Some Emphases within Neo-Marxist Critical Theory

Neo-Marist critical theory is a paradigm of research concerned with human emancipation. It seeks liberation from oppressive, totalitizing structures and attempts to create a world satisfying the deepest aspirations of human beings. Whereas traditional social theory endeavored simply to explain the existence and contour of actual societal structures, critical theory both explains and seeks to transform these societal structures thought to exploit human beings. 

Critical theory thus seeks to increase freedom by decreasing the domination of oppressive, exploitative structures conducing to human alienation.  It does this by providing both descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry. Accordingly, critical theory seeks to distinguish its forms, aims and theories of explanation from standard (traditional) views, primarily within the social sciences.  

The term 'critical theory' is most closely associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.  Founded in 1923 by Carl Gruenberg, the Institute was initially financed by Felix Weil. The general thrust of the Institute was to rethink classical Marxism in the context of the Weimar Republic. Scholars of the movement had noticed that social reality did not conform to the predictions of Marx. Why did the proletariat not overthrow the bourgeoisie as was predicted?  Why did the working class not want to effect revolution? 

Instead of regarding these empirical results as disconfirming Marxism, scholars of the School adjusted Marxist theory to be consistent with the empirical results. The effect of all of this was a brand of neo-Marxism focusing upon the structure of contemporary culture and the concomitant alienation human beings experience within that culture. 

Max Horkheimer offered the initial address of the Institute in 1929 and became its Director in 1930.  Other luminaries of the School include Adorno, Fromm, Pollock, Kirchheimer, Loewenthal, Neumann, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas. The maverick thinker, Walter Benjamin is often regarded as associated with the School as well. Thinkers of the Movement were united in their understanding of social theory which would combine philosophy with the disciplines of the social sciences.  

While thinkers differed in accents and emphases, I attempt below to identify and summarize some of the common themes emerging within the Frankfurt School's paradigm of research.  As with any attempt at generalization, there is some loss of accuracy. The Frankfurt School is not monolithic in its affirmations across all areas of its research. This being said, I believe that the School in general holds to the following:  

• While the economic and materialistic determinism of Marx had predicted an overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, this did not happen. Since Marxism is in some deep sense true, there must be some explanation for this that is consistent with this truth.
  

• The explanation for the working classes not revolting is that they have not sufficiently understood their exploitation within the capitalist system. They have somehow become distracted from their true plight.
  

• The sources of this distraction are found within the structure of capitalism itself. Whereas Marx had claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses -- functioning to distract workers from their actual exploitation -- contemporary capitalism offers many secular kinds of distractions, notably "mass culture" and the entertainment industry in general.
  

• Art in pre-industrialized societies had been an active concern for people as they both made, shared and appreciated that art. This is important because art, in fact, actually offers human beings the chance to see the world in new ways, ways crucial for the process of social transformation and amelioration. However, art in the twentieth century has become a commodity, something that people merely passively consume.
  

• In the twentieth century, technological developments have made possible the distribution of cultural products like art, music and film on a large scale. The result of this has been that art, film and music has become formulaic, designed to be purchased by people in satisfaction of their particular wants. Instead of these cultural products opening one to possible new ways of being, they simply exist to be consumed by workers in their leisure time. These commodities provide pleasant times of distraction between the times of work. Instead of engaging and challenging human beings actively to pursue truth and transformation, they are purchased and passively consumed by the masses in order to anesthetize themselves from the exploitative relationships in which they find themselves, and in so doing, make their intolerable lives more livable.
  

• Mass culture functions through these cultural products ideologically; people's values and their very consciousness are thereby affected by the consumption of these products. Natural human intellectual curiosity is dulled and people become intellectually inactive and politically passive. 
  

• The sameness of the cultural products available to humans in art, film and music is predicated on what will ultimately sell to consumers. Nobody is, in fact, designing a system of capitalism that exploits the working class. Moreover, nobody is intending to feed people mindless artistic commodities in order to keep them distracted and satisfied enough to go to work the next day. It is simply that this is what occurs because of the practice of capitalism as it functions in the modern world. Everything has a price and people consume that which is pleasant to them. On a daily basis, more people want to watch romantic comedies than view Schindler's List. They would rather listen to pop music than reflect upon Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions. They prefer three chord rock to late 19th century German chromaticism.  (I don't know how that is possible!) They prefer landscape pictures of trees, hills and lakes to cubist paintings. 
  

• In a capitalistic society people are consumers. In order to sell products to consumers, advertisers must create needs in the consumers so that they will buy the product. The creation of these needs actually functions as a type of human alienation because most of the needs advertising endeavors to create are things consumers really don't need. Accordingly, advertising and marketing really are in the business of creating false needs, needs that displace the person further from his or her true self.  Advertising thereby effects alienation.
  

• In order to bring about human liberation and transformation to more humane conditions of existence, capitalism must be replaced. It cannot be fixed or adjusted to work because it begins with the assumption that human beings are consumers, assumptions that ultimately lead to human alienation. Whereas Marxism potentially treats human beings as ends in themselves, capitalism interprets human beings as means to the end of building up capital. Men and women become commodities within capitalism. A person is identified as one who fixes roofs, or pipes, or electrical panels, or drives trucks, or places a certain bolt in a machine built on the conveyor belt.  

• While it is true that Marxism seeks to treat human beings as ends in themselves, this did not happen in the Marist-inspried Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet-style communism unfortunately also produced human alienation and turned human beings into mere means to some other end. 
  

• Most education within capitalistic societies is itself commodified. Instead of education having intrinsic value for the purposes of human flourishing, most education merely teaches skills so that people can become skillful workers within a consumer-dominated, capitalistic society.  Instead of freeing people from the tyranny of assumed limited possibilities, this type of education merely functions to teach people how to fit within an alienating structure. It thereby binds one to a system of exploitation rather than freeing one from such exploitation. 
  

• What is needed to diagnose the current ailments of society is a hermeneutic similar to that of classical depth psychology. In depth psychology, the individual's unconscious is explored at its depths for clues on how to interpret the existence and behavior of surface consciousness. The Frankfurt School sought to bring the hidden alienations and totalizations of society to the surface in order to grasp the existence and functioning of the present social order. Exploration of society and culture at its depth provides the key for interpreting social and cultural behavior. 
  

• Moreover, psychoanalytic theory helps explain how it is that people within fascist societies could feel as if their lives had meaning. Adorno, for instance, believed that Freud's theory of narcissism was helpful in understanding how the "little man" could both submit to, and identify with, authority. 
  

• Whereas classical Marxism understood primary oppositions as based upon economics, e.g., the working class vs. the bourgeoisie, critical theory of the Frankfurt School extended this list of oppositions. A similar domination of one group by another is thereby located in the relation between the sexes, in relations between the races, and in relations between people having different sexual orientations. Whereas traditional Marxism sought to free the working class from their economic exploitation, neo-Marxism attempts to free those marginalized and dominated from all of their numerous oppressions. It believes a better world is possible when traditional structures of oppression are negated. 
  

• A theory of hegemony claims that the dominant class not only creates its own ideology, but that of all of the other classes dominated by that class. Proper social education -- which capitalists might call "propaganda" -- is needed to change the class consciousness of both the dominating and dominated groups, and thus to bring about political change. 
  

• Whereas the reason of the Enlightenment critiqued earlier mythologies in order to help protect men and women from the very real threats of nature, so too must reason today diagnose and expose the mythology of this Enlightenment critique itself to protect mean and women from the dangers to human flourishing inhering within it.  Enlightenment reason has become merely a means-ends instrumental reason which leaves outside of itself any reasonable valuation of the ends to which reason as an evaluation of effective means must relate.  Accordingly, Enlightenment reason bears potential totalizations within itself, totalizations leading to domination and alienation.  Reason, which showed such promise to liberate, carries within itself the very ideologies that bind human beings even more fully. 
  

Examining critical theory more deeply demands, however, that we move past the generalities I have just sketched. However, I think the above list may be helpful in the examinations to follow. My hope is to provide summaries of major critical theorists of the Frankfurt School, summaries where one eye is focused on the potential appropriation of the thinker in the revolutionary rhetoric and action we are witnessing today, and where the other eye is allowed to gaze out towards the entire horizon of theology and religion more generally, discerning how the thinker's views relate to the deepest questions of the human heart. 

Why are Things Seemingly Unreasonable?

How will history come to understand 2020?  How will it ultimately interpret this movement called, "Black Lives Matter?  Is this movement a continuation of the Civil Rights Movement of the early and middle 1960s, or is its true foundation the student protests that happened later in that decade?   Moreover, what is its relationship, if any, to the "Occupy Wall Street" movement?

In looking at these questions, I am not concerned primarily with what people think they are doing when participating in Black Lives Matter protests, nor with what they are intending when looting, rioting, or committing acts of violence.   Most of the people actually engaged in Black Lives Matter protests seemingly believe that systemic racism pervades many large urban police departments, even if 20-30% of these police forces are themselves black. Some in Black Lives Matter have experienced actions that can easily be interpreted as racist, and these experiences then have surely formed the subsequent hermeneutical lens by which entire communities interpret subsequent police activity.

When this happens, statistics about the actual number of unarmed people shot by police matter very little. The narrative has been birthed and the power of the narrative to explain and predict subsequent events is clearly manifest.  But does the belief that racism exists and a distaste for such racism really explain why people are out in the streets in protest all over the world?

I don't think so. I am old enough to remember the Civil Rights marches on television, and I am old enough to recall that there were actually people in the sixties who were intellectually against the Civil Rights movement.  A fortiori, one needed to march in those days in order to raise the awareness of others. Some people believed, after all, that only white people should enjoy the privileges that society could offer.

The strange thing about the protests today is that virtually nobody is now consciously a racist who believes that people of color are somehow inferior and should not enjoy all of the benefits of our society and culture. In other words, if the marches are actually about basic equality between the races and the notion that police departments should not murder black people -- or people of any color -- then there really is nobody to have to convince by marching.  So what is the point?  What are we supposed to learn from those marching and demonstrating?

Clearly, since we are not needing to learn how not to be explicitly or consciously racist, then the marches really are teaching us something else: how not to be unconsciously or nonintentionally racist.  People march so people around the world can reflect upon how it is that there are groups of people, sometimes races, who do, in fact, exploit other people systematically and perhaps nonintentionally.  They do not exploit by being individual agents that have particular beliefs and desires that explain their behavior. Instead they exploit by being part of an entire social order that eventuates in the exclusion and marginalization of people other than those in power.  

If this is true, then white privilege is really nothing one can confess, nor is it something from which one can repent.  It is itself an entire structure of aims, behaviors and interpretations.  One is tempted perhaps to say that is is a form of life, an overarching matrix of meanings and actions.  It is, in fact, a world that one occupies and upon which one projects one's own possibilities of being. Such a world of meaning and action is not something that can be easily adjusted.  When a controlling understanding of race relationships is deeply ingrained in our culture and traditions, one cannot simply excise this understanding while leaving in place the world from which the understanding emerged and upon which their concomitant actions and meanings make sense.

All this is to say that if we are to understand what is happening in our world today, we need to know something of the theoretical grounding that supports movements like Black Lives Matter. An honest examination of this grounding removes us from the drama on the streets and deposits us in seats in the German academic lecture hall. In order to understand what is going on today, we must learn something about critical theory as it developed within, and subsequently morphed outside the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany.

In subsequent posts I will examine some of the crucial insights of the Frankfurt School and also "third generation" critical theory with an eye towards how its basic presuppositions and assumptions inform our contemporary situation with regard to the worldwide protests. I will try not to distort the views of these thinkers through simplification and generalization.

Continental thought in the last 100 years is extremely complicated.  We cannot simply call everything "postmodern," and say that "postmodernity teaches X."  Some continental thinkers in recent decades are postmodern, it is true.  But individual thinkers disagree with one another on all types of issues.  What is important is that we achieve clarity, that we are sober in our judgments and that we don't try to find the bogeyman under every tree. Clearly, in examining facets of continental thinking over the past eight or nine decades, the devil is in the details.

Critical theory challenges the assumption of modern democratic capitalistic societies that people are in general happy or fulfilled in their lives. It unmasks the myriad sufferings of humanity and offers a general remedy for such sufferings.  Critical theorists in general believe that Marxist theory, if properly adjusted and purged of its original materialistic determinism, can provide a superior alternative to capitalism if one is properly to advance human flourishing.  Such theory aims at transformation, an overturning of the old order of things in order to attenuate social marginalization and exclusion.

Critical theory may have profound theological implications. After all, how is sin possible on the assumptions of critical theory?  In what does salvation consist?  What does 'justification' mean?  Will contemporary interpreters of critical theory find room for any theology at all? 

In subsequent posts, I shall try to introduce the basics of critical theory fairly, connecting it to our current situation.  I shall attempt to be fair, knowing that many would claim that my own background, education and experience would make my fairness in regard to it very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.  Since I am a theologian, I will be making theological comments along the way as well.  This may be even more offensive to some readers.