Ladies and gentlemen,
First of all, I have the pleasure of drawing your attention to a lecture that will take place tonight at the seminar for the science of politics at the invitation of my colleague Fetscher.1 This lecture will be given by Professor Lucien Goldmann from Paris, who, to my particular pleasure, is also present at this session – did you not understand, or is that a protest? Did you not understand what I said? – so, it is a lecture by Professor Lucien Goldmann from Paris entitled ‘Marxism and Contemporary Society’,2 and will take place at 8 p.m. cum tempore in Lecture Theatre I. I would strongly recommend attending this lecture, which naturally has a very close connection with the content of our course.
Perhaps I can remind you – after we had to break off again last week3 – that I had tried to give you some insights into the difficulty of theory today – not in connection with abstract methodological problems, for I tried, and will continue today, to show you with a few models how difficult it is to form an adequate theory that addresses relevant questions about society. It is after all, as you know, my custom not to separate methodological and so-called contentual questions; rather, as far as possible when speaking concretely of methodology, I do not use more or less trivial examples but address issues that are theoretically relevant, at least in my view. Today I wish to pursue the problem I mentioned earlier when I referred to the role of trade unions and the increasing integration of the proletariat into society as a whole; I will do so by asking why the current situation presents a theoretical understanding with difficulties and, through these difficulties, encourages that fundamental renunciation of theory which is codified by the so-called positivistic tendencies in social science and, as it were, mirrored in the latter’s own epistemology. In other words, in connection with this problem, I now wish to address the problem of the proletariat as it manifests itself in empirical social research. And here I wish to proceed from certain findings from a study about ‘work climate’4 carried out by the Institute for Social Research some ten years ago and published in a book – which is no longer available, and would probably be rather difficult for you to find – whose main results were interpreted and preserved in the recently published book on industrial sociology by my friend Ludwig von Friedeburg.5 I therefore strongly recommend that you consult von Friedeburg’s book,6 which has appeared in our series – the Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie – in connection with what I will tell you about the interpretation of this study.
The matter in question is the system-immanence of the proletariat, or the so-called integration of the proletariat, from the perspective of the proletarian consciousness. I consider this especially important because a large part of the established contemporary reflections on the problem of class in modern society deals one-sidedly and exclusively with people’s consciousness, with class consciousness, and behaves as if the question of class were essentially a question of consciousness, leaving aside the fact that, in the theory where the concept of the proletariat as such has a systematic status, the attempt was made to define the proletariat objectively, namely by its position in relation to the means of production – by being cut off from control over the means of production – whereas the consciousness of the proletariat has never aligned itself with this objective position in any straightforward fashion. This is a fact of fundamental importance if one ever asks as to the possibility of a theory of modern society, because we are faced today with the very difficult contradiction that such a subjective consciousness in the proletariat of being such – I would not say it no longer exists, but that, at least in some important capitalist countries like America, this consciousness barely exists; and that there is evidently a tendency in countries where the labour movement has such an extensive and, I would say, such a theoretical tradition as in Germany for this consciousness to play an ever smaller part.
Of course, when we look at the results of the studies on workers – you all know the very important ones by Bahrdt and Popitz,7 or also those of Lutz, Braun and Pirker,8 to name only a few of the most important people working in this field over the last decade; you should acquaint yourselves with these matters, because empirical studies truly form an integral element of theoretical reflection here – in all these studies, and in ours too, there is certainly no lack of critical statements by the workers. So if one is looking for assessments of the so-called work climate, one will repeatedly encounter a wealth of critical ones, although a quantification is very difficult for certain structural reasons. Let me already say that this is so difficult because it is very hard to decide how far these critical statements refer to structural issues in society and how far to only limited situations within the companies. Thus the impression one gains when dealing with this material is primarily that, at least in Germany, some people still employ old terms from the tradition of the former Marxist parties in Germany – they speak of capital and labour and the opposition of capital and labour – but no longer really mean what was meant by those terms; what they and their critique mean are so-called grievances, unpleasant conditions within particular companies or particular company situations that are imagined as fundamentally corrigible, as ones that can be resolved through sensible cooperation under whatever conditions happen to be given. But if, as I told you, the authors speak nonetheless of capital and labour, then these terms almost have the character of natural occurrences, which is of course extremely at odds with the conception from which this terminology has been taken. This seems to be the way that countless workers today, at least in Germany, think about it. One must be very careful with generalizations about such things across national boundaries. There are countries such as Italy, and especially France, where things are probably entirely different, but in this country, at least, what is meant is a form of unchanging, natural framework in which certain frictions ensue but can be resolved, oppositions of, to quote a famous phrase, a ‘non-antagonistic’ character.9 When you look at complaints, for example, you will find complaints – this is highly characteristic – especially about superiors, mostly in the lower tiers – in other words: superiors like the foreman or the overseer in the mine, who come into direct contact with the workers. These superiors are very often held responsible as individuals, as persons, for what happens, completely ignoring their function, completely ignoring the fact that, for example, they are generally obliged to maintain a certain level of production, which forces them to exert pressure on the workers, which they are, in reality, simply passing on.
Let me note here – this is really a chapter of ideology critique, but you can already see in this how far the issues of so-called ideology and the issue of immediate, lived experience today have merged – that you are looking at a phenomenon which is characteristic of an ideological area that I take the liberty of calling the phenomenon of personalization. By personalization I mean a habit of thinking that is very widespread today: that one attributes certain grievances – whether one would normally consider them so blind and fateful that one has no power over them, or at least looks for a scapegoat or a living person to cling to so that one can somehow deal with it, to avoid being hopelessly consumed by the awareness of one’s alienation – that one attributes, to resolve my anacoluthon, such grievances to the fault of persons, whereas one associates positive experiences such as the economic boom, the boom that has already lasted fifteen years, or the massive rise in living standards in Germany, with the economic policy adopted in Germany, and even considers them the work of individual politicians, without considering for a moment that this boom originated in structural aspects of the reconstruction of a bombed-out, war-ravaged country. This factor of personalization has been a trick for a very long time, incidentally, and its function seems to grow in virtually direct proportion to mass society – that is, to the alienation of the masses from the most important decisions in direct proportion to the anonymity of social decisions. In the gigantic country of America, for example, with its immense population – where the candidates in the important elections are, of course, exclusively exponents of objectively warring interest groups – the official ideology, which, as surveys show, fools countless voters, is still that the purpose of a presidential or whatever election is to find the so-called best man for the job, despite the fact that in general, of course, none of the voters can remotely assess whether Mr X or Mr Y really is the better man. This is such a simple point that one would really expect anyone who was not a complete imbecile to grasp it, but evidently the affective power inside people which resists objective, anonymous laws governing events over their heads is so immense that people will fall for this mechanism of personalization, even against their better judgement. So you can see here in this one fulcrum, as it were, how closely seeing through ideologies is connected to gaining insight into the social reality itself. That is why I elaborated somewhat on this point.
On the other hand, if one considers these matters cautiously and fairly, one should also say that there is an element of truth in the tendency of so many workers to blame their superiors for objective difficulties resulting from the employment relationship itself – and one must never simply disregard such concrete elements with a stroke of the pen – because those lower superiors, the ones with whom the workers come into direct contact, are the ones who actually give the system a tangible form for them. Roughly in the same way that the anger of the petty bourgeoisie about the large retail centres stems from the fact that they are being handed the bill, as it were – that is, they realize how little they actually have and how little they can consume, not when the man receives his pay envelope or salary, but when his wife is forced – ‘to make ends meet’ [Eng.], as one says in America – to use the meagre cheque she has received to procure food, clothes and whatever else. My point is that even the deformation phenomena I am describing to you, such as personalization, have their basis in the matter itself in so far as people’s unreflecting, non-theoretical experience does not yield anything else. You may already conclude from this, at least in the form of a postulation, that anything resembling an understanding of society is impossible today except via theory, via theoretical thought, and that a theory-free so-called empiricism is merely an ideology that captures only apparent phenomena. And this pragmatic perspective, if you will, is certainly not the least important of those forcing us to seek the crystallization of theory.
Now, the workers very often voice a certain discontent with the current situation, but very often this discontent appears – I will keep citing our results10 – in the complaint that the workers of today no longer show solidarity with one another but instead behave towards one another in a more or less atomized state. It is quite astounding, I must point out, that the suffering of a particular group is reduced by that same group more or less to itself, not to the objective conditions; one is reminded somewhat of the arguments one encounters in surveys about democracy in Germany, where people making a case against democracy rationalize it by saying of themselves, ‘Well, we’re not ready for democracy yet.’ I will not discuss the socio-psychological consequences of this, especially the socio-psychological perspectives it opens up, but will leave that to your theoretical imagination. There does initially seem to be a degree of plausibility to this: the fact that, in the past, theory itself was binding, that there were certain programmes, that people believed the implementation of these programmes was directly imminent, and thus that the situation of the workers, in terms of their mutual solidarity, was possibly better than it is today; one should beware of ideologizations here too, however, and be especially careful not to evoke a supposedly glorious past simply because of certain flaws in the present state. In reality, it is far harder to establish what is behind these complaints than this argumentation suggests, especially because one cannot be sure whether more immediate pressure and more faith in the possibility of change would have brought about more solidarity, or whether this change might have been cancelled out by a less advanced state of consciousness among the workers, some of whom were simply dragged into that sphere without being equipped for reflection in the way that people are today, simply because of the increase in communication. To be scientifically conscientious, at any rate, one would have to say that there are no figures to compare concerning this question of solidarity. The most plausible option is probably that this fantastic, legendary solidarity probably existed within certain cadres, certain leadership groups in the organized workforce, from where people then tried with varying success to implant it in the ‘rank and file’ [Eng.], whereas the decisive aspect today is more that, at least in Germany, such cadres who were able to provoke such a sense of solidarity hardly exist any longer. In addition, if one posits for a moment this apparent fact of an increasing bourgeoisification of the proletariat – we will later address this apparent fact in a very fundamental sense – it naturally makes sense that the characteristic behavioural patterns which would otherwise apply within the dominant group in society, namely the behaviours of the competition, would also become increasingly common in the proletariat. The more bourgeois the workers feel in their own subjective consciousness, the more they will view one another as competitors, just as other groups in society do. And, incidentally, there is actually no lack of symptoms in empirical research showing that, clearly, there are already competing groups within today’s workforce. The most important competition is between those factions involved in the actual production – who thus consider themselves the productive workers according to the old definition of Saint-Simon and Marx11 – whose numbers are dwindling because of the increasing mechanization and automation, and, on the other side, the countless individuals who carry out repairs, which the classical definition views as mere services, but are becoming more important in a sense, primarily because they are becoming ever larger as a group in comparison with the actual production workers and therefore, to the extent that there is something like a numerically significant class, are becoming increasingly significant within that class. Between these two groups, the growing and, in a sense, more modern group of neo-craftsmen in repairs, on the one hand, and the classical workers who consider themselves productive workers but who are becoming less numerous, on the other, one can observe the development of increasingly clear mechanisms of competition. And here, too, the people are entirely naïve about this competition, because they cannot grasp the social mechanisms that bring about such a thing without theory, and because there is not really any genuinely contemporary, fully developed theory that explains these differences.
Beyond these aspects, however, there are a great many other motifs that I will show you to refer to what one could, from the outside and somewhat too lightly, call integration, and what I will instead term the systematic thinking or system-immanent consciousness of the workers. Of these, the best known and most important is the improvement of general living and working conditions, which one naturally cannot ignore. Any theory of society which neglected the fact that the lot of workers today is actually no longer as it was in the classical analyses of Marx and Engels, that, simply stated, the proletarians today genuinely have more to lose than their chains,12 namely their small car or motorcycle as well, generally speaking – leaving aside the question of whether these cars and motorcycles are perhaps a sublimated form of chains – there is no doubt about that, at least; and if one fails to incorporate these aspects into one’s theoretical reflection, it is abstract in the bad sense and falls short of the phenomena in question. Then one must think of the radical depoliticization of the trade unions – in this country, at least – and in connection with that also the lack of political training, which is tied to the problematics of political education as a whole, which I will not dwell on in this context; there is no doubt, at any rate, that something like a true political training, in the theoretical sense, no longer exists, and if anyone does attempt such political training, they will not usually have such a good time of it. A significant factor for the tendencies I have characterized – which are generally just presented to you as a trend that is so strong that one must quite simply take note of it, without giving it any further thought, which means without analysing its reasons – is a rather important element on the side of subjective consciousness: the scepticism towards all politics that took hold of people in Germany, and I mean the entire population, not just the workers, after Hitler. For Hitler, tant bien que mal, did achieve one thing: an incredible politicization of consciousness. The content of this politicization was wrong and ghastly, but recalling the time before my emigration, when I actually experienced Hitler in the flesh, I can tell you that the extent to which every issue in the world was seen as a political issue, in the consciousness of the masses too, was incredible, and that one can barely imagine today just how far that went. This has changed radically. People saw where things can lead when someone decides to become a politician, which is why they are now fed up with the entire sphere of politics and think it best for them to stay away from it. The entire restoration period in Germany can be considered a period of reprivatization in a number of ways, both in the sense of state-owned enterprises turning back into private enterprises, or the seeming transformation of the large businesses into private property, and in the sense of a reprivatization of individual consciousness – but a reprivatization in which there is little virtue, because, despite this reprivatization of consciousness, people are objectively tied to their socio-economic contexts more than ever.
For now I would like to touch on this problem of politics at least with some short theses, because I think it is fitting to address the sphere of politics in a course of lectures on the theory of society. On the one hand, the entire sphere of politics is certainly an aspect of ideology, that is to say, it seems as if the power struggles take place in the political sphere proper – the sphere of government, the sphere of legislation, the sphere of elections, in all these elements of political institutions – as if they were the matter itself, whereas they are epiphenomena over the real social process that carries them. It is especially difficult to see through this – as simple as it may sound if I say this to you now – because the things with which people are first confronted, aside from persons, are really political institutions that represent the social, and because it already demands a substantial and analytical process of abstraction to perceive the underlying play of social forces. It is no coincidence that the theory of the state is incomparably older than the theory of society, which, though it too can be traced back to the Stoics, is – as a distinct theory – little older than the eighteenth or, at the earliest, the late seventeenth century. But, on the other hand, the sphere of politics as the sphere of seizing power, where it is quite possible for the entire fundamental conditions of life, especially the economic ones, to be decided, is after all a sphere, an ideology, that holds within it the potential to become something more, something different from mere ideology. If you want to see a demonstration of what is meant by dialectic, by social dialectic, in a very simple model, then such a definition of the nature of the political is probably the best paradigm one could find, because here you find two opposing aspects united in a single concept and almost in the same sphere: on the one hand, this ideological aspect that politics only conceals what is really going on underneath, and, on the other hand, the political as the potential to change precisely what is going on underneath. So, to be precise, politics is the manifestation of ideology that can take hold of the substructure and move it in a different direction. As the possibility of thinking the contradictory and the dialectical is increasingly in decline and is giving way to a simple binary logic in people’s consciousness, such a concept of politics is no longer grasped. The possibility of politics as something other than ideology is no longer even conceived; instead, politics in general is seen only as the ideology it also is, namely as the sphere of a negotiation of interests that is actually determined by far stronger interests over which individuals believe they have no power, and which as a result they view largely with disinterest. On the other hand, the sphere of the political is now equally compromised – and this applies especially to the workers – by the abuse of what has happened to politics in the entire Eastern bloc under the name of socialism, where politics, to a large extent, is genuinely like politics in the bad traditional sense: an expansive, more or less imperialistic power politics, or certain groups clinging to those in power while completely abandoning the actual socialist tenet that political action should end in the abolition of politics. But God knows that people over there play politics – the famous great game of politics – the same as they always have. If one also takes into account the stark difference of living standards, especially among the workers, between the people beyond the border and in this country, then this impossibility of having a real idea of politics is entirely understandable. All the more because the element on which the entire Soviet conception of politics rests, namely the idea of revolution and the possibility of revolution as such, has obviously become – I refer here to the extremely interesting study in Merkur written by Mr von Kempski about this point13 – something so technologically questionable, or perhaps even entirely impossible, through a concentration of military resources that presumably consign a notion such as that of armed revolt to what one can only call the realm of childish dreams. And so it is understandable if a concept becomes a myth at the moment when it obviously and actually becomes what it had previously only been in a bad theory, namely that of Sorel,14 and can then, within the – in some ways – oh-so-enlightened humanity of today, no longer take hold of the masses.
To avoid any misunderstanding, ladies and gentlemen, I am not saying all this in order to justify these phenomena of subjective consciousness, but I think that the task of a theory is precisely to grasp all changes of consciousness, and also of reality, that are generally, according to the dominant thinking habits today, simply tolerated and accepted as such. I have referred to any mere acceptance of what is the case with a term I stole from psychology and transferred to sociology: concretism. This is analogous to the psychopathology of people who are incapable of abstraction and therefore do nothing but cling to what is closest. A number of analyses of the state of the proletariat, for example the famous study by Bednarik15 about the young Austrian worker, which some of you will perhaps also have come across, essentially point to the concretism thesis, to the fact that people are unable to resist their immediate interests – the aforementioned motorcycle, the television and a number of other things and behaviours connected to all this – and that they are consequently also prevented subjectively from attaining that theoretical consciousness which, as I showed you, faces such extraordinary objective obstacles. There has always been a degree of truth in the concretism of those who have to bear the burden. I think that the people who are given the burden, and consequently walk bent over with their heads bowed, that it has always been very hard for them to hold those heads up high – to stay with the image – and see more than their immediate interests. Expanding one’s consciousness, having a wide, unrestricted view, is itself already a form of privilege, yet those of us who like to think we have such a consciousness often fail to realize how much it is due to our inherited advantage that we are even able and allowed to have it. On the other hand, it does strike me as highly probable that this phenomenon of concretism, which people so often ascribe to the workers, especially the young workers, is not actually group-specific but, rather, a phenomenon that has spread throughout society as a whole in connection with all the things I have described to you, and hence that this restriction to the immediate, and the decision to clench one’s teeth and avoid looking beyond what is closest at all costs, that this is where we find something resembling solidarity in society as a whole.