in Trotsky’s lifetime but much later, after the 1956 Hungarian uprising was crushed by the Soviet Union. Orwell was “in contact with the small and scattered forces of the independent international Left” and this fact, that he questioned Stalinism at a time in the history of the British Left when it was extremely unpopular to do so, is central to why Orwell matters to Christopher Hitchens [WOM, 62]. As a fellow traveler of “the International of persecuted oppositionists who withstood ‘the midnight of the century’ – the clasping of hands of Hitler and Stalin” [WOM, 63], Orwell was a confirmed leftist critic of the Left from at least the time of his fighting on behalf of the Spanish Republic, which he chronicled in his early work, Homage to Catalonia. Nor did Orwell ever discard the commitments and insights that crystallized for him while fighting in Spain, since in his late work Animal Farm “the aims and principles of the Russian revolution are given face-value credit throughout: this is a revolution betrayed, not a revolution that is monstrous from its inception” [WOM 187]. Thus, while “the edifice of [Orwell's] work. . . [is typically] identified with sturdy English virtues” [WOM, 63], it constitutes for Hitchens an internationalist legacy far more valuable than that of many figures more widely lionized on the British Left, where the New Left intellectuals’ struggle to work through the fraught legacy of the past was hobbled by the relatively superficial de-Stalinization after 1956. Hitchens skewers Raymond William’s hatchet job on Orwell as symptomatic of precisely an undigested Stalinism that then also affected the New Left Review‘s editors, who in their reverence toward Williams in the 1960s, failed to theoretically work through the struggles on the Left of the 1930s.

But Hitchens, too, fails to work through the history of the left. On the one hand, he is adamant that we regard as a victory for the anti-Stalinist New Left the Velvet Revolutions that brought to an end “actually existing socialism” in the former Warsaw Pact countries. On the other hand, he recognizes that “once the Cold War was over, there was a recrudescence of. . . totalitarianism and. . . authoritarianism” ["'Don't Cross Over if You have any Intention of Going Back,'" 7]. It is altogether unclear just how Hitchens can view the 1990s as simultaneously a culminating revolutionary moment and as a period of the revival of totalitarianism. Here is no dialectical antinomy, just a flat contradiction.

Retreat to moralism

The insights Hitchens develops respecting the history of the Left with reference to Orwell are valuable and, in many instances, merit further elucidation. The difficulty arises in trying to address such matters in the moral terms on which Hitchens bases his analysis, as for instance when Hitchens attempts to characterize the European fascism of the 1930s and 40s in terms of “arrogance,” “bullying,” “greed,” “wickedness,” and “stupidity” [WOM, 7]. Such moral and intellectual flaws have, after all, plagued humankind throughout its history, and for this reason they provide an inadequate basis for conceptualizing something so distinctly and exclusively modern as fascism. Similarly, leftist politics, while it may be rooted at the individual level in a certain moral impulse, can never be guided by that impulse alone. While Hitchens’s expressions of moral disapproval are in themselves unobjectionable and indeed often rhetorically powerful, they hardly suffice as categories of political analysis. For such analysis requires a theoretical grasp of social and historical circumstances, the abstract character of which necessitates theory. As Hitchens himself acknowledges, “I became a socialist . . . [as an] outcome of studying history” [168]. In other words, Marxian theory is necessary to actually grasp the ongoing transformation of society. The power of facing unpleasant facts that Hitchens associates with Orwell is scarcely sufficient if the aim is elaborate a politics rooted in a critical grasp of the present. Hitchens knows full well that “a purely moral onslaught on capitalism and empire would be empty sermonizing” ["The Grub Street Years," The Guardian 6/16/07], and yet he seems to think an increasingly moral rhetoric to be adequate for contemporary critical purposes.

Stefan Collini (in a 2003 essay unfortunately omitted from the volume under review) is no doubt right to balk (or chuckle) at the machismo of the ostentatiously hard-drinking, chain-smoking, author of pieces like “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” But, what is curious is the evidence of Hitchens’s masculinism that Collini adduces, namely his commitment to being “right about which way the world . . . is going, right about which policies will work and which regimes are wicked; right about the accuracy of one’s facts and one’s stories; and right when so many others, especially well-regarded or well-placed others, are demonstrably wrong” [Stefan Collini, "'No Bullshit' Bullshit" London Review of Books 25:2 (1/23/03), online edition]. If Hitchens fails in his attempts to understand which way the world is going, it is scarcely because of the masculinist folly of the enterprise, nor, indeed, because of the limitations of his talent, intellect or instincts, but because the world itself has become opaque. This, and the impulse toward being right — at least against the “Left” — is what has led Hitchens to shill for the American warmongers. The old habit of choosing sides betrays Hitchens when the task requires more than simply making compromises and choosing the lesser evil, but actually critically confronting a situation in which there is nothing to choose. While Collini’s chastising as “masculinist” Hitchens’s commitment to being right when so many others are politically wrong amounts to little more than the imposition of a thought-taboo, it is nevertheless undeniable that, for the present, the formulation of “a political line” is impossible. This is because of “the world’s” incoherence when the Left is dead. Hitchens’s polemics would seem to imply an independent position, but the impossibility of this is precisely where the contemporary circumstance of the death of the left must be registered.

Hitchens’s “return” to moralism in the 1990s and 200s is coupled with a nascent sense of historical regression, which he understands as a return to the Enlightenment and a replay of bourgeois revolution. Thus Hitchens’s most recent writings on the Enlightenment, American Revolution, and atheism stem from his sense of the need for a renewal of “the war for Enlightenment values” [213]. As early as 2002 Hitchens wrote, “as the third millennium gets under way, and as the Russian and Chinese and Cuban revolutions drop below the horizon, it is possible to argue that the American revolution, with its promise of cosmopolitan democracy, is the only ‘model’ revolution that humanity has left to it” [WOM 105]. But, in the works that grew out of this conviction published after 2005, Hitchens flattens out much of what remained suggestive in the polemical writings contained in CHHC. For instance, in his recent non-fiction best-seller God is Not Great, Hitchens improbably portrays the struggle against contemporary religious fascisms as a mere continuation of the Enlightenment tussle with irrationality. As if al-Qaeada’s “medievalism” were a relic of the unscientific feudal past! At this point, rationality surrenders to dogma in the name of the Enlightenment and Hitchens’s recognition of political regression threatens to transform itself into the idée fixe of a crank who has forgotten that the argument with religion is the beginning, not the end, of the ruthless criticism of everything existing. Adopting a more sympathetic approach towards these more recent works requires reading them against the grain to argue not only that the self-described left today is entirely past saving and needs only to be retired, but also that the project of re-constituting the left today may be advanced more through an engagement with those drawn to (and encountering the limits of) liberalism than with the sleep-walkers that today pass for the Left. |P

[This article has been reprinted in Mainstream Weekly]

Deep historical precedents

However sincere its backers or belligerent its enemies, the “War on Terror” is not and cannot become anti-Islamist. This is not because, as some think, there is no Islamist or Taliban-style fascism on the receiving end of America’s War on Terror. Far from it. The reason is that the prosecutors of the war are only half committed to the selective elimination of certain religious reactionaries. In consequence, the War on Terror presents the Left with a dilemma: How to respond to apparently anti-fascist imperialism? It is a dilemma that has been faced before, most notably in the experience of World War II. Writing in the Partisan Review after the Allies’ “liberation” of French North Africa and the reinstallation of French imperialism there, Leftist intellectual Dwight MacDonald expressed those difficulties as follows:

A nation fighting the kind of war the French Revolutionary armies fought, or the Red Army in 1919, does all it can to politicize the struggle. It is notable that everything possible is done by [American] leaders to depoliticize this war. . . . Some weeks ago, the Office of War Information issued directives to its propagandists on “the nature of the enemy.” [Hitler] was described as a bully, a murderer, a thief, a gangster, etc., but only once in the lengthy document as a fascist. [“The Future of Democratic Values” in The Partisan Reader, 548]

Roosevelt and Churchill’s imperialist “anti-fascism” arose as a deliberate propaganda project set to counter that fascist “anti-imperialism” that found fertile soil among Persian, Arab, and Indian nationalists in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia in the 1930s and 40s. Leftists like MacDonald were aware that as in North Africa, the contradictions of the Allied war effort were most starkly revealed in the British struggle to preserve their empire in India. There, the crypto-fascist Subhas Chandra Bose emerged as a leading nationalist, eventually escaping British India and lending military assistance and the prestige of his cause to the fascist Axis. Anticipating such possibilities, Leon Trotsky chose to address the issue in 1939 in “An Open Letter to the Workers of India,” in which he warned against imperialist overtures to support a “war . . . waged for principles of ‘democracy,’ ” arguing that by dissolving itself into a liberal-Stalinist popular front, the Left prepared the way for its own marginalization and for the betrayal of the very anti-fascist aims that actuated it to begin with.

Unable to work through its past, the Left today is disoriented. It stumbles about aimlessly while the executors of the War on Terror, their first blush of neo-conservative ideological enthusiasm now dissipated, gradually abandon the rhetoric of “fascism” and “democracy,” growing more “pragmatic” day by day. Just as American officers found Vichy French colonial administrators and officers in 1943, American war makers today are discovering the congeniality of the “good Taliban” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, even as they applaud the “moderate elements” in Iraq. As I show in the following review of significant editorials on the Mumbai attacks written by prominent Indian Leftists, and Leftists writing about India, the crisis that MacDonald identified in 1943 remains with us still. Only now it seems that, if the Left could be said to still exist, we would be forced to confess finally that it has not learned the lessons of the failures of the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and that it remains the inheritor of Stalinism. Today, as in the 1930s, there prevails a tacit alliance between Islamist fascism and important segments of the Left which actively inhibits the re-emergence of emancipatory politics. Of course, some things have changed. In the 1940s the Left signed up with “anti-fascist” imperialism, in the 2000s the Left tends to keep company with fascist “anti-imperialists.” The review of media discourse that follows focuses on pieces appearing in one of the world’s most Left-leaning mass-circulation daily newspapers in English today, the Manchester Guardian or simply The Guardian. In examining works from this source, I argue that in their incapacity to isolate and cogently discuss the issues raised by the attacks they exemplify what Platypus terms “the death of the Left.” The shortcomings of these pieces are rooted in the Left’s inability to honestly face up to its historical circumstances.

An overcrowded local train in Mumbai

9/11 and the Mumbai attacks

In the title of her December 4, 2008 Guardian editorial on the Mumbai attacks, Priyamvada Gopal asserts that “Comparing Mumbai to 9/11 diminishes both tragedies.” But even this title is deceitful, since, as her readers soon discover, the piece is not concerned with the particularities of the two events. Nor does the danger of “diminishing” 9/11 give Gopal pause. On the contrary, diminishing and displacing 9/11 from our active preoccupations is her intent. Allowing the November attack on Mumbai to be deemed “India’s 9/11” would be, she argues, “to privilege the experience of the United States” and to be complicit with India’s “relentless Americanization.” 9/11 is either another brand name in McWorld or something even more sinister, an event so “fetishized” as to “sanction endless vengeance,” even as it obscures “the experience of millions [elsewhere] who have suffered as much” as those who died or were injured in the attack on the U.S. on that day. 9/11 “legitimized a false war,” “created legal abominations,” and “strengthened neoconservatism.”

While Gopal’s piece makes perfunctory mention of the suffering of the victims of 9/11, it says nothing of the actual contours of that event, much less the intentions behind it. The U.S. reaction concerns her more than the attack itself does. Rather than offering any analysis of the event about which she was writing, Gopal strains to change the subject. Presumably the killing spree that took place in Mumbai from November 26th to November 29th 2008 (and has now come to be referred to “11/26”), requires no analysis. But when we actually specify what 9/11 was, can the comparison with it really be so easily avoided?

The crucial point to be made about 9/11 — and the one that Gopal studiously avoids — makes the comparison with the Mumbai attacks inevitable: both were attacks inspired by Islamism on intensely cosmopolitan urban populations with the intention of inflicting the maximum number of casualties. Moreover, like New York, Mumbai is an old colonial port city with a rich if submerged history of radical democratic struggle. Like New York, Mumbai is the commercial and cultural, though not the political, capital of a pluralistic democracy. In short, like New York, Mumbai is one of world’s great nerve-centers of contemporary capitalism. Also, the attacks on Mumbai were not on the Hindu chauvinist politics of Bal Thackeray, just as the 9/11 attack was not on the neo-liberalism of Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. In both cases, the targets were the profane pleasures of modern society. In both cases, the attacks were made, so to speak, in plain view, so that the fascistic menace was unmistakable (albeit in the absurdly comic form of expressionless young men who might, but for the assault rifles in their hands, be easily mistaken for ravers en route to Goa). Finally, as with 9/11, the regional strategic consequences bound to flow from the Mumbai attacks are profound.

In a certain respect, the semiotics of the attacks in Mumbai were even more ghastly than those of 9/11, since it witnessed the deliberate hunting of Jews qua Jews, especially at the Chabad House, where Jews were subjected to savage beatings before their execution, unlike even the Americans and Britons who were also singled out. For those who planned the attacks killing Jews was a priority and it was executed in the midst of a police siege by killers who had, in all likelihood, never so much as seen a Jewish person before. Though the murderous anti-Semitism on display in Mumbai ought by now to be an all-too-familiar aspect of Islamist ideology, Guardian correspondent Richard Silverstein, like Gopal on the editorial page, declines to acknowledge the obvious. Instead he insists that the attack on Chabad House was “not necessarily anti-Semitic,” claiming that the attackers were seeking “redress for crimes against Palestine” [“Why did the Attackers Choose to Attack Chabad House” Guardian 12/4/2008, cf. Alex Stein “Inspiration from India” Guardian 12/4/2008]. From this we may safely conclude that, for Silverstein, anytime a Muslim kills a Jew he need only utter the magic word “Palestine” to have his guilt absolved: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza means that it is open season on Jews all over the world. In the same vein, William Dalrymple, informs the wised-up readers of the Guardian that “the horrific events have to be seen in the context of. . . the abject failure of the Bush administration” and the “ill-treatment of the people of Kashmir” [“Mumbai Atrocities Highlight Need for a Solution in Kashmir” Guardian 11/30/08]. In Arundhati Roy’s column, too, we rely upon the terrorists to tell the truth and to remind “us” of the “things we don’t want to talk about any more” [“The Monster in the Mirror,” 12/13/08]. It is one thing for a journalist to report the content of authoritarian manifestoes or the statements terrorists make in the course of an attack; it is quite another matter to rationalize such statements in the manner of Silverstein, Dalrymple, and Roy.

Highlighting the political significance of the attack on Chabad House cannot be allowed to obscure the fact that there was also something quite discriminating about the seemingly more indiscriminate killing of commuters at the Victoria Terminus. It is not enough to say simply that, compared to the foreigners and the rich people at the Taj and Oberoi Hotels, the victims there were poorer, working people, though this is true. It is also worth pointing out that at the train station, the attackers fired directly into crowds. The Muslims among the dead there were not unintended victims. They were punished for living and working in peace in secular democratic India, i.e. of having failed to join the jihad. Of course, the Hindus regarded as pagans were positively marked for slaughter. As for the attacks on Mumbai’s elite hotels, likewise, the clear intent was to comingle on their marble floors the blood of dying unbelievers of all sorts — Zionist, Crusader, and Infidel. There again was the same unbridled murderousness that has been a significant feature of previous attacks, such as the 2006 commuter train in Mumbai and the serial bombings earlier in 2008 in Jaipur, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, and Delhi, to name just a few. These rather elementary aspects of the politics behind the Mumbai attacks rarely merit mention in the analysis to be found in the Guardian. But while the “Left” cannot remain at this elementary level of analysis, neither can it afford to ignore the obvious.

While Gopal is right to claim that in many respects 9/11 is not unique as a point of comparison (there have been many other Islamist terrorist attacks besides 9/11), her aim seems not to locate the attacks in an alternative history of recent Islamist terrorism, as, for instance, in relation to the bombing in Pakistan in September of the Islamabad Marriott that killed 53 and injured more than 250. Rather, the Mumbai attacks are treated as have no determinate character whatsoever, Gopal preferring to speak only of a “massacre of defenceless innocents.” Presumably the same is true of the bomb detonated December 5th, 2008 in a market outside a Shi’a mosque in Peshawar in which 22 people were killed and more than 90 were wounded. While 9/11 posed for everyone worldwide the question of modern Islamism, Gopal’s editorial reveals once again how the Left continues to rely on its old reflex responses — supposed “anti-imperialism” — to defer any confrontation with the full scope of the barbarism in our time. In this way, the piece tends to obscure or deny what is salient for advancing (or even imagining) a politics genuinely capable of both countering fascism and reconstituting an emancipatory politics in South Asia.

Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Station (AKA Victoria Terminus) at rush hour

The Pakistan connection

All indications identify the culprit of the Mumbai attacks to be the notorious Pakistani Islamist organization Lashkar-e-Taiba [LeT], a group the CIA and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] founded in the early 1980s to foment jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Beginning in the early 1990s, it shifted focus to Indian Kashmir. It was in one of LeT’s Rawalpindi safe houses that the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was apprehended in 2003. Late the previous year, Pakistani authorities took al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah from a LeT safe house in Faisalabad.

LeT is not hidden away in remote tribal areas beyond the reach of the Pakistani state. It recruits, indoctrinates, and trains members for military action in full view of the Pakistani Army, which must, therefore, be said to protect it. And it is worth noting that there is nothing on the Indian side comparable to Pakistan’s harboring of such “non-state actors.” Of course, the Pakistani government’s first reaction to the news of the Mumbai attacks was, as usual, to flatly deny claims that the attackers were Pakistani, or that LeT was involved. But the important investigation of Guardian journalist Saeed Shah helped confound these denials. This he did by finding the one of many villages in Pakistan named Faridkot, where in his statement to the Indian police the sole surviving terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kasab, claimed he was born. To confirm that he had in fact found the attacker’s village and that LeT recruiters were indeed active there, Shah spoke to local people. One confirmed the story on condition of anonymity, adding, “We know that boy [caught in Mumbai] is from Faridkot. . . . We knew from the first night [of the attack]. They brainwash our youth about jihad. There are people who do it in this village.” [Saeed Shah, “Mumbai Terrorist came from Pakistan, local Villagers Confirm” Guardian 12/7/08]. Given Islamabad’s proven mendacity, Washington’s opportunism, and Delhi’s capacity for evidence-tampering and deception of the public (most notoriously in the botched frame-up of the alleged plotters of the December 13, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament), Shah’s brand of investigative journalism is invaluable. His reports in the Guardian were significant and sound — in stark contrast to the irresponsible commentary we are addressing here.

Though officially denied in Islamabad, there can be no doubt that many in the Pakistani Army and ISI approve and promote LeT’s attempts to Islamicize the resistance to India’s long-standing military occupation of Kashmir. This collusion between elements inside the Pakistani Army and LeT is inextricably related to the Mumbai attacks. For years the Pakistani military has permitted jihadis fighting in Kashmir free rein to train and recruit in Pakistan creating the milieu from which the Mumbai attacks came. Even if the LeT and the other organizations of Kashmiri and Afghan jihadis which the ISI has created are no longer under their control, it can scarcely disclaim all responsibility for their actions. Moreover, as confirmed by the July 7th 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the ISI is certainly directly engaged in the promotion of the Taliban and the sabotaging of the Karzai government in Afghanistan. We catch a glimpse of such Pakistani army councils when President Asif Ali Zardari, upon being pressed regarding LeT involvement, tellingly exclaims: “Even if these activists are linked to the LeT, who do you think we are fighting?” [quoted in Bernard-Henri Levy, “Let's Give Pakistan the Attention It Deserves” Wall Street Journal 12/3/08]. That is, the resistance to the newly elected government’s assertion of its authority over the military (a highly fraught proposition) derives from those elements still promoting a jihadi-based foreign policy.

LeT is chiefly a player in the growth industry that is Islamist terror attacks against India, a country al-Qaeda rightly perceives as a weak link in the Zionist-Crusader-Infidel alliance with which so many of its recent propaganda broadcasts have been preoccupied. While, in knowing tones, area specialists insist on the great significance of the theological distinctions between jihadi groups, bin Laden himself is clear in his reiterated calls for unity. He knows, even if they do not, that there is only one modern jihad and that, in Pakistan, it is bidding for the soul of the Army. As bin Laden’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri (otherwise notorious for his recent slander of Barack Obama as a “House Slave”), stated in his April 2006 message “To the People of Pakistan”:

Musharraf was the primary backer of [America’s] ouster of the Islamic Emirate from Kabul. . . As a result of Musharraf’s betrayal, Indian intelligence has crept close to the Pakistan-Afghan border. . . [Consequently] the Pakistani Army, with the exit of the Taliban government from Kabul, became a double loser: first, the Pakistani Army lost the strategic depth which Afghanistan, with its highlands and mountains, can offer it in any Pakistani-Indian confrontation. And second, the Pakistani Army’s back became exposed to a regime hostile to it and allied with its enemies.

Zawahiri demonstrates perfect familiarity with the “national security” language in which top ISI officers have long rationalized their support for Islamist fascism. The civil war within the Muslim world has long since become a struggle inside the state apparatus of Pakistan. The Army has become so Islamized that its strategic aims are now interchangeably describable in the rhetoric of Clausewitz or of jihad. The Mumbai attacks and LeT’s rising prominence also represents a fusion of al-Qaeda’s international agenda to long-standing projects of the Pakistani military and ISI.

Mumbai attack suspect

Reaction in-progress

While it is certainly well for commentators such as Gopal to wish that cool heads should prevail in the Government of India’s deliberations regarding its response, her ignoring of the manifestly Islamist character of the attack, the apparent link to LeT, and the internal tensions within the Pakistani state weakens that very plea for moderation and peaceful negotiations. Her commentary leaves unspecified what the purpose of any negotiation might be. After all, it is clear that, as in the past, Pakistan will first try to deny all involvement, then refuse to extradite its citizens to face trial, and, in the end, will release all those it has rounded up under pressure from the U.S. In the course of this response, Pakistan will no doubt take the opportunity to point out the manner in which India has in the past used terror attacks as an occasion to frame inconvenient dissidents and advance repressive purposes. At any rate, it is not clear that Pakistan can be pressured to take on the jihadi groups at all. As Fareed Zakaria’s December 8, 2008 CNN interview with former ISI chief Hamid Gul suggests, the institutional culture of Pakistani military intelligence is so completely Islamicized as to permit a senior spokesman to state publicly, on global media, that 9/11 and the Mumbai attacks were “an inside job” perpetrated by the “Zionists and the neo-cons.” This is from a man who claimed in 2002 that “jihad has the UN sanction,” and who is rumored to have relayed information to the Taliban in advance of U.S. strikes. Given the fact that such opinions can be held by a man in Gul’s position, deepest anxieties are not unwarranted. We might add that Gul’s conspiracy-mongering is not confined to military circles, but is widely represented in the Pakistani media today [for which see, most recently, Kamal Siddiqi’s “Everyone at Fault Except Us” in The News (Islamabad) 12/15/08]. As for Pakistan’s bureaucratic and scientific elite, it will do well to remember that the “father” of the country’s nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, in February 1984 dismissed concerns about Pakistan’s nuclear program as “a figment of the Zionist mind.” Three years later, Khan reversed himself to gleefully announce that Pakistan had succeeded in constructing what he called an “Islamic bomb” [Leonard Weiss, “Pakistan: It’s Déjà vu all Over Again” Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 60:3 (May/June 2004), 55-56].

Gopal’s analysis leaves unspecified a fact crucial for the Left to recognize, that Pakistan is subject to and an exporter of a murderous fascism that goes unopposed by any mass political organization inside the country and which enjoys informal state support. Radical street demonstrations and political organizing in Pakistan have been largely moribund for some decades now, as these have been the near-exclusive domain of reactionary and jingoistic displays, the recent “lawyers’ movement” notwithstanding. The little labor organization that once existed in the country is now utterly dispirited and depoliticized. At the same time, given the permanent political crisis in the region, a circumstance to which all the relevant political actors, not least the NATO commanders in Afghanistan, are reconciled, the demand for the reigning-in of fascism, whether “Hindu” or “Muslim,” serves only to reinforce the status quo. That is, at present this demand only translates into support for the Indian National Congress or the Pakistan People’s Party, political defenders of the wretched cronyism that prevails in both countries.
While Gopal is not wrong to note the crimes of the Bush administration, neither it nor American imperialism is responsible for the attacks on Mumbai. Nor does a recitation of the sordid history of U.S. support for military dictator General Zia ul-Haq’s Islamicization of Pakistan and for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s fundamentally alter the fact that the jihadis have their own deeply reactionary agenda that is wholly irreconcilable with secular democratic politics in South Asia. In this era of political imbecility, it requires emphasizing that opposition to this ISI-jihadi nexus in Pakistan implies no tempering of the critique of the Hindutvavadis or Hindu fascists in India, nor any diminution of their crimes, such as the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid and the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. On the contrary.

At least since the time of Zia, the political order in Pakistan has rested on a despicable alliance between military despotism and Islamicism. This alliance, which has functioned during both civilian and military governments, is responsible for many thousands of corpses of Leftist activists, trade unionists, and intellectuals. Neither the Bush administration nor recent Pakistani leadership, whether that of Musharraf or Zardari, has done anything to disrupt it. Indeed, they are on the side historically of those who perpetrated those crimes. Rather than emphasize this complicity, Gopal reserves her concern for what the Indian government might do. If anything, what we have seen is something that demonstrates the strength of Indian democracy, as with the immediate acceptance of responsibility and resignation by the Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil, Chief Minister of Maharashtra Vilasrao Deshmukh, and Home Minister of Maharashtra R. R. Patil. Her concern to restrain India also sits uneasily with the statements of President Zardari of Pakistan who, writing in the New York Times, seems precisely to pin his hope on leveraging U.S. and Indian pressure to strengthen his hand against the military establishment and the homegrown Islamism that seeks to overthrow his government. Certainly, recognizing Islamist responsibility and ISI complicity implies no support for the opportunistic use to which the Mumbai attacks be put by India’s military and political parties. As its entire long history shows, when the Left evades such facts as ill-suited to its preferred understanding of the political environment, not only does it confess its own helplessness in the face of the present, but threatens in the process to betray — yet again — what should be its own most fundamental commitments.

The possibility of a Left

In urging that the Mumbai attacks are not to be compared to 9/11, Gopal, as we have seen, was not concerned with the actual events themselves so much as the potential Indian response. Instead of strengthening democracy and the struggle against authoritarianism (much less any attempt to criticize and advance the politics of the Left), Gopal proposes something else: “Rather than imitate the US . . . India has the option of turning to its own unique history in seeking an end to the violence.” Invoking Gandhi, she declares, “India has no need to cede its unique cultural resources for the derivative language of 9/11.” To the same purpose Arundhati Roy relates her recognition that “November isn’t September, 2008 isn’t 2001, Pakistan isn’t Afghanistan and India isn’t America.” Like Gopal, Roy dismisses as trifling the “war on TV,” attempting to insert it into the familiar framework for understanding Hindu-Muslim antagonism in South Asia, that of so-called “communal violence” which she duly attributes to the legacy of British colonial mendacity. If indeed Gopal acknowledges any danger to emanate from Pakistan, she leaves it to the American Empire to sort out. As for the political (as opposed to cultural) resources available to India, Gopal declines to specify which of those is up to the task of opposing the fascism on display on 11/26. Should we inquire as to India’s political as opposed to cultural resources, Gopal would offer nothing in reply. But the degeneracy of the Indian left is a rich subject. After all, the Indian Left in recent years has been guilty of active complicity with Islamism as, for instance, in the 2007 expulsion of Bangladeshi asylum seeker, feminist, and critic of Islamism, Taslima Nasreen by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Government of West Bengal.

In the world Guardian writers prefer not to face, the Left is in no position to affect outcomes. Still, acknowledging circumstances and the Left’s exhaustion is the only way forward. For, to invert Marx’s famous thesis, we will not be in position to change the world, until and unless we understand it. And the crucial conditioning factor of current events is the death of the Left. In the here-and-now, it is clear that the political struggle against Islamism in South Asia, as elsewhere, has a military aspect and that any marginally desirable political outcome will have been brought about at least in part by means of the violence of state action. Moreover, as most Leftists would doubtless be loathe to admit, the very prospect of reconstituting Leftist politics in South Asia rides to no small extent on the ability of the U.S. and NATO to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Left has a stake in historical processes that at present it is powerless to affect.

It has long been evident that with respect to “the war on TV” the scattered fragments of the Left can do little more than watch the bullets fly. However, we might even take some comfort in the fact that, once again in the recent elections, most people in Pakistan rejected the appeal of the religious parties. Despite the prevailing depoliticization, many recognized that they too have stakes in the struggle against Islamism, and did not allow their discontent with the status quo to lead to a reconciliation with it. The Left ought to attend more closely to the dilemma the Pakistani people are forced to negotiate on account of a failed politics, i.e. a choice between two right-wing alternatives. Certainly, as has been shown here, anti-imperialism in our time has become a smokescreen that obscures more than it reveals. It alone offers no way forward. While we cannot contemplate without horror an Islamist victory in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Kashmir. At the same time, it is impossible to imagine its defeat at the hands of such “enemies” as it now faces. That is, in present circumstances the “War on Terror” is no more horrific to contemplate than is the peace to be made with it. If, rather than railing against or rallying on behalf of one or another right-wing politics, the Left would be complicit with neither barbarous war nor rotten peace, it will have to subject itself to searching critical reflection. Though as “a newspaper of record” the Guardian will continue documenting atrocities symptomatically expressive of the ongoing political regression like the attacks on Mumbai, it will do so without the critical awareness that this is what it’s doing.

This German propaganda poster (circa 1944) reads in part: "Who gets the wealth that is produced in India? The British Empire. It is all sent there and is not used for the India’s benefit! Britain has ruled India for 200 years and still the Indian poor are dying of hunger."

Let’s begin with Peter Schjeldahl in the June issue of the New Yorker: “There is something nightmarish about Jeff Koons.”

In a recent exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA), Jeff Koons received a well-attended mid-career survey of his work. Surrounded by two-story high white walls, the twenty-eight years of Koons’s art surveyed in the exhibit didn’t present anything to disturb our peaceful slumber. Even the rather lurid 1991 photograph of Ilona’s asshole, does not give us much pause.

Across the Atlantic, however, Koons’s work has caused a national controversy in France. Seventeen of his sculptures are currently installed at the Château de Versailles, the residence and political headquarters of the absolutist French monarchy for over a century. The playful juxtapositions of unquestionably post-modern works of art with King Louis XVI’s rococo style rooms demand a historical consideration of — and controversy over — socio-political and artistic developments between the time of Louis XVI’s reign at Versailles and that of Koons’s work.

Some responses to the exhibition have met its seeming provocation with stiff opposition. Although the opulence of Koons’s sculptures makes them seem well-suited for display in Versailles rooms, the exhibition outraged nationalist and conservative groups. After unsuccessful efforts to cancel the exhibition, over two-dozen members of the “National Union of Writers of France” showed up and protested at Versailles on opening day. The chairman of the group publicly declared the exhibition to be “truly sullying of the most sacred aspects of our heritage and identity,” and “an outrage to Marie Antoinette.” This kind of historical nostalgia — or better, amnesia — is representative of the Right’s desire to entirely forget and deny the social transformations that proceeded from the French Revolution. For the Right, the ghost of the Revolution appears again, after so many attempts at an exorcism, with Koons leading the séance.

In Jeff Koons at Versailles, the sculptures are conspicuously selected for display in Les appartements du Roi (King’s apartments) and Les appartements de la Reine (Queen’s apartments). As the sepulcher of the French monarchy’s works of art, Versailles, with its 2000 acres, is one of the worlds most visited historic monuments (nearly 5 million visitors a year). With an emphasis on the history of the French Revolution, visitors are reminded by Versailles tour guides of what Versailles once was: the headquarters of a now outdated form of political life that dominated Europe for over five centuries. In Chicago, MCA visitors were more inclined to consider Koons’s work for their contemporary relevance and vitality, as already well-established within the canon of art. The exhibition at Versailles, however, is an invitation to contemplate correspondences between the history —of art and society— represented by the odd coupling of Versailles rooms and Koons sculptures.

A series of tongue-in-cheek gestures abound throughout the installations: a marble self-portrait bust of Koons stands in the same room that houses baroque and rococo style statues, respectively, of Louis XIV and Louis XVI; a plexiglass encased display of vacuum cleaners accompanies the portraits of the royal women, and stands in front of a Marie Antoinette painting in the queens antechamber. Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), a decorative rococolike sculpture with shades of white and gold, in the middle of the Venus Salon, accompanies dark marble walls and columns of the 1660s, busts of Roman Emperors, and a seven-foot tall painting of the Sun King.

When contemplating Balloon Dog (1999-2000), one can imagine it being modeled after a “Toys R Us” inflatable collectible enlarged to the size of a classical equestrian sculpture. This purple “Trojan horse,” as Koons himself nicknamed it, provocatively sits in the Hercules Drawing Room, the same room that was used for receptions of the representatives of the Estates-General in 1789. Of course, the convening of the Estates-General in 1789 paved the way to the revolt of the Third Estate, and the revolutionary actions that put an end to the French Monarchy. What conclusions do visitors make when they see Koons’s chromium stainless steel Balloon Dog in the Salon d’Hercules as their tour guide relays that fateful moment? Those representatives of the third Estate — can we imagine how they would have reacted?

In the Queen’s apartment, next to the bed last occupied by Marie Antoinette, and where the would-be inheritors of the throne were born, stands Koons’s Large Vase of Flowers (1991), a polychrome wood spring bouquet. The garish middle-class aesthetics of the flowers clashes with the flower-covered decor of the rooms. The oversized flowers, however, allow you to study the peculiarities of the sculpture’s forms. When seen from up-close the flowers have grotesque details, genitals with STD-like lumps and ass-hole like shapes. An awkward, hyper-sentimental gesture for the queen who spent seven years without being able to consummate her marriage to Louis XVI.

In the same tradition of Duchamp and Warhol, Jeff Koons excels in being both an iconographic and an iconoclastic artist. Like Duchamp, Koons manages to remove —and transform— the function of ordinary objects. Like Warhol, he succeeds in producing objects-de-art out of the immense reservoir of cultural images. Duchamp, it has been said, wanted “to put art back in the service of the mind” in response to the predominance of “retinal” art of the turn of the 20th century. The work of Jeff Koons can be considered a synthesis of these two artistic tendencies, unraveling the relationship that “retinal” art —which seeks to cause visual pleasure— might have to art that seeks to nourish the brain.

Rabbit (1986), a stainless steel, all reflecting bunny, standing on a marble pedestal, located at Le Salon de l’Abondance for curiosities and rarities, becomes a different sculpture than when sitting within the white walls of the MCA. In an empty gallery space all that Rabbit reflects is the subject watching it. In the white-walled gallery, Koons’s use of mundane, banal, or immediately recognizable —kitschy— cultural imagery is an “easy” mechanism used to reel in the viewing subject.

When Rabbit reflects a room in Versailles, contemplating it becomes more complex. For it forcefully introduces a third element, the historical. This kind of aesthetic experience triggers both a kind of personal and sociopolitical recognition. As Schiller argued in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, art ought to contain a physical quality that can directly relate to “our sensual condition,” our reason, and our will. Only an aesthetic experience, argues Schiller, is able to cultivate the totality of our sensuous and intellectual abilities.

Unlike Duchamp’s or Warhol’s work, Koons’s work can be admired for its technical precision, and labor-intensive industrial characteristics; some of Koons’s sculptures can take up to a decade to complete, which is comparable to the craftsmanship necessary to complete many of the permanent works in Versailles. As visitors exit the Queen’s apartments, they encounter a 3,500 pound stainless steel magenta/gold Hanging Heart sold for a record-setting $23.6 million in 2007. The high chromium stainless steel surface of the 9-foot tall Hanging Heart is coated in more than ten layers of paint, and took over 6,000 man hours to make. This mammoth heart-shaped pendant is the most ambivalent of all Koons’s gestures. Is the heart in memory of Marie Antoinette? Or was it taken triumphantly from her breast? Are we to mourn her death, or are we to rejoice in it?

All these juxtapositions seem to lead us back to one question: what is the significance of the French Revolution today? How do we understand Versailles, the Rights of Man, the elimination of the French Monarchy, the beheading of the King and Queen?

The Koons exhibit illustrates that our present is still haunted by the still-present spectre of the French Revolution in our lives. The ideals of the Enlightenment, now 200- 300 years old, which so profoundly influenced the American and French Revolutions, are undoubtedly expressed in the work of Jacques Louis David, for example. In the same manner, Koons’s work also represents a particular point of view regarding the historical trajectory of humanity.

What is so nightmarish, then, about Koons’s work (along with postmodern thought more generally), what comes into relief in the palace, is its ambivalence toward modern society — seeking to neither criticize it nor celebrate it, merely using it as content.

But at the same time the Versailles exhibit exemplifies how we cannot deny the modern subject’s judgment.

As self-conscious “moderns”, we must proceed to make a judgment, not only about Marie Antoinette’s fate and the French Revolution, but also about our present. Considering the economic conditions, the social transformations, and the technological advances that have made such an exhibition possible, what judgment do we make about the progression — or regression — of the project set in motion by the French Revolution?

What can the Versailles installations of Jeff Koons’s work illuminate about Modern Art’s historical development, about the history between Jacques Louis David and Koons, and thus the modern history of humanity? Thinking through these questions is central to understanding the extent to which we face today, in art and society, continuity with or change from the political ideals that brought about the emergence of the modern.

Koons’s work, when comfortably sitting in the Versailles rooms, eclipses everything in between now and then; it eclipses the French Revolution, it eclipses Delacroix, Manet, Picasso, Pollock and Rothko, either by clumsily ignoring it, or by consciously denying the rise and development of Modernism. What is so nightmarish, perhaps, is that if his work really does treat the enlightenment project as irrelevant, its purported ambivalence is, in a way, no different than the right-wing French nationalists protest of his work outside of Versailles.

In the last paragraph of Hal Foster’s introduction to The Anti-Aesthetic he characterizes our historical moment as one that treats the project of modernity, along with the “adventures of the aesthetic,” and the “critique of the world as it is,” as an outdated utopian dream: “we have to consider that this aesthetic space too has eclipsed — or rather, that its criticality is largely illusory (and so instrumental).” Instead, “in the face of a culture of reaction on all sides, a practice of resistance is needed.” But, this not need be the case. For thinking about Koons’s work reminds us that that would mean relinquishing history from the hands of humanity.

The alternative would be to agree with Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China, who in the 1950s visited France and was asked about the impact of the French Revolution, and said, “it’s too early to tell.