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NEWS & LETTERS, January-February 2004EssayThe fate of totalitarianism: Marxist-Humanism in conversation with Orwell, Sartre, and Adornoby Tom More In 1984, George Orwell projected the future of totalitarian society. As everyone knows, the author of ANIMAL FARM had the Soviet Union in mind. Projecting the logic of totalization to the end, he foresaw Winston’s reintegration into the totality. In this context, reintegration is code for Winston’s dissolution. By the same token, the annihilation of Winston’s difference is the restoration of the pure positivity of Big Brother. The gesture of protest, Winston’s momentary refusal, is crushed with clinical, surgical, machine-tool precision. With the ingenious novelistic device of newspeak, Orwell shows that the effect of a false totality is annihilation; the diminishment of language to the vanishing point. With newspeak and the ensemble of measures of techno-bureaucratic manipulation and domination, what is annihilated is the consciousness of freedom, rendering the appearance of a Winston, a Spartacus, or a Nat Turner socially impossible. Likewise, in the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON (1960), Jean Paul Sartre demonstrates the dialectics of the annihilation of freedom as "serialization.” And Theodor Adorno, whose centenary was marked in November 2003, shows it in NEGATIVE DIALECTICS (1966). Like Orwell’s, Adorno’s critique of the totally administered society was directed to the Soviet Union. But before World War II, the first-generation Frankfurt School theorists originally targeted capitalist society after World War I, when a totalitarian economism threatened to fashion all things in the bourgeois mirror of the fulfilled logic that Adorno eventually characterized (together with Max Horkheimer) as a dialectic of Enlightenment extending back to the ODYSSEY. But in precisely just this historical extension, Adorno also abandoned the specific, historically determinate logic of the capitalist mode of production. Or in other words, his extension of Marx’s categories--such as commodity fetishism--to the level of a trans-epochal dialectic of Enlightenment, executed in the cultural remains of Europe at the onset of a new age of barbarism, as ingenious and insightful as it was, also pays a stiff penalty for its displacement of categories from the critique of political economy to a universalizing, totalizing cultural criticism. Why this is a mistake becomes apparent only with the comparison of Winston’s defeat with historical facts that disclose a different reality. 1984 can come to pass ONLY IF freedom can be abolished--the possibility Orwell foresees in common with Adorno. But so chilling a specter is belied by events that call for a different philosophy. Sartre comes closer because he identifies freedom with consciousness and consciousness with negativity, in order to demonstrate that a totalized totality that destroyed freedom would also destroy itself (in Sartre’s ontology, there can be no Totalizer). Still, Sartre too falls short, for reasons that have to do with a similarity between Sartre and Adorno in their respective conversations with Hegel. For Adorno, the critique of Enlightenment ripens into NEGATIVE DIALECTICS after Auschwitz, and Auschwitz emblemizes the actual history of the Hegelian Absolute. Adorno and Sartre alike presuppose in the heart of their thought that the Absolute Idea is the sham that unmasks Hegel--their anti-Hegelianism--though each also recognizes that his thought is impossible without Hegel. ADORNO'S NEGATIVE DIALECTICS That Nietzsche and not Hegel is the figure for Adorno in the end, also shows why Adorno’s centenary holds an undeniable significance, inasmuch as Adorno is so widely taken as a precursor of postmodernism. But outside the court of the mandarins, history happens, and historically, the noteworthy fact is not 1984 but the collapse of the Soviet Union, the intensification of the pace of both the formal and the real subsumption of global political economy under the commodity form, the global reality that Peter Hudis outlines in his essay, "What is new in today’s imperialism?” (N&L, November 2003), and the emergence of new passions and forces of resistance from below. A fourth voice needs to enter the philosophical conversation with Orwell, Sartre, and Adorno. Is 1984 the last word, the endgame? Is the Absolute Idea totalitarianism? Can freedom be destroyed? What if the Absolute Idea is the idea of freedom itself? What if the pure positivity of Big Brother cannot vanquish the power of negativity without also destroying itself? If the point of negative dialectics is to defy the false totalitarianism of the megaton bomb, epitomized by Adorno’s maxim CONTRA Hegel that "the whole is the untrue,” and elaborated within the framework of a philosophy of non-identity, then we can also observe how this negation is incomplete and as one-sided as the positivity it opposes and in whose shadow it stands. Adorno’s failure of political engagement is hand in glove with his mandarinism and voluntary confinement to the German academy. By contrast, Sartre, who struggled to break the bourgeois chains that bound him, not only took up but made himself a prime exemplar of the engaged, public intellectual. Yet as Raya Dunayevskaya shows in her treatment of Sartre in the chapter of PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION subtitled, "Outsider Looking In,” he had to struggle with the question of his relevance, which one could not quite say brought him into the revolution from below, or even within the fold of Gramsci’s organic intellectual. He was too much the prisoner of his isolation and alienation (portrayed in the autobiography, THE WORDS), despite his unprecedented impact on radical thought in France from the resistance to May 1968. Sartre was an optimist, if the term can be used non-trivially at all, because he was a humanist. But Adorno was not a humanist but a pessimist. However Sartre the humanist was for a significant number of years in the 1950s a fellow traveler with Stalinism, and it has become impossible in retrospect to deem this ambivalent capitulation to be anything other than a telling mistake. Optimism and pessimism, terms we might as well keep bland in the present context, have more profoundly to do with our final assessments of Hegelianism, AS HUMANISM, and Nietzsche as the emblematic anti-humanist. THE FAILURE OF TOTALITARIANISM Marxist-Humanism, on the other hand, is not pessimistic. As the systematic recreation of Marx’s Marxism for our time, its starting point, expressed by Dunayevskaya in MARXISM AND FREEDOM, is that if Marxism is not a philosophy of freedom, it is nothing. Dunayevskaya’s is the fourth voice to challenge Orwell, Sartre, and Adorno from another point of view--unsurprisingly, the philosophical, theoretical, and practical achievement of a woman revolutionary and a major figure in the development of American feminist theory. It is not that we are not threatened by the totally administered society (best understood within the conceptual framework of state-capitalism) and by what Sartre seems to think of as the inevitability of serialization. From its inception, capital has aimed to transform humankind into mere appendages to the machine. But the founder of Marxist-Humanism saw very early that the forms of state-capitalism had their work cut out for them and in all likelihood would not succeed in their totalizing objectives. In "What is new in today’s imperialism?” Hudis quotes Dunayevskaya from an essay on "War and Peace” in 1960: "The reason that the capitalistic world, from its division into five power blocs in World War I, came out of World War II with two and only two, power blocs, nuclearly armed, is that there is just no room for more if this madhouse of ‘production for production’s sake,’ where the dead labor of machines and not the living labor of human beings has the decisive voice, is to continue. In fact, there is no room for two.” At first blush, these lines might seem to concede the force and the logical progress of capital as totality. With "no room for two,” we seem now to have entered the world of "the One.” Capital APPEARS as the Absolute Subject (Marx's CAPITAL Vol. 1, chapter 4). This very integration and concentration of many capitals into a single world capital--institutionally organized by U.S-led capitalism, militarism, and imperialism, internationalized and globalized through such club-members’ only bodies as the G8 nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the relevant treaties, like NAFTA, GATT, the failed MAI, and the FTAA--is the fulfillment of the logic of totalization and the reason behind Adorno’s pessimism. Only because this is the APPEARANCE (SCHEIN, not ERSCHEINUNG or showing forth), a phenomenological moment drenched and swept within an absolute movement of becoming, it is also fraught with contradiction, harboring within itself an absolute source of resistance--the movement from practice and the movement from below of new passions and forces--the absolute character of which is assured by the logic of totalization itself. SARTRE'S CRITIQUE OF TOTALIZATION In the CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, Sartre comes close to recognizing the dialectical necessity of this circumstance, that an appearance appearing absolute must be self-defeating, inasmuch as since we are "condemned to be free,” absolute serialization and pyramidization cannot overtake freedom without also overtaking itself. This is the hope he still finds in the transformations of the Soviet Union of the 1950s. But that he has to look to the Soviet Union at all as an apologetic French outsider, if only momentarily, shows how his thought, even in the CRITIQUE, still finds itself thinking in the shadow of Stalinism--in other words, the totalized totality, the degenerate form of second negation that is really nihilism. To be clear, Sartre’s thought is NOT Stalinism, because his project of a CRITIQUE of dialectical reason will not permit a totalizer. But in that case, the correct inference to draw, but which Sartre will not allow himself to make, owing to his own interpretation of the Hegelian Absolute, is that the absolute opposite of a totality that cannot be totalized is the absolute negation of pure positivity; or in other words, that the absolute opposite of totalitarianism is freedom. However, this is not Winston’s failed, reintegrated, annihilated freedom. This is the freedom that cannot be annihilated because the very power of the auto-totality, capital as Absolute Subject, requires the voluntary complicity of the subjects it would seek to annihilate. This is the point where Marxist-Humanism posits revolution--specifically, the revolution in permanence--as the absolute opposite of the absolute it opposes. In this way, the Absolute Idea, as it stands in Hegelian dialectical logic, is the idea of freedom itself, the self-bringing-forth of liberty (as Hegel puts it in the PHILOSOPHY OF MIND), the irrepressible aspiration to be free by the social subjects of history, also drenched and swept up in the absolute movement of becoming. Hence almost 40 years before the implosion of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, Dunayevskaya was confident--on the dual grounds of a philosophy of freedom profoundly different from Orwell’s, Sartre’s, or Adorno’s, and of the unceasing movements from below--that humans WOULD RESIST, in insurmountably large numbers, and could not fail to affirm the very freedom that explodes as the power of the negative. Moreover Marxist-Humanism holds that this absolutely new beginning is not postponed to a future beyond our present grasp. The new beginning is already underway, as when for example the Iraqi feminist Yanar Mohammed writes to NEWS & LETTERS (November 2003) to say that neither Bush and Halliburton, nor Ba’athism, nor Islamism and the theocratic state is the answer that Iraqi women want: what they want instead, in the second Iraq, is what we want in the SECOND America--to be the free and responsible authors of our own lifeplan, to determine for ourselves, and not to be determined by capital. The signs of the new society are all around us. But Sartre, staring through his hotel window at working people working on the ground below, might have a skewed vision of what was new. If only he had gone down to talk to them! If only Adorno had listened to the students instead of calling the police. If only Orwell hadn’t become the project of Christopher Hitchens and a strange darling among neoconservatives. The negation of the negation is not the return to the same. Rather, it presses to the higher viewpoint of something new, beyond the horizons of the Bush administration, Blair, Islamic fundamentalism, Ariel Sharon, and the tightening noose of bad ideas that have little or nothing to do with people being free. If Dunayevskaya criticizes philosophers as great as Sartre and dialecticians as profound as Adorno, it is only because their misreading of Hegel (not without warrant by its widespread acceptance), correlates directly with the understanding they propose of the times we live in. In Dunayevskaya’s philosophy, Marxism IS Hegelianism: only, it is a Hegelianism critically transformed and rendered coherent with it's own deepest philosophical intention, that is, the intention to present the Absolute Idea as the idea of freedom itself. The revolutionary Marxist-Humanist philosophy of freedom, once granted the necessity of a philosophy in the first place, furnishes us with the reason why the future is not 1984, the standing possibility of retrogression notwithstanding. The inheritance is first of all philosophical in nature, because it takes a philosophy of freedom to hear the voices from below in the movement from practice, and it also takes a philosophy of freedom to achieve the most penetrating explanation of our current world-historical situation and dilemma. Recasting empirical episodes or historical occurrences as the signs of our times, Dunayevskaya already projected the collapse of the Soviet Union with the workers’ uprising in East Berlin in 1953. She tested her theory repeatedly against the onrushing events of the second half of the 20th century in virtually every world-historically significant form. And she was able to achieve this not merely because she was in possession of a revolutionary philosophy of freedom, but because she never lost sight in her indebtedness to Marx of the unequivocal theoretical necessity of holding fast to the capitalist mode of production, as the basis of the bourgeois form of life, the class and other divisions that ravage and destroy the social landscape of human life, the totalizing, totalitarian finality of capital itself, in its false appearance of being the Absolute. Against this backdrop, Adorno’s attenuation of political economy and his abdication of a Marxist outlook on history, his failure to stay close to the point of production of the mode of production that shapes the bourgeois form of life, jointly explain his withdrawal and possibly even his surrender to the impossibility of the absolute idea of freedom, seeing the only possibility of the absolute in the totality that must be totalitarianism. Orwell’s 1984, Sartre’s serialization and pyramidization, and Adorno’s Auschwitz and megaton bomb can alike be faulted for their one-dimensionality, the truncated dialectics of a one-sidedness that proves to be only the negative mirror of the one-sided positivity it opposes, giving rise to the thought that the counter-revolution could really triumph in unmitigated, unrelenting totalitarianism. This is what the Absolute signifies in one system of significations. Dunayevskaya’s correction repudiates what can only be called this theological rendition of the Absolute, and then she reposits the absolute idea of freedom in the historical being, the human being, whose being is truly human only as free. The iron cage of capitalism seeks to cage a power that is beyond its iron grip to cage, the unceasing dialectics of freedom. |
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