For a Good Time...

Left Fascism, Cultural Marxism...and Breasts!

Writing this manuscript is making me a bit unhinged, I fear, which will hopefully explain to you why I just found reading the published correspondence between Theodore Adorno and Herbert Marcuse regarding the student protests in Germany so fun.

Maybe I should explain a little more.

First of all, if you don’t know who Adorno and Marcuse were, they were two of the primary thinkers of what became known as the Frankfurt School, or more correctly the Institute for Social Research. The Frankfurt School is the protagonist of the right wing conspiracy theories about Cultural Marxism, which like other conspiracy theories correctly sense there is some historical force at play but completely misidentify the agents and underlying logics behind that force.

“Cultural Marxism” both exists and doesn’t exist. There was indeed a Marxist idea that cultural change must occur before successful revolutionary action can happen, but that idea didn’t originate with the Frankfurt School. Instead, it comes from Antonio Gramsci, who is also the originator of the concept of cultural hegemony. Further, Gramsci’s ideas influenced both the left and the right: the European New Right, for example, sometimes referred to their ideological movement as “Right Gramscian.”

Anyway, the current idea about what Cultural Marxism is quite confused as to the changes the Frankfurt School wrought into radicalism. Judith Butler would not have been possible without them, but also it’s quite likely that none of the critical theorists whose ideas she relied on would have even recognized her theories as coherent.

That’s why those letters are so damn interesting. As way as background, Adorno—who was at that point the head of the Institute for Social Research—was writing his friend Marcuse, who was its earlier director, about student protests which had just occurred at the Institute.

Though he makes no direct reference to the event in his letters, the most significant of these events was called the Busenaktion, or “Breast Action” in English.

That photo, incidentally, was taken just before the three women you see harassing Adorno take off their shirts and bras, refuse to let him escape, and then start covering in him flower petals while other students shout at him.

But what was Adorno wearing to provoke them? Sorry, I mean, what had Adorno done to anger the students?

Quite simply, he’d publicly questioned their tactics. Previous to the Breast Action, students had occupied one of the rooms at the Frankfurt School and refused to leave, harassing and threatening Adorno until he called the police to have them removed.

Adorno, whose very ideas had helped provide the framework for the radicalism the students embraced, then began to fear what he had helped create. In his letters to Marcuse, he re-iterates the position of their third colleague and co-founder of the critical theory movement, Jürgen Habermas, there there is a kind of awakening “left fascism” in the student movement.

Read that again, probably, because it might sound a bit weird to hear the words “left fascism” attributed to a so-called Cultural Marxist. But it’s true—Habermas is the originator of that term, which he elaborated on in an essay on the student protests (called “The Phantom Revolution and Its Children”).

Anyway, there is a lot more to all this, and the rest of what I have to say about the matter is in the manuscript. For now, though, I highly recommend reading those letters. They feel like they could just have easily been written by a leftist professor at an American or British university now, watching in horror as the radicalism they argued for morphs into something that more resembles authoritarian-thinking than something that might actually liberate people.

Here’s a brief except (I’ve separated the paragraph for easier reading) and the full correspondence is available here.

“I would have to deny everything that I think and know about the objective tendency if I wanted to believe that the student protest movement in Germany had even the tiniest prospect of effecting a social intervention. Because, however, it cannot do that its effect is questionable in two respects.

Firstly, inasmuch as it inflames an undiminished fascist potential in Germany, without even caring about it. Secondly, insofar as it breeds in itself tendencies which— and here too we must differ—directly converge with fascism. I name as symptomatic of this the technique of calling for a discussion, only to then make one impossible; the barbaric inhumanity of a mode of behaviour that is regressive and even confuses regression with revolution; the blind primacy of action; the formalism which is indifferent to the content and shape of that against which one revolts, namely our theory.

Here in Frankfurt, and certainly in Berlin as well, the word ‘professor’ is used condescendingly to dismiss people, or as they so nicely put it ‘to put them down’, just as the Nazis used the word Jew in their day. I no longer regard the total complex of what has confronted me permanently over the past two months as an agglomeration of a few incidents. To re-use a word that made us both smile in days gone by, the whole forms a syndrome. Dialectics means, amongst other things, that ends are not indifferent to means; what is going on here drastically demonstrates, right down to the smallest details, such as the bureaucratic clinging to agendas, ‘binding decisions’, countless committees and suchlike, the features of just such a technocratization that they claim they want to oppose, and which we actually oppose.

I take much more seriously than you the danger of the student movement flipping over into fascism.”