The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism

2. Marxism "or" the Frankfurt School?

2 Marxism the Frankfurt School? Marxism as Method This book begins with four essays that address different critiques of Marxism -even from within Marxism itself. I begin with readings of other authors as a way of establishing my own argument as counterpoint. Each of these four chapters deals in one way or another with my overall thesis: Marxism can be invigorated only by rebuffing both orthodox Marxism and orthodox anti-Marxism, a task best accomplished by adapting Marxist critical theory creatively to present circumstances. Orthodox Marxists ensure Marxist obsolescence by insisting on Marx's imperviousness to revisions (e.g., Slater in the present chapter). Other Marxists translate Marxism into a positivist science, reducing it to scientism (e.g., Wright in chap. 3). Orthodox anti-Marxists who dominate American sociological theory sociologize Marx, spuriously assimilating him to the canon of bourgeois sociological theory (e.g., the main project ofAlexander, discussed in chap. 4). Finally, certain postmodernists (chap. 5) abandon Marxism altogether , regarding it as the spent passion of nineteenth-century ideologues . These essays are directed at the Left's Right, which is gathering momentum today as people celebrate the supposed end of ideology, 14 15 MARXISM "OR" THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL? contestation, conflict. I argue that to be a Marxist requires more than simple self-identification. Indeed, one must insist on the plausibility of a Marxism that refuses to take for granted its own unproblematic relationship to Marx's texts-in fact, to textuality in general. As I shall argue in this chapter, to be Marxist is continually to interrogate Marxist belief and disbelief. My discussion of Slater and Connerton suggests some of the problems involved in appraising the Frankfurt school's Marxism. I submit that Marxism is a particular version of critical theory and argue for its essential flexibility and adaptability. Slater dismisses the Frankfurt theorists as leftist traitors, where Connerton rejects them as theoretical failures. Both arguments are exemplary attacks on critical theory and need to be addressed. Since the major works of members of the so-called Frankfurt school began to be published in English in the early 1970s, critical debates have flourished in England and North America about the brand of the Frankfurt Marxism. Some sympathetic critics have taken the position that the members of the Frankfurt school advanced one step beyond traditional Marxism, a view often associated with appraisals of Habermas's work (Wellmer 1971; Schroyer 1973). Others (Jacoby 1975b) argue that the Frankfurt critical theory was an ingenious deepening of categories implicit in Marx, an interpretive line associated generally with the political scholarship of the Telos group. Unsympathetic critics have been equally quick off the mark in assessing Frankfurt Marxism . Here there have also been two prevailing schools of thought: one views Frankfurt theory skeptically through the lenses of analytic philosophy and Vienna Circle empiricism. This view is seemingly shared by most practicing social science empiricists in North America, who regard theories as valuable only when they can produce testable hypotheses. The other school rejects the Frankfurt theory as an unjustified recanting of what are taken to be fundamental Marxist positions. It is the latter reading that will concern me here inasmuch as it informs two books that exemplify two typical misreadings of the Frankfurt school and necessitate clarifications that help me extend critical theory beyond its origins in Frankfurt-the project of this book. Although their authors differ on many points of substance, what they share is more interesting and instructive. Connerton's (1980), particularly, is a sophisticated attempt to probe weaknesses in the Frankfurt theory from the point of view of a sympathetic materialism. Although Slater (1977) also apparently accepts the original Frankfurt bifurcation of traditional and critical theory (e.g., Horkheimer 1972), his impatience with the ideology -critical focus of Frankfurt work is ill concealed, emerging in what 16 THE LEFT'S RIGHT amounts to a rejection of the entire Hegelian-Marxist enterprise. They share a belief, increasingly prevalent among Marxists of a more orthodox persuasion who resist philosophical and psychoanalytic revisions of Marxism, that the Frankfurt thinkers failed to produce a viable response to fascism and to emerging monopoly capitalism. This is allegedly because they rejected basic aspects of Marx's legacy. Of all the readings of Frankfurt critical theory, this is the most interesting. I reject it but find in it the occasion to raise what I regard as pertinent questions about the future of Marxism that occupy this...