Ladies and gentlemen,
In the last session, in which I did not remotely get as far as I had intended, I began by outlining certain problems regarding the consciousness of the proletariat, always from the perspective of the difficulty of forming a theory, an adequate theory of society today – but also by attempting to contribute to such a theory with an analysis of one of its elements; here it is actually somewhat coincidental that I am speaking about the proletariat. I could just as easily have chosen the middle class as a model for the problems of forming a theory. If I did not do so, this is simply because we have the data from the ‘Work Climate’ study, which I attempted and will continue attempting to interpret a little for you.
Now, you will perhaps remember that the last concept we arrived at was the concept of concretism, which is the tying of consciousness to the immediacy of the given conditions, and more specifically the tying of consciousness to the consumer goods that people are presented with on such an overwhelming scale today. This overwhelming quantity of consumer goods, incidentally, like the advertising apparatus, points back to objective structural problems in society – I will only touch on this – namely the whole question of overinvestment and overproduction, as well as the necessity for the system, in order to survive, to exert an additional pressure in every conceivable way in order to shackle people to these very consumer goods. So I told you that this so-called concretism is not really group-specific but, rather – this is admittedly a hypothesis, and strict researchers among you may point to a lack of certain analogous analyses for the lower middle class or indeed the ‘middle’ middle class, though we do know a certain amount about the lower middle class, especially here – something that is not group-specific but present in society as a whole: those phenomena that contributed to making Helmut Schelsky speak, with reference to this structural similarity of consciousness between the different classes, of a ‘levelled middle-class society’,1 a concept that proved to have an extremely significant effect, though I assume, after my last conversations with Schelsky himself, that he himself no longer actually adheres to this concept in the form in which it became famous. But that is how it always is for those like us: as soon as a concept we have formed is turned into a sort of master key, such concepts make us uncomfortable, but then it is usually too late. The phenomenon of concretism stands in a correlative relation to this, and, while it does not prevent the objective possibility of theory formation, the incredibly complex and ramified context makes it seem opaque to the naïve person, if I may put it so crudely, by which I mean people who do not reflect on these matters or automatically proceed from a theory. Perhaps the argument repeatedly used in this context – and used especially often by my American colleague Robert Lynd2 – namely that society has become so immensely complex and complicated that people cannot comprehend it and will therefore adhere to concretism – is not the last or the most profound word to be spoken on this matter. For one could certainly counter that, in our modern centralist – or, as people like to say nowadays – dirigist society, countless intermediate levels between the sphere of production and the sphere of social domination on the one side, and the consciousness of the masses on the other side, have disappeared; probably, because of the incredible concentration and rationalization of the methods of production and the adaptation of social forms to these methods, things are genuinely no longer so terribly complicated. I think you should familiarize yourselves with this thought, for complicatedness can also become an ideology if faith in complicatedness per se takes hold of the masses. I would think that the true origin of this phenomenon of concretism lies much deeper, that it is not really true that one cannot trace social processes to their relatively simple roots in economic planning and economic power structures, but rather that, because of the incredible disproportion between all individuals, every individual, wherever they might be, and the concentrated power of society, the notion of resisting this agglomerated power seems illusory. And that applies even within the labour organizations themselves, which are usually controlled so firmly by narrow groups, just as in the other forms of rule, that, within them, resistance against the general line imposed from above – I am deliberately speaking so vaguely – has a futile and superfluous quality from the outset. It should be the case, however, that theoretical interest – and this is truly an aspect of the unity of theory and practice – wanes wherever people have the feeling that they cannot really change anything about the object of theoretical reflection. This consciousness may be false – and it is a vicious circle, for this sense of powerlessness obviously leads to a reinforcement of powerlessness because it really prevents people from doing anything – but, at any rate, as soon as one has the feeling that, despite one’s correct insight, one’s theoretical insight into the overall structure, one cannot change it – as it seemed to the labour associations a hundred or 130 years ago, one should note – the consciousness of the structural context, and even the negative consciousness of the machinery in which we are bound up, only really becomes a further source of suffering and is therefore kept at arm’s length by people, and certainly not without reason, which leaves them focused on what is close, what is directly in front of them, the concrete. But that is no longer what was previously the concrete, in the sense of immediate relationships and immediately useful goods; now the closest genuinely consists of consumer goods, commodities and mass products, whether of a material or a cultural nature, with which people are flooded for economic reasons and to which they bind themselves.
Perhaps you can already recognize something here that I really consider extremely important for a theory of contemporary society, namely that the so-called levelling tendencies which can be observed and which it would be pure superstition to deny are not such that they reveal a levelling of society as a whole, for it is rather in the levelling itself that the supremacy of the dominant social mechanisms is reflected; and the theorists of levelling, who simply keep to the subjective consciousness that we are discussing now, very often keep quiet about this, producing a skewed picture of the social situation of consciousness. With this concretism, one must also distinguish between different aspects. For it would be wrong simply to denigrate this concretism in keeping with some puritan notion of unchanging, divinely enthroned spiritual goods, some culturally elitist ideas. Because of the immeasurably increased number of produced goods, the things to which people’s consciousness attaches and limits itself genuinely offer them all manner of gratification and convenience, and to sneer at this and condemn it is the very last thing that would befit a theory driven, after all, by the material interests of dissatisfied people. On the other hand, concretism is not limited to such utility values, as I will formulate it for now, to the increase in these genuinely positive, sensually material qualities of the things that are available to people; rather, the synthetic character of the evoked needs is expressed in the fact that – if I may fall back on an old and perhaps not completely economically ironclad formulation I used thirty years ago3 – people do not only consume or attach themselves to utility values; rather, they are attached to exchange values. By this I mean that what an object represents as a monetary value, its exchange value, already becomes a source of pleasure on that basis, almost becoming a utility value, yet not directly, but mediated through this exchange value that such an object has on the market; in other words, the aspect of the commodities that is enjoyed now itself constitutes their utility value – their fetish character, one might say. And if one speaks of a reified consciousness, I would say that one of the central aspects of this reification of consciousness is that it attaches itself to the fetish character of commodities, to what things represent on the market, instead of attaching itself to what these things actually mean for people. What one usually means by ‘prestige categories’ and the meaning of the prestige associated with all manner of commodities is a relatively superficial observation that is based only on the relative assessment of various goods, and therefore cannot grasp this very profound structural change whereby people consume exchange values instead of utility values. I certainly have no intention of selling you the theory I developed somewhat blithely in the study on fetish character, now published in Dissonances,4 as wisdom that still holds absolutely true today, especially because something like the enjoyment of exchange values can only truly be grasped socio-psychologically, in terms of certain Freudian categories, and is thus, strictly speaking, not actually social. So I am very much aware of the shortcomings of such a theory, but I still think the questions raised by this for the cohesion of contemporary society are of such central significance that I would at least encourage you all to give some thought to this complex in which it is exchange value rather than utility value that causes pleasure. One can already find formulations in Marx, incidentally, that point in a strangely similar direction, such as when he says that there is a class in society that actually enjoys the negative, namely its own alienation from things and people;5 and if one extends this Marxian formulation a little, it can certainly be brought into agreement with what I just outlined to you.
When I speak of this concretism and the relative inability to recognize the connections correctly, you should think of it in very concrete terms. When a worker in a study refers with a certain generality to ‘the powers that be’, for example, without any accompanying idea of who ‘the powers that be’ actually are and what their function is, let alone any notion that the behaviour of ‘the powers that be’ is determined by their own interests and they are not some demigods or epicurean gods who live up there and make carefree decisions about humans, this delusion – like all social contexts of delusion – has a social reason, namely that they will simply never reach ‘the powers that be’ in the hierarchy; society is arranged and constructed so hierarchically that the possibility of coming across the managing director is eliminated from the outset. If one ever has a chance to speak to the labour relations director, who is also on the executive board, that is already something of a miracle. He will usually be extremely obliging and extremely friendly, and it may seem to the worker who is speaking to him about their problems as if he is paying attention to their interests, but in reality he will not do so seriously for different, formal-sociological reasons, namely because he is on the executive board and, as they say, ‘integrated’ into the uppermost hierarchy of the firm. Within the consciousness of the workers, this leads – to continue this point – to the appearance that the need somehow to voice one’s wishes spontaneously, and be heard, will no longer even be felt; rather, as long as they can live a reasonably comfortable life in the economic boom, they will content themselves with delegating to functionaries, specialists for the problem complex of capital and labour, who will represent the labour side. So the division of labour between the workers and the lobbyists will be reproduced within the workers themselves, as it were; it repeats itself, which then leads both to the familiar consolidation phenomena within the labour organizations and ultimately also to the monopolistic structures that are becoming apparent in all labour organizations, the so-called political ones as well as the apolitical trade unions.
All this needs to be examined – as I believe I have outlined to you, at least in its overall perspective – by means of a social theory. But here you must realize once again, in order to see the difficulties I wish to convey to you here, and to advance independently the ideas which I can essentially only set in motion with these lectures, that the theory itself, which truly attempts to get to the bottom of the relationship between capital and labour, has been elevated to a state religion in the Soviet Union and its entire eastern sphere of influence, distorting it to the point where it has virtually become the opposite of what it was once meant to be. So one cannot blame anyone in the world if they no longer adhere to this theory in its powerful – that is, socially sanctioned – form but, rather, have the gravest doubts about it. I have noticed, if I could just say this in the present context, that those students who fled from East Germany and, because they supposedly learned dialectical materialism there, have now listed this for some examinations as an area they know about, usually – and I say this without the slightest reproach towards these fellow students, merely to characterize a phenomenon that concerns more than just consciousness – have no idea of the simplest concepts in the theories of dialectical materialism and Marxian economics, that is, from the very state religion that is preached over there. Thus they produce the most nonsensical answers to questions with which one would expect them, having allegedly had this theory as their basic curriculum, to be familiar. It is evidently part of the transformation of a theory into religion that it is removed from people’s living thought and living experience, and that, as soon as it is presented dogmatically, it ceases to be comprehensible and forfeits its solid theoretical structure – and only these can give it any force. If I could just say one more thing about it: this perversion of the theory of class relations I am speaking of consists primarily in the fact that Marxian theory, like every theory of society that seeks to understand society as a totality, is essentially a theory of the existing capitalist society of its respective time – and if one were put on the spot and had to name the difference between Hegel and Marx in this respect, it would initially be only that the laws of movement in society, which Hegel, Smith or Marx define as positive laws, are now criticized by Marx, and consequently all categories he uses for society are critical categories; we will yet discuss this much more fundamentally. And the aforementioned perversion or dogmatization and distortion lies in the fact that all possible categories, especially those concerning the supremacy of economics and referring to materialism, were simply elevated to positive categories in the dominant thought of the Eastern bloc, as if dependence on a material superstructure or the primacy of economics, or even the primacy of production, which is certainly an intra-capitalist category and was described and criticized by Marx as such – as if these could simply act as the categories of a non-capitalist society too. And thanks to this sudden transformation of critical categories into invariants and into a form of basic doctrine applying to every possible society, the concept of a theory of society – even where a developed one already exists, and people still think they can invoke it – really turns into the childish mockery that reveals itself in all manner of phenomena, some of which are familiar to you.
Though I spoke of concretism as the inability to perform what the German Idealists called ‘self-elevation’, incidentally – which is supposed to refer not to some cloud cuckoo land in this context but simply to the individual consciousness freeing itself from its restriction to the immediate conditions and objects it faces – this concept of concretism is insufficient to describe what I meant; rather, one should say that it also has a correlate which Horkheimer once termed ‘abstractism’. So, if I might return to my earlier example – the ominous talk of the ‘powers that be’ – this is concretist on the one hand, because people are focused only on the foreman Meier, who is supposed to be such a bad man, but it is simultaneously abstractist, because there is no longer any genuinely implemented notion of concrete contexts. This abstractism I would like to call the inability to have genuine experiences, and this inability to have experiences and the fixation on the mere objects of immediate exchange, which are affectively charged, idolized and fetishized by people, are essentially the same thing. This loss of the ability to experience is something that psychology found long ago, especially analytical social psychology, and for which it has also pointed to a number of psychologically genetic aspects; those who are interested can find a great deal regarding this in particular in The Authoritarian Personality.6 But today – as the perspective we are discussing is only accidentally the subjectively psychological one, and we are interested primarily in the objectively dominant structural issues of society – I would like to draw your attention to a different aspect, namely the question, a question that has perhaps not yet been thought through in this way sufficiently radically, of whether something like experience is even still possible in the reality in which we live today. Aldous Huxley, who, as well as having some strange ideas about the correct human state, was blessed with an eye for the sinister, tried to show in Brave New World7 – I believe I once referred to it in a text8 – how the conversations between the people in the dystopia he depicts increasingly degenerate and become more and more pathetic, because they are essentially no more than conversations about different forms of commodities, produced and launched by oligopolies, from which they have to choose; thus the tendency is for conversations to become no more than a comparison between different product catalogues. I fear there are enough conversations if one has the slightest sensorium for such things that move in this direction; at any rate, he extrapolated a tendency, extended a tendency, that already exists. Probably experience is tied to what – if you will permit this abstract formulation for the moment – one might perhaps call the possibility of the new, or the openness of the world – namely that the world is not subject to laws of its own reproduction that are preordained and set in stone, that at any moment there can be something which is not already pre-arranged or, in modern parlance, ‘scheduled’. But wherever that is not the case, where precisely those forms of mass production which constantly produce the same under the guise of the new result in such fixity, experience is very severely compromised in objective terms. And if people, let us say in novels, still report or deal with immediate human experience today, then the very fact of speaking about oneself, one’s experience, one’s immediacy, already has something that I would almost call ideological, something that pretends human immediacy and human destiny still exist, whereas we are actually all debased, even in our innermost being, to mere masks of the ghastly reality principle to which we are bound. So when some novels, novels from all sorts of countries, avoid portraying individual destinies and become mere montages of objective social facts or contexts, one should by no means see in this simply a positivist, record-taking mindset gone wild; rather, one should see the compulsion, the necessity, to attempt any form of utterance about this reality, to show oneself any sort of match for a reality that one can in fact no longer experience. This seems the most profound reason for those interrelated phenomena that I tried to present to you dialectically – on the one hand as concretism, the restriction to the merely existent, and on the other hand abstractism, meaning the inability to have living experience.
Ladies and gentlemen, one of the most dangerous habits of thinking is to blame the phenomena which I have described to you without any sugar-coating, I would say, on the workers – assuming the workers are the issue – by accusing them of so-called bourgeoisification. The late Belgian social psychologist Hendrik de Man,9 for example, who had a background in sociology, proceeded from certain observations about the levelling of the so-called proletarian consciousness into a bourgeois consciousness to pass a sort of verdict on the bad bourgeoisified proletariat and then moved more or less consistently from this verdict towards fascism, ultimately leading to his rightful expulsion from Belgium as an exponent of the same. With this bourgeoisification, whose most blatant symptoms are such concepts as the social partner, which have meanwhile become widespread in workers’ circles and are possibly considered there as something especially progressive and modern, one must not hold these phenomena against the people who behave in this way. For these phenomena of the so-called bourgeoisification of the proletarian consciousness simply reflect the overall tendency of society to suck up the consciousness of the workers and to ridicule any notion that their consciousness is not immediately identical to either the consciousness of society or the interests of society as a whole. So one cannot reproach them for this, and I would like to add that, if Marx’s theory of immiseration10 has proved to be wrong in countless spheres, and over such long time-spans that one would have to be delusional simply to pass over these periods, then it is also quite unjustified to blame the workers for thinking the way people think if they have more to lose than their chains. For that is not a betrayal; rather, such accusations against the workers in particular usually amount to agreement with those whose only response to the concerns of the labour movement is to reach for the truncheon. If the workers do indeed have more to lose than their chains, then that may be painful for the theory, but it is initially very good for the workers. And I think that a theory which fails to recognize that, and therefore does not incorporate those aspects where the way things have so far gone materially has not actually resulted in the extreme situation predicted by Marx – I think not only that acknowledging this fact is the most basic matter of academic honesty but also that a theory which dismissed this and expected the workers to behave like starving people when they are not starving, that this would no longer even be a theory and would risk becoming a mere figment. That would not, admittedly, answer the question of whether this condition is static, whether it is really something structural, or whether that too does not belong in the realm of mere appearance. But theory must also respect appearances; that is the element of truth in positivism which one must concede, and which was conceded by no less a person than Hegel, in the famous formulation in the second part of his Science of Logic that ‘essence must appear’,11 and that, if it does not appear, it is not actually the essence.
Incidentally, the observation of the divergence between socialism as a conception of the right society – something Goldmann referred to two days ago, with a term I did not consider very well chosen, as ‘worldview’ [Weltanschauung] – and, on the other hand, the immediate, concrete experience of the workers within the work process, which seems essentially causal-mechanical and not finalistic, is obviously not something that was just invented yesterday. What one calls the everyday class struggle, after all, has always differed from the setting of large-scale political goals and has always had, in part, a tendency to defer the setting of political goals to the Greek calends and thus degrade it to ideology again. This tension has expressed itself time and again in the extremely variable relationships between trade unions and political parties, and it would be a grave mistake to locate trade unions on the side of, shall we say, concretist compromise as mere lobby groups and political parties on the side of utopia. It has certainly not always been so, and at the moment – if I may venture so far into concrete social analysis for a moment – it seems that precisely, because the political parties negate the fundamental tensions in party practice, it is the trade unions – which must register that daily struggle, after all, but have officially been separated from politics entirely – that still have some possibility of realizing critical elements of theory within the framework of social practice.