Messages in a bottle: An introduction to the Walter Held – Max Horkheimer exchange
Lukas Hedderich and Ethan Linehan
Platypus Review 171 | November 2024
WHAT IS THE ROLE of the intellectual in a revolutionary working-class movement? How does the separation of theory from practice affect the development and utility of Marxism? And how did the twin phenomena of the Frankfurt School and Trotskyism succeed — or fail — in addressing the tasks of their historical moment? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Walter Held’s 1939 essay “Critical theory without political practice?”[1]
Walter Held (1910–1941), originally named Walter Heinz Epe, was a German Marxist whose political education came in the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic. In 1932 he was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany for “Trotskyist” sympathies. He fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power, eventually settling into exile in Norway. While in exile, he served as a secretary and propagandist for the Left Opposition, and in 1933 he joined Trotsky in advocating for the establishment of a new International. Throughout the 1930s, Held labored tirelessly to rally support for the Fourth International among dissident socialists in Northern Europe. Having grown frustrated with the indefinite political inactivity his refugee status imposed upon him in Scandinavia, he first attempted to get to the United States in 1938 but was denied the requisite paperwork for three years. In early 1941, with plans to join the political activities of American Trotskyists, he attempted to cross the Soviet Union by train, intending to reach the Far East and sail across the Pacific, but was detained by border guards and executed at the age of 30.[2]
In the aforementioned essay, Held takes to task what he perceives as Horkheimer’s reluctance to engage in political practice despite the latter’s profound theoretical insights. Horkheimer reproaches philosophers for failing to move beyond abstract theory to effect real change, yet he himself remains ensconced in abstraction, divorced from the immediate struggles of the day. This inconsistency, according to Held, undermines the emancipatory potential of critical theory. It fails to translate its critical insights into meaningful action, so the accusation goes. The proletariat, despite experiencing the injustice and unfreedom of life under capitalism, automatically possesses neither the correct knowledge of their situation nor the means to transform society. For these, they have need of theoretical guidance and political leadership. But Horkheimer’s separation of the theoretician from the activist leads to a disconnect between theory and practice. Critical theory becomes a methodology that is isolated from the very social forces it aims to liberate. Marxism is made sterile in Horkheimer’s hands by his deferral of political activity. “The radical politician,” Held says, “is the true inheritor of radical philosophy, which is sublated and preserved in him.” It follows, then, that Horkheimer is a reversion to mere philosophizing — a retreat in the heat of battle to ground already captured.
Held holds up Marx and Engels as counterexamples to Horkheimer. Despite their intense theoretical rigor, Marx and Engels were deeply embedded within the working-class movement and sought as participants within it to dialectically relate theory to practice. By idealizing the separation of the two, Horkheimer falls below a level of consciousness previously reached. For Held, Marxism is essentially a guide to action, and the truth of its theories must be verified in practice. In so many words, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School are encouraged to purge any anti-Marxist tendencies in their own ranks and to become theoreticians for the Fourth International.
The Frankfurt School immediately became aware of Held’s essay. In the summer of its publication, it was disseminated between colleagues at the Institute for Social Research. The scholar Helmut Dahmer suggests that Franz Neumann likely sent it to Leo Löwenthal,[3] who passed it on to Horkheimer with an inquiry whether the Held essay should be reproduced in the pages of the Journal for Social Research. In a letter to Löwenthal dated July 20, 1939, Max Horkheimer writes, “It seems that we differ greatly when it comes to judging this essay. I think it’s by far the best I’ve ever read about us. It is based on a thorough study of our material. The critical comments, which are spot-on, seem to me to be more of a promotion than a malicious attack. It is precisely because I believe that the publication of this work will arouse interest that I don’t want to publish it.”[4]
Horkheimer’s point would not have been lost on his colleagues, but a century later it is not immediately obvious why he would have received Held’s criticisms so gleefully and at the same time not want them to receive a wider readership. After all, the kinship between Horkheimer and Held is more than theoretical. Practically speaking, Horkheimer’s directorship of the Institute imposed a level of rigor reminiscent of a sectarian Leninist organization. As Detlev Claussen observed in his biography of Adorno, “Right up to and including their individual behavior, the debates among the institute members remind us of the wretched history of radical leftwing organizations. Horkheimer himself had led the institute like a leftwing splinter group after taking over the directorship in 1930, and the same tone was maintained in the radical writings he produced in emigration.[5]” Even Horkheimer himself half-jokingly said in his inaugural address that his tenure would be a “dictatorship.”[6]
The historically conditioned approach of Horkheimer’s circle is expressed in a piece like “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), a programmatic statement meant to guide the Institute for Social Research. Held’s essay, then, demonstrates his contemporaneous recognition of the Frankfurt School’s complete withdrawal from all pretense of political involvement, which is the legacy of the Frankfurt School as we know it today. After the crisis of World War I and the closing of the revolutionary window of 1917–21, capitalist society reinvented itself. The “administered society” that emerged as the triadic new order of fascism, Stalinism, and the Western welfare state supplanted 19th-century liberal capitalism. Consequently, the older political tradition initiated by Lenin and Luxemburg, and upheld by Trotsky and his followers, found itself decreasingly capable of transforming the world. In turn, the decline in opportunities for emancipatory politics reduced the clarity with which such political ideologies could understand the world. The Marxists that founded the Frankfurt School self-consciously embarked upon their endeavor in a moment of retreat. As the horizons for Marxism diminished practically, they made the Sisyphean effort to sustain Marxism in theory only. The problem of capitalism had become more diffuse and obscure in Horkheimer’s time than it had been in Marx and Engels’s time (this is exponentially true of our own day and its opacity compared to Horkheimer’s). This is the meaning of a term in critical theory called “regression”: problems are not posed to consciousness either theoretically or practically as acutely as they once were. Every 20th-century radical had the duty to reflect for himself on the difficulties of proceeding straightforwardly from history by building on the basis of the past, without recognizing the deep regression that inevitably throws him back onto preceding tasks. That Held in some sense recognized the impossibility of the Frankfurt School’s task as clearly as they themselves did is remarkable.
The “Trotskyism” of which Held was a partisan was one response to regression; the critical theory of the Frankfurt School was another. Both Trotskyism and the Frankfurt School, then, are products of failure. They continue to be read today because of their lucidity about the stakes of such a monumental defeat that still echoes into the present, and for their valiant efforts to not cede ground theoretically and practically that it took years in the preceding century to gain. Both Trotskyism and the Frankfurt School provide guideposts to the problems posed by Marxism that have been all but obliterated in historical memory. Both traditions claim to preserve Marxism in ways that other tendencies do not. They point back through the historical wreckage to the deeper problems that have been forgotten. They continue to make people uncomfortable because they put their finger on a wound in history that will not heal.
Critical theory, for better or for worse, understood its own state of fragmentation. Most flavors of Trotskyism were less than clear about this. The incomprehension of regression implicates Held’s essay in every line. At the heart of the issue is Held’s assumption that the separation of the theoretician from the activist is a voluntary choice made by individuals, rather than a crisis imposed upon them by the regressed historical situation. It is probable that Horkheimer’s reservations about republishing Held’s essay took into consideration the fact that any efforts to heroically leap over the fissure between theory and practice only entrenches their estrangement. Held threatens to treat “not the real conditions but a mere effort of will as the driving force of the revolution,” a danger of which Marx once accused a minority faction of Communist League members.[7] Held correctly criticizes someone like Karl Kautsky in his period of renegacy for degrading Marxist theory to vulgar practice instead of elevating practice to the level of theory. But the degradation owing to abstention was matched by the degradation of theory that participation in the political struggle seemed to require by the late 1930s.
Held cannot abide any intellectual that would consider himself above class and party. This is the force behind his reminder that Marx and Engels were simultaneously first-rate theoreticians and members of party activities who disciplined their intellectual contributions to the needs of the party. But he does not see that Horkheimer very much understands his isolation as the double-edged sword that it is. Held also omits the fact that Marx and Engels were not party men in perpetuity. On the contrary, in the early 1850s they consciously and excitedly entered into a period of intense intellectual activity in a moment of profound reaction and defeat. Their declaration that revolution was not imminent earned them scorn from their comrades and fueled speculations about their commitments to the cause. This is the time in which, as Held derisively puts it, “Marx and Engels also found time to leisurely muse over primitive society, matriarchy, and the history of the family and private property.” The desperation of the late 1930s necessarily meant hostility towards theory, aimed at those who would muse over merely theoretical questions. Marx in his most desperate hour, by contrast, was “firmly convinced that [his] theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than [his] meddling with associations which had now had their day on the Continent,” associations of parties whose “meetings, resolutions, and transactions . . . since 1852 belong to the realm of fantasy” and of “revolution-mongering.”[8] Held is not wrong to suggest that the abstention from the political struggle for socialism can result in a degradation in thought. Thinkers may become “deformed,” Adorno says, by their lot in the division between mental and physical labor.[9] But thinkers cannot “by sheer will abolish” this separate existence imposed on them by contemporary society.[10]
Held’s criticism surely infiltrated the consciousness of Horkheimer and Adorno in the very same year, as is clear from their posthumously published notes for a draft of a new Communist Manifesto (1848), dated October 25, 1939. There, they bemoaned the gulf between the desire for a subjectivity required for revolution and the undeniable objective possibilities for it: to them, it was not true in 1918 and “is even less true today” that “the world is not yet ripe for socialism.”[11] In contemplating their role, they agreed that “it is extremely easy to present what the proletariat would need to do,” because “if the world were not covered by a veil of blindness, the proletariat could immediately set things right.” However, to flatly demand revolution as the goal would amount to “sectarianism.”[12] Rather, they decided that “we must remain outside; we cannot identify ourselves with the proletariat,” an identity which otherwise might dissolve the critical distance needed to be of most use to them.[13] The next month, in incomplete notes, Adorno claims the following: “Everyone says that Marxism is finished. In contrast, we say, no, it is not finished; rather, we must stay true to it. But if one truly remains faithful to Marxism, that means continuing the dialectical process.”[14] He goes on to add that fidelity to Marxism is the priority. Staying true to theory would be in service to saying what concrete change is needed, as well as to confronting the political and theoretical reification that blocks such change.
Such thoughts remained in the foreground as a continued concern for years to come. Consider, for example, the dialogue between Horkheimer and Adorno from 1956, published as Towards a New Manifesto. There, Adorno and Horkheimer worry that the entire rationale for theory seems to have disappeared in part because the party no longer exists; theory’s only use in contemporary politics is to gild “either reformism or quietism.”[15] Horkheimer puzzles whether the political question is still relevant at a time when you cannot act politically and revolution has become such an unlikely prospect.[16] Adorno suggests that to propagate “a communist theory” in such conditions “is really an absurdity,” because its object is “something that no longer exists.”[17] What passes for Marxism in their time “no longer has anything in common with Marx,” or “with the most advanced class consciousness,” because it is “no longer a function of the proletariat.”[18] For such musings, they are well aware that they could be accused of simply being a talk-shop in a world where disasters daily befall mankind that deserved an urgent response. In the intervening years, Horkheimer must have processed Held’s exhortation that the Frankfurt School take a less ambiguous position on the Soviet Union, for he asks Adorno, “What use is a theory that does not tell us how to behave towards the Russians or the United States?”[19] They also concede that to “formulate some guiding political principles today” is completely inappropriate given their lack of intimacy with the politics on the ground.[20] They too recognize the disconnect between themselves and Marx, agreeing that they cannot fall back on the concept of practice that was still available to him.
Horkheimer belatedly takes up the pressures from the Helds of the world: “What these people want from us is partly pernicious, partly well-intentioned. It is the belief that the intellectual must be someone who can really help. It is not enough to say ‘I am just thinking . . .’”[21] Adorno and Horkheimer decide that the intellectual in a moment of reaction and low prospects for change has recourse to working in what they call “a curious waiting process.”[22] That is to say, the radical intellectual today finds himself in the position of treating “theory as a message in a bottle,” as a tool to be kept “in stock.”[23] Held says that “the place of the theorist is at the head of the revolutionary party”; here, Lenin and the Bolsheviks are the clear contrast with Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. Recognizing their dire straits, but also recognizing the opportunity to leverage the absence of a politics that could really change the world, Adorno reminds his colleague that “when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto there was no party either. It is not always necessary to join up with something already in existence.”[24] Both are optimistic that the time will come again when theory can be of use if only the “breathing space” for critical reflection can stave off the reifying pressures to act for action’s sake.[25] In a twist that Held would no doubt have appreciated, Horkheimer says the claim that new constellations of political activity not beholden to the old rot are possible “has echoes of Trotsky.”[26]
The merit of Held’s intervention is its demonstration that in the 1930s it was clear to both Trotskyists and the Frankfurt School they speak the same mutually intelligible language and descend from the same tradition. In stark contrast, today’s heirs of these traditions are incapable of understanding one another. Academics broadly aligned with critical theory frequently deny any connection to a more explicitly Leninist politics, while sectarians with Marxist roots dismiss critical theory as irrelevant or disconnected from Marxism. The latter are likely to echo Held’s polemic on this score, which, in one of the earliest known critiques of academicism in the Frankfurt School, pillories the critical theorist who “fails to shed the skin of the bourgeois professor” and “remains in the clouds of philosophy.” Held accuses the editors of and contributors to the Journal for Social Research of placing “greater value on abstract methods than on engaging with the concrete issues of the present,” arguing instead that “Marxist philosophy is essentially a guide to action.” What can be observed clearly in this chastisement is that the actionist critique of mere theorizing that we associate with Stalinism and Maoism in the 1960s is actually a repetition of the critique of those who stepped out of the line of fire in the 1930s, the very period when Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique was first formulated.
The crux of an intervention like Held’s is this: can we accept that the link between theory and practice, which formerly could be taken for granted, has, for some time now, been severed? What if, for the time being, Marxism is only able to be a guide to thought and not action? Does that render Marxism useless? On the contrary, perhaps it is as Horkheimer suggests, that even if the party no longer exists, the fact that the preservers of critical thought are here still has a certain value.[27] The practitioners of critical theory, whom Held criticized for their failure to connect theory to practice, clung to the hope that “even if [their] theory doesn’t directly feed into practice, and even if the link with practice is utterly opaque, it will nevertheless benefit practice somehow or other.”[28] Despite the highly mediated relationship between intellectuals and the proletariat, “it might become evident much later,” Horkheimer wrote, “that some of their ideas, as well as their memory of the materialist stance aiming at a free humanity, are not entirely worthless.”[29] It remains worthwhile to consider bourgeois problems of art, literature, and philosophy, “even where their connection to the question of revolution is entirely opaque” because “what comes out of this need not be lost.”[30]
The included essay by Held is the fruit of a collaborative effort. Lukas Hedderich undertook the lion’s share of the work, performing the initial rough translation from German into English. Ethan Linehan then refined the draft, improving its readability and the conveyance of the author’s meaning into the target language. Where Held references Horkheimer, some quotes are available in well-known English translations, while others required our own translation. In the original text, Held underscores two quotes from Horkheimer as especially important, which have been duly noted. Contextual footnotes are included for figures of lesser renown. Special gratitude is offered to Spencer Leonard for reading a draft of our translation. It was greatly improved by his comments. Any remaining issues are our own.
By making this work accessible to an English-speaking readership, we are facilitating a broader understanding of the foundational debates in Marxism and encouraging a re-examination of the fraught relationship between Trotskyism and the Frankfurt School. But this historical document is not only of archival significance. Held’s is a critique that remains relevant today because the disconnection between theory and practice persists. Grappling with the import of Marx’s 11th thesis is a challenge that remains as urgent today as it was in Held’s time. |P
[1] Translated into English and included in this issue. See <https://platypus1917.org/2024/11/01/critical-theory-without-political-practice-an-evaluation-of-the-journal-for-social-research>
[2] For more, see Pierre Broué’s biographical note, Revolutionary History 1, no. 2 (Summer 1988), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/1930s/held01.htm>.
[3] Helmut Dahmer, Freud, Trotzki und der Horkheimer-Kreis (Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2019), 492.
[4] Max Horkheimer, Letter 481, in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 16, Briefwechsel 1937–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995), 618ff; Dahmer, Freud, Trotzki und der Horkheimer-Kreis, 490–92 [our translation].
[5] Detlev Claussen, Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 223.
[6] Max Horkheimer, “The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research” (1931), in Between Philosophy and Social Science, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 11.
[7] Karl Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne” (1853), in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 11 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 402–03.
[8] Karl Marx, “Letter to Ferdinand Freiligrath, February 29, 1860,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 41 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010), 82–84.
[9] Theodor Adorno, “Resignation” (1969), in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 289.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Max Horkheimer, “Diskussionen über Sprache und Erkenntnis, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, politische Aspekte Des Marxismus,” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, Nachgelassene Schriften 1931–1949 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1987), 514 [our translation].
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., 524.
[15] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 2019), 52.
[16] Ibid., 25.
[17] Ibid., 65.
[18] Ibid., 67.
[19] Ibid., 60.
[20] Ibid., 43.
[21] Ibid., 60.
[22] Ibid., 62.
[23] Ibid., 67.
[24] Ibid., 70.
[25] Ibid., 63.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid., 53.
[28] Ibid., 68.
[29] Max Horkheimer, “Bürgerliche Welt,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 12, 332 [our translation].
[30] Ibid.
