Highlights: On the History of Ideas and Effects of the “New Left”
1.
The student movement of 1968 understood itself as “anti-authoritarian,” which was essentially synonymous with “anti-institutional.” Rudi Dutschke’s famous catchphrase of the “long march through the institutions” did not contradict this self-understanding, but was meant, at least in its original meaning, only to express the necessity that the anti-institutional struggle was to be waged not only from the outside, but at the same time also from “within,” in the subversive penetration of the capitalist institutions themselves. Another catchphrase of the student movement – namely, that of “revolutionary professional practice” – pointed in a similar direction and reflects the ideas, hopes, and illusions of that time, as one might say today. The concept of “autonomy” – which is more common today and by which an entire current of radical young opposition currently defines its self-image – could be considered synonymous with the concept of “anti-authoritarianism.” This alone shows that we are dealing, in a transformed form, with unresolved, contemporary history – that 1968 is not merely history, even if it may seem as distant to some young people today as World War I.
The anti-authoritarian ideology could not have fallen from the sky; yet it seemed to appear suddenly, unquestioningly embraced by a rapidly spreading movement whose members, for the most part, were initially entirely unaccustomed to theoretical reflection. The decisive impetus was not the proliferation of ivory tower experiences, but rather social change – an objectivity unfolding behind the subjects’ backs. The movement’s external triggers and rallying points were political and moral; politically, the critique of emergency laws and the grand coalition – in itself a purely bourgeois, democratically immanent critique; morally, the outrage over the U.S. war in Vietnam – in itself a sentiment that had not yet departed from the framework of bourgeois thought. But why were the social institutions, which had been there all along, now suddenly perceived as authoritarian and intolerable (“Under the robes, the mustiness of a thousand years”)?
Undoubtedly, the objective social transformation that served as the backdrop to the 1968 movement was shaped by the Fordist socialization process of capital. The postwar era was not merely a “period of reconstruction” for capital, as the movement itself put it, but rather a process of capitalist socialization that went far beyond that, reaching a new level. This is indicated not only by the historically unprecedented growth rates of capital accumulation; above all, the social quality of this change itself was decisive beyond mere quantitative growth. It has already become a sociological commonplace that Fordist socialization produced the interventionist, Keynesian welfare state and largely disintegrated the family. Theoretical reflection (for example, by Critical Theory) had already partially anticipated these tendencies and derived them from the logic of war economies, fascism and the “New Deal.” But it was not until after the Second World War that the real Fordist socialization thrust began. Only now did the automobile and consumer and household electronics, aided in part by the technological innovations of the war, enter the phase of worldwide mass production; the creation of new mass needs on a world scale and their production as a profitable absorption of huge masses of living labor first constituted the self-sustaining boom. On an unprecedented scale, women were drawn into the capitalist-defined “labor force,” while at the same time the preconditions, consequences, and “unintended side effects” of this process increasingly demanded comprehensive state intervention – ranging from monetary control to the “permanent war economy” of the arms industry and the rapidly expanding institutions of professional training and scientification, all the way to social work, etc.
At the same time, however, social institutions and modes of transportation remained entrenched in traditional ways of thinking whose roots stretched far back into the estates-based, pre-capitalist society. While the bloody crucible of the two world wars in the first half of the 20th century had already destroyed, dissolved, and eroded traditional modes of interaction, ways of thinking, and behaviors in many respects, “peaceful” Fordist socialization now completed this work, penetrating even the finest pores of society. As a result, the only negative-social individual adequate to capitalism emerged, the abstract MONAD, liberated from all traditional ties and “values,” “liberated,” however, only for the empty end in itself of the valorization of value, of the total buying and selling of oneself. The realization of this tendency, immanent in the capital relation from the beginning, on a new level, the formation of this empty, self-sufficient individual, had to collide with the fossilized, “authoritarian,” in their essence still pre-capitalist traditional modes of thought and behavior. This clash had found mass cultural expression among young people long before the 1968 movement, not only in the revolt subculture of rockers or in the far-reaching fascination with existentialist heroic rebellion per se, for example through the stylization of James Dean, but above all in the massively popular music culture of rock or beat and its idols. The significance of this development cannot be overstated. For the first time in history, the phenomenon of WORLD CULTURE – which had already taken shape under capitalism in the 19th century – descended from the pedestal of “high culture,” the preserve of intellectual elites, into the everyday lives of the masses. This was made possible by the technological productive forces of Fordism and the associated emergence of a global network of direct communication. In this respect, no other form of mass culture has yet been able to even come close to pop music. And it was precisely at this level of the old and the new mass culture that the first violent clashes occurred, triggered by habitual secondary forms that were initially understood as protest (jeans, long hair, etc.). All this was not simply the eternally repeating generational conflict, but the incipient clash of two worlds, the traditional world, in which capitalist socialization was still merely sectoral or external varnish, and the Fordist world of total full capitalism, which subjugates social reproduction to its empty form-determination, right down to the last niches and pores.
From these contexts emerges an objectively grounded interpretation of the 1968 movement that stands in direct contrast to its own self-understanding at the time – namely, its portrayal as a mere function of the “modernization” of capitalism, or more precisely, of the imposition of a totalizing, historically self-identical full-scale capitalism. Tendencies toward such a reevaluation of the movement of that time are increasingly found in the literature, sometimes with negative, but more often with positive connotations under the ideological guise of the “democratization” narrative. The current banal democratic-capitalist self-image of most of the movement’s leaders at the time, extending even to the leading figures of “radical leftism” (Cohn-Bendit, for example), also points in this direction.
And yet such an interpretation would be just as one-dimensional as the super-revolutionary self-image of 1968. This movement, like the preceding revoltist and existentialist subcultures, was fundamentally ambivalent. It expressed not only the capitalist drive toward modernization in the articulation of abstract monads against “authoritarian” traditionalism, but simultaneously also the immense SUFFERING of this abstract individuality at its own hands, the outrage against the horrific emptiness of total self-exploitation. And the question remains whether this aspect of the revolt, whether this outrage, can be preserved as a “legacy” and transformed into a new revolutionary thinking at the height of our time: today, twenty years later. To be able to understand this, the traces of anti-authoritarianism’s ambivalence have to be identified within its own theoretical and ideological forms of expression and critically resolved.
2.
Then as now, the definition of “anti-authoritarianism” or “autonomy” remained rather vague. It is supposed to be about the autonomy of the individual vis-à-vis the social institutions experienced as repressive; the autonomous individual is supposed to defend himself against the authority of repressive sociality or its representatives and constitute a movement of many autonomous individuals, which finally abolishes the repressive-institutional sociality. This anti-authoritarian or autonomous ideology is naturally in a strong and contradictory tension with the socialist history of ideas. On the one hand, it largely shares the socialist intention of abolishing economic relations of exploitation as the basis of social repression; on the other hand, it sees in socialism as it was traditionally understood and practiced (2nd and 3rd Internationals) a new form of institutional repression of the individual, an assessment that was of course only reinforced by the real development of the Soviet Union. An essential impulse of the anti-authoritarian students and youth movement was therefore, in addition to the critique of repressive late capitalism, at the same time the critique of the real-socialist repressive-authoritarian forms of socialization. The fact that in 1968, at the height of the movement, the tanks of the machinery of oppression rolled in equal measure during the Paris May uprising and in Prague under the reformers seemed to confirm this view decisively in practice.
To critically understand anti-authoritarianism, it may be helpful to take a brief look at its intellectual history – a leap back 150 years. Literally “unthinkable” in traditional societies, anti-authoritarian ideology is, even in this early phase of “capitalism on its own terms,” a typical product of the bourgeois 19th century – as, incidentally, is Marxism – and certainly reflects an emancipatory impulse. From the very beginning, currents of anti-authoritarian thought have been close to anarchism or were originally part of it.
In its most radical intensification, even the earliest anti-authoritarianism is directed against any authority external to the individual ego, regardless of its nature. This basic idea of “solipsistic” egoism, which understands itself in emancipatory terms, is already summarized with almost brilliant banality by Max Stirner on the eve of the bourgeois revolution of 1848: “Away, then, with every cause that is not completely my affair. You think that at least the ‘good cause’ must be my affair? Which good, which bad? I am myself my own affair, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither makes any sense to me. The divine is God’s affair; the human cause is ‘humanity’s.’ My affair is neither the divine nor the human; it is not the good, the true, the just, the free, etc., but only my own, and it is not general, but is – unique, as I am unique. For me, there is nothing greater than me!” (Preface to “The Unique and Its Property,” 1842). Even in this earliest formulation by Stirner, the essence of anti-authoritarianism becomes crystal clear. In contrast to all the hypocritical altruism of Christian slave morality and bourgeois “welfare” organizations, there is undoubtedly something refreshing about this statement, just as there is in similar statements by Nietzsche, albeit in a different intellectual context. This problematic kinship is, of course, by no means coincidental. The question cannot be avoided: how does anti-authoritarianism actually intend to distinguish itself from the equally individualistic ideologies of radical liberalism (Manchester liberalism in the 19th century, monetarism, etc., today) or Nietzschean master-man ideology? The answer – that the freedom of each individual and “unique” self is contingent upon the freedom of all others – seems somewhat lame and helplessly abstract. This postulate could be denounced as an altruistic slip-up, as a moral appendage not inherent in the logic of radical autonomy that underlies consistent anti-authoritarianism. Nor does this abstract definition offer even the slightest hint as to how humane sociality is supposed to be practically possible under the presupposition of radical anti-institutionalism.
Quite obviously, anti-authoritarianism drags around with it the unsolved problem of the relationship between the individual and society, the classical problem of bourgeois thought in general, which never gets out of this dualism. The starting point is always the already formed modern individual, as if this individual had fallen from the sky. This individual is alien and external to his own sociality, sometimes even hostile to the extent that the state and bureaucratic institutions grow ever more threatening in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and seem to devour the I of individuality. It does not occur to bourgeois thinking that this individual is not an unquestionable presupposition, but rather a historical-social construct that only came into being with the generalization of commodity production through capitalism and thus the emergence of money as the total and universal form of exchange in society.
Stirner wants to do away with the false abstractions of Christian belief in God just as much as with the false abstraction of humanity in Feuerbach’s critique of religion, in order to arrive at what is supposedly truly concrete, corporeal, and tangible – namely, one’s own ego. He does not notice that it is precisely this that is the most extreme and most arid abstraction of all. This ego is so abstract that it is no longer aware of its own social constitution, but rather experiences it practically as the downright hostile coldness of the social institutions, which it fights against for its abstract, empty autonomy. The incessant dualism of bourgeois thought thus constantly oscillates between the abstraction of sociality and the abstraction of the individual’s privacy, unable to reconcile or mediate between the two, even though it concerns a mediated identity of the self that has disintegrated within itself and with itself. Depending on the context, either abstract sociality – or its institutions such as law, the state, the nation, and so on – is invoked as a necessary constraint on the freedom of the individual, or, conversely, war is declared on these institutions in the name of that very same individual freedom, even though they are merely expressions of the very same process that brought the individual into being in the first place. The unconquered and unconquerable pain obviously stems from the fact that it is precisely an abstract individual in the context of an abstract sociality. The unleashing of commodity production and thus the transformation of human labor power itself into a commodity has triggered an immense surge in socialization compared to the crude, traditional modes of production such as feudalism; people are increasingly less at the mercy of the immediate natural environment, and they are increasingly no longer reproducing their lives within a small domestic-village context based on an agrarian mode of production. Wage labor, the expansion of markets, the creation of the world market, and the associated industrialization have, to use a term now common in ecological discourse, established a global “networked” interconnection of human labor and reproduction. Within the capitalist framework, this is a historical process of socialization, albeit one that is, so to speak, only half-baked – namely, abstract. It is abstract because people do not collectively plan and regulate this growing interconnectedness of their social labor directly through their social institutions according to criteria of concrete utility; rather, social interconnection takes the form of developed, wage-labor-based commodity production, which is only indirectly linked to people’s social practice and DECOUPLED FROM CONCRETE NEEDS. The medium of this abstract socialization is an external thing, MONEY. As a “general commodity,” money is an abstract entity empty of all content that serves as an expression of social labor, completely severing it from its concrete content. Money, as is well known, does not stink; one cannot tell from its appearance whether it is the expression of a destructive or a useful expenditure of social labor. For the multiplication of the money advanced as the well-known end in itself of capitalist production, the aspect of concrete usefulness therefore plays no role in and of itself.
The modern individual, who emerged only after breaking free from the constraints of traditional modes of production, is therefore an abstract social individual – that is, a mere money-subject. In a well-known variation on Descartes’ famous statement, he had to say of himself: “I earn money, therefore I am.” Anti-authoritarianism may oppose the modern institutions driven by the abstract socialization of money; it may morally condemn the dance around the golden calf, not unlike Christian sanctimoniousness in this respect, but unfortunately it is not anti-authoritarian enough to avoid ultimately submitting to this incomprehensible, material authority of money, because it cannot escape its own incomprehensible sociality. Money, through the abstract, empty end in itself of fully unleashed commodity production, even appears to the abstract individual, for whom “nothing matters more than themselves,” as the unconsciously presupposed means by which he must bring his ego to bear. Antiauthoritarianism, or the ideology of the autonomous individual, is thus nothing but the unconscious reflex of bourgeois subject-development, the hopeless walkout of abstract money-subjectivity against itself. And yet in this revoltist reflex there lies, still unseparated, an emancipatory desire that does not know how to give itself adequate expression. In each new crisis epoch of bourgeois, money-mediated socialization, anti-authoritarian ideology therefore also emerges anew on a higher level, without ever being able to break out of the prison of commodity-logical categories, as long as no transformation into a concrete critique of the commodity form itself takes place. How was it historically possible that the idea of a liberation of the individual has nevertheless not progressed beyond anti-authoritarianism or abstract “autonomy” until today?
3.
Marx’s theory essentially contains at its core a radical critique of commodity production in general, that is, of the merely partial, abstract social nature of the individual. For Marx, the communist revolution is ultimately the abolition of wage-labor AS the abolition of the commodity-money-form itself, even if he was unable to articulate these consequences with the necessary clarity. This difficulty stems from the relative underdevelopment of the capitalist abstract socialization process in his time. For the same reason, the old workers’ movement could not grasp the truly radical consequences of Marx’s theory, even in its revolutionary wing. It wanted to abolish wage labor on the ground of commodity production and money, an undertaking doomed to failure. In the West, the result was social democracy integrated into capitalism; in the East, it was Soviet society, which took on a specific form as an expression of CATCH-UP industrialization and BOURGEOIS socialization. Starting from these premises, Marxist theory had to be drastically simplified and thus also had to offer a truncated and oversimplified critique of anti-authoritarianism. Traditional Marxism, itself caught in the categories of abstract commodity-money socialization, was not at all able to analyze anti-authoritarianism adequately. By using the merely accusatory label of “petty-bourgeois individualism,” it signaled its inability to recognize anti-authoritarian ideology as an expression of capitalist socialization at all. The flat sociological classification as the specific ideology of a certain class defined as “petty-bourgeois” obscured the fact that the problem of abstract individuality, with the advance of capitalist development, grips ALL classes, EVEN THE WORKINGCLASSas the bearer of the commodity labor-power and thus as the bourgeois money-subject. By merely countering the anti-authoritarians’ abstract individualism with the anti-individual, external organizational perspective of the old labor movement, traditional Marxism itself remained trapped in the dualism of bourgeois thought in its critique of anti-authoritarian ideology; it did not advocate the concrete individuality of communism – mediated through the struggle for social liberation – against the abstract individuality of money, but merely a new variant of abstract sociality in the form of “state socialism” against the abstract privacy of the liberals and their “inverted” anarchist variant.
The central theme of anti-authoritarianism therefore had to remain alive beyond classical anarchism, and not merely during the upheavals of capitalist crises. The emptied, abstract bourgeois money-subject, at odds with itself, is all the more the subject of the entire philosophy of the 20th century. Lebensphilosophie and existentialism took up the problem, without, of course, being able to resolve it philosophically. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, like most of “Western Marxism” in general, also has to be situated in this context. In its critique of the “authoritarian state” and the “authoritarian personality,” it remained committed to the central motifs of early anti-authoritarianism not merely in form and name: however, it was shaped by contemporary philosophical debate and simultaneously drew upon Marx’s critique of political economy. Although the result remained rather eclectic in many respects, there was no sign of a critical resolution of the old contradiction. Critical theory itself still reproduced the old bourgeois dualism of individual and society as an external, unmediated, hostile opposition; In contrast to the traditional Marxism of the old workers’ movement, however, it did not simply assert the abstraction of the generality of society against the liberal individual in a “state-socialist” manner, but rather tried, precisely the other way around, to defend this individual, the “individual” (including the individual existing as a proletarian in his or her unrepeatable uniqueness) in its mediation through the bourgeois philosophical debate against the impositions of that power of abstract, negative sociality, which began to escalate to unbearable levels in the 20th century. Critical theory itself did not get beyond the individual as an abstraction; in this respect, Stirner’s central motif still remained unresolved in a modified and further developed form. But by daring to make the bold attempt to justify, against the grain of traditional interpretation, the very liberation of the individual from Marx’s theory, Critical Theory ultimately opened the door to a reformulation and further development of this theory beyond the limitations of traditional Marxism; a door, however, through which no one has yet passed.
This was the historical context of socially critical thought that the student movement still encountered in 1968 and could not escape. It was unable, so to speak, to leap directly into a complete reworking of theory, but had to establish a theoretical basis for its legitimacy in its opposition to the existing social structures. Given the ossification of social democracy as a bourgeois institution and the complete theoretical and political impotence of so-called “Marxism-Leninism” of the Eastern variety – as a false “Marxist orthodoxy” – the adoption of anti-authoritarianism through the historical filter of Critical Theory represented an inevitable transitional phase in radical theory and practice; the uselessness and theoretical exhaustion of traditional Marxism, oriented toward the old labor movement, compelled a return to less discredited approaches to radical thought. If the re-emergence of anti-authoritarianism in the crises of the twentieth century had hitherto remained in the shadow of the old labor movement and its major parties, it re-emerged into the full limelight of history in 1968 as the central idea of the worldwide youth and student movements, precisely as the new claiming of an old, unfulfilled promise on which both liberalism and traditional Marxism had failed. The representatives of the old labor movement Marxism were as surprised as they were horrified, as the outcry of one of their propagandists shows: “Anarchism has risen again; it inspires student rebels, defuses the hand grenades of direct action, floods bookstalls, and enriches the vocabulary of police reports. The fact is undisputed, however surprising it may be. It had been considered dead, a museum piece; but it was only a false death. We must renew the discussion, enriched by the experience of a turbulent century” (Bruno Frei, Die anarchistische Utopie, Frankfurt 1978, I. Auflage 1971, p. 5). But in this renewed discussion the “traditionalists” had nothing new to say, as the same author shows with involuntary clarity when he objects as follows to the “petty-bourgeois individualism” of the new anti-authoritarian movement and its neo-anarchist concept of freedom: “The state, which guarantees social order (!), is not the antithesis of freedom (!). The question is rather: which state guarantees which social order, and whose freedom does it guarantee? ‘Freedom,’ Marx teaches, ‘does not consist in negation(!)’, in individual refusal, nor in the isolation of the individual from society, but on the contrary in the ability to identify with the ‘laws of motion(!)’ and ‘lofty goals(!)’ of humanity” (ibid, p. 77).
A conservative could have said exactly the same thing. The traditionalist proponents of “real socialism” and left-wing social democracy thus exposed themselves all too clearly as ideologues of peace and order, who could once again offer nothing in response to the abstract individual’s call for freedom but abstract state-imposed bourgeoisification – the other side of the coin. While, according to authentic Marxist theory, the abolition of the state is identical to the abolition of wage labor and money, the ideologue of “socialist commodity production” and “social democratic” statehood must take refuge in the “laws of motion” and “lofty goals” of humanity. These “laws of motion,” which are nothing other than the immanent logic of commodity production and which Marx considered above all worthy of abolition, force precisely the disintegration of the individual into abstract privacy and abstract sociality, that unresolved dilemma which first brings forth nebulous constructs of external “ideals” and abstract “lofty goals of humanity,” to which the empirical individual is then morally condemned to “subordinate” himself. Quite rightly, this real-socialist/social-democratic civic Marxism earned nothing but scorn and derision on the part of the anti-authoritarians. Of course, this left the classic dilemma of the internally conflicted bourgeois individuality unresolved from the other side as well, for the new anti-authoritarian movement was just as unable to advance a concrete critique of commodity production itself – and thus of the abstract socialization mediated through money – as the traditional forms of state-citizen socialism. The movement of 1968 thus became a mere hot-water heater for all the socially critical ideas of emancipation from the past, which were all rushed through and discarded once again, including anti-authoritarianism itself.
4.
To do justice to the anti-authoritarian movement, it must nevertheless be emphasized that, just like Critical Theory itself, it by no means simply and uncritically repeated Stirner’s statements from 1842 or merely merged into traditional anarchist ideology. In fact, two distinct and ultimately contradictory lines of argumentation and interpretation can be identified within the new anti-authoritarianism, though at the time they did not truly play out their objective opposition. The first and actually more significant line of argumentation, which could still be of great importance, was developed by a group that has today been completely lost, at least in the consciousness of the German left: the “Situationist International.” As the somewhat strange-seeming name suggests, this current seemed to derive from French left-existentialism. The concept of “situation” is a central concept of the whole philosophy of existence, as Bollnow shows; this concept means “[…] that a situation is not something into which a person merely stumbles occasionally and only superficially, but that human existence is, by its very nature, a being-in-a-situation, and that a person caught up in a situation can never escape it. At every moment of his life, he finds himself placed in a situation that he did not choose, that takes no account of his wishes and needs, but which presses upon him as something alien and hostile” (O.F. Bollnow, Existenzphilosophie, Stuttgart/Berlin/ Koln/Mainz 1955, 9th edition 1984, p 59f.).
Translated into the language of left-wing actionism, this could only mean promoting a version of the old anarchist idea of “direct action” – that is, to rebel as a subject, in a “situational” manner, against the objectively established “situations” of capitalist socialization. The social-democratically regressed historians of the SDS, Fichter and Lonnendonker, do not have much more to report about this source of the international anti-authoritarian movement: “The resigned mood prevailing among the European intelligentsia at the time […] led the Situationists to a strange practice: through ‘experimental behaviors,’ a ‘uniform environment’ was to be brought about in collective organization as a ‘constructed moment of life’” (Fichter/Lonnendonker, Kleine Geschichte des SDS, Berlin 1977, p. 78f.).
This indeed strange idea of practice seems merely reminiscent of old anarchist and utopian “commune” experiments. In fact, in the FRG it was the later communard Dieter Kunzelmann who established himself as early as 1959 with the Schwabing artists’ group “Spur” as the German section of this “Situationist International.” This group around Kunzelmann was, however, excluded from the SI only one year later because of its putschist and neo-anarchist tendencies, which suggests a different real self-image of this French current. Under the name of “Subversive Action,” to which Rudi Dutschke also belonged for a time, the Kunzelmann group became part of the history of the SDS and, in the FRG, the forerunner of anti-authoritarian actionism.
Much more interesting, however, are the theoretical approaches of the Situationists themselves, which were hardly known in the FRG, but did play a role in the France of the May Revolt. In the summer of 1968, the German translation of a Situationist pamphlet appeared, which had already been distributed not only in France but also in England, Italy and the USA. The ideas expressed in this pamphlet were hardly discussed in the German movement, but seem all the more important today for a critical reappraisal. The anti-authoritarians of the SI did not merely repeat the basic ideas of the old anarchist anti-authoritarianism, but sought to mediate them with Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism, i.e. precisely that dimension of Marx’s critique of the capital relation which had been suppressed by traditional Marxism. Sartre had already taken up this problem as a problem to be mediated with existential philosophy in his late writings inspired by the confrontation with Marxian theory, without, however, going beyond a first attempt (see Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, New York 2004). Going beyond the “Marxist” Sartre, the Situationists wanted to directly attack and abolish the alienation of the individual from his social existence constituted by the commodity fetish; one of their public slogans was: “Down with the image world and commodity fetishism.” By “image world” they understood the existence of the commodity fetish in the culture of capitalist mass consumption of the Fordist epoch, an approach that went far beyond the anti-authoritarian slogan of “compulsion to consume” widespread in the FRG, even if today it may seem somewhat naïve to cast this keyword of an essential theoretical insight abruptly into slogan form. The Situationist pamphlet says: “The fetishism of facts masks the essential category, the mass of details obscures the totality. Everything is said about this society except what it really is: a society dominated by commodities and spectacles […]” (On The Poverty of Student Life).
From this position, the traditional left could be fundamentally criticized in a truly new sense: “Such pseudo-opposition, propagating the worst mystifications and invoking more or less rigid ideologies, ultimately helps consolidate the dominant order” (ibid, emphasis in original).
This characterization, albeit a general one, captures the essence of the entire old workers’ movement and the Marxism that fused with it; admittedly, the tone of a quasi-“ontological” critique can be discerned, owing to an ahistorical perspective still rooted in existentialism, which amounts to merely denouncing the old workers’ movement as “false” in an abstract manner and without a conditional analysis of its real achievements. What is important, however, is that the Situationists do not criticize the immanence of traditional Marxism in the usual merely political-revolutionary way, but make much more far-reaching demands specifically directed against commodity-money socialization: “It is not enough to be for the power of workers councils in the abstract; it is necessary to demonstrate what it means concretely: the suppression of commodity production and therefore of the proletariat. Despite their superficial disparities, all existing societies are governed by the logic of the commodity; it is the basis of their totalitarian self-regulation […] In the world of commodity production, praxis is not pursued in accordance with autonomously determined aims, but in accordance with the directives of external forces. Economic laws take on the appearance of natural laws; but their power depends solely on the ‘unawareness of those who participate in them.’ The essence of commodity production is the loss of self in the chaotic and unconscious creation of a world totally beyond the control of its creators” (ibid, emphasis in original).
The significance of this solitary attempt at a radical critique of the commodity form cannot be overstated, especially when one considers that, in the twenty years since then, the most “radical” stance taken by the Left has never amounted to more than a mere being “for the power of workers’ councils” – a stance held by the new Left, which has itself grown old in the meantime, as well as today (at best!) among the Autonomists. Admittedly, these important statements by the Situationists remained abstract within their new approach at first and, apparently, could not be further developed – based on existentialist foundations – into a concrete application of Marx’s critique of political economy in the context of the times. Nor were the Situationists yet able to overcome the short-circuited false identity between theory and immediate practice, which is the very hallmark of the anti-authoritarians’ actionism. If anything from their entire approach has stuck in the forgetful consciousness of the Left, it is perhaps that oft-quoted phrase: “Proletarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very keynote of the life they announce.” However, the association of abstract, unmediated hedonism that emerges from this thought, taken out of context, does not do justice to the Situationists. Their radical critique of commodities and money goes far beyond ordinary anti-authoritarianism and remains even today that “Archimedean point” from which alone existing social orders can be unhinged.
But precisely because this approach so boldly anticipated a future of revolutionary movement – one that even today remains to be achieved – it could not truly be grasped or understood by the prevailing consciousness of the movement in 1968; the Situationists themselves had to lament that their ideas had been “thoroughly discussed and thoroughly misunderstood by the entire French left-wing press.” This is all the more true of the German movement, which even largely refrained from commenting. Instead, an interpretation of anti-authoritarianism prevailed that remained rather attached to Frankfurt Critical Theory with its resigned reformist implications and could not keep up with the radicalism of the French “existentialist” attempts to reform Marx’s theory. While Critical Theory certainly addressed the mystifications of what it termed the “exchange society,” its theoretical audacity – in invoking the unresolved abstract individual against its own social mystification – causes it to turn back at the very door it has opened, returning to the professional worlds of democratic fetishism. The concretion of critique did not grasp the commodity form as such and directly, but rather only the secondary forms of its historical development. With regard to the “central nerve” of bourgeois society, Critical Theory thus ultimately remained vague and inconsistent, on the one hand evaporating into the cultural spheres, on the other hand itself operating uncritically with the fetish categories of political economy (see the relevant works on the theory of economic planning by Friedrich Pollock, the “political economist” of Critical Theory). In fact, therefore, despite its theoretical merits, the Frankfurt School succeeded far less than at least some leftist existentialists in leaving behind the mere invocation of unresolved abstract money-individuality and thus bourgeois liberalism.
Drawing on Adorno’s theory, Rolf Wiggershaus has succinctly summarized the key premises and implications of Critical Theory. According to this view, Marx is supposedly concerned with the “non-bourgeois realization” of the bourgeois ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity – that is, with fulfilling the promises of the Enlightenment and liberalism. In a quasi-moral or rather metaphorical sense, this may well be true (cf. Marx’s idea of the “realm of freedom”).
Conceptually-theoretically, however, and in the sense of revolutionary social practice, such intentions were quite far from Marx’s mind; he was NOT concerned with the “realization,” but with the ABOLITION of liberalism and enlightenment. The mere idea of realization itself remains in the framework of commodity fetishism and thus of abstract money-subjectivity. The reformist implication of this approach is most clearly represented by Habermas, who, as an ordinary Enlightenment philosopher, still liked to tinker with this “realization” within the limits of legality and the laws of commodity production. In Adorno, too, the rather resigned reformism results from the connection between market economy and individuality in general, which remains liberal at its core; because the value form of the commodity, as the basic form of reification, remains entirely unresolved and shrouded in darkness, the critique of its cultural secondary forms fizzles out without effect, and it remains entirely unclear how a communist social individual is to be constituted through the abolition of commodity production. Instead, bypassing the central problem, Adorno, much like Horkheimer, directs his attention to the supposed forms of transformation of capitalism within the capitalist form of reproduction itself; in “organized capitalism” and the modern state bureaucracy he sees the destruction of the individuality and subjectivity constituted by commodity exchange, and his interest is directed primarily toward lamenting this and analyzing this process: “According to Adorno’s conviction, without a market economy and the patriarchal nuclear family, not only would there be no relatively independent entrepreneurs, but there would no longer be any reasonably autonomous individuals at all. […] Because of such judgments, Adorno did not even look for conditions other than liberal-capitalist ones for the emergence of counterforces. […] The collapse of the market, the collapse of the bourgeois family, and the collapse of the self were the key terms in Adorno’s view of the genealogy of the desubjectivized subjects of hierarchically organized capitalism” (R. Wiggershaus, Theodor W. Adorno, Munich 1987, p. 75).
Of course, Adorno was not a flat liberal in the sense of a capitalist market ideologue; on the contrary, according to his self-understanding, he was concerned with the abolition of capitalistically constituted social reproduction, but this intention is bent back in a peculiar way by his own theoretical approach. His crux lies above all in the fact that, due to a lack of concrete criticism of the commodity form itself, he is actually unable to name any individuality other than that constituted by this form in its abstractness; the idea of abolition therefore stalls, is no longer thought through, and ultimately exhausts itself in a falsely posed “condition” problem: the subjectivity constituted by (what is assumed to be transitory) “liberal capitalism” is supposed to be the indispensable condition for a radical rejection, which itself remains a black box and a theoretically empty mere intention. Paradoxically, this almost inevitably leads to the toothless slogan of SAVING “liberal capitalism” as the supposed presupposition for its abolition. Quite apart from the fact that this suggests a circular argument owing to the mere idea of “realization,” this view already implies a tendency to wage, in practice, only a defensive struggle for the mere “conditions” of emancipation, while leaving the goal itself – precisely in its decisive content –empty and open to a commodity-form-immanent interpretation. It is no coincidence that a surprising association flashes to mind in this context, namely the memory of the old revisionist Bernstein, for whom “the movement was everything and the goal nothing.” The compatibility of Critical Theory and social democracy, which has since become a practical reality, thus becomes understandable already from the theoretical approach. In the apparent radicalism of the anti-authoritarian movement associated with this line of argument, the seeds of a shift toward shallow reformism were therefore present from the very beginning.
The movement’s dilemma vis-à-vis its “theoretical fathers” lay in the fact that it was unable to critique their reformist-democratic reticence on the basis of the theory’s content itself, but only did so in a peculiar, formal way, as a mere critique of an alleged lack of “will to practice.” This one-dimensionality of the movement’s criticism of “professorial authorities” such as Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas – who raised their hands defensively in the face of these uninvited ghosts – contributed greatly to the mindless praxis fetishism that has repeatedly driven the revolutionary Left into demoralization. This dilemma can already be seen in the strategic approach of Rudi Dutschke, the central symbolic figure of that movement. The “long march through the institutions,” the “process of change,” can in fact be interpreted in two ways, and it is precisely here that an unconscious duplicity of the movement itself lies: either it is truly a process of raising consciousness for the revolution – but in that case, it would be a raising of consciousness against money, against commodity-based socialization itself, that is, in the sense of Marx and the Situationists of 1968 (even if the latter were unable to carry this intention further) – or it is a “democratic renewal” of commodity production itself, i.e., of capitalism. There cannot be a third option. To put it succinctly, Rudi Dutschke did indeed state clearly: “The problem of reform no longer even arises. Reforms, insofar as they can be implemented, are nothing more than improvements to prison cells; they reproduce the existing reality […]” (R. Dutschke, Mein langer Marsch, Reinbek 1980, p. 16). But the content remained unspecified, the direct attack on commodity production and thus money as a capitalist form of socialization (and only in this intensification would a revolutionary critique of “real socialism” also be conceivable) remained unspoken, leaving Dutschke open to interpretation as democratic and thus commodity-fetishistic. No matter how personally credible his emphasis on the liberation of the individual might have been, it was bound to remain bourgeois in this conceptual fog – if not in the situation at the time, then certainly historically. Dutschke himself eventually joined the Green Party’s citizens’ association, and his early death left this decision firmly in place. Even while he was still alive, at the height of the movement, Dutschke was occasionally called upon and questioned from a civic-integrationist perspective – a view he had vehemently rejected at the time: “The fact that this Rudi Dutschke exists, that he must be taken seriously, results from the current state of our parliamentary democracy and the parties that sustain it. If the Dutschkes – and I use this term here, not in a pejorative sense – initiate the necessary self-reflection within the state and the parties, leading to a re-democratization, then they will strengthen the very society they seek to overcome. An effect that is desirable not for Dutschke, but for the majority” (Stuttgarter Nachrichten, 5.12.1967, quoted from: Mein langer Marsch, op. cit. p. 55).
The late Rudi Dutschke is now interpreted by the majority of his former comrades-in-arms ONLY in this light: they declare the commodity-logical, democratically immanent aspect of the 1968 movement to be the “only true” one, thereby denying – almost doggedly – the other, more far-reaching aspect that transcends mere democratic immanence, as well as the very essence of the revolutionary. If these people still want anything at all today, it is, at best, an “improvement of prison cells” – attributed to “feasibility” – of the very kind that the Dutschke of 1968 so detested.
The social ambivalence of the anti-authoritarian movement and its ideology can be illustrated even better and more clearly than in Dutschke’s case by another spokesperson, Oskar Negt, who could never have been accused of revolutionary activities and who presumably always carried his SPD membership card with him. In his frequently reprinted speech “Politics and Protest” from October 1967, he does occasionally speak of “reified relations of domination,” but this hackneyed phrase no longer has any specifically identifiable meaning and is far removed from the Situationists’ direct conceptual sharpening of the issue. Instead, Negt argues primarily within a comparatively narrow and limited framework of German postwar history; rather than the historically totalizing commodity fetishism, the only structure perceived as negative – and thus in need of combating –
is a specific internal dynamic of the most recent stage of capitalist commodity production, understood in the sense of Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of an “authoritarian state.” It is a matter of “[…] the stabilization of an authoritarian meritocracy that, in the interest of monopolistic and state decision-making powers, seeks to gradually eliminate the liberal sphere of political discussions, parliamentary controls, the protracted negotiation of compromises, and the temporary balancing of conflicting interests – all of which it regards as the epitome of unnecessary friction losses in the overall functioning of society” (O. Negt, Politik und Protest, in: Strategie und Organisationsdebatte, Hannover o.J., p. 3).
Quite bluntly, this suggests a fallback position that is by no means to be understood merely as a tactical maneuver; its own substantive aim is rather to invoke the “liberal sphere of parliamentary controls” and, ultimately, to identify the (“social partnership-based”) “reconciliation of conflicting interests” in the sense of the most run-of-the-mill trade union legalism as the only clearly formulable objective. Negt does, at the same time, concede that the protest movement presents itself with “a total claim to social change” (ibid.), but the peculiar lack of substance in this characterization already indicates that the totality of this claim could not have been that far-reaching. This becomes even clearer when he says of the anti-authoritarian groups that they “[…] develop forms of organizational self-activity through politically active reflection” and thereby not only realize “the constitutionally (!) inherent claims to democratic solidarity contained in the catalog of fundamental rights (!)” but simultaneously “[…] stabilize ‘autonomous zones of practical resistance’ ‘against an order that can respond to the demand for legitimation only with coercion and violence”(ibid., p. 13f.). If the vaguely defined “autonomous zones of resistance” could truly be portrayed as radically transforming society, then they were, of course, precisely a break with merely “constitutionally immanent” claims and could by no means be linked to such claims within the logic of “not only but also.” This duplicity on Negt’s part not only reveals the budding German professorial philistine peeking out from beneath the revolutionary cap – who, in his argumentative legitimization, was already covering his back long before the professional bans – but it also signals precisely that unconscious duplicity within the movement itself. Its real empirical starting point had, in fact, been merely the “defense of democracy” and the bourgeois constitution against emergency laws, the grand coalition, and “technocratic” tendencies toward consolidation. The movement’s own momentum had formally led it toward revolutionary positions, the substance of which, however, could not be more precisely defined or concretized. In fact, the supposed radicalism manifested itself more in the mere FORM of “breaking the rules” – such as violating academic regulations – than in any radical, society-transforming substance. In truth, the content ultimately remained rooted in the movement’s merely democratic – and therefore commodity-fetishistic, capitalistically immanent – point of departure, from which it had initially gained its relative mass base. This becomes clear, for example, at the end of Negt’s speech, when he says: “A practice constituted by the dialectic of anti-institutional and institutional elements, which creates the conditions (!) for a socialist overcoming of capitalist class society, will transform the sublime into the manifest violence of the system of domination to the extent that revolutionary-democratic (!) activity gains a genuine mass base. It was only through such an expansion, of course, that the political substance of the protest had become socially concrete; the manifest violence of the state would no longer be able to be directed exclusively against students and young people, but would be confronted with strategies of organized counter-violence that unite all democrats (!!) in this society in a united front of resistance” (ibid., p. 15f.).
Here, not only do the democratic dog-ears become visible in all their glory – tributes with which Negt is now, more than ever, lavishly blessed – but the reduction of the struggle to one concerning mere “conditions,” as already hinted at by Adorno, is already evident.
With regard to a real social movement, however, this definition becomes all the more questionable and nebulous. For “conditions” – in the sense, for example, of an impairment of the real social process of reproduction – cannot be “created” at all by the merely subjective efforts of a relatively limited youth and student movement; if, however, “conditions” of consciousness are meant in the “cultural-revolutionary” sense or in the sense of spreading theoretical insight, then this would indeed be the very proclamation, unfolding, and concretization of revolutionary content itself – and not a feeble assertion of bourgeois-immanent demands and slogans of merely democratic consciousness. To invoke the “common ground of the democrats” – or even “all democrats in this society” – merely in a supposedly “true,” alternative way – invoking the PRINCIPLE of bourgeois society against its empirical reality, rather than shattering this ideological principle as well with the revolutionary content of a radical critique of the commodity form – must from the outset remain a manifestation of bourgeois immanence and expose all seemingly radical rhetoric as a lie. Democratic drivel, which remains entirely within the confines of commodity-fetishistic abstractions, is, however, merely the necessary consequence of a truncated theoretical approach. Because, in truth, its own revolutionary content is lacking, the long-since decayed ideals of the 18th-century revolutionary bourgeoisie must be regurgitated ad nauseam, while their supposed radicalism can cling to nothing but FORM and, precisely for that reason, must make the purely formal “QUESTION OF VIOLENCE” the eternally repeated linchpin – in reality, devoid of content or filled with utterly non-militant bourgeois content – and thus fall into the stylized gesture of militancy known as “strategies of organized counter-violence.” Today, Negt no longer wants to acknowledge his own share of responsibility for the RAF’s destructive and suicidal path; it is precisely within the context outlined above that this can be presented to him. The RAF fighters were simply more morally consistent than the spineless university careerists of Negt’s ilk, who – despite their own aura – were in truth never radical in substance, not even back then. Nor should it be seen as an expression of theoretical decline when Oskar Negt today, after 20 years, unabashedly and openly documents his complete lack of understanding of the central categories of Marx’s critique of commodity production – as he did at the “Prima-Klima Congress” of former SDS members in November 1986: “Unfortunately, it’s the case that many […] have only read the chapters on the value-form in Capital – those are the most difficult, the most obscure, and probably the least significant. Yes, there might be some objections to that – I don’t want to commit myself on that point either… It’s just not really that essential for me, I mean, the value-forms… or not” (Prima-Klima Protokolle, Hamburg 1987, p. 165).
This conceptless babble really says it all. This is not a decline, because the theoretical level was never higher. It’s just that today, pseudo-radical rhetoric is no longer necessary; sated and ensconced in the bosom of the factual reality of capitalist socialization – whose normative power may finally be accepted without resistance – a Negt can now, with a slobbering mouth, spout democratic drivel among those who have turned out to be “realists.” The shame is simply over. The democratic interpretation of the anti-authoritarian movement – which had prevailed from the outset against all more radical options, especially those of the French Situationists – had to, by its own internal logic, capitulate to the consequences of the unresolved money-subjectivity in commodity-fetishist society and ultimately openly commit itself, in the spirit of “realpolitik,” to capitalist state bourgeoisie.
5.
It thus becomes apparent that the anti-authoritarianism of 1968, despite all the unsympathetic criticisms leveled by traditional Marxism, had its merits, at least for a historical moment, it brought to light a level of contradiction that has not been recognized to this day, and precisely in its social ambivalence it represented a necessary moment of development – though, just like that Marxism, it was incapable of breaking through the bourgeois shell of unresolved history of social emancipation. The extreme abstraction of the individual – who fails to grasp the basis of his social constitution and, as the monad that he is, rebels merely formally against his own institutional sociality, which is external to him – can only produce a semblance of radicalism that, so to speak, pantomimically enacts the extreme consequences of the bourgeois monetary subject, but does not overcome them, neither theoretically (which would be the presupposition) nor practically. The substantive emptiness of anti-authoritarianism therefore leads, with logical necessity, back into the bosom of that bourgeois world which it has set out to defeat – with Don Quixote-like emphasis and in a constant metamorphosis of its manifestations – at every stage of capitalist socialization, time and again.
The peaceful – albeit rather lackluster – return to the bourgeois fold, or, as Thomas Schmid, another former pseudo-radical, puts it somewhat more eloquently, the “return of the Left to its homeland,” proceeded quietly at first and, on the surface, even seemed to take on the opposite character. Anti-authoritarianism had helped the SDS blow up the inherited bourgeois organizational structure of a social-democratic kennel club; this, too, can only be counted as a merit. Admittedly, the merely negative “dissolution into the movement,” for lack of substance, could not resolve the organizational question of the radical Left; behind the supposed organizational question, bourgeois regression was in fact already lurking. In practice, this manifested itself in the rapid and short-lived withdrawal of the eerily Byzantine K-sects, which were oriented toward the traditional Bolshevik party model. Their mythologizing of an empirically defunct form of the proletariat and the class struggle of the 1920s – when the “revolutionary world was still in order” – did not in any way signal, as their members imagined, a chemically pure “class betrayal of the petty bourgeoisie” and “transition to the working class,” but could only be a stopover on the way back to the bourgeois home port. The fact that some people got stuck at every stage of the movement – and that we can still observe all their transitory manifestations empirically in pocket-sized form today – does not alter the general course as such. The historically costumed “proletarian” organizational fetishism actually served, above all, the function of stifling – with its rigid prohibitions on thought and the self-flagellation of the “intellectuals” (which every “revolutionary” first-semester German studies student was allowed – and required – to pay for) to stifle and extinguish any remaining impulse of the movement’s “excessive” moment, which touched upon the radical critique of commodity fetishism. It was not the long-sought antithesis to the bourgeois world – that traditional Marxism in its glorified “revolutionary” guise, which was now merely invoked dogmatically against its own pitiful forms of decay, denounced as “revisionist” – but rather the secretly kindred spirit that was already unconsciously sensed. The true substance of that ostensible organizational and class question was then revealed in the late 1970s in the accelerated metamorphosis into a green kennel club with all the attributes of bourgeois law and politics – a revival of old-style social democracy, painted green to the point of absurdity, under new conditions.
What remains are those “new conditions” themselves; and the anti-authoritarian movement can rightly claim that it helped “modernize” capitalism – not only in the FRG – in the sense of negative, abstract total socialization in the commodity form. If, however, the veterans today wish to pin this contribution to their chests as a medal in the name of a “democratization” of society, an “expansion of rights and freedoms” that even the “turnaround” could not fully reverse, etc., then they are distorting the true nature of this development beyond recognition. Critical Theory’s thesis of the “authoritarian state” already perceived this historical tendency in a very one-dimensional way, even if it was still aware of the ambiguity of the terms in the fetishistic commodity form. The expansion of state repression and state intervention on the one hand, and the expansion of formal “individual freedoms” on the other, are not mutually exclusive but rather mutually reinforcing. It is, after all, the unchecked dynamic of the abstract commodity form and the full-fledged emergence of the abstract human being that unites both as a single identity. Individuals are nationalized in the form of the abstract generality, yet through that very same process they are “liberated” as the contentless, increasingly dehumanized monads of money. It is a sign of boundless theoretical and political naivety to misunderstand the statist elements of this process as a “return of the authoritarian state” (a mistake even Adorno could not always avoid). The state’s apparatus of repression – an apparatus that has in fact been enormously expanded – beats down on individuals in both overt and subtle ways, insofar as the contradictions of the total commodity form place them in hopeless situations that threaten their very bodies and lives, driving them literally mad; but this repression no longer serves, in the slightest, the function of the semi-feudal traditional state apparatus, which was to forcibly maintain traditional hierarchies and structures of authority. Quite the contrary: individuals are expected to be able to adapt, without any further restrictions, to the free movement of the “automatic subject” (Marx), the finally total value form of social reproduction, and thus of money. To the extent that residual traditionalist structures and authoritarian forms of consciousness still stood in the way of the free floating of money monads, they had to be melted away; and it is precisely in this regard that the anti-authoritarian movement has achieved its lasting “successes.”
The “liberal” capitalism of the 19th century was not, as Critical Theory suggests, the “true” capitalism of the liberal individual – who still had a chance at “true,” socially universal emancipation; rather, it was in reality a still semi-feudal form of capitalism, existing merely as a subsector of society, and still far from complete and undeveloped; the liberal individual of that time was not the fully developed form, but only the embryonic precursor of abstract individuality. Fordist full or total capitalism is therefore not a transcendence of the capitalist relation on its own terms, as Horkheimer and Adorno believed, but, on the contrary, precisely that completion of capitalism, the blood of which they imagine to have been shed in the past. The secondary forms of the commodity fetish described by them are, in their perversity, not the result of a false sublation of the commodity, but, on the contrary, its very realization – the revelation of its true nature and logical consequence within itself. Every assertion of unresolved abstract subjectivity against the institutions of the abstract generality – as supposed bearers of authoritarian traditions – could thus only entangle itself all the more deeply in the fetishism of the commodity form, a fact that Adorno at least intuited. His refusal to bow to the anti-authoritarian demand for “praxis” thus appears in a more favorable light. For in fact: every partial realization of the anti-authoritarian emancipatory ideas in the forms of bourgeois society has, in practice, turned them into their opposite. The partial realization of “liberated sexuality” was bound to culminate in the pornographic industrialization of the sexual. For the “democratization” of sexuality is directly identical to its pornographic commercialization, because the commodity form and democracy are identical. Were it otherwise, the “democratization” interpretation of the anti-authoritarian movement would have had to lead directly to a confrontation with the commodity form rather than to its affirmation.
The fact that the anti-authoritarian movement, in its development, not only contributed to the objective social affirmation and further historical liberation of the commodity form, but was also affected by it in its subjective consciousness, is also demonstrated by its degenerate form of social reform in the guise of the “alternatives,” whose diverse projects are still regarded today as a social pillar of the Green Party. From the very beginning, the alternative projects have represented a scaling back of social aspirations – a de facto abandonment of the political, society-wide framework that had degenerated into a moral ornament, within which alone the social nature of the individual and his or her claims could be addressed. “Communes” – reduced to “shared living arrangements” – printing shops, publishing houses, bars, bookstores, cultural projects, etc., were decoupled from the disintegrating political movement and, with varying degrees of friction, transformed into “social enterprises”; but in doing so, they also shifted from serving a logistical function for a higher social purpose to becoming an end in themselves – an abstract privacy that ideologically confined the transcendence originally conceived for society as a whole within its own interior: the politicization of the private gave way to the privatization of the political; the emphasis on revolutionary self-determination gave way to the faint echo of life-reformist “self-administration” within the mere confines of alternative projects. The feeble reflection of social aspirations in the expansion of what were initially merely logistical projects of a movement – into life-reformist pseudo-production (alternative bakeries and other artisanal workshops, agriculture on the “scorched earth” of abandoned peasant cultures, all the way to models of Keynesian state-subsidized “worker-owned enterprises”) and their state-interwoven “networking” signaled not merely a shift in the subjectivity of “revolt,” but long ago its abandonment in the unconditional renunciation of the revolutionizing of real social production after only a few years of short-lived attempts. It is a testament to theoretical stupidity when, in an ingratiating affirmation, the movement subject’s revealed bourgeois abstractness is still celebrated even in its forms of disintegration that take the direct shape of commodities: “Today, when reflexivity is itself threatened as a principle of life, social movements are also emerging, for example in the form of alternative movements, which directly (!) take up the struggle for technically threatened forms of life, finally the chances of SELF-BEING, however contradictorily” (Claus Daniel, Theories of Subjectivity, Frankfurt/New York 1981, p. 125, emphasis Kurz)
The adoption of the “alternative” agricultural dairy model evidently entailed a shift toward the theoretical as well. Yet, questions regarding the content – or the “contradictory nature” inherent in the social form of this proclaimed subjectivity – are no longer asked, just as the content itself is ignored. In socially totalized commodity production, however, the empty form itself is the content as an end in itself, from which no one can escape unless they fundamentally critique this form as such. It is easier to ride a tiger than to mobilize the money form – long since unleashed by society – as such for “good causes.” A false life cannot be truly lived; “being oneself” within the totalized commodity form can only ever mean the abstract subject’s unconditional surrender to the objective self-movement of this form. The alternative movement, as a metamorphosis of early anti-authoritarianism, has long since been overtaken on its own turf by the voracious appetite of the social value-form. This is evident not only in the ironic spectacle of founding a bank, but more broadly in the inevitable “professionalization” driven by market forces; here, the objective laws of the commodity form inevitably expose the illusion of “self-management” just as thoroughly as they did the long-bankrupt “workers’ self-management” of Yugoslavia’s capitalist commodity economy. And already a new, final metamorphosis of anti-authoritarianism is taking shape, one that – in conjunction with that “professionalization” – restores its connection to society as a whole, but now in the form of openly anti-socialist ideological militancy as the managerial perspective of “ecological capitalism.” The Green “market ecologists” constitute only a small segment of this trend, which focuses more on the development of “eco-social” perspectives within capitalist social technology. The post-Fordist shift in social work during the 1970s was, from the outset, closely intertwined – both in terms of personnel and ideology – with the anti-authoritarian movement and its transitional stages, including alternative projects. In the context of community social work, however, and its “theoretical” reflection, the push toward “professionalization” is evidently yielding unexpected results: “Highly developed industry itself demands social innovations for its own purposes. […] Everyone is their own manager. […] The new style of management is ‘a networking style of management’ […] in which everyone becomes a resource for everyone else (!). […] Companies nurture their human resources (!) by orienting toward the social and everyday needs of their employees. Company planning of working life and personal life planning, work style and lifestyle, adapt flexibly to each other (!). On the other hand, in many places alternative economic enterprises are founded for social reasons: Living differently, working differently […] The ‘new poverty’ should not blind us (!) to a process of increasing the value of human resources that runs diametrically opposed to the classic theory of impoverishment (!). The individual human being can make more of himself in the industrialized West (!) and achieve more with less effort than ever before. […] Human resources are the pound to be gained (!). The future role of social work will probably be determined less by its continuing obligation to assist the needy than by its effectiveness in tapping social resources (!). […]This tapping of resources takes place, on the one hand, through the direct link between social work and economic activity. […] After all, the alternative economy sector in the Federal Republic of Germany already employs 150,000 and more people. […] In the long run, profitability and welfare must coincide everywhere (!), economic and social yield must be brought into a balance. To ensure that this does not happen over people’s heads – and thus become “anti-social” again – an increasingly important task of social work is to encourage people, both inside and outside of companies, to shape their own lives productively and to participate socially and actively in economic processes. This is the essence of autogestion, under which term the French discuss the connection between self-determination, self-government and self-management (!!) […]” (Wolf Rainer Wendt, The Broad Field of Social Work: Historical Motivations and Ecological Perspectives, in Oppl/Tomaschek, Soziale Arbeit 2000, vol. 1, Soziale Probleme und Handlungsflexibilitat, Freiburg 1986, pp. 68ff.).
The brutal, perverse reification of this language and its terminology is self-defeating. Now it becomes clear what the phrase “reification” was worth in the mouths of those who failed to concretize it as a radical critique of the commodity form of social reproduction itself. And this is by no means an isolated voice; just think, for example, of the “paradigm shift” among formerly “leftist” industrial sociologists like Kem and Schumann, who today likewise rely on “enlightened management.” In its objective long-term consequences, as well as in the shift in the subjective consciousness of its proponents, the anti-authoritarian movement has become the last cry of capitalist corporate culture. From revolutionary “self-determination” through life-reformist “self-administration” to brutally defining oneself as a reified “human resource,” to “self-management” and “self-exploitation” – what a merciless logic of self-destruction of emancipatory will under the guiding star of unresolved abstract subjectivity! The inability of a merely formal conception of autonomy or anti-authoritarianism to distinguish itself from liberalism’s monetarist definition of the subject is thus cruelly demonstrated in practice. It suffices to quote another great anti-authoritarian, alternative thinker, and lover of abstract money-subjectivity: “The American Revolution was a philosophical one. For the first time in human history, we have unleashed the individual genius of the single man to rise as high and as far as his own strength and ability will carry him” (Ronald Reagan, 1980).
By defining “self-determination” and “self-administration” in terms of their outcome in this way, they subsequently lose, as such – as mere formal proclamations of emancipatory will – every last trace of revolutionary transcendence. The notion that, as a money subject, one must “make something of oneself” required no emancipatory idea, because the content of the money form consists in itself and in its emptiness, in which the total de-subjectification of the subject is grounded. The anti-authoritarian movement did not arrive at the bitter end of its path in Holderlin’s much-cited “Open,” but rather voluntarily and definitively cemented itself into that “prison cell” of abstract socialization, the name of which Dutschke and his followers had been unable to articulate in a radically critical manner. The “lead-heavy era” has only now truly begun – both for the victors of the process of “self-management,” who cannot be subjects, and for its losers, who are consigned to capitalist poverty and disaster management. In the event of their revolt, the Tumschuh-Noskes will stand ready, if necessary, as the enforcers of the depersonalized rule of the “automatic subject,” now that the Greens have already produced their own version of Tumschuh-Millerandism. The Situationists of 1968 knew what they were talking about: “The self-management of commodity alienation would only MAKE EVERYONE THE PROGRAMMERS OF THEIR OWN SURVIVAL – squaring the capitalist circle. The task of the workers’ councils will thus be not the self-management of the existing world, but its unceasing qualitative transformation: the concrete supersession of the commodity (that enormous detour in the history of human self-production)” (On the Poverty of Student Life, emphasis Kurz.).
The negative aspect of this statement reads today as a prognosis for the anti-authoritarian movement itself, even in its democratic, capitalist-immanent interpretation. With the verification of this prognosis, the left has in fact “come home to roost.” The Greens and their social milieu are the stinking corpse of the emancipatory will of 1968. This will, drowned in the logic of money and its self-perpetuating motion, will not – in the coming and, in part, already manifest crisis of money and the commodity economy – rise again from its former bearers like a phoenix from the ashes, but will instead transform them once and for all into frenzied, greedy, and ultimately murderous neo-petty bourgeois. The snatching and biting, the howling and gnashing of teeth over the dwindling “alternative funds” of the state and local governments must escalate to unbearable levels with the manifest crisis of public finances amid a looming global economic crisis, giving rise to political forms of expression that remain obscure today. At present, there are only faint glimmers of new hope for a social will to emancipate the human subject. For today’s young radical opposition of the Autonomists – who have given their concept of “autonomy” as little clear substance as the anti-authoritarian movement of 1968 did – the development of that movement and its social and subjective outcomes should serve as a warning sign. “It is not enough to cast an abstract vote for the power of the workers’ council.” The abstract slogan against wage labor and for autonomy, no matter how often repeated, remains empty and ineffective if it cannot be concretized in theoretical social discourse and in practical struggle at all levels of society as a fundamental critique of the commodity and money forms themselves. The Autonomists, like other future movements, will be radical as radical critics of commodity-fetishist society and of money itself – or they will not be radicals at all.
Originally published in Marxistische Kritik no. 5 in 12/1988
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