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.