Work

At the time the question of what work was became immensely controversial. 

But at the same time as work under capitalism offered less opportunity for self-fulfilment, a gimcrack alternative -call it consumption of consumer goods, call it shopping was being born. If we couldn’t realise ourselves through the self-actualising process of work, perhaps we could do it through shopping? That was the possibility, as we will see in the next chapter, that Benjamin’s friend Bertolt Brecht explored in his and Kurt Weill’s opera Mahoganny. Capitalist society, then, seemed to be at a pivotal moment during the late 1920s and 1930s in terms of how human beings might fulfil themselves and realise their potentialities. Writers as varied as D. H. Lawrence and Simone Weill meditated on what work could and should mean in an era When it seemed to be, increasingly, a brain-numbing, spirit-crushing, soul-destroying nightmare, and the only alternative to the Marxist cogito (I work therefore I am) was the consumerist one (I shop therefore I am). 

Marx’s concept of work was to prove particularly controversial for the Frankfurt School. His suggestion was that man and woman need to work to flourish and achieve dignity. Even in a communist paradise, we must work. On the face of it, what Benjamin wrote in ‘Hashish in Marseille’ and One-Way Street about work was in line with this Marxist orthodoxy that humans defined themselves through work; the problem was that the increasingly mechanised, routine and exploitative nature of work under capitalism thwarted any possibility of fulfilment. 

But scepticism about humans defining and liberating themselves through work was to become a hallmark of critical theory as it evolved from the 1930s onwards. The Frankfurt School has been called neo-Marxist, but in this area at least it might more accurately be called anti-Marxist. Indeed, the man who would take the Frankfurt School on a new intellectual trajectory in the 19303 baulked at this Marxist perspective. Max Horkheimer wrote in Dammerung, a book of aphorisms published not long after Benjamin’s description of his drug-fuelled ramble around Marseilles: ‘To make labour into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology. . .Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda." For Horkheimer, who when Dammerung was published was the director of the Frankfurt school and its primary intellectual influence, Marx fetishised labour as a category.
If that was true, then Marx was following in a venerable tradition in German thought, As Erich Fromm wrote in his 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man, Spinoza, Hegel and Goethe all held that, as he put it, 

man is alive only inasmuch as he is productive, inasmuch as he grasps the world outside of himself in the act of expressing his own specific human powers, and of grasping the world with these powers. Inasmuch as man is not productive, inasmuch as he is receptive and passive, he is nothing, he is dead. In this productive process, man realises his own essence, he returns to his own essence, which in theological language is nothing other than his return to God.

Hegel wrote in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the productive man makes the world his own by grasping it productively, by ‘translating itself from the night of possibility into the day of actuality’. The work of unravelling the thread, similarly, helps lead one from the cave to the daylight to actualise oneself, rather than being like the deluded prisoners in Plato’s cave or the Niebelungen of Wagner’s Ring Cycle mining for gold in an endless subterranean night. Under Horkheimer, the Frankfurt School rebelled against this orthodox German view of the value of work and in particular against the Marxist credo that we fulfil ourselves through labour. For the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, if not for Fromm who remained more faithful to Marx than his colleagues, labour is not the basic category of human realisation. 

Indeed, when Horkheimer read Marx’s recently published Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts in the early 1930s, in which this orthodoxy about work is expressed, he detected in it something that made him queasy. Even Benjamin, who eulogised creative productive labour, found a presentiment of the Nazi jackboot in it. The vulgar Marxist conception of labour, he wrote, ‘already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. . .The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation or nature wmch \n‘th naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat?“ That wasn‘t the kind of creative productive labour that he eulogised in One-Way Street or ‘Hashish in Marseille’; it was just the socialist flip side of the capitalist coin. This queasiness before the ruination of nature in what Benjamin called vulgar Marxist thought was to become an increasing concern of the Frankfurt School. Indeed, as late as 1969, Adorno told an interviewer that Marx wanted to convert the world into a gigantic workhouse. 

Perhaps, though, that’s unfair. Read sympathetically, Marx’s notion of productive humans didn’t entail the ruination of nature, but rather the mastery, through creative work, of oneself. And yet the Frankfurt School repeatedly disavowed this aspect of their Marxist heritage. Two decades after Horkheimer accused Marx of fetishising labour, Herbert Marcuse elaborated the accusation in his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud. Marcuse used the stand-in of Marx’s favourite cultural hero Prometheus for a coded attack: ‘Prometheus is the culture-hero of toil, productivity and progress through repression: he wrote, ‘the trickster and (suffering) rebel against the gods, who creates culture at the price of perpetual pain. He symbolises productiveness, the unceasing effort to master life . . . Prometheus is the archetypal hero of the performance principle.’

The performance principle was a special version of Freud’s reality principle, whereby one repressed one’s pleasures in order to function better in civilisation. But there were other principles, and other heroes, Marcuse suggested. Against Prometheus, he pitted different Greek heroes Orpheus, Narcissus and Dionysius: ‘they stand for a very different reality . . . Theirs is the image of joy and fulfilment, the voice that does not command but sings, the deed that is peace and that ends the labour of conquest: the liberty from time that unites man with god, man with nature . . . the redemption of pleasure, the halt of time, the absorption of death: silence, sleep, night, paradise the Nirvana principle not as death but life.“1 Marcuse’s utopian suggestion contradicted not just the German philosophical tradition that embraced Hegel, Marx and Schopenhauer, but also Freud. It was Freud who posited the Nirvana principle as an innate psychic drive or death instinct that aims to end life’s inevitable tension. We all yearn to leave the treadmill of labour, perhaps, but our fate as humans is to remain on it until we die: Thanatos and Eros are, for Freud, contrary to one another. Marcuse refused to accept that. 

But were Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse right to suggest that Marx fetishised labour? It could be argued that he fetishised not labour but human development, and it is precisely that fetish that Fromm, in Marx’s Concept of Man, shares and that Marcuse seeks to overcome through, somehow, realising the Nirvana principle in life. Indeed, the very idea of a communist society is one that, for Marx, involves the ‘withering away’ of the state since it is no longer necessary; in fact its continued existence would hamper the free development of the productive forces of society. But that society, as Hannah Arendt argued, was one of individuals freely fulfilling themselves: this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied. 

What then is the paradise to which Marx thought proletarian revolution paves the way? The American Marxist critic Marshall Berman argued: ‘Marx wants to embrace Prometheus and Orpheus: he considers communism worth fighting for because for the first time in history it could enable men to have both. He might also argue that it is only against a background of Promethean striving that Orphic rapture gains moral or psychic value: “luxe, calme et volupté” by themselves are merely boring, as Baudelaire knew well.’ And who would want a revolution if it resulted only in an eternity of boredom? But that seems precisely the boring paradise Marcuse invoked in Bros and Civilisation when he suggested that the Nirvana principle can be realised in human lives. More charitably, perhaps, we can interpret Marcuse as arguing for a work-life balance by means of shortening the working day to give opportunity for, if not Orphic rapture, then the redemption of pleasure and the halt of time. 

Marx’s suggestion, nonetheless, was that to be free involves being free to do work that is not alienating, by means of which one becomes what he thought was increasingly unlikely under capitalism. The French philosopher Simone Weil argued that there must be more to human liberation than this in her essay Oppression and Liberty, published the same year Horkheimer published Dammerung in which he attacked Marx's conception of labour.
For Simone Weil, human relations must not be conflated with labour and work: the latter are merely instrumental, since they involve relations of a subject to an object. For her, human interactions need to 
be revolutionised as much as productive forces and productive relations if humans are truly to be free. Weils thoughts were to prove important to one later Frankfurt School thinker, Jurgen Habermas, who wrote: ‘Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction.’ That distinction between work and interaction runs through Habermas’s monumental 1981 book The Theory of Communicative Action, in which he systematically argues for liberation from servitude and degradation not through revolutionising productive labour, but through interaction. 

Axel Honneth, Who was to succeed Habermas as director of the Institute, argued that the degradation of work in Taylorite production processes prompted the Frankfurt School thinkers to abandon the Marxist notion of work as self-fulfllment. But they replaced it with something else: arguably, rather than making a fetish of industrial labour, one might expect the Frankfurt School to fetishise communication which could be construed not as an alternative but as the form of productive labour to which they were temperamentally suited.

Freud and Oedipus

Throughout the 19th century, Greece acted as the ideal model for Germany, with an all-embracing power that is difficult to appreciate today. To long for Greece was a sign of the great German soul. Classical studies and Greek in particular dominated the German curriculum. One fundamental force that forms a bridge between the artistic fervour, the educational reforms and the broader politics of culture is German nationalism. Many of the leading writers, artists, and thinkers of the German-speaking world were explicit that their work is dedicated to the formation of a new nationalism. Greece offered an ideal of a society and a culture which the nascent state could strive for. May arguments were developed to make the geneological case convincing. One particularly significant approach is the invention of the Race, the People or in German, Das Volk.
Johann Gottfried von Herder laid down the criteria by which a race could be defined: they must have a shared body of myths, a shared language, a shared homeland and even a shared body type. The race was the Aryan race, its German branch the Teutons. Sir William Jones, a British linguist proposed an original language that existed in the far distant past which explains some of the apparent linguistic connections between the lauages of Europe and the East. He called this Indo-European. The language offered scientific proof that the Aryan Volk were a dominant power in the past- for it was their language and both Greek and German were descended from Indo-European..
A further argument was put in place by Karl-Otfried Muller who published a book in 1824 called the Dorians. The Dorians were said to have invaded Greece from the North and to have succeeded in colonising it. It was based on mythic stories told by much later Greeks in order to justify their political and territorial conquests. Muller contrasts the Dorians with the Ionians favorably. Strange as it may seem this geneology was widely believed. The tyranny of Greece over the German imagination had its ancestor cult.
Our image of the 19th century culture will be hopelessly inadequate if we do not understand how this nationalist myth was forged out of a longing for Greece.

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At the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, it was perhaps inevitable that Freud should turn to a figure of Greek myth to express his revolutionary comprehension of the psychology of the self, which so changed how the modern world answers the question of where we come from. There’s no escaping Freud today Everyone now lives in a cultural environment deeply influenced by Freudian theory. The subconscious, repression, the Freudian slip, the Freudian symbol are part of what society knows, however scandalous his theories may have seemed to his Victorian audiences and no matter how much modern critics have questioned his propositions. Freud’s Oedipus has become part of how we all understand ourselves. 

Freud made an anxiety of self-knowledge central to his therapeutic principles. The inability to escape what the past does to each of us, and the need to pursue a new knowledge of that past, are founding principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. If you do not know how your childhood development is formative, you are destined to spend your life locked into your unresolved Childhood problems (to rewrite Cicero again). What happens to the child and how the child resolves the tensions of his infant life make the adult what he or she is and the failure to resolve those tensions destines the adult to an infantile state. Knowing Where you come from is the pursuit of analysis. For Freud, Oedipus was the figure who epitomized that anxiety of self-knowledge, and Freud made out of Oedipus a master-narrative for the development of the modern mind and modern sexuality. Through Oedipus, Freud found the nasty secret of a sexual past in everyone’s mind. Without Oedipus, psychoanalysis would look very different indeed. 

So why did Oedipus play such a role for Freud? Two answers immediately suggest themselves.  First, the name of ‘Oedipus’ conveniently summarized the violent, ambivalent emotions of desire between children and parents that Freud saw as the emotional crisis in any child’s early development. Second, he recognized in Greek tragedy the type of exploratory and powerful conversation which psychoanalysis demanded. Freud was explicit about this debt. The action of Oedipus the King. he writes, depicts ‘a process that can be likened to the work of psychoanalysis" Oedipus’ painful, obstinate search for his self, which moves through questioning of the past back towards his engendering, reminds Freud of the work of analysis. The repeated language of ‘solving riddles’, ‘tracking the traces’, ‘hunting the truth’, in which Oedipus’ search is described, was also an obvious attraction. 

But, more oddly still, Freud saw himself as Oedipus. He identified with Oedipus, the solver of riddles and tragic searcher for self-knowledge. The typically opaque words of Nietzsche ‘Who of us is Oedipus? Who is the Sphinx? It is a rendezvous, it seems, of questions and question marks’ -could stand as an epigraph to Freud’s lifelong obsession with Oedipus. 

 In 1873, Freud had made a special study of Oedipus the King, part of which he had to translate in one of his student exams. References to the Sphinx dot his correspondence. He gave one of his patients ‘the present of a picture of Oedipus and a Sphinx’ to thank him for his help in Freud’s self-analysis though we don’t know how the patient interpreted the gift. Around his consulting room as an analyst, he kept statues of ancient figures that he collected avidly.  The Sphinx is clearly placed on top of the cabinet, proudly standing, facing the camel over the bowl. Higher on the shelves were busts of the great Greek tragedians, including Sophocles. Freud also had a whole cabinet dedicated to little terracotta statues of Eros, the Winged boy, god of desire.
All indicate Freud's deep and abiding involvement with the classical past. His engagement with antiquity is made most vividly evident by those ancient statues. Freud was passionate about archaeology. The model of excavation, layer by layer was particularly stimulating- both the technique itself and the authenticity of the discovered truth.
But when Freud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been our own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal is being made too and it is deeply connected to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and violence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandallous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for Freud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity. 

The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When Freud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its classical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the Freudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, Freud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in nineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of Freud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek. 

Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions of the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud nind, and made Freud’s turn to ancient Greek models 3 way ”f 'ustifying his new method of investigation. 

But when F reud says that ‘Oedipus’ fate moves us only because it might have been orir own,’ or when other critics in the same tradition make such statements as ‘in some sense Oedipus is every man and every man is potentially Oedipus’, another appeal i9 being made too and it is deeply connected to the qUEStiOU ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Writing at the pinnacle 0f the German-speaking world’s love of Greece and its nationalist fervour, Freud is uncovering the dirty secret of desire and V1.04 lence in the family history of the race. He is exposing a scandall ous truth that threatens Germany’s national myth of a pure white origin in Greece. Greece, for F reud, provides the story to explain where we come from but it is not a story of glorious ancestry. Freud’s theories were a deep provocation to a German sense of identity. 

The German context is of fundamental importance to Freud’s Oedipus. When F reud called his discovery ‘the Oedipus complex’, the name has a sort of instant authority from its cla3r sical status. Greece was so important to the West’s idea of its own development that a Greek hero was an immediately attractive figure for a new model of human psychological development. And, along with the Unconscious and the F reudian symbol, the Oedipus complex is probably still the most instantly recognizable indicator of a psychoanalytic approach. At the same time, F reud’s theories were really scandalous. He discovered that even children have sexual feelings, and that everyone’s sexual desires were at a deep level transgressive -a position even less popular in hineteenth-century Europe than today. Greece, in his hands, became a more primal, bloody and disturbing place than in most German schoolrooms. The provocation of F reud’s writing also knowingly exploited the lustre of the Greek. 

Tracing Freud’s German Oedipus has overlapped several versions 0f the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Freud worked to find where the self comes front, and located the point of development in infantile desires. There is in every human a buried history which makes us what we are. He named this model after a Greek hero whose story is the archetypal quest to find where he came from a buried history which also finds its turning point in transgressive sexuality. At the same time, Freud was writing for an audience engaged in a growing nationalism which ensured that the genealogical search for roots became a passion. Blood, the purity of the race, made where you came from a different sort of question. German nationalism, at all levels of culture, found a symbolic home and birthplace in ancient Greece, and put that claim into action in its education system, opera houses, literature its general cultural life. And for the twenty-first century Freud himself is one of the origins of a modern sense of identity we are all Freudians now. Our sense of self is mediated through a century of talk of Freudian slips, the subconscious, repression of sexual desire, psychological health even when Freud’s own writings may not have been studied in themselves. The intricate story of Freud’s German Oedipus reveals how many layers there are to the question ‘Where do you think you come from?’ Digging down through those layers uncovers just how intimately the history of the modern idea of the self and the political history of Europe are intertwined with the Greece of the Imagination. 

White and Red

From V Finlay
There was a famous case study of a housewife in St. Louis, mentioned in A History of Makeup, who bought several bottles of Bloom of Youth. She applied it diligently and in 1877 she died of lead poisoning. She was by no means the first. Lead white had been used unsparingly in face cream and makeup since Egyptian times: the Roman ladies swore by it; Japanese geishas used it-it contrasted beautifully with their teeth which they had fashionably blackened with oak galls and vinegar.8 But even in the nineteenth century, when the dangers must have been better known, it was common on the dressing tables of women of all complexions. _ 

Today too, women die for beauty: they starve themselves too thin, or employ surgeons to tuck their skin too tightly. Was the white lead death any more monstrous? I wondered. One of the problems was that in the beginning-as with consumption-the damage caused would sometimes even make its victim feel more attractive. Lead exposure made women seem like ethereal spirits, almost like angels-which was part of its fraud. By the time the truth was clear, it was probably already too late. 

I consulted a book on poisons and imagined being one of those nineteenth~century fashion victims. If I had assiduously applied Bloom of Youth every morning, I would first feel a sense of lethargy: I’d probably blame it on those wretched corsets. I would then, perhaps, stop sleeping, which would give a pallid hollow to my cheeks. My Victorian suitors might even find this an attractive look, fitting the idea of what a woman should be like: “dead-pale," but with a lovely face, a Lady of Shalott. And then my legs might begin to feel a bit wobbly, so I might take to my bed, like the consumptive heroine of a Puccini opera. Rather romantic really, I’d joke with my girlfriends. 

At this point I would pull down the sleeves on my dress to hide the little blue marks-tiny plumb lines-that were forming on my wrists. At least no one would notice the ones on my ankles, I’d think. And then-and this would be more of a secret-my need for the chamber pot would change. Constipation would set in early and I would no longer need to urinate much either-but the pot would be useful for containing the vomit, which I would produce biliously and often. That sounds bad, but it would be just the beginning of the discomfort, which could later involve kidney collapse and what are kindly described as “behavioral abnormalities." Not even the champions of the accidental beauty of the consumptive could support such painful final hours as those suffered by a woman who had smoothed a surfeit of white lead into her cheeks. I wonder at what point I would have realized what was wrong. 

The sickness had two names. It was called either “plumbism,” because of the lead content, or “saturnism”-because lead has traditionally been associated with the planet Saturn, which apparently brings gloominess to anyone born under its influence.

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Alan drew pictures of the cochineal bug on a notepad: an oval cartoon insect the size of a little fingernail, with tiny wavy legs and a big body bursting with potential. “Is it cruel?” I asked him about the cochineal industry in general. “Only for the cactuses: the insects eat them alive.” 

Spanish Red, I noted in my diary that night, is usually born between the fog and the frost in places where land is cheap and the prickly pear, on which it is a parasite, ‘grows in abundance on the desert sands. It is a holy blight, a noble rot where the treasure is rubies rather than the gold of dessert wine. It is a deep, intensely colored organic red: but it will never be used for Buddhist robes because there is too much death in it. In the 21st century women around the world coat their lips with insect blood, dab their cheeks with it and it is one of the few permitted red constituents of eye shadow. And finally, Cherry Coke is full of it. It is color additive E120.

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Turner had at least 12 kinds of madder, an extract from the rubia tree, but most madders were as fugitive as cochineal and by 1900, less than 50 years after Turner put down his paintbrush for the last time, there were only two varieties still available to London artists. 
He also had red lead~a color made by heating white lead~which was called minium and was almost orange. It was so popular among Persian and Indian Mughal artists that their work became known as “miniatures": the word is nothing to do with the size of their paintings. 

But one of Turner’s favorite reds may well have been Cinnabar which he used in its manufactured form, vermilion, and which Pliny described as the result of an epic struggle by an elephant and a dragon. These two troublemakers were always fighting, Pliny recounted, and the battle eventually ended with the dragon-evidently a rather snaky one-wrapping its coils around its heavy enemy. But as the elephant fell it crushed the dragon with its weight and they both died. The merging of their blood made Cinnabar. It is a marvellous metaphor for this expensive paint,‘ which is made from the conjunction of heavy mercury and burning sulphur. Its chemical designation is HgS, which indicates that both elements are equally matched. Combined, the silver elephant and the yellow fire-breathing reptile miraculously make something that is blood red. ' 

The Romans loved raw Cinnabar. They painted their gladiatorial heroes with it; rich women sacrificed their health for beauty using a lipstick made of it, and it was used to paint the statues of the gods and the emperors on festival days.

Paul

from The Evolution of God:
Anyone who wanted to set up a far-flung organization in the ancient world faced two big problems: transportation technology and information technology. In those days information couldn’t travel faster than the person carrying it, who in turn couldn’t travel faster than the animal carrying the person. Once Paul had founded a congregation and left to found another one in a distant city, he was in another world; he couldn’t return often to check on the operation, and he couldn’t tire off e-mails to keep church leaders in line. 

Faced with what strike us today as such glaring technological deficiencies, Paul made the most of what information technology there was: epistles. He sent letters to distant congregations in an attempt to keep them consonant with his overall mission. The results are with us today in the form of the New Testament’s Pauline Epistles (or, at least, the seven, out of thirteen, that most scholars consider authentic). These letters aren’t just inspiring spiritual reflections-though they are often that-but tools for solving administrative problems. 

Consider that famous ode to love in I Corinthians. This letter was written in response to a crisis. Since his departure from Corinth, the church had been split by factionalism, and Paul faced rivals for authority. Early in the letter he laments the fact that some congregants say, “I belong to Paul,” whereas others say, “I belong to Cephas.” 

There is a second and possibly related problem. Many in the church-“enthusiasts,” some scholars call them-believed themselves to have direct access to divine knowledge and to be near spiritual perfection. Some thought they needn’t accept the church’s guidance in moral matters. Some showed off their spiritual gifts by spontaneously speaking in tongues during worship services, something that might annoy the humbler worshippers and that, in large enough doses, could derail a service. As the scholar Gunther Bornkamm has put it, “The mark of the ‘enthusiasts’ was that they disavowed responsible obligation toward the rest.”  In other words: they lacked brotherly love. Hence Paul’s harping on that theme in I Corinthians and, especially, in chapter 13 (the “love chapter,” which has figured in so many weddings). In light of this context, the language in that Chapter makes a new kind of sense. It 'is in reference to disrupting worship by speaking in tongues that Paul writes, “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” And when he says that “love is not envious or boastful or arrogant,” he is chastising Corinthians who deploy their spiritual gifts-whether speaking in tongues, or prophesying, or even generosity-in a competitive, showy way. 

Paul didn’t go so far as to ban speaking in tongues. But he did stress that speaking to your brothers in a language they can’t understand isn’t a loving act, whereas to speak intelligibly is to “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.” Accordingly, he laid down some guidelines. As a rule, no one should speak in tongues unless there is someone present who can validly interpret, and even then the speakers should be few and orderly: “If anyone speaks in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn.” Prophecy, on the other hand, is fine, because it is intelligible and hence can serve others. (But mightn’t people use their claimed prophetic powers to question Paul’s authority? Don’t worry-Paul is way ahead of you; “Anyone who claims to be a prophet, or to have spiritual powers, must acknowledge that What I am writing to you is a command of the Lord. Anyone who does not recognize this is not to be recognized.”)

The beauty of “brotherly love” wasn’t just that it produced cohesion in Christian congregations. Invoking familial feelings also allowed Paul to assert his authority at the expense of rivals. After all, wasn’t it he, not they, who had founded the family of Corinthian Christians? He tells the Corinthians that he is writing “to admonish you as my beloved children. . . .Indeed. in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. I appeal to you, then be imitators of me. Had Paul stayed among the Corinthians, he might have kept the congregation united by the mere force of his presence, with less preaching about the need for unity-the need for all brothers to be one in “the body of Christ.” But because he felt compelled to move on and cultivate churches across the empire, he had to implant brotherly love as a governing value and nurture it assiduously In the case of I Corinthians, chapter 13, the result was some of western civilization’s most beautiful literature-if, perhaps, more beautiful out of context than in. 

Thus, for the ambitious preacher of early Christianity, the doctrine of brotherly love had at least two Virtues. First, fraternal bonding made churches attractive places to be, providing a familial warmth that was otherwise lacking, for many, in a time of urbanization and flux. As the scholar Elaine Pagels has written, “From the beginning, what attracted outsiders who walked into a gathering of Christians . . . was the presence of a group joined by spiritual power into an extended family.” ‘9 (And there is no doubt that Paul wanted his Churches to project an appealing image. In I Corinthians he asks: If “the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind?”) Second, the doctrine of brotherly love became a form of remote control, a tool Paul could use at a distance to induce congregational cohesion. 

Strictly speaking, this emphasis on brotherhood didn’t always mean an emphasis on interethnic brotherhood. For all we know, some of these early congregations weren’t ethnically diverse-in which case cohesion within individual churches didn’t need to involve bonding across ethnic bounds. So where does this connotation of Christian brotherly love come from? 

Part of the answer is that transcending ethnicity was built into Paul’s conception of his divinely imparted mission. He was to be the Apostle to the Gentiles; he was to carry the saving grace of the Jewish messiah-~Jesus Christ-beyond the Jewish world. Here, at the origin of Paul’s aspirations, he is crossing the bridge he famously crossed in saying there is no longer “Jew or Greek,” for all are now eligible for God’s salvation. 

In putting Jew and Greek on an equal basis, Paul was, in a sense, placing pragmatism above scriptural principle. By Paul’s own account, the scriptural basis for his mission to the Gentiles lay in the prophetic writings, notably in the apocalyptic expectations of Second Isaiah, who envisioned a coming messiah and a long overdue burst of worldwide reverence for Yahweh. And, as we saw in chapter 7, these passages aren’t exactly an ode to ethnic egalitarianism. The basic idea is that the Gentile nations will abjectly submit to the rule of Israel’s god and hence to Israel. God promises the Israelites that after salvation arrives, Egyptians and Ethiopians alike “shall come over to you and be yours, they shall come over in chains and bow down to you. They will make supplication to you.” Indeed, “every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.” Thus, “In the LORD all the offspring of Israel shall triumph and glory.” 

Of course, Christians like to look back and stress the less nationalistic passages of Second Isaiah- such as Yahweh’s promise to bring salvation “to the end of the earth,” with Israel ultimately serving a selfless role of illumination, as a “light unto the nations.” But these aren’t the passages Paul himself emphasized. Explaining his mission to the Gentiles in a letter to the Romans, he quotes the Verse about every knee bowing and every tongue swearing without mentioning anything about a light unto the nations. He declares that his job is to help “win obedience from the Gentiles.” In line with past apocalyptic prophets, he seems to think that the point of the exercise is for the world to submit to Israel’s messiah; Jesus, Paul Says in quoting First Isaiah, is “the one who rises to rule the Gen tiles.” And Paul seems to accept the idea that ethnic bloodlines can guarantee divine favor, even salvation, for those who wouldn’t otherwise merit it; though many Jews don’t see that Jesus is the Messiah, “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors.” But ultimately these and other theoretical dispositions mattered little compared to the facts on the ground. Any residual scriptural overtones of Jewish superiority to Gentiles that Paul may have carried into his work were diluted by a key strategic decision he made early on.

There were other Jewish followers of Jesus who, like Paul, wanted to carry the gospel to the Gentiles. But many of them insisted that in order to qualify for Jesus’s saving grace, Gentiles had to abide by the Jewish Law, the Torah, which meant following strict dietary rules and, moreover, undergoing circumcision. In the days before modern anesthesia, requiring grown men to have penis surgery in order to join a religion fell under the rubric “disincentive.” 

Paul grasped the importance of such barriers to entry. So far as Gentiles were concerned, he jettisoned most of the Jewish dietary code and, with special emphasis, the circumcision mandate: “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love.” Paul was so intent on dropping the circumcision barrier that, when he argued with fellow Jesus followers over this issue, his sense of brotherly love sometimes deserted him. In his letter to the Galatians he expressed the wish that those who preached mandatory circumcision would “castrate themselves!” (And some scholars say that “castrate” is a euphemistic rendering of a Greek passage signifying more dramatic surgery. “Cut the whole thing off!” is an alternative translation.) 

There is little doubt about Paul’s strategic wisdom. Many religions of the day, including some of the “mystery religions,” were open to people of varied ethnicities. But these movements tended to have hurdles to membership, including financial ones, such as priests who charged initiation fees. Christian churches enjoyed a competitive edge by having no such financial barriers, and Paul kept the edge sharp by making sure these weren’t replaced by other kinds of barriers. 

This decision to leave recruiting unshackled by the Jewish Law not only mitigated the drift of Paul’s letter to the Romans-the idea that his mission was to subjugate Gentiles on behalf of Israel’s messiah. It also got Paul accused of “rejecting” the Torah. But this “rejection” was meant to apply to Gentile recruits to the Jesus movement. Indeed, Paul may have considered himself a good, Torah-abiding Jew, albeit one who, in contrast to most other Jews, was convinced that the Jewish messiah had finally arrived. (In none of his letters does Paul use the word “Christian.”) 

Whether or not Paul thought of his identity as now severed from Judaism, he couldn’t afford to sever Judaism’s ties to the Jesus movement, because he needed to use the infrastructure of Jewish worship. According to the book of Acts, when he came to a city and set out to recruit people to the movement, he sometimes started his preaching at the local synagogue. Indeed, according to Acts, some of Paul’s most important early recruits were Jews. So, even as practical considerations distanced Paul’s variant of the Jesus movement from Jewish ritual, they encouraged ongoing contact with the Jewish world. And, even as Paul chafed at the rejection of his doctrines by some Jews within the Jesus movement (to say nothing of Jews outside it), he continued to seek rapprochement, trying to preserve a broad base. 

In short, the kind of bridge Paul built to the Gentile world wound up alienating a lot of Jews, and maybe even alienating Paul from them, but it was a bridge he couldn’t afford to burn. So an inter~ ethnic symbiosis persisted and colored Paul’s writing. Thus did the phrase “neither Greek nor Jew” enter the scripture, with its enduring connotations of ethnic egalitarianism. 

There were aspects of Paul’s business model that pushed even more powerfully toward interethnic bonding. To see them, begin with the reference above to some “important early recruits” being Jews. Now leave aside the part about some of them being Jews and focus on "important" recruits.
Though Christianity is famous for welcoming the poor and powerless, to actually "run" the congregation paul needed people who could provide a meeting place. And many of the early associates of Paul were like him travelers. These businessmen tolerated ethnic differences for their own financial interests. Also travelers were hosted by their brethren in the church. It might sound cynical to explain the growth of a religion in crass commercial terms, but such practical functions play a role even today.

The Romantic Philhellenists

In his love of Greece, Keats was absolutely typical of the cutting edge of English culture. A whole generation of Romantic artists in Britain were absorbed by Graecomania. While the poor Keats languished artistically in London, Lord Byron, forced to flee London, became a superstar poet writing from abroad but entered the pantheon of Romantic artists by dying for Greece. Like many writers and thinkers he was galvanised by the fight for Greek freedom from the Turkish Empire. It was a fight that gave a fully politicised agenda to the ideological idealism of the artistic turn towards Greece. Byron may have in reality achieved next to nothing and died of fever, but he became a heroic symbol of Romantic commitment to the cause of freedom (artistic, political, sexual) which made Philhellenism an essential credo of the age. 
Shelly too was passionate about the Greek fight for independence, and many of his greatest poems link the struggle to escape the dulling shackles of social convention and political oppression with the ideal image of a free Greece. Prometheus was a figure who Shelly returned to again and again: the chained creative spirit who suffers for truth and mankind, and yet longs for freedom and justice, a very definition of the Romantic artist as much as a Greek Titan. Shelley also died young and abroad. He drowned off the coast of Italy a death that has been invested with less mythic nobility than Byron’s. Strangely, however, even swimming was touched with the glamour of the classical. It’s hard now to appreciate that swimming was rediscovered as a pastime only in the late eighteenth century, and as a sport much later still. Although Greeks and Romans swam as a leisure activity, there is a long gap in its history people don’t swim in medieval and Renaissance Europe. It was taken up again with a conscious look backwards towards the ancient love of exercise and training the body, especially by Romantic Philhellenes, who fancied swimming the Bosphorus, like Leander of Greek myth, towards a lover of their own. To swim was to sport and strive like a Greek or Roman hero. Shelley’s death by water his last swim becomes part of his self-mythology of Greekness. 

For Byron, Shelley and a host of intellectuals the Romantic giants of the first quarter of the nineteenth century Greece was an intellectual rallying call. A generation of English intellectuals defined themselves aesthetically and politically by turning towards an idealized Greece. They were committed to a revolutionary politics and a revolutionary poetics, and in both areas they found the image of a free Greece inspirational. Shelley raised the banner for his whole generation when he proudly declared: ‘We are all Greeks." 

These Romantic Philhellenists set the agenda for the century that follows. Greece courses through the artistic and cultural life of England with a continuing obsessiveness. For the educated classes, it was an integral part of the construction of a personal and cultural identity. We can see Oscar Wilde, flamboyant as ever, on his first trip to Greece, which he made with his tutor from Trinity College, Dublin in the 1870s. dressing up as a Greek for the camera, a self-confident smile, and foot poised on the ancient rocks of Greece, in a carefully posed image for friends at home or universitv. It is a highly coded self-projection, with the same flair for spectacular self-presentation that marks Glde’s later career. He had written to his tutor in Oxford to ask permission to be late for term because a visit like this to Greece was so educational. Certainly Wilde was learning. 

Wilde was acting out what it meant to say ‘We are all Greeks,’ and he knew well the intense charge of such a claim in the circles in which he was already moving. He found himself at home with a group in Oxford and London known as the ‘Aesthetes’. These Aesthetes offer a distinctive flowering of self-conscious transgression. The group was a self-selected and shifting collection of individuals, linked by their commitment to an extreme aesthetic principle where ‘beauty’ mattered above all. All aspects of life 
were submitted to that criterion. And for all of them Greece provided the very paradigm of a world infused with beauty. 

Wilde’s later notoriety has eclipsed a line of more serious scholars, including the art historian Walter Pater, poets such as Algernon Swinburne and essayists like John Addington Symonds, who had a profound influence on a generation of young men both by their publications and by personal contact in the elite world of Oxford University education. Greece ran through their debates on beauty and on sexuality. Pater, the movement’s high priest, wanted his pupils to rediscover all around them ‘a world of exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest details of daily life with splendour and skill, in close correspondence with a particularly animated development of human existence’ which was how he defined Greek art, his model and hope. 

Symonds, however, had a more specific liberalizing sexual agenda.He saw the cultural ideal of Victorian Hellenism in terms of his own socially stigmatized desires. His Greece of the imagination is summed up like this: ‘Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed, chapleted and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks appears before us. Upon his soul, there is no burden of the world’s pain . . . nor has he yet felt sin.’ For Symonds, a longing for Greece is pictured as a beautiful boy without for once the feeling of sin. Greece promised a pre-Christian, guilt-free paradise. Unsurprisingly, it was Symonds rather than Pater who was scathingly attacked by Oxford conservatives for what they all-too-vividly imagined he was thinking of when he demanded that ‘we must imitate the Greeks’. Wilde knew what he was doing when he dressed up as a Greek. 

Wilde himself shows his growing engagement with this Greek love in his notebooks and commonplace books, where he collected a series of passages from Pater, Symonds and his other reading. Platonic philosophy and the Symposium’s praise of male love play a special role here. These phrases show Wilde’s Grecian style as it is being formed: ‘We wrestle to embrace and embrace to wrestle,’ he wrote, lovingly dwelling on a mixture of homoeroticism and dialectical philosophy. He added a catchphrase from Pater: ‘to do philosophy with desire’. So strong was the ‘Grecian’ aspect of doing philosophy that ‘being of a philosophical disposition’ became a euphemism for someone with whom you could talk of homoerotic feelings. 

Wilde tried to capture those intense conversations between young men in a single principle: ‘the refinement of Greek culture coming through the romantic medium of impassioned friendships’. The romance of his impassioned friendships needed the veil of the ‘refinement of Greek culture’, and in particular Plato’s discussions of desire offer an ideal image to live up to. Hellenism was the medium of homosexual expression for this high-profile and influential intellectual milieu. It’s not by chance that the lead character of Wilde’s best-known novel should allude to a scholarly world of Greek feeling. The Picture of Dorian Gray hesitates to mention ‘the love that cannot speak its name’, but through the odd name ‘Dorian’ it alludes knowingly to the Spartans, the Dorian race par excellence, and thus to a Spartan pederastic tradition, which made male love part of manly warfare, and not a sign of effete softness. This sort of hint and smirk is typical of the insider talk of these aesthetically minded teachers and pupils, writers and artists. 

For the educated classes in Victorian Britain, Greece was a fundamental route to understanding the world and, above all, for expressing one’s own place, intellectual, moral, sexual, within it. This is partly why the long-running argument about the place of classics in the school and university curriculum was so heated. This political debate ran throughout the nineteenth century and stretched well into the twentieth. Nor has it finished yet today. But in the nineteenth century the argument started with the question of whether anything else but classics and the Bible should even be taught to children, once they could read and write. For most of the century, classics took up a good 80 per cent of the time in the classroom. The familiarity with Greece and Rome begins with this institutional foundation. 

Politicians and educationalists throughout the nineteenth century made educational reform and the place of classics in it a matter of intense national concern. One of the most influential figures in this long debate was Benjamin Jowett. At the same time as the Aesthetes were strutting their stuff on the streets of Oxford and London, Jowett who was friendly with many of them, especially Swinburne was fundamentally changing the educational system in Oxford, starting with Balliol, the college where he was master. 

Jowett also took Plato as his master-text, but in a quite different way from those who poured over the Symposium as part of their crushes on beautiful boys. Jowett established the one-on-one class or ‘tutorial’ as the mainstay of his educational policy ~ classes deliberately set up like Plato’s portraits of Socrates with a friend, doing philosophy together. He himself translated all of Plato into English, and made Platonic philosophy 3 guide for those in public life something Plato would have appreciated well. Jowett educated his students with Plato to rule the Empire, and, from the study in Oxford to the corridors of power across the Empire, this education was remarkably effective. 

It was helped by a civil service exam that awarded many more marks for success in classical papers than any other subject even the languages spoken in the areas to be governed. Classics was a training to rule, and the best and brightest who went from public school to university to government were educated in ancient texts. The role of the civil service in ruling India had been formulated by Thomas Macaulay back in the I 8305. When he traveled out to India first by boat, he carefully read and reread much of Greek literature including nearly all of Plato, and the Iliad and the Odyssey, along with Cicero and other Roman writers. This was his preparation for ruling an empire. When Alexander the Great conquered the known world, he slept with a copy of Homer under his pillow, as he strived to achieve the immortal glory of the Homeric heroes. The pursuit of empire cultural conquest is fed by classical dreams. 

The dominance of this educational model was pervasive and Jowett's Oxford formed the apex of a far broader educational commitment in England. From the first schooldays to ruling the Empire to a quiet retirement reading Homer in the evening classics was integral to the formation of the nineteenth-century gentleman.

These snapshots of poets, aesthetes and educational grandees give a good flavour of how varied the passionate lovers of Greece in Victorian Britain were. What such vignettes cannot capture is how pervasive and broad this passion was. The figures I have focused on are the cultural heroes for nineteenth-century England. They set the cultural agenda which was absorbed and followed by vast numbers of the educated classes. The Romantic poets and their self-conscious revolutionary Hellenism, the Aesthetes with their self-consciously transgressive Hellenism, and the Oxford-educated elite with their self-aware commitment to Hellenism as an education for Empire, take very different roots towards an ideal Greece, and use their Greece in very different ways. Yet each group is empowered by their understanding of Greece, and their understanding informs their whole lives. Their interest in Greece is not just one intellectual hobby among others, but a way of responding to the world and existing in it. It is an integral part of the construction of their personal and cultural identities. 

A Greece of the imagination informs Victorian culture. In the last hundred years, modern British culture has spent a tremendous amount of energy trying to show how it is different from Victorian society ~ while recognizing its roots in it. It’s one of the obvious places contemporary Britain comes from and anxiously, explores, rejects, fantasizes about. In England, unlike, say, the USA, there are plenty of Victorian buildings in towns and cities around the country. Victorian novels are still a mainstay of our education in English, and of television adaptation. 

the 1920's amongst the Frankfurt School

Via Jeffries

Lukacs (in his masterpiece of 1922 History and Class Consciousness) posited that the proletariat, once conscious of its historic role, would destroy capitalist society. Class consciousness was understood by Lukacs as a result of the proletariat being the product of the contradictions of history, chief among which is the exploitation of its labour under capitalism. But then Lukacs made a key distinction between the ascribed and actual consciousness of the proletariat- the higher ascribed consciousness was embodied in the revolutionary party, while actual consciousness may not be able to grasp its historic role. The party, in a sense, knows what is good for the proletariat- how it must act, and what the historic significance of its suffering under capitalism is. Into this gap between ascribed and actual consciousness, too, the Frankfurt School, as we will see, would insert itself, trying to understand what it was about capitalism’s oppressed that stopped them rising up to end their bondage to be delighted, rather, with the very chains that bound them. 
Revolutionary leaders such as Lenin didn’t suffer from such false consciousness- they were adepts at revolution and understood the historic role of the proletariat which, as Lukacs put it in Hegelian terms, was to be the subject-object of history, by which he meant that instead of the proletariat being, as it currently was, in a mode of contemplation or passivity, it became an active subject engaged in the production of the world in which it could flourish. But why was there a gap between actual and ascribed class consciousness? Lukacs’s answer to that is what made his book revolutionary in Marxist theory and go on to have a profound influence on the Frankfurt School. To account for the gap, Lukécs developed the notion of reification, extending Marx‘s analysis of the ‘fetishism of the commodity form’ in Capital. The problems of society, perhaps even the reason the German Revolution had failed, could be traced to a riddle of the commodity form that Marx wrote about at the start of his master work. 

Lukacs’s book discussed a new form of alienation that confronted industrial workers in the 1920s. Industrial nations such as Germany, Britain and the United States were now entering what became known as the Fordist era, a period of mass production. In 1913, Henry Ford had installed the first moving assembly line for the mass production of motor cars in Detroit, reducing the time it took to build a Model T Ford from twelve hours to two and a half. Fordism’s new industrial revolution changed production, consumption, culture and thereby what it was to be human. At the level of production, by training his workers to specialise in one of the eighty-four discrete steps necessary in the car production, and by deploying motion-study expert Frederick Taylor to make those jobs even more efficient, Ford raised output, enabling him to cut the prices of the finished cars and, crucially, change the relationship between workers and the product of their labour. For philosophers as far back as Spinoza and, in particular, for Karl Marx, humans were productive beings, who were only alive to the extent that they grasped the world outside themselves in the act of expressing their own specific powers. Mass production, through division of labour, increasingly thwarted the possibility of such fulfilment. The idea of personally fulfilling labour, sanely remunerated and manifesting artisanal skills, was the stuff of William Morris’s anti-machine-age socialist-medievalist fantasies. 

Assembly lines sped up the production processes but diminished workers: they increasingly became cogs in a machine, or, worse, rendered obsolete by machines. For example, Henry Ford’s car factories included machines that could stamp out parts automatically far faster than mere humans. Humans were becoming unlit for productive purpose, a fact that, for Marxists who deemed humans to be essentially productive beings, might have seemed existentially tragic were such terms part of their theoretical vocabulary. ‘When I’m through' Ford said of his cars, ‘about everybody will have one.’ Humans weren’t just becoming machines or being replaced by them, 
but were becoming desiring machines their identities defined through their more or less passive consumption of mass-produced goods. 

At the level of culture, Fordism made the world modern. Those mass-produced goods included not just Model T Fords, but also Charlie Chaplin films. Mechanisation didn’t just revolutionise industry but also industrialised art, speeding up the possibilities of production and distribution, making new art forms cinema, photography possible and making old ones -novels, painting, theatre seem sluggish. Speed, economy, the ephemeral and the entertaining were the hallmarks of mass-produced culture. While Italian Futurists eulogised on the machine age’s unleashing of velocity, and while, as we will see, Walter Benjamin saw revolutionary potential in new art forms, others bemoaned the pace of cultural production. ‘In all the arts the output of trash is both relatively and absolutely greater than it was’, wrote Aldous Huxley in 1934.

But it wasn’t only conservative dystopians who worried about mass-produced culture. For Frankfurt School thinkers like Horkheimer and Adorno, if not Benjamin, this output of trash had a function: to pacify the masses. Even Benjamin could write of these times: ‘Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into a bottomless abyss.’ Weber’s iron cage of capitalism had subdued humans during working hours; now the culture industry subdued them at their leisure changing them increasingly from productive beings to consumers, from the Marxist dream of creatively vital humans to stupefied moviegoers all giggling at the same thing. 

What it was to be human was changing radically in this Fordist modern age. Like an importunate lover, monopoly capitalism had come on too quickly in its flashy new motor promising all kinds of ruinous temptations to the masses. ‘A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath these clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body’, wrote Benjamin. To be human under such conditions was to find oneself, as Lukacs put it in 1920, transcendentally homeless, longing nostalgically for what was lost. 
To be human involved being alienated from the machine-like, functional replaceable thing one had become. 

In Capital in 1867 Marx wrote about the fetishism of commodities, how human consciousness becomes reified and how the class consciousness necessary for proletarian revolution can be thwarted. The Marxists gathering at Ilmenau were living under a more advanced form of capitalism than the one Marx had described. Why was socialist revolution increasingly unlikely in the 1920s? Because the reified structure of society, the alienation of workers and the commodity fetishism of the modern world were so complete that they militated against the class consciousness necessary for such a revolution. 

But what do these terms mean? Alienation? Reification? Class consciousness? Commodity fetishism? Think of the chair you’re sitting on, or the iPhone to which you’re umbilically linked. A chair is a commodity not because you can sit on it, but because it was produced by humans to be traded. It has value, that is to say, not because value is a natural property of the chair, but because each commodity has a use value, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. This is all very sensible and straightforward, but hold on to your hat (also a commodity) because we’re going into a spectral realm. Under capitalism, the things that humans make take on phantasmagoric lives of their own. Marx’s Capital is not just a forbidding tome of philosophical and economic thought, but a racy gothic novel, a Frankenstein-like tale of how we created a monster (capitalism) from which we are alienated and which, by means of class struggle, we will slay 

The crack humans opened in the world that allowed all these monstrous things in is the gap between use value and exchange value. Through that gap came the corrupting flood of commodities. Here comes one now: it’s Apple launching a fatuous new iPhone minimally different from its predecessor. When a chair or an iPhone is sold, it is exchanged for another commodity (money for instance). The exchange takes no account of the labour that went into the chairs making, still less that, for example, of Apple’s overstressed and underpaid workers, some of whom have contemplated suicide in order to escape the penal servitude of manufacturing ostensibly must-have gizmos for you and me. 

But that’s only one part of the ghost story. The other has to do with what happens when the worker is paid wages for her labour. For Marx, the wage relationship between capitalist and worker takes no account of their respective social positions or of their social relations. The labour that produced the value in the form of a coat is treated as an abstract commodity that is equivalent to any other commodity, just as the exchange value of the chair detaches the chair from its use value. This is what Marx calls commodity fetishism.

Strikingly, both Marx and later psychoanalytical thinkers derived their accounts of fetishism from nineteenth-century European attitudes to African religions.‘ Just as, in some religions, an object invested with supernatural powers becomes a fetish for those who worship it, so commodities under capitalism are accorded magical powers and illusory autonomy. The strange illusions unleashed under capitalism, for Marx, aren’t just one but many: sometimes the relations between humans become a relation between things; sometimes value appears as what is not a natural property of the thing; sometimes the commodity takes on a life of its own and becomes personified. But, Lukécs argued, such commodity fetishism, which existed in Marx’s day, has become all-pervasive in the modern age. Under capitalism the properties of objects, subjects and social relations become reified or ‘thinglike’ in a particular way. According to Lukacs, the mechanisation and specialisation of industrial work processes fragments human experience, leading to an attitude of ‘contemplation’ where one passively adapts to a law-like system of social ‘second nature’ and to an objectifying stance towards one’s own mental states and capacities. The commodity form, he wrote: 
stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of ’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.“ 

Reification affects relations between persons, and even within the person: one becomes an object to oneself, self-alienated as well as alienated from other humans, particularly those With whom we should be expressing class solidarity. . 

This implies that objects are transformed into subjects and subjects are turned into objects, with the result that subjects are rendered passive or determined, while objects are rendered as the active, determining factor. Hypostatisation, a term that runs through Frankfurt School writing like a thread, refers to an effect of reification which results from the fallacy of supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist. It’s a word that crops up many, many times in the Frankfurt School’s writings, as a jibe to thinkers of lesser stamp. The concept is related to, but distinct from, other terms in Marx’s technical arsenal. Alienation is the general condition of human estrangement. Reification is a specific form of alienation. Commodity fetishism is a specific form of reification.” 

The result of all this, for the Frankfurt School thinkers, is that under capitalism we don’t so much inhabit a world as a phantasmagoria, a world turned upside down in which things become persons and persons things, and things (both human and non-human) take on a spectral life of their own. It was this spectral life of things that haunted the writings of Walter Benjamin. It helps explain the shift from his first attempt at memorialising his childhood in his Berlin Chronicle of the 1920s to the obsessively reworked Berlin Childhood of the 19305. In the process, as we saw earlier, Benjamin’s remembrance becomes increasingly depopulated, his attention focusing on things rather than people. But the point here is that in a phantasmagoric society dominated by commodity fetishism, things could stand in for persons and vice versa; perhaps even that things, bearing the Proustian imprint of pasts painfully recalled, could serve better as fetish guides to our lost childhoods than mere remembered humans. 

But what Benjamin draws attention to again and again, particularly in his long laboured-over but at his death incomplete Arcades Project, is how the endless substitutability of commodities (both things and humans), and our immersion, under capitalism, in a fantasy world of material well-being, ensure that we lose sight of the class struggle that underpins this phantasmagoria. It is as though capitalism, having rubbed out the true nature of class struggle and airbrushed historical contingency, had covered up the tracks of its murder and diverted us from our detective work with the captivating allure of commodities. But that seeming heaven is exposed by Benjamin as a kind of unwitting damnation a ring of hell in which the consumerist faithful endlessly buy and sell, eternally deluded in believing that this activity will bring fulfilment. 
This was, indeed, the hell that Benjamin explored in the Arcades Project, a Paris that, for him, created the modern world by erasing the conditions of its existence. The Arcades Project is throughout bent on contrasting alluring appearance with Marxist reality. The nineteenth-century Paris he described in this book was not so much a city as a beguiling phantasmagoria akin to the one he had witnessed in the Kaiserpanorama in Berlin as a child. Paris, to Benjamin, itself a ‘conse~ quence of the reifying representation of civilisation’. What would the world be like if there wasn’t commodity fetishism? If goods were made for use rather than for sale? It had become almost impossible even to imagine because capitalism had made the way in which it functioned seem natural or immutable. As Slavoj Ziiek later wrote: ‘the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people’. For Lukacs, the madness was such that real people didn’t know their real needs: hence the difference between actual and ascribed consciousness. 

Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo saw nothing mad in the free-market capitalist economy; rather, they treated prices, profits and rents, the law of supply and demand, as natural phenomena. Marx’s incendiary point was that these were historically specific features of a particular economic system. They had not existed under feudalism; nor, moreover, would they under communism. 
The Marxist article of faith, then, is that the horror story must end. Thus, for instance, in his preface to Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that Marx was right to argue that the contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment: a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism. 

But when? That is the $64,000 question. Henryk Grossman, Widely held as the Frankfurt School thinker who theorised when that the (sic) mad dance would end, argued in The Law of Accumulation and Collapse of the Capitalist System (1929) that because capitalism increases the productivity of human labour and accelerates the production of use values, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall and, ultimately, for capitalism to create the conditions of its own demise. 

It happens like this: what Marx calls labour power (roughly, the ability to work) yields surplus value to the capitalist over and above the costs in wages. Capitalists reduce commodity prices to undercut rivals, often by introducing new technology or machinery to increase labour productivity. But as output expands, constant capital (machinery, equipment, raw materials) expands more rapidly than variable capital (invested in wages to labour). So what? Well, as a greater share of investment goes into machinery and plant, rather than the living labour that produced surplus value, which under Marxist economics is the source of capitalist profits, the rate of profit to the total capital invested declines. Grossman apparently used to lecture at Frankfurt wearing white gloves and carrying a cane. One can imagine him with a flourish of the cane and a magician’s ‘Abracadabra!’ on clinching the ramifications of this equation. 

But, of course, as you’ll have noticed, capitalism hasn’t ended. Why? Because capitalists found other means of staving off the calamitous decline of p and thereby their doom such as exporting loan capital or the crazed speculation that Ziiek mentions. Such speculations could defer capitalist oblivion to the long term, that functionally irrelevant prospect in which we are all, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, dead. Indeed, in The Law of Accumulation Grossman argued against Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the necessary collapse of capitalism, in which she proposed that only when there are no non-capitalist markets left to be exploited will capitalism founder. 

That, he thought, could take ages. For Grossman, her proof or the absolute economic limits to capitalism comes close to the idea that the end of capitalism is a distant project because the capitalisation of non-capitalist countries is the work of centuries’. Centuries? Only the most laid-back Marxists could wait that long. 

In the same year as Henryk Grossman’s masterpiece appeared, perhaps the biggest crisis for capitalism in the twentieth century occurred when the speculative bubble burst on the New York stock exchange, starting a world economic crisis and undermining what Iohn Kenneth Galbraith called the ‘faith of Americans in quick, effortless enrichment in the stock market’.“1 But capitalism didn’t fall. Instead, capitalists dusted themselves down, renewed their faith in quick, effortless enrichment and started the mad dance again. 

Grossman did not specify when capitalism would end. Rather, he is most bracing in The Law of Accumulation not for dating the revolution but for exploding the myths that suggested capitalism could carry on in principle forever and that it was not prone to crises that would ultimately destroy it that the economic disruption was just a problem of disproportionality between different parts of the economy, or that workers’ consumer spending was insufficient to buy overproduced goods. The barrier to capitalist accumulation, as Marx explained and as Grossman elaborated, was capital itself. 

In such circumstances, it’s a great shame that Grossman’s analysis has been derided as predicting the automatic collapse of capitalism. ‘The full ramifications of his argument, whose predictions have obviously failed to come true’, writes Martin Jay, ‘need not detain us here. Let it be said, however, that the quietistic implications of his thesis, similar to those of all Marxist interpretations that stress objective forces over subjective revolutionary praxis, were not lost on some of his contemporaries.“ That seems a particularly unfair charge to throw at the one Frankfurt School scholar who, unlike his colleagues philsophising from their armchairs, had seen active service in the socialist struggle. Rather, the truth of the matter is that Grossman adhered to the Leninist notion that the revolutionary process was dialectical and that capitalism’s fall was one in which workers were actors in history rather than spectators observing the economic forces. 

True, much of Grossman’s work was directed against those who thought that the revolution could be successfully launched irrespective of the propitiousness of the circumstances. He wrote in 1928, for example, that for a revolution to break out, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes ‘not to want [to live in the old way], it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable [to live in the old way], that it becomes objectively impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their domination in unchanged form’. Rather, Grossman was arguing, in a non-quietist manner, that revolution could only take place when the objective conditions could be exploited by a revolutionary party conscious of the historic role of the proletariat. The revolutionary process he envisaged was dialectical: capitalism created the working class, and the circumstances in which it was compelled to struggle against capitalism. It was during struggle that the proletariat could become aware that the destruction of capitalism was necessary for its self-liberation. 

The chastening words here are ‘could become’, and they take us back to what worried the Marxists gathered in Ilmenau in 1923. Lukacs had argued in the previous year’s History and Class Consciousness that capitalist society is reified. It was the reification of capitalist society that shifted Marxism from the firebrand optimism of The Communist Manifesto to the melancholy resignation seeping through the Frankfurt School: it was as if, under the modern capitalism that confronted Marxists in 19205 Germany, the proletariat had become the gravediggers not of the bourgeoisie but of their own hopes and aspirations, so alienated from their labour and from themselves that they couldn’t remember what it was they were burying. 

To understand this alienation, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School read Marx’s early account of it in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. There Marx draws on the notion of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) in which an alienated soul is divided and whose aspirations to universality are thwarted. Hegel’s unhappy consciousness is the ‘consciousness of self as a dual natured, merely contradictory thing’. For the early Marx, the worker is similarly alienated, finding not joy in her work but slavery before a commodity system that exploits and denies what labour could have been, joyful and fulfilling. ”This Hegelian theme of self-division and alienation wasseized on by Marx‘s predecessor Feuerbach who, in his Essence Of Christianity, came to the view that the Christian God was a projection of an essence otherwise denied to humanity. For Feuerbach, what we were alienated from as human beings, we turned into an object and called God. For Marx, by contrast, alienation was the necessary consequence of capitalism, distancing the worker from herself and her work. She becomes part of a system that exploits her and her fellow workers. As a result, instead of the working Class being capable of changing the conditions under which it lives, it becomes passive in the face of the apparently autonomous exchanges of commodities. It becomes, in extremis, unable to create the conditions for its own self-liberation. 

But if all these thoughts about alienation, commodity fetishism and reification are in Marx already, why was Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness so influential, especially for the Frankfurt School? For one thing, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which Marx developed that theory of alienation were not published until the late 1920s in Moscow, so Lukacs’s Hegelianised Marxism of a decade earlier seemed prescient or, rather, he had got to the same point as Marx had in his early neglected writings. Moreover, Lukacs argues that the commodity fetishism Marx set out in Capital was, under more primitive economic systems, merely episodic. Now, by contrast, it pervades society entirely. Lukacs wrote: 

With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work-process (in Taylorlsm) this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker’s soul: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialised rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.

As a result revolution was less likely than ever, especially in an advanced, rationally administered society like Germany.