The Breakdown of Capitalism by Hansen Fay R

Author:Hansen, Fay R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315387482
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

6 The anti-orthodox response to crash and recovery:

Superstructural models of collapse

Liberation from capitalism is liberation from the rule of the economy. When the autonomy of the economy is ended, ‘political economy’ as an independent science also disappears.

Lukács, History and Class Consciousness

Are we always within the capitalist mode of production? Are we within a later mode? Are we within a mode of production at all, and have we even been in one?

Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production

In 1930, soon after Pollock’s work was published, Horkheimer replaced Grünberg as the director of the Frankfurt Institute, now well established as the center of serious social inquiry in Europe. Horkheimer was a philosopher by training, and a rigorous critic of the German Social Democratic Party and the German Communist Party. His efforts as the new director were supported by Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, central members of the Institute who shared Horkheimer’s political and theoretical views. The development of Marxist theory in the West over the next forty years was largely the work of intellectuals who, like the central members of the Institute, had little in common with orthodox Marxists or the neo-orthodox theorists who had constructed the dominant forms of breakdown theory in the period before 1930.

The failure of the proletarian revolution in Germany and the rise of fascism in Europe were formative political experiences for the theorists associated with the Frankfurt Institute in Germany and the academies in France. Unlike the generation of Lenin and Luxemburg, which had been marked by internationalism and activism, the anti-orthodox Marxists of Frankfurt and Paris were characterized by parochialism and intellectual isolation, and by their uneasy, sporadic and indirect contact with worker organizations. With what may well have been a glance back to the theoretical failures forced by proximity to particularistic political activity, Horkheimer once wrote, ‘[o]n the identity of theory and practice, is not to be forgotten their difference.’1

The anti-orthodox theorists were trained as philosophers, with their immediate attention turned away from economics and politics, and towards a discourse on method and aesthetics. Their interest in non-Marxist ideas was intense rather than superficial, and their relationship to Marx was critical rather than committed. Their Marxism was spoken in a code that served the dual purpose of eluding political censorship and avoiding the positivistic terminology of the orthodox and neo-orthodox schools. Their analyses of capitalism appeared in works which were both betrayals and affirmations of Marx’s most fundamental ideas. In the writings of the anti-orthodox theorists, the concepts of Capital were mediated by a series of perceptions and new theoretical elaborations that pressed Marx’s thought to its most extreme, but nonetheless logical, conclusions. As Adorno said, their work did not represent ‘the replacement of one theory by another, but the immanent drawing out of certain of the fundamentals of the materialist dialectic.’2

The result of their work was a fundamental shift in the nature of Marxist theory and, consequently, in the formulation of concepts of breakdown, after 1930. This theoretical shift was characterized by a pessimism about the

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