Deppe Eng Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 Μ.Μ
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 1 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 2 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 3 Seventh Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 4 EKΔOΣEIΣ νήσος – Π. KAΠOΛA 14 Sarri, 105 53 Athens tel./fax 210 3250058 e-mail: [email protected] www.nissos.gr Publishing Director: Pola Kapola Scientific Director: Gerasimos Kouzelis Since 2007, the Nicos Poulantzas Institute has established an Annual Lecture in memory of Nicos Poula ntzas, where distinguished figures from different countries elaborate on their issues of interest, linking theory to political practice, in the broad sense. © Nicos Poulantzas Institute Proof reading: Τereza Bouki Printing: Quick Print Center ISBN 978-960-9535-97-7 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 5 Frank Deppe Authoritarian Capitalism Seventh Annual Nicos Poulantzas Memorial Lecture Athens, 4 December 2013 nissos | Nicos Poulantzas Institute | transform! europe ATHENS 2014 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 6 Frank Deppe is Professor of Poltical Science at the University of Marburg. deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 7 FOREWORD Gerassimos Kouzelis* Our professor and our comrade Frank Deppe was and is one of the most important political scientists in Germany. He has signed a great part of the theoretical and research work that shaped the Marxist thought in the then West Germany, and in what today counts as left political theory. He was and is the emblematic figure of what is called the ‘Marburg School’. He was and is a theorist and a fighter, active both in the lecture halls and in the meeting rooms - formulating critique but also for- mulating politics. Born in Frankfurt in 1941, he studied Sociology, Political Science and Economics both at the University of Frankfurt and the Univer- sity of Marburg. I should note - and please forgive my personal tone - that this is one of the four things that we have in common: first, we studied the same things; second, we went to Marburg for the same purpose, to find ourselves in a department that, at the time, bore the stamp of the great sociologist and left fighter Wolfgang Abendroth who, I should remind you, went to the island of Limnos as a member of a German battalion. There, he cooperated with, and eventually de- fected to, ELAS in 1944. He joined the ranks there, and was later ar- * Professor of Philosophy of Science and Sociology of Knowledge. 7 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 8 rested by the British and sent to exile in Egypt. In 1968, Frank Deppe submitted to Abendroth his doctoral dissertation on Blan- qui, and received his readership at Marburg in 1972. He went to Marburg in 1964 in order to study next to Heinz Maus [my own professor - a third coincidence], the student and ed- itor of Horkheimer’s work, a special personality of the then crammed Critical Theory. It was crammed because the dominant - at that decade in Marburg - Marxism did not have space for a lot of criticism and too many openings, in the context of correctness set somewhat absolutely by DKP. And this is the fourth coincidence: I started studying in the year and the institute where the thirty-year old Deppe had just become a professor, giving ground and oppor- tunities to a more dialectical, more western version of Marxism, as we somewhat stubbornly followed, influenced by Poulantzas, Euro- communism and the renewing left. From my then teachers, well- known names of the orthodox communist intelligentsia at the time, board members of the famous IMSF, the Institute for Marxist Stud- ies and Research of the German Communist Party, a body that was too dogmatic towards the Marxism that I then and now support or rather exercise, Deppe, perhaps together with Dieter Boris and Georg Fülberth and of course Abendroth himself, was one of the few who taught social theory from a perspective of fertile activation and critical control of Marxist conceptions and notions. It sounds of minor importance, but it is not. Because this was an era when, in this bastion of left theory and politics, you would not easily pass the course of Reinhardt Kühnl - also an assistant of Aben- droth - if, following Poulantzas, you distinguished fascism from dic- tatorship or if you recommended an Althusser-inspired reading of Rousseau to the famous and otherwise refreshing and Gramscian Marxist historian of philosophy, Hans Heinz Holz. The climate, therefore, that started to grow thanks to teachers like Deppe, and 8 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 9 of course with the moral support of an anti-dogmatic and anti-com- formist attitude such as the one of Maus, allowed the post-1968 generation of Marburg to play a role outside the orthodox, Soviet- like, critical discourse. I shall limit myself to what may be somewhat familiar to our dis- cussions here. To this intellectual climate, we should attribute the development of informal research and discussion groups, out of which the critical reading of the French and Italian Marxism in Ger- many began (I remember Professor Alex Demirovi and the con- troversial election as a full professor of the then director of the Gramsci Institute, which ultimately was not accepted by the educa- tion minister of Hessen), a core nucleus of ‘Class Analysis Program’ [Projekt Klassenanalyse] that nurtured the hegemonic project of the VSA publishing house (which of course was located in Hamburg and Berlin), as well as the stormy debates on the contribution of other poststructuralist approaches and particularly the Foucauldian theory, as advocated for example by our then classmate Ulrich Raulff (a recognized translator of Foucault, Castel and Deleuze). In this theoretical and political context, we owe to Frank Deppe and the company of the younger former assistants of Abendroth the development of a theoretical current that, on the one hand con- verses with Frankfurtian critical theory and, on the other hand - apart from whatever was inherited from Horkheimer (more than the other school members, as Deppe notes) - kept intact the task of class analysis and the interest in the structural element, beyond the individual, and in the confrontational element of Marxian theory. We owe this to them, and this is why I, at least, went to study in Marburg. We owe to them a robust defence of the practical - po- litical dimension of theory, which is what allows us to understand social reality, and when the flow of time brings twists, it shuffles the ground of historical developments and blurs clear analyses. I am trying to say - and my peers know this all too well - that in the wake of 1968 and with fresh images from the uprising in Prague, 9 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 10 amid a cold and a hot war - remember Vietnam -, with a Europe built as a union, a social democracy that was dominant by exploit- ing what was built as a welfare state, an economy becoming global- ized at an unprecedented rate, with trade union demands and ini- tiatives on the agenda, in the orgasm of asymmetric development of the ’70s and ’80s, the theory, Marxist theory and left-wing thought were tested on a daily exercise of interpretation and policy-making. There was no protected non-practical space, as there was no po- litical practice independent of the use of concepts, with universities and social sciences at the forefront. The fact that Frank Deppe belongs to those who opened and en- riched the field of critical social research in those decades is not unrelated to his political activities. Besides, critical theory is an at- titude according to our Frankfurtian teachers. So, having embraced such a conception of theory as practice, through his engagement with the work and teaching of Adorno and Horkheimer, but also under the influence of Marcuse in Frankfurt, Deppe - still a student at the time - turns to politics while at Marburg. Already in 1964, he joins the famous SDS, the socialist German student union which, though founded under the umbrella of social democracy, had al- ready breached its relations with SPD and had become the pole of attraction of the ‘new Left’. He joined there before well-known leaders like Dutsckke did, in the organization that was about to play a catalytic role in the German May of ’68, with headquarters in Berlin, Frankfurt and Marburg. And he is in the leadership of this organization during the critical years from 1965 to 1967, thereby coming into contact with the Institute of Abendroth, who at the time played a leading part in the theoretical work of SDS, among others as editor of his journal, ‘Neue Kritik’. Academic and political collaboration in the years of his thesis completion leads Deppe to participate in the establishment of the 10 deppe eng_Layout 1 24/11/2014 3:45 μ.μ. Page 11 Socialist Centre and the Socialist Office [Sozialistisches Büro], which published the famous links magazine, as well as in a number of ini- tiatives geared towards democracy and disarmament. Action, this time, is both movement-inspired and theoretical, and the connec- tion between practice and research work will remain in the subse- quent period. [I should note, anecdotally, that the slogan circulated among Marburg students at the time was “Marx an die Uni, Deppe auf H4!” (Marx at the university, Deppe as first-grade professor)]. A member of the Scientific Council of the Institute of Marxist Stud- ies and Research, IMSF, until 1989, he is currently a member of the Scientific Council of Attac and a member of Die Linke (becoming a member of a political party for the first time) while, markedly, his farewell lecture as professor emeritus at the University of Marburg was titled ‘Crisis and Renewal of Marxist theory’ [Krise und Erneuerung marxistischer Theorie].