[Marxism] Fw: Re: [lbo-talk] Frankfurt on the Hudson

["farmelantj@xxxxxxxx" <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

Chuck Grimes on the Frankfurt School.

Jim F.
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
From: Chuck Grimes <cgrimes@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lbo-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Frankfurt on the Hudson
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 19:09:59 -0700



``Especially appealing to academics is the way Critical Theory makes
the  
analysis of culture feel like a revolutionary act in and of itself.  
Reading Adorno on modern music, or Benjamin on literature, it is  
momentarily possible to believe that criticism is a weapon of  
liberation, rather than simply a hermetic exercise for intellectuals.

No wonder that after the 1960s, as Thomas Wheatland writes in his  
impressive new study The Frankfurt School in Exile, "ambitious young  
sympathizers with the New Left" in the academy turned en masse to the  
Frankfurt School, a scholarly subject that they could explore "without  
having to disguise or hide their intellectual and political  
orientations." It is strange that it took until the 1960s for the  
Frankfurters to make a major impact on America, however, since from  
1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States.'' 

Adam Kirsch 

----------

I want to point out that it is _not_ ``strange that it took until the
1960s for the  Frankfurters to make a major impact on America,... since
from 1934 to 1949 they were actually living in the United States.''

The one word explanation is MacCarthy. A longer explanation follows. 

And then remember too, that most of what I am writing about are the
effects in public education which is directly managed by the politics of
state officials. Meanwhile, places like The Institute for Social
Research was not a public institution, so it could afford a certain
amount of independence.

Just think about the dates mentioned. During the 30s through 40s in the
US, there was quite a bit of left-liberal cultural production in writing
and art. The Frankfurters left the US because of the rise of the US
right and its anti-communist politics. Thomas Mann and much of the LA
German emigre community split about the same time. The Hollywood HUAC
hearings were known for their chilling effect on any form of
socialist-realism or neo-realism in film---the kind of social comentary
and documentary style that had some popular following. The movie studios
figured it out pretty quickly. America wasn't supposed to look like a
dirty, sorted, crime ridden, repressive, racist, psychopathic,
politically corrupt nightmare as portrayed in cinema noir. No sir.
America was beautiful, filled with beautiful people, who always had
above average children. We are cleaning up the West. Movies like Night
of the Hunter and The Bad Seed told a different story. 

So then, growing up in that era in LA I could feel there was something
wrong with writers and painters. They were somehow an attack on american
middle class values. Everything about them was wrong. They didn't have
regular jobs, they didn't keep regular hours, the inside of their
apartments, studios, flats didn't look like regular places to live.
(Well, ours didn't at any rate. I had two families. One near downtown
and the other out in Valley. One bohiemian, the other track home
regular.) 

The same intellectual and culture chill penetrated everything. Certainly
the school system. By the time I got to college in 1961 the civil rights
movements were hammering away, challenging the nice presumptions of
white liberal academy, peeling away the layers of pretend tolerance to
find a not so very nice and not very liberal nuggut inside. 

There was a constant drone of anti-commie noise pervading just about
every course I took from English to History, even Biology where they
never failed to mention Lysenko. American biology seem obcessed with the
idea that Lysenko was wrong---and that was proof Soviet science was
bunk. The sciences were particularly noted for this constant drumming
away at the communist menace. The Russians got the bomb, now they had
Spitnik. God we're all going die in the big after glow. It was crazy. 

Kennedy had launched a series of federal education programs to beat the
Russians on the higher education battle front. The federal student loan
program was called The National Defense Education Act. I had to sign a
loyalty oath on my loan application. I had to sign a loyalty oath for
student registration. The Oppenhiemer case was still in the news now and
again. Edward Teller was on the new warning of the missle gap. 

The very earilest student revolts were over this anti-commie bullshit
one week, then civil rights the next. The FBI was convinced civil rights
were a communist plot. Words like bourgois were highly suspect. Talk of
class war...even the word class itself was not right thinking.  

It was in this climate that I started reading all kinds of books that
never appeared on the curriculm or reading lists. There was a thriving
student culture and word of mouth recommendations on what to read. I was
always on the look out for some off-beat looking professor. Maybe arm
patches, hand knit sweater, or smoking french cigarettes. My first
continental philosophy professor looked like a state college professor
was supposed to look, sports coat, tie, but there was something off
about him.

The point was that by the 60s there was a general intellectual and
student revolt on going since MacCathy when much of this activity was
not exactly underground, but off the cultural-state monitoring system.
The revolt covered a broad cultural, arts, intellectual front. You could
sense it jazz in its fight against swing era big bands. Or listen to
records of folk and blues. Or listen to public radio, KPFK and KPFA.

Well, so this was when I remember reading Herbert Marcuse, Hannah
Arendt, C.Wright Mills, Eric Fromm, etc. I even borrowed Hegel's
Phenomenology because the paper back had some op-art on the cover.
Didn't understand a word of the few pages I looked at. These were all
circulating in the student culture. Nobody I knew could take a class in
any of this stuff. Occasionally some of this sort critical work would
appear on an official course suggested reading list, which nobody
usually followed up. The first time I saw a book written by Karl Marx,
it was from a little red set, an English translation printed in Russia,
I think. It had all the mystic of forbidden work. Somebody had produced
a memographed copy of the Communist Manifesto. 

It's taken me years to figure out that the whole Anglo-American world,
let's call it the public intellectual mind had undergone a post-WWII
purge, an erasure and denial syndrome. One of the insights into this
purge academia mentality I got was by reading the interesting background
of Haakon Chevalier. 

It started by accident when I read Chevalier's Oppenheimer: The Story of
a Friendship (1966), another of those books on the student circuit, but
off the official reading lists. 

[For those who don't know, from the 30s through the 40s Oppenheimer and
Chevalier were friends, both lived in Berkeley, both were members of an
underground communist party, and Chevalier's above ground organized
teacher's union. Oppenheimer was of course a nuclear physicist and
Chevalier was a professor of romance languages. Between the two you have
encapulated the sciences and humanties in the purge mentality.
Oppenheimer was fired as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in a
protracted battle. Chevalier was subpoenaed by the HUAC hearings in SF
where he refused to answer questions and was dutifully fired from UCB.
Chevalier did what the Frankfurters did, pack up and leave for Europe.]

Everybody understands MaCarthism in terms of political repression. What
wasn't well understood was the cultural-intellectual dimension of the
repression.

So returning to the above quote, the reason it took until the 1960s was
due to the cultural-intellectual dimension of the anti-communist, cold
war repressive mentality, the big chill. This is a much more complex
area to think and read because of an overlap between the anti-bourgeois
artists, writers, musicians, and the general intellectual class internal
conflicts, and the class war of a Marxist view of society. Some share in
the revolt of what is in the name of what could be, and some
don't.(Thanks to DRR for reminding me). 

There is yet another emigre body in this post-war period that was much
more influencial than the Frankfurters in developing the post-war
Anglo-American public mind. This influence was the Austrian School or
Vienna circle intellectuals in philosophy and the social sciences. These
included  Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper, Rudolf Carnap, Kurt Goedel among
many others. I only recently started reading Popper and Hayek. I
immediately recognized all the kinds of arguments put forth in my
courses in the humanities as to why the nature of western civilization
was at stake, in our (student) needs to reject all forms of Hegelian and
Marxist thought. One spoke of Hegel and Marx as the dark menace
threatening the clear glass palaces of the open American mind. 

I'd never seen a book in a book store with Karl Marx's name as author. I
had only seen a small red book edition of Marx printed in `Great'
Britain from long ago. God damn. At nineteen I had held actual evil in
my hands. I flipped through a few pages and didn't understand a word.

In any event the Austrians had done a fine job of helping to set up the
post-war intellectual purge in academia and the professional class
everywhere. Here is Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1950:

 ``...Neither the war or any other contemporary event was explicitly
mentioned in the book; but it was an attempt to understand those events
and their background, and some of hte issues which were likely to arise
after the war was won. The expectation that Marxism would become a major
problem was the reason for treating it at some length.

Seen in the darkness of the world situation of 1950, the criticism of
Marxism which it attempts is liable to stand out as the main point of
the book. This view of it is not wholly wrong and perhaps unavoidable,
although the aims of the book are much wider. Marxism is only an
episode---one of many mistakes we have made in the perennial and
dangerous struggle for building a better and freer world.'' (Preface,
viip]

I have to admit, I only flipped through this work and read some of the
sectons on Plato, and a smattering of his chapter on Hegel. But I think
I understand its general plan. At stake is the struggle between Idealism
and Materialism and their interpenetrating weave of thought, action, and
social systems. The `free' or open society only arises when a more
rational and empirical based view of the world is used to create and
manage the world we live in. 

Here is a quote opening Chp 24, Oracular Philosophy and the Revolt
Against Reason:

``Marx was a rationalist. With Socrates, and with Kant, he believed in
human reason as the basis of the unity of mankind. But his doctrine that
our opinions are deteremined by class interest hastened the decline of
this belief. Like Hegel's doctrine that our ideas are deteremined by
national interest and traditions, Marx's doctrine tended to undermine
the rationalist belief in reason. Thus threatened both from the right
and from the left, a rationalist attitude to social and economic
questions could hardly resist when historicist prophecy and oracular
irrationalism made a frontal attack on it. This is why the conflict
between rationalism and irrationalism has become the most important
intellectual and perhaps even moral, issue of our time.'' (410p)

So, finally then it is no surprise that it took until the 1980s for the
Frankfurters to emerge from the intellectual mire of the US. Politics,
society, social conflict, class war, intellectual and philosophical
books from other countries must be really low on publisher's lists of
projects, plus translation costs and copyrights all seem to conspire to
keep the US isolated. Then of course the forever toxic political
climate, the constant academic wars and on and on, not to  mention the
problem of literacy and fluency in the global world of ideas.

Max Horkheimer writes in his reissue preface from 1969:

The first edition of The Dialectic of the Enlightenment was published by
Querido of Amsterdam in 1947. The book made its reputation only by
degrees, and has now been out of print for a long time. We have decided,
to rissue it after more than twenty years, not only in answer to many
requests but because we believe than not a few of the ideas it contains
are still apposite to the times and have to a large extent determined
our later theory...'' (Preface to the New Edition, ix)

Then pulling out the companion work, Critical Theory, selected essays
(1968, English trans, 1972, reissue 1999), Max Horkheimer I read (had
read and forgotten):

The new left of the early 1960s was no less imbued with the habis of
thought characateristic of the American celebration than its elders. At
first optimistic about the chances to change society through the
application of consistent pressure on the institutions to live up to
their pluralistic claims. The crisis of late capitalism was seen as the
conflict between the ideology of bourgeois individualism and the reality
of the concentration of power in the hands o a few large corporations,
the military and the government which they controlled.... If many
radicals had been disabused of the possibility of piecemeal reform, they
were firmly wedded to a symbolic politics whose foundation was
moralistic rather than Marxist. 

The generation which venerated Marcuse was attracted more to his
indictment than his analysis...'' (CT. xi)

CG



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