by Gill Hands
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL
The Frankfurt School is a rather informal term used to describe a school of Marxist thought that evolved from studies into philosophy, social theory and social research at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. The term refers to those who were actually affiliated to the Institute and those who were influenced by them, although they never used this term to describe themselves. The Frankfurt School was one of the early examples of what is sometimes called Western Marxism, in order to differentiate it from the use of Marxist thought developed in the Soviet Union and China.
The Frankfurt School began in the 1920s, but it became more important in 1930 when Max Horkheimer became the director of the institute and it became a focal point for dissident Marxists. They believed that many of the Marxists of their day were only parroting a narrow range of Marx’s ideas in order to prove orthodox Marxist-Leninist ideas and ignoring many of Marx’s original works and ideas.
They were greatly influenced by the fact that, although there had been a large socialist movement in Germany and much of Europe, the predicted communist revolution had not occurred and fascism had taken popular hold instead. They believed Marx had not been able to foresee the social conditions that were occurring and they drew on the works of other thinkers to fill in the gaps of Marx’s thought. They were also influenced by the publication of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which had only recently been published. The rise of the Nazis meant that many of the philosophers of The Frankfurt School were forced out of Germany in the 1930s and moved to New York, returning to Germany after the Second World War.
The Frankfurt School philosophers are well known for use of critical theory, as defined by Horkheimer in his 1937 essay Traditional and Critical Theory. In its original form, it was a social theory that went towards critiquing society as a whole in order to bring about desired changes and was a development on the Marxist idea of historical materialism. It attempted to integrate aspects of economics, social science, history, politics, anthropology and psychology. The Frankfurt School philosophers were interested in the role of ideology, hegemony and false consciousness in society and the way that the culture of capitalism perpetuated itself through the media. They were particularly interested in the role of language in this context. The study of media, art, film and other cultural systems from a Marxist perspective is often called cultural Marxism, and this aspect of the Frankfurt School’s work influenced the thinkers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies based in Birmingham, who were influential in the 1960s and 70s.
The most well-known philosophers of the Frankfurt School who have written extensively on Marx are:
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) who with Theodor Adorno (1903–69) wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944. In this they put forward the idea that mass culture is used by capitalist society as a way of getting capitalist ideals into the unconscious minds of society. In this way the members of society become passive consumers and lose their individuality. Society becomes a homogenized mass.
Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) wrote Eros and Civilization in 1955 in which he attempted to synthesize the ideas of Marx with those of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. He also wrote One-Dimensional Man in 1964. Marcuse believed that mass communication and consumerism had an insidious hold over the minds of people, which amounted to a form of totalitarianism. ‘False needs’ are set up by the consumer society through advertising and we are all then in the grip of an all-powerful consumer state that permeates our thoughts and turns us into cogs in the capitalist machine. Marcuse believed that by these means, the working class are sucked into the cycle of production and consumption, which works as an ideological force to blind them to the fact they are working to support the capitalist status quo. The title of the book comes from Marcuse’s belief that thought becomes one-dimensional as critical thinking and opposition are leached away by consumerist society.
Jürgen Habermas (1929–) is a German philosopher who studied under Adorno and Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School in the 1950s. He later disagreed with many of the theories of the school, believing them to be too critical of modern culture, over-sceptical and pessimistic. His thinking is often called neo-Marxist and comes from the tradition of critical theory. He is mainly noted for his discussion of the idea that the public sphere of modern society does not allow a genuine democratic debate. This was first brought to the public view in his work The Theory of Communicative Action in 1981. Although critical of modern society, he is in disagreement with many postmodern thinkers who see the world in a fragmented way. This is discussed further in the section on postmodernism.
THE PRAXIS SCHOOL
This was a school of Marxist, humanist philosophy that began in Yugoslavia in the 1960s and began as an attempt to free Marxist thought from the narrow confines of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist thought that was emphasized by the government of the time. The chief figures of this school of thought were Milan Kangrga, Gajo Petroviç and Mihailo Markoviç, who published a Marxist journal Praxis in the 1960s and 70s. This became well known in international academic Marxist circles as a leading journal of Marxist theory.
They believed Leninism and Stalinism were not true to the original works of Marx and had been distorted for political purposes. They emphasized the works of the young Marx, where humanism was stressed and believed these to be the ‘real’ works of Marx. They were critical of existing communist regimes and were an influence on Western Marxism, stressing humanist aspects of Marx.
ANALYTICAL MARXISM
Also known as ‘no bullshit’ Marxism, this was a school of thought that came about as a result of George A. Cohen’s book Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence in 1978. This took the unfashionable academic view that historical materialism is a valid system but looked at it in a new way, using techniques derived from deconstruction. Analytical Marxism was a popular school of thought in the 1980s and Cohen published two other books: History, Labour and Freedom in 1988 and If You’re an Egalitarian How Come You’re So Rich? in 2000. Analytical Marxism has largely disappeared as a school of thought in the twenty-first century although it still has some influence.
STRUCTURAL MARXISM
Structural Marxism is a description of the approach to Marxism put forward by French philosophy professor Louis Althusser (1918–90). He was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s, during a time of great political unrest in France. Althusser did not believe that there was such a thing as fixed human nature, or as Marx would put it, the ‘species being’, which could explain social change. In an extension of the ideas of Gramsci, he proposed that there are ideological structures in society which people comply with; but where he differs from Gramsci is that he believes these forces are not necessarily the tools of capitalism but have an autonomous material existence.
The concept of ideology and the related idea of hegemony have been largely rejected by postmodernist and post-Marxist thinkers as being too simplistic. They believe that in the postmodern world people are quite capable of seeing through media manipulation and of projecting their own interpretations onto media output. But what exactly is the postmodern world and how does it relate to Marx’s philosophy?
POSTMODERN AND POST-MARXIST THOUGHT
Postmodernism is a term that is often used but is very difficult to explain simply; even those who are described as postmodernist thinkers cannot agree on exactly what the concept means. The basic core of postmodern thought is that in an attempt to understand the complexities of the modern world:
it is sceptical
it questions the ideas of absolute knowledge and absolute truth
it sees the world as ‘fractured’
it relies heavily on the meaning of language.
Many postmodern thinkers would argue that we live in a new kind of world in the twenty-first century. We have gone beyond the ‘modernist’ view of the world that developed out of the ideas of the enlightenment with its belief in rationality, objectivity and progres
s.
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Insight
Modernism as a cultural movement came about after the Industrial Revolution when the ideas, traditions and rational certainty of the age of enlightenment were questioned, including art, architecture, literature and religious faith.
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The rapid rise of new technology and the economic conditions of our age have meant that society has become decentralized and dominated by mass media. It has become a world that has gone beyond the modern and into the realm of the postmodern.
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Insight
For a deeper understanding of postmodernist theory I recommend reading Understand Post modernism.
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It is not possible to detail all the conflicting theories that surround postmodernism in this chapter, but I have summarized some of the main theories of the philosophers that are relevant to the way Marx and Marxism are perceived in the postmodern world:
Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was a French literary critic and philosopher. His writings are notoriously difficult to understand and he is best known for his development of the idea of deconstruction: a blend of philosophy, linguistics and literary analysis. This questions the true meaning of texts and shows their inherent instability. He believed that language was a slippery and suspect medium that could never represent the ‘truth’ and that there is no form of truth in any kind of academic analysis, whether economic, political or philosophical. All interpretations and narratives have equal validity. In his book Spectres of Marx, published in 1994, he put forward the idea that Marx’s ideas should be looked at as a moral system and not a scientific one.
Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French cultural theorist and philosopher. His early works were greatly influenced by Marx and were an extension of some of the basic Marxist theories. He agreed that the expansion of capitalism had brought about social change, but he believed that Marx had to be brought up to date to take into account the way consumer society was changing. He believed the world is a now a society of reproduction rather than production. This means that images and information are just as important to the economy as commodities; they have actually become commodities. Like Gramsci, he believed that the cultural superstructure has a power of its own and is not just a reflection of what happens in the economic base. He also believed that Marx’s theories of the modes and relations of production do not take into account the rise of modern consumerism.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924–98) was a French philosopher and literary theorist who wrote The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge in 1979. In this he puts forward the idea that in the postmodern world nobody believes in grand narratives, or meta-narratives as they are sometimes known. Examples of grand narratives include large-scale theories or world philosophies, the view of history as a coherent progression, or the idea that science can know everything or can formulate a grand unified theory of everything. Marx’s historical materialism and economic determinism are grand narratives and so, using Lyotard’s perception of the postmodern world, people are less inclined to believe in Marx’s philosophy and follow his ideas.
Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) and Felix Guattari (1930–92) wrote a book in 1972, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which they argued that capitalism represses individuals and gives them false ‘mediated’ desires which are connected to the production and consumption of goods; this is an extension of the beliefs of the Frankfurt School. Although they were Marxists, their views differed from the classical Marxist view, as they saw class as something of a myth, believing the working class to be a diverse mix of different types of people. They did not believe in a uniform working class that would join together to bring about revolution and saw the classical Marxist view of class as a false view. They believed that under classical Marxism women and ethnic minorities were often marginalized, and in their view class struggle is only one strand of a very complex social structure and not the basis of it. The Frankfurt School thinkers saw the state as a single monolithic entity and believed society had become a homogenous mass of passive consumers. Deleuze and Guattari disagreed with this point of view; for them, society was a diverse mixture of complex individuals and they saw that capitalism was becoming unstable because of its diversity. Their view of the self is a very postmodern one, in that they believe that is not necessary to be stuck with a single identity or fixed self, people have the choice of living out different ‘lives’ and reinventing themselves; they do not have to follow the social ‘rules’
Francis Fukuyama (1952–) is an American political scientist who put forward the idea that we have reached the ‘end of history’ in his book, published in 1992, The End of History and the Last Man. In this he proposes that liberal democracy, as practised in the United States and Britain, is the ultimate form of society, which in some ways seems very similar to the way that Hegel saw Prussian society in the nineteenth century. Fukuyama does not see our society as the final product of the ‘universal mind’; he argues that Western civilization, based on liberal democratic values, fulfils humankind’s needs in economic terms and satisfies our needs for self-esteem and recognition, that we are becoming ‘actualised’. As we saw in Chapter 5, ‘actualisation’ is often used as a term to indicate the opposite of alienation; so in Fukuyama’s view, living in modern Western society is not the alienating experience that Marx believed it to be. At the core of Fukuyama’s theory is his belief that human nature is governed by a desire for recognition. He believed that there was no need for ideological struggle after the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War. However, he has since written that scientific and technological changes may lead to developments in history, so it is not at an end after all. Critics of his theory would point out that although the Cold War has ended, there is no end to conflict between ideologies. There is talk of a new Cold War between Communist North Korea and the Western world and talk of a new nuclear arms race. At present, there are also numerous ongoing ideological clashes, including those between religious groups: Islamic, Jewish and Christian. These have been inflamed by terrorist acts and ideological conflict doesn’t look like it’s going away at present.
POST-MARXISM
Post-Marxism is a term used to describe those who have built theories on those of Marx but have gone further, so that they are outside or beyond what was considered to be Marxist thought. Post-Marxists have moved away from the economic determinism that is implicit in Marx’s work and disagree with his concept of class, but they do believe that there should be solidarity between members of society. Ernesto Laclau (1939–) and Chantal Mouffe (1943–) became the best known of the post-Marxists after the publication of their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics in 1985. In this they analysed classical Marxism but from a postmodern perspective, drawing on theories of language and deconstruction from Derrida and also exploring Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. They believe that social conflicts arise out of ‘antagonisms’ within the hegemony that are difficult to understand because of the complexity of society and the personality. Postmodern thought sees the individual as a series of narratives; for example, Laclau and Mouffe saw that a working-class person is never just a ‘working class’ person. They may be a single parent, from an ethnic minority, a woman and working class all at the same time. Each of these different facets of the personality may be in antagonism, or conflict, according to Laclau and Mouffe. Class is not a unifying structure at all. Everybody has a subjective view of society that depends on their experience; class identity is only a small part of this, so a class-based revolution is bound to fail. Conflicts will always be a part of society and it will always be unstable and changeable but people can group together, despite antagonisms, to take action at a local level.
Post-Marxists believe that the conventional democratic process actually alienates many people and they also believe that the state is always open to corruption, even under communism. They see a form of ‘civil society’ as the way forward, where
people promote their own interests in the marketplace and achieve change by grouping together for local struggle.
Where does Marx fit in?
There is a great deal of argument over whether society has been pushed forward into a new postmodern age or if it is still part of the modernist world. Jürgen Habermas puts forward the idea that we are still living in the last age of the enlightenment, although some people would argue that even the postmodern world is over and we are living in the post-postmodern world. So how is all this relevant to Marx?
Marx was one of the first people to write about ‘modernity’ in a structured way, he documented the rise of technology and the effects of the Industrial Revolution. He also helped us to realize that society is not always as it seems. In this way he inspired many of the thinkers of the postmodern world, but their thought has gone beyond his and they have disagreed with some parts of his philosophy, especially his view that the history of the world is one of class struggle. There is a great deal of debate about the role of class in the world of today. Other groupings of people, along lines of ethnic identity, gender or age, for example, are seen as just as important as class. If there is no such thing as class, in the way that Marx described it, and no oppression by another class, what does that mean to the idea of working-class solidarity? Is there any way that revolution can come about when society seems to be made up of diverse fractured selves without any agreed values? Can the world be transformed by one belief system that attempts to find a solution to all the world’s problems? Postmodern thinkers do not believe that there is a ‘theory of everything’; Marxism is just one of numerous alternative ways of looking at the world – a subjective, grand narrative.
