3.7 - Dubiel, Helmut - Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left (en)

7/30/2019 3.7 - Dubiel, Helmut - Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left (en)

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Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left

Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left

by Helmut Dubiel

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3+4 / 1990, pages: 242-249, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=31132ed2-cee0-4ddb-9e51-11fc25f75341http://www.ceeol.com/


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RELECTIONS ON INTELLECTUALS AND THE EVENTS OF 1989

BEYOND MOURNING ANDMELANCHOLY ON THE LEFT*

Helmut DubielThe reactions of the left-wing intelligentsia in West Germany to theunstoppable exit of 'empirical socialism' from the world stage conform to a

pattern that invites psychoanalytical interpretation. On the one hand, thepostmodern reaction, reflecting a presently erupting trend that sacrificesleftist identity altogether - admittedly the maintenance of which had been amatter of excessive exertion for some time. But in the process, it is not onlydead weight that is being thrown overboard, but also the very passengerbasket itself. Thus the affair might continue to have the appearance of flight.On the other hand we find those who have been beset by a fear of flying.Instead of pitilessly taking stock of a self-destructing reality, their firstconcern is preserving their own identity. They too are throwing off deadweight. But what characterizes them is the deliberate conscientiousness withwhich they are doing it. Scrupulously, they make a list of those political andintellectual stocks in the tradition that they want to know are secure againstthe downdraft caused by the tailspin of empirical socialism. As examples ofeach of these reactions one can cite for the first Cora Stephan's essay inMerkur, "Schmutziges Interesse? Spekulationen iiber das Menschenfreundliche am Eigennutz" (no. 493, March 1990), and for the second Oskar Negt'sarticle, "Schadelstatte des Sozialismus: Anfang oder Ende der Utopie?"(Frankfurter Rundschau, 10 April, 1990). Cora Stephan sings the praises of apolitics conducted in strict accordance with purely egocentric interests - sothat we, who have been hearing this neoconservative song for years, findourselves scared stiff of such a daring housecleaning. But perhaps CoraStephan can be so daring because she, unlike masculine post-modernists, stilldisposes over a purple parachute. What a contrast to the good Oskar Negt,who lists with pastoral thoughtfulness all that which still warms the hearts andminds of us greying members ofthe sixties generation: the ideas ofBloch, theunification of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Benjamin's philosophy ofhistory, Critical Theory! Why does he not point out that Critical Theory itselfwas the fruit ofworking through disillusionment over the failure of socialism?That is precisely the reason why it, least of all, can be understood as a timelessintellectual treasure upon which our political identity can rest forever.Manics and MelancholicsIt takes no prophetic gift to predict that a majority of the debates to beconducted in the coming years in the journals of the left will originate in* This article first appeared in Merkur, No. 496 (Spring-Summer 1990), pp. 482--491.Praxis International 10: 3/4 October 1990 & January 1991 0260-8448$2.00


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242 Praxis Internationalquarrels among these two camps. According to a suggestive typificationintroduced by Sigmund Freud in a 1915 text, "Mourning and Melancholy,"one could designate the two forms of reaction sketched above with hisrespective concepts, manics and melancholics. In the context in which Freudintroduces them, both designate unsuccessful forms of the work ofmourning.With the concept of "thework ofmourning" we associate the toil it costs us towithdraw libidinal energies from their links with a lost object. The manicfailure of the work of mourning expresses itself for the subject through thefact that "there is ... a long-sustained condition of great mentalexpenditure, or one established by long force of habit, upon which at lastsome influence supervenes making it superfluous." A manic reaction comesfrom those who suddenly throw off a false position they have imposed uponthemselves and endured for years. This unsuccessful form of the work ofmourning represents for Freud a triumph of the unconscious, with theproviso that "what the ego has surmounted and is triumphing over remainshidden from it." It is otherwise with the melancholic. He fails to accomplishwhat the manic exaggerates, namely the detachment of libidinal energy fromthe loved object. Instead of undertaking a testing of reality, the frustratedego withdraws into itself and secures what stocks it has on hand. For thepsychoanalytic interpretation of melancholy this manoeuver is the proof thatthe choice of the lost object was founded in narcissism. But the images ofmania and melancholy in reference to the condition of the work ofmourningare not sharply separated. They border on each other in their extremes:melancholy often transforms itself into mania; the melancholy withdrawal ofthe ego onto itself comes to expression precisely in massive self-rejection.However they may be constituted, what interests us in these failed forms ofthe work of mourning is solely the positive ideal in which they are lacking.

One could ask though why the question should be one of mourning in thefirst place, when the matter at hand is the relation of the non-communist leftin the West to 'empirical socialism' in Eastern Europe? What does the onehave to do with the other at all? Did not Western Marxism develop as apitiless critique of Marxism-Leninism, which was misused as an ideology ofdomination? And, unlike the case of the literary intelligentsia, the number offellow-travellers of totali tarian socialism within the social scientificcommunity (in the Federal Republic of Germany) was negligible - aminority, representative only of poor individuals subjected to professionalexclusion and who broke their own backs in their sacrificium intellectus. Doesnot, one could further query, the very suggestion of the present necessity ofmourning amount to an identification with the conservative aggressor, whowas never willing to recognize the differentiations central to our WesternMarxist identity? What could be the occasion for us to make thegeneralizations, just as dominated by self-interest as they are vulgar, of aJohannes Gross or a Friedrich Karl Fromme the standard of our selfexamination?It is doubtless necessary to do away with such ideologically chargeddistortions. It is equally correct on another level that there certainly did existfor the West German (critical-theoretical) left-wing intelligentsia a back-

cessviaCEEOL NL Germany


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Praxis International 243ground relation to the fact of empirical socialism. And I have the impressionthat the "manic" and "melancholic" types of mourning so prevalent atpresent are the reaction, as Freud says, of one who very well knows "whomhe has lost but not what it is he has lost" in the lost object.

What we had to do with empirical socialism is related to the specificpolitical and intellectual situation ofthe Federal Republic, as the post-fasciststate located on the front between the two ideologically competitive worldsystems. The founding years of the Federal Republic were marked by such avirulent anti-communism that the latter dimmed even its adversaries' clarityof vision. The fundamental confrontat ion between a conservative anticommunism and a helpless "anti-anti-communism" on the part of leftistscaused all political and moral criteria not already stamped in advance by theestablished structures of empirical socialism and empirical capitalism to pale.In the process, the critique of their own, like the apology for the otherpolitical system, was reduced on the left - and, with the terms reversed,among the conservatives - to a zero-sum game. Even in our day we comeupon the absurd fear that a pitiless critique of former Eastern Europeansocial orders could slip into an apology for the elite democracies of theWest.The political constraint of the Western German leftist intelligentsia thatsprang from the constellation of anti-anti-communismwas further supportedby a theoretical perspective inherent to Critical Theory. Our conceptualorientation derived from the theory of "late captialism." Instructed by theold Critical Theory, indeed we - unlike the Marxist intelligentsia of the

twenties - no longer believed in an end ofthe capitalist social order that couldbe anticipated in empirical terms. The point of our theory consisted preciselyin the identification of the economic, political, and mass cultural strategieswith which capitalism thwarts revolutionary attempts to transcend it. Thisperspective, inherent to the theories of fascism, of thewelfare state's capacityto adjust, or of mass culture, made continued use of the end of capitalismonly as a heuristic fiction, as a contra-factual assumption for purposes of thetheoreticalconstruction of empirical development in western societies. Of thepolitical hope that this analytical finalism would sometime assume practicalhistorical form there have not been in recent years even the weakestindications. Precisely for this reason it was important for the theory of latecapitalism that there be - however unloved and rejected, nonethelessempirically existing - proof of the possibility of transcending capitalism.Nothing distinguished totalitarian socialism other than its sheer existence,other than the fact that it embodied the possibility that capitalism could besubject to a beyond.Only a consideration of the critical constraint derived from the anti-anticommunism of the West German leftist intelligentsia in the face of thetotalitarian socialism along with the analytical finalism in the theory of latecapitalism sketched above gives an appropriate understanding of the shortlived euphoria over the democratic revolutions in the East and, then, theensuing depression. For that critical constraint and the analytical finalismcrystallized into a wishful image of a "third way." The dreams of a third waywere altogether oriented to the - not at all self-evident - suggestion that the


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244 Praxis Internationalpath of a free society is shorter from the rubble of empirical socialism than itis through the labyrinth of the existing capitalist democracies. Thecircumstance that it was precisely the collapsing social order of the GermanDemocratic Republic in the hot early winter of 1989 that catalyzed the dreamof socialism rising from the ashes of totalitarianism with a human face mighthave instructed us as to what it was that we lost in it, in empirical socialism toreturn to Freud's formulation.The Agenda of MourningThat empirical socialism became the target for the projection of leftist

hopes in the West just as it was disappearing proves that interpretationalpatterns still stored in the unconscious of many leftists had become linked toits mere existence. These patterns refer to the apparent seizure of the chancein the East to make a revolutionary exit once and for all from the nexus ofcapital. To take reflexive possession of these interpretational patterns couldbe the goal of the left's work of mourning.

In a footnote to his essay, "Bindung, Fessel, Bremse,,,l Claus Offesupplies a few concise indications as to what the agenda of such a work ofmourning might look like. On the basis of the sober insight that "the conceptof 'socialism' ... is today (and not only since today) operationally empty,"he sketches in abstractly compact form five aspects of a fundamental selfcritique of the left.

According to Offe, we have to admit with pitiless consistency that, from apurely technical perspective, neither now nor in the foreseeable future doesthere exist a functional or tolerably efficient political organizational model ofsocialism. But even if there were such a functional model, there still do notexist the conditions necessary to bring it about which are practicable in socialtechnical terms and democratically acceptable. And even if there were such amodel and the conditions of its achievement were not problematic, it wouldremain open what would have to happen with those parts of the populationthat were still not ready to follow us along the path into a post-capitalist stateof affairs. But even if there were a functional political organizational modelof socialism, and the conditions of its implementation were as unproblematicas its acceptance in democratic terms, we would still be lacking the certaintyof a social state of affairs that was (also) proof against (wholly novel) forms ofregression forever. And finally: even if a post-capitalist society weretechnically practicable, democratically accepted, and forever immune fromnovel forms of regression, there would remain for us the problematics ofsociety's relation to nature and to gender difference - problematics for theconceptual and political overcoming of which the repertoire of the oldsocialism was not prepared. On each of these five points I want to comment.(1) Before the thoughts of Keynes took form in western economicpolicies, the subordination of the means of production to the centralizedcontrol of the state was the only fully elaborated political organizationaloption going by the name of socialism. This political organizational optionhas today - in complete contrast to the times of the world economic crisis at


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Praxis International 245the beginning of the Weimar Republic - no mass movement behind it, nointellectuals of stature, and no politicians, in either the East or the West.After the experiences of the state socialist societies inside the sphere ofSoviet domination, we have to admit that the model of a state-centralizedcommand economy is in all aspects inferior to welfare state capitalism: in theaverage level of material and infrastructural provisions, in the degree ofpolitical control exerted over the problem of pollution, not to mention therelative security of human rights and the level of popular politicalparticipation.The more recent Western project of a social state compromise, with itscharacteristics of a growing public sector and cooperative arrangementsbetween unions, state, and capital, is in no way discredited in a similar sense.

The fundamental principles of this project have, for one thing, become suchself-evident components of Western political culture that they represent nolonger a genuine socialist project (if it ever was one). Second, the politicalproject of a social state compromise has long since run up against theimmanent limits of capitalist development. Given the possibilities of flexiblepersonnel utilization opened up by the new key technologies, the flexibleorganization of production and labor; given the expansion of purelyspeculatively inspired financial cycles; given large budget deficits and thepowerful integration of national economies in the world market, theKeynesian instruments of planning are no longer effective. The smallminority that continues to sing the praises of demand management faces thetask of furnishing the technical argumentation as to which new markets withwhat type of goods could capture which consumer strata - and any spurt ofgrowth and employment comparable to that of the post-war period wouldhave then to avoid an intensification of the ecological crisis.The catastrophic deficiencies of state socialist systems with regard totechnical planning and democracy, and the vanished operational conditions

ofKeynesian regulation, have led to the dilemma that the classical carriers ofsocialist politics in western Europe are unable to oppose, either on thetechnical or on the normative-utopian level, a comprehensive and consistentalternative to the neo-conservative project of a "self-cleansing" of capitalism.Other aspects of an alternative economic-political strategy, like shorteningthe work week or introducing flexibility into the work day, guaranteedminimum income, etc., are at all events the first components of a new leftistorganization of politics, which, however, continues to lack an organizationaloutline.(2) That we have no unified, economically operational, and ecologicallytolerable model of a post-capitalist political organization at our disposal is,admittedly, only the first problem. Deeper in historical and theoretical termsis the problem of the transition, the transformation to a- however conceived-post-capitalist state of affairs. Despite his well-known remarks on socialism asthe transitional phase, Marx did not occupy himself with the problem of thetransformation. The failure was neither accidental nor negligent, but a resultof the image, on the level of the philosophy of history, he constructed of theend of capitalism. The relation between capitalism and post-capitalism, or


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246 Praxis Internationalcommunism, corresponded to the relation between necessity and freedom.Between the two states of affairs there is in a strict sense no transition, butonly a revolutionary break. To the utopian promise of a society of freeproducers, material surplus, and fully transparent social relations areopposed with no mediation the alienated relations of a society still mired inthe private appropriation of social surplus value. Through this historicalphilosophical lens, capitalism appears as the potential of material andcultural wealth shackled by domination, which can be freed only through arevolutionary act. The transition to a post- or non-capitalist state of affairs isnot conceived as an open process of learning, during the course ofwhich notonly the means, but also the goal of the revolutionary struggle is subject torevision. Revolution is solely the flat realization of the state of affairs aimedat in historical philosophical preconceptions, in which an enlightened avantgarde and a collection of experts exercise judgment as to the appropriateinstrumental standards. This understanding of revolution, still widespread inthe unconscious ofmany leftists, who denounce all political activity this sideof the threshold of a revolutionary break as mere "modernization," as"conformity to the changed necessities of domination," etc., is a heritage ofthat historical philosophical denial of the transformation problem.(3) Andrzej Szczypiorski tells the story of a Polish teacher and activist whoattempted to make the communist utopia appetizing to his pupils by sayingthat there would then be currant pudding for everyone. A pupil objected thathe didn't like currant pudding. "After the revolution you will like it," was thereply.This story caricatures an authoritarian universalism that many leftists,knowingly or not, have internalized. This authoritarian universalism wasblind in both eyes. It was blind to the complex motivational economy ofactual individuals, in whom particularistic, that is egotistical and traditional,impulses are often so o p a q u ~ l y mixed with universal ones that any test ofrationality administered from an abstract point of view gets nowhere. Fromthe beginnings of the Frankfurt School, through Gramsci and all the way tothe current theory of populism, Marxism has labored with the problem thatthe masses continually act differently than the universalist morality imputedto them demands. And this authoritarian universalism was also blind to thegenuinely modern phenomenon of an unsurpassable plurality of interest andvalue orientations, of religions, worldviews, cultures, and ways of life. Wethe great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment have only truly comprehendedvery recently that every theoretical and practical political attempt to level outthis plurality through colonization or assimilation destroys the substance ofthese ways of life. A socialist project can only have a future as a democraticone, for all fundamental political intentions to change must not only notinspire resistance in the hearts and minds of actual people, but must findagreement there.(4) The aged totalitarian socialism that is now leaving the historical stagewas born before the "dialectic of enlightenment" was grasped. That thepreceptors of the revolution could themselves develop into a despotic andparasitical class, that the command economy, for its part, could lead to


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Praxis International 247monstrous irrationalities and become a fetter on social wealth, that theunfettering of the productive forces would lead to devastating environmentalcatastrophes, that the abolition of bourgeois rights and forms of dominationcould end in a new totalitarianism, that the high culture ofMarxist critiquecould develop into an intellectually deadening scholasticism - none of thiswas foreseen by those who struggled for the realization of that socialism. Intheir early enlightenment optimism they were blind to the danger that theirsocialism would merely add a new chapter to the dialectic of enlightenment.We, on the other hand, can no longer believe that humanity only poses itselfproblems that it can also solve. At every stage of social development weconsider the risk to civilization of regression. The future-oriented trust in amerely correct and just administration of the development of the productiveforces, which characterized the "old" socialism, has been replaced, preciselyamong leftists in theWest, by struggles for the defense, and the preservationof the assets of nature or civilization now being threatened. The secret of sucha politics was clad by WaIter Benjamin in the image of angels whoimmediately perish when they cease to sing. This image opens the eyes of theever-present vulnerability of a hard-won status quo, of the fact that the"balance of the tolerable" (Jiirgen Habermas) occasionally achieved, is theaccomplishment of social actors, who, in their hopes for progress, could relyonly upon themselves.(5) In the Marxist explanation of society, the organization of sociallaboroccupied an absolute monopoly position. The potential both for maintainingdomination and for emancipation was located in the sphere of industriallabour. The objectively determinate force of industrial labour has notlessened in the course of the twentieth century, but in the subjectivedimension of social self-construction its monopoly has been relativized. Notonly in social scientists' diagnostic analyses of periods, but also in thearticulated consciousness of social movements, in electoral decisions, and indemoscopically researched attitudes, other problem complexes have takentheir place beside it. The public politicization of society's relation to natureand of the hierarchical treatment of gender differences might be historicallyrecent phenomena, but the problem dimensions they call up not only runcounter to the social question, but lie deeper anthropologically andhistorically as well. In the ecological question the relation of the species to thenature that surrounds it is addressed beyond all internal differentiations ofsociety in the form of classes. In the politicization of the one-sided treatmentof gender difference it is a matter of a critique of domination founded in theintimate structures of the gender-specific division of labour. The practicalpolitical spelling out of this subjectively "new" problem complex has alreadyled to a constellation of conflicts, to alliances and political identities, which-measured according to the normal image of distribution conflicts - areradically new. The forms of domination, the crisis scenarios, the institutionalamelioration strategies, and the understanding of politics altogether willchange in the course of the dramatization of these problems. In an interviewwith L'Espresso regarding the programmatic reorientation of Italiancommunism, Norberto Bobbio recently remarked that the theory of the


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248 Praxis Internationalrevolution in everyday relations being conducted by women in the Westernmonopolies has not even been written yet.Empirical CapitalismThat we have at our disposal no alternative candidate for a comprehensivesocialist political organization, that the transformation to a non-capitaliststate of affairs can no longer be conceived in the image of a revolutionary

break, that any restructuring of society will have to be accepted by peoplewho are complexly motivated and pluralistically oriented, that there is nometa-political insurance against civilizational regressions, and that the issuesof society's relation to nature and gender differences have an independentdimension - these points belong to the lesson leftists must truly haveinternalized if their imaginations are to become free once again for a newproject.The constellation of such a project cannot be described at present withoutirony. What we are experiencing is precisely not the collapse of capitalism,but of a social order that alleged itself to have overcome the former once andfor all through revolution. More likely to be practiced in pacing offtheoretically the stages of a capitalist order destined to be overcome, we areconfronted today with two grim tasks: we are supposed to understand thetransformation of a totalitarian state socialism into a liberal democracybased on a market economy; and we must enter into a new, precisely nonfinalistic relationship with empirically existing capitalism.The worldwide choir of conservatives is now striking up the euphoric song

of the "end of history". It is seconded by the mournful tune of a pessimisticleft, which believes that now - following the irrealization of the old socialism- the internal and external and thorough capitalization of the world canproceed without any resistance. I am not persuaded by this assessment. Ihave much more the impression that the misery that capitalism produces the unequal distribution of life opportunities within and between societiesand continents, the notorious vulnerability of its economic development ofcrisis, the shirking of the consequences of production onto the naturalenvironment, the cultural levelling of variations in modern styles of life - canonly be effectively mobilized for politics when the radical critique of thismisery rids itself once and for all of the freight of its mortgage to totalitariansocialism.The simple mistake underlying the conservative scenarios of jubilation andthe corresponding images of horror on the part of the left is that of anunhistorical conception of capitalism. For capitalism, which seems now tohave the world lying at its feet, is not an order identical with itself. It can bedefined only by its unique historical capacity for change, by its capacity celebrated by Marx in the Manifesto - ceaselessly to revolutionize the

conditions of its own existence. Orthodox political economists, whether ofMarxist or liberal provenance, like to affirm a "logical" core in this historyprocessing capitalist mode of production. According to their respectiveweightings, they localize in it the right of private property, wage labor,


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Praxis International 249production mediated by the market, or the separation of the producers fromthe means of production. Clearly the context, in terms of economic policy,the sociology of classes, and the requirements of legitimation in which thesein fact constitutive features of capitalism are imbedded, is so radicallydifferent from the context of its historical inception that there can scarcelyany longer be a question of an invariant core of the capitalist order that issubject to unambiguous isolation from the historical dimension of itsdevelopment. Those who depart dogmatically from the premise that thecapitalist system has the sovereignty always to prescribe the conditions of itschanges fail to appreciate the extent to which it found it necessary in thecourse of its historical development to incorporate into itself aspects of asocialist critique. In capitalist societies, in which half of all the economicprofits realized are mediated by the state, in which the majority of elites inthe public and private sector are oriented according to the imperatives of afunctional rationality, and in which the legitimatory aspect of privateproperty has been weakened in favor of democratic control, it becomes lessand less possible to contrast an "economic" core with the power to determinethe structure to a "political"" margin. Correspondingly inadmissable is a"surgical"" understanding of revolution, permanently secure in the knowledge of what key economic mechanism has to be removed to organize thepolitical body along fundamentally new lines.Such different Marxist theorists as Otto Bauer" Antonio Gramsci, andFranz Neumann proposed more than a half century ago that state-mediatedcapitalism not be conceptualized as a homogenous territory under enemyoccupation, but as a moving field of compromise between various classes andgroups contending for predominance by way of appeal to the norms of thebourgeois constitutional state. Antonio Gramsci made this interpretationinto the basis of a socialist strategy that undermined the distinction betweenreform and revolution. He makes clear that in a developed, politicallymediated capitalist society, the revolutionary goal can no longer consist inthe conquest of the command centers of the state. With the misleadingmetaphorofa "war of position, '" he characterized the "cultural revolutionary'"project as a focusing and intensification of those emancipatory potentials insociety not yet shut down by the capitalist spirit. "Civil society" was for himthe epitome of that ensemble of moral, cultural, and institutional potenciesthat make it possible to check the destructive dynamic of capitalism. Such astrategy no longer anticipates the outright end of a capitalist order identicalwith itself, but fortifies the democratic, the social state, and the ecologicalbuttresses contained within it. And in the place of those final fictions entersthe possibility, not by any means ruled out historically, of civilizing capitalismto the point that it is no longer recognizable.

Translated by Don Reneau

NOTES1. In Axel Honneth. et al. (eds.). Zwischenbetrachtungen im Prozess der Aufkliirung

(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989) (English translation of this volume which is a Festschrift forJiirgen Habermas is forthcoming from MIT Press).

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3.7 - Dubiel, Helmut - Beyond Mourning and Melancholy of the Left (en)