Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition

Vasilis Grollios, Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition, New York: Routledge, 2017. 267 pp. $140.00

The relation between critical theory and Marxist theory has been disintegrating since the work of Jürgen Habermas gained extensive influence in the 1980s and 1990s. For Habermas, critical theory could only remain salient once it was able to articulate a theory of social action that would be able to resurrect and defend the Enlightenment conception of reason as a public, democratic enterprise. This led to his theory of communicative action and, in time, to his work in discourse ethics and theories of law and democracy. This move also effected a more fundamental shift in critical theory by moving it away from the problems of the traditional subject-object problem in western philosophy of consciousness and toward a paradigm of intersubjectivity. What has been lost in these developments and shifts in critical theory has been an emphasis on the Marxian themes that animated and motivated the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists.

Vasilis Grollios’ powerful new book is an attempt to reconnect Marxism to the critical theory tradition. For him, the key link between the projects of Marxism and the first generation of the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of society is the theme of negation: of a kind of thinking that forces us to resist the fetish character of capitalist life. As he puts it in his introduction: “Negative dialectics attempts to make us aware of the human content that lies hidden inside fetish-forms” (p. 2). What Grollios wants to argue in this book is that negation is the core feature of critical theory and, he believes, of Marxism as well. He utilizes the ideas of the “Open Marxist” school and in so doing brings together the theme of negative dialectics and the Marxian thesis of the social-laboring essence of all social reality. As he put it: “By shedding light on the essence, the philosopher demystifies the fetishized forms by revealing our going, our objectified labour, as their true content” (p. 17).

The idea of a “negative dialectics” has often confused those that have tried to read late critical theory and it continues to be a theme of contemporary scholars in the field. The basic principle of the thesis of negative dialectics, however, is not all that complex. Hegel posited three stages to dialectical thinking. First, there was the stage of the “understanding” which means the ability to grasp an object as a distinct entity. Any object appears to consciousness as a thing, a thing that seems to be what it is, self-sufficient. But once consciousness examines this thing more closely, it sees that it is dependent on other things. This leads to the second stage of “negation,” or the move of the understanding toward negating the independence of that object and seeing its relations to and its dependence on other things. Lastly, Hegel posits that a third stage exists, that of the “speculative” that comes to view the totality of the relations of dependence as the truth of the thing. Those who push for a “negative dialectic” transform this triadic structure into a dyadic structure where the negative is seen as a force for resisting the ideological and cultural forces that make agents complacent to capitalist social relations. For Grollios, as it was for Adorno in particular, the second stage of negation is therefore the crucial category for any form of generating political resistance.

Grollios argues that we should view the critical theory tradition as essentially orbiting the category of negation since it is this that continues the impulse of the original Marxian idea that we need to de-fetishize consciousness in order for genuine radical political activity to emerge. He begins this with a penetrating reading of Marx and Engels and their conception of democracy which posits an equality where all members of the community are able to participate in the decision-making processes over the collective resources of that community. As Grollios puts the matter: “democracy exists when all wealth produced by society is controlled by the majority od the population and is used for the fulfillment of human needs” (32). Marx and Engels therefore constitute a kind of basic radical-democratic principle that governs the vision of radical democracy. The problem continues to be, however, how to generate a consciousness of this need on the part of political subjects.

Grollios turns to Horkheimer’s distinction between traditional and critical theory in order to show how critical theory seeks to link the negative powers of cognition to the democratic aims of classical Marxism. Horkheimer’s views traditional theory as problematic because: “the real contradiction of opposed class interests is hidden behind the veils of harmony, the free subject and pure reason” (75). Horkheimer’s negative dialectics therefore places him in this “open Marxism” mode of reasoning that Grollios sees as politically important. In contrast, Georg Lukács is seen as a deviation from this mode. For Grollios, Lukács departs from the emphasis on negation and moves into the third stage of the dialectic by pointing toward the totality of society as the cooperative end of socialist society. Lukács is therefore seen as anti-democratic since he “holds that only a very few are able to acquire this special knowledge” (107).

In truth, this reading of Lukács is deeply skewed and does not consider the overwhelming bulk of his ideas about the power of realism and its democratic character as well as his later writings on democratic theory and the democratization of socialism. For Lukács, negation was not alone able to shatter reification, only lead to political nihilism or irrationalism. What was needed was the need to cognize the totality, a society based on the essential social cooperative nature of human life. Reification is therefore considered a major blockage to the class consciousness of workers, but negation alone cannot lead to socialism, and this seems to be the main issue with the remaining critical theorists (with the exception of Marcuse and Fromm) who eschewed actual politics for a solipsitic theorizing. Shattering reification, for Lukács, remained a central problem that had to be overcome for socialist society and real democracy to take root, hence his criticism of alienation within socialist society in his posthumously published Ontology of Social Being.

Grollios correctly follows the theme of the negative dialectic in an excellent chapter on Adorno’s idea of the “false totality.” He rightly points to Adorno’s problematic with the third, “speculative” stage of Hegel’s dialectic and instead highlights his ideas about the resistance of the totalizing impulses of capitalist society. In place of a distinctly political theory, Grollios argues that: “democracy should not be understood as a call for a more effective domination of the people, for another kind of power or for a replacement of the elite that currently holds power. It should instead be theorized as a distinct philosophy of culture, an entirely different value system that will discard the values of accumulation of wealth, hard work and competition” (173). His reading of Marcuse stresses negation against the “bad negativity” of capitalist life. A refusal to posit a vision for any kind of post-capitalist society “should not be considered a weakness of his philosophy,” Grollios maintains, “but a strength.” Grollios ends his comprehensive study with a defense of the “open Marxism” that will go not only against capitalism and the technical-rational control of time and labor, but also the domination of “bourgeois democracy.”

Grollios’ book is without question a work of important scholarship, in particular, his strong chapters on Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Marx demonstrate a powerful mind at work. But I found myself quarrelling with the way he forces critical theory into the constraints of an “open Marxism” and into the strictures of negation. For one thing, it does not seem to me to be politically realistic nor desirable to dispense with the Enlightenment ideas of the modern state and law, nor for democratic institutions and constitutionalism. In the end, Grollios insists that: “The only purpose of a critical theorist is to make us aware of the antinomies inherent in our schizophrenic way of living in capitalism” (168). But in truth, if we accept this assertion, we in fact condemn critical theory to being a purely academic enterprise. Negation needs to be seen as a mode of consciousness, not its sole operation. We have to be able to posit concrete, rational alternatives to the defective forms of social life under capitalism lest we destroy the possibilities of real politics. It is precisely this lack that made thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer a kind of dead end politically – they saw no alternative to the density of reification of modernity.

What is needed is, as Lukács – the only one of the theorists Grollios treats who performed any kind of genuine revolutionary political activity – properly knew, was a speculative moment to round out the negative one. That knowledge of a just human society would be one premised on our cooperative interdependence on one another. To overcome our alienation from this central, radical thesis will require more than negation, it will necessitate a vision of what kind of social relations, ends and purposes are democratic and just. Negation simply must lead to something politically positive to fight for – to deny this is to consign critical theory to eternal practical irrelevance.

Michael J. Thompson
Dept. Political Science
William Paterson University
thompsonmi@wpunj.edu