Wendland-Liu on Adler and Blum, 'The Marxist Conception of the State: a Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method'

H-History-and-Theory Wendland-Liu on Adler and Blum, 'The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method'

Review published on Monday, June 28, 2021

Max Adler, Mark E. Blum, ed. The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method. Leiden: Brill, 2019. xiii + 243 pp. $130.00 (e-book), ISBN 978-90-04-40997-2.

Reviewed by Joel Wendland-Liu (Grand Valley State University) Published on H-History-and-Theory (June, 2021) Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of California, Los Angeles)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56434

In positioning the Austrian Marxist Max Adler in a third space between Leninism and emergent liberal theories in the reconstructed post-World War I Austria, Mark E. Blum’s preface to this new translation of The Marxist Conception of the State notes, “Adler’s book ... would challenge the Leninist understanding just as it challenged the bourgeois understanding” of the state (p. vii). Instead of exploring this particular positioning in his discussion, however, Blum alludes to Lenin only twice and instead focuses his brief comments on Adler’s critique of liberal democratic theory. (Contrarily, another reviewer finds strong similarities between Adler and Lenin.)[1] More accurately, however, Adler shared the Second International’s tendency toward scientism and economism, subordinating working-class revolutionary agency in the process.

Blum, a historian of modern Western European thought focusing on German and Austrian social democracy, has elsewhere argued that the Soviet Union was part of a twentieth-century “history of failed praxis” of Marxist projects.[2] The claim is projected as a truthful assumption that need not be proven, and a brief review of Blum’s ideas provides some instruction on how to understand his take on Adler’s thinking. He believes that in the theoretical work of World War I-era Austrian social democrats (represented in the works Otto Bauer and Max Adler), modern Marxists may discover alternative concepts, theories, and philosophies of praxis, specifically in contradistinction to what he regards as the historical Leninist disaster.

The Adler/Bauer philosophy sought “a more effective scientific socialism,” Blum argues, which merits the renewed attention of socialist-minded readers. While Adler’s work centered on problems that may have limited generalizable value, this body of theory has produced “still-seminal orientations” and “interesting problematics” that might enable a modern Left disillusioned by the “historically failed praxis” of the past century to recover a meaningful radical politics.[3] Capitalism’s management of negative imagery of the twentieth-century Marxist projects is simply too powerful, he further contends, that Marxists have to accept those images as true and mold their revolutionary project against those images as well.[4] Blum’s reading of Adler and the Austrian Marxists and easy dismissal of Lenin seem to be shaped by this acceptance of negative imagery of existing socialism. He asserts that among these Austrian Marxists we can discover an avenue to democratic socialism, but Blum’s preface to this new edition registers little distinction from capitalism’s brand of democracy other than

Despite these inclinations, we can take seriously Blum’s claim that reading Adler’s Marxism offers a chance to approach with critical eyes existing Marxist currents. It is worth remembering that we do not have to read Adler through Blum’s lens, and we should review Adler’s theories on their own terms. Thus, in what follows, I aim to establish Adler’s principal arguments and to explore their feasibility within the context of objective historical conditions. What problematics do they raise? How can we understand and contextualize those problematics in the present to shape activist politics rooted in the Marxist frame we share with Blum but not limited to analysis or discourse?

Adler’s book is first and foremost an evaluation of liberal constitutionalism. It independently deploys what has come to be termed a Gramscian maxim. Both Adler and Gramsci derive their political theory from Marxism and share similar explanations for why people in a society submit to the authority of the state (which, it must be emphasized, are in line with Lenin’s own explanations on this topic). Yes, the rule and power of law function to secure this submission, but people within a social formation accept the legitimacy of the state, consent to its authority, and generally believe that they, despite their class, share its aims and goals. In reference to the social function of dominance and consent, Adler writes, “one finds the inner command of morality or the outer rule’s law” (p. 33). In other words, people urgently seek an affinity with others. This desire promotes a strong need to avoid stigmatization as “irrational” for failure to conform and consent to the existing rules, laws, morality, customs—the so-called general will they have been convinced is universal within their society, a process he refers to as “sociation.” This production of consent creates a false and distorted identification of state and society, which is in fact shot through with a fundamental contradiction. In a class society, the ruling class dominates a state in which its “special will” is enforced and treated as the “general will.” This “form of the state then is merely a partial complex,” writes Adler, “that takes the apparent form of a universal solidarity which is not simply obedience to the law, but a recognition of its sanctity” (p. 35). Here, we recognize the duality of ruling-class power or hegemony: coercion/law and the exploitation of the desire for solidarity by linking it to consent or to the sanctity of the status quo as such (patriotism, law and order, racial identities, patriarchal forms, and other forms of solidarity that reproduce the “special will”). This latter ideal, Adler identifies with the “bourgeois idea of the state,” placing it within a particular stage of historical development under capitalism.

Adler views the state as a site of contradiction. Ideally, the state and society claim to function as an identity or unity of the society and its governmentality. By this, he means the political-legal forms that are claimed to correspond with a particular level of economic development and human consciousness (or sociation). In bourgeois society, this identity is disrupted by the reality in which the state serves as a set of institutions in which the “special will” of the capitalist class is reproduced as a “general will” to which all members of society adhere. The discrepancy between reality and the ideal is generated and obscured by the ideological production of “political freedom” in which power is abstracted from rights for the overwhelming mass of the people, the working class in the most developed capitalist countries. Thus, “political freedom” is extricated from human liberation and serves as a cover for the dominance of the wealthiest, property-owning, capital-controlling minority.

Marx termed this contradiction, the political formation in which a “general will” is successfully manufactured out of the capitalist class’s “special will,” as “the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.”

Adler proceeds on this foundation to assert the nature of radical social transformation: “[o]ne can only produce a new form of human community based upon the activities that generate related forms of consciousness and living together.” Thus, in order to revolutionize society, a re-combination of three social elements must occur: 1) new forms of consciousness, 2) new productive activities, and 3) new forms of living together, or social relations (pp. 33-34). Rather than being imagined and constructed through the revolutionary action of the working class, however, these processes necessarily emerge through the contradictions of and, thus, the development of capitalism. The Bolshevik emphasis on action in the present proved to be an error, Adler insists (pp. 144-45).

Adler’s alternative solution for this incongruity lies in the abstract process of the “evolution” of the position of the working class within this framework, the transformation of the consciousness of the working class, and the deployment of democratic power within the current constitutional forms (participation in parliaments, voting, legal political parties, etc.) to realign and resolve this structural discrepancy in favor of the widest possible number of the society (pp. 105-06). Thus, no confrontation with the capitalist class in illegal or non-institutional forms (such as illegal direction action, armed struggle, or dual power agency) is necessary, he contends, because the working class, empowered through its economic development and its demographic majority, will be able to deploy existing institutional forms through the prevailing state structure to alter its social relation of subjugation to one of social leadership, or what Marx and Engels termed the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Thus, political rights and social power will be realigned, creating a basis for a transition to socialism.

This evolutionary change depends primarily on the education of the working class and the sociological (Marxism’s true discursive field) working out of the correct analysis of economic and political development. Here, we see Adler’s alignment with the scientistic and economist elements of Second International social democracy. Adler characterizes economic development as “an automatism of the social mechanism” (p. 15). Economic conditions, in this mechanical vision, are influenced by levels of consciousness, but generally operate as a feature of capitalist contradictions. This automatic process produces a working class that is numerically the largest and because of its economic situation and the material conditions it produces, holds the most unrecognized, potential social power. That this argument centers the working class of developed European and North American countries in its evolutionary frame, both defining development in place and culture and even race-bound terms, is left undiscerned by its producer, who deems it, without a recognition of the irony, a universal process. This privileging of developed capitalist society invites a question of the role of imperialism in this development and the marginalizing of colonized and semi-peripheral countries in the model. This question is left unanswered.

Adler’s model for class consciousness may be the most revolutionary dimension of his thought. For it, Adler cites Marx directly in his discourse on “the emancipation of thought” (p. 39). The working class must recognize the contradiction of political rights and the surrender of social power the subaltern classes make to the bourgeoisie in the name of a shared community (nation, race, civilization perhaps). This capitulation produces power primarily for the bourgeoisie rather than for the community as a whole. The working class must recognize that this contradiction, rather than producing a community of shared power, produces incongruities between the capitalist class’s power and its own, a condition of subordination that is obscured by appeals to the abstraction of mostly universal political rights, and abstraction of the political (the individual’s freedoms and privacy) from true leadership of the social frame that its numbers and economic condition warrants. Further,

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wendland-Liu on Adler and Blum, 'The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method'. H-History-and-Theory. 06-28-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/15741/reviews/7880295/wendland-liu-adler-and-blum-marxist-conception-state-contribution Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-History-and-Theory revolutionary consciousness should produce recognition of the power that this numerical majority as a class and economic power as workers would allow them to wield in a system no longer obscured by bourgeois ideology, atomistic individualism, and the false contention that the “special will” of the capitalist class is actually universal (pp. 34-35). Finally, the working-class social position improves via reconciliation of the realm of political rights with social power, leading to its fullest (not just political) emancipation and to something Adler calls “pure” democracy (p. 81). In essence, Adler calls for a rejection of the limits of power merely to individual political rights, a rejection of the adherence to bourgeois “special will” in favor of a comprehensive realignment of political rights and social power in favor of the vast majority of the developed capitalist society, the working class. This all will be worked out within the realm of existing constitutional/parliamentarian forms and structures, which the working class will be able to eventually claim.

This formula also invites a question about the revolutionary agency of the working class. Indeed, if this human action is subsumed by mechanical laws of development, if the only process worth pursuing is evolutionary change within a democratic framework already corrupted by the contradiction of power and rights, where is the revolutionary agency of the working class? For Adler, such assertions of agency are limited to metaphorical and idealist terminologies. For example, “proletarian striving” (p. 8) is not linked to working-class militancy in a given situation or as part of the social democratic demand for power, but rather as an “influential” component of an automatic historical process set in motion by capitalism’s contradictions and development (p. 80). The “proletarian interest is revolutionary,” writes Adler, but this abstracted class interest is revolutionary only to the degree that its institutions (such as parties and their strategic and tactical aims) further “developmental change” (p. 81). In Adler’s Marxism, working-class action in the form of revolutionary agency is reduced to “striving” in the abstract, “willing” in a historical sense.

Adler explicitly reduces the concrete role of the working-class party to a primarily passive element in a sociological drama. Instead of direct action for immediate reforms that enhance the power of the working class, Adler deploys Marxism as a sociological tool for the advanced section of the Social Democratic Party to understand the cultural, economic, and political development of capitalism by which it can instruct the working class (and the whole of society) on the most humane course of social development. By contrast, and here, Blum is correct to assert keen differences between the two thinkers; Lenin emphasized the primacy of action in the formation of revolutionary consciousness. Action in the class struggle may produce class consciousness; passive waiting produces capitulation and acquiescence. Likewise, revolutionary action is the immediate externalization of consciousness, which specifically in the case of Marxism and working-class revolutionary practice, called for and created the break with developmental and mechanistic Marxism and bourgeois democracy simultaneously. When the masses of millions engage in that revolutionary action, socialist revolutionary transformation becomes realizable and actual, because abstract “political rights” are translated into class power. While Adler waits for a purer form of democracy to emerge in the abstract from the contradictions of capital, Lenin, in the face of deep political crisis and the starvation of the Russian people, recognizes in the contradiction of democracy the tool of oppression that elicits working-class consent to its own subjugation while denying it the power it needs to rule in the name of the majority of the people. Democracy serves as a tool of the minority to subjugate the vast majority. Thus, revolutionary action becomes by necessity what Stathis Kouvelakis has called “a vital decision,” rather than a waiting game.[5]

Adler produced this argument in 1922, nearly one century ago. In his writings, Blum calls for a resurrection of Adlerian socialism to push back against capitalist triumphalism after the collapse of the USSR, even as he admits that most accounts of that collapse have distorted the truth of revolutionary history in the twentieth century. Can we, however, not already objectively measure the validity of Adlerian theory? Over the last one hundred years, we have seen in capitalist countries the development of the working class as the majority demographically. We have seen technological and economic developments and wider access to education. We have seen social democratic labor movements wax and wane. We have seen social welfare policies ebb and flow. We have seen imperialism in resurgence, especially since the elimination of a Marxist-oriented countervailing anticolonial force. But we have not seen Adler’s prediction of social revolution without an actual confrontation of class forces. We have seen deeper levels of racism and xenophobia shape appeals to forms of solidarity that enable right-wing insurgencies. We have not seen meaningful or institutional changes occur without militant engagement with struggle, often resulting in a terribly violent and deadly reaction by state forces. We have not seen a commitment to the socialization of economic, cultural, or political resources or institutions. Instead, we see “democratic” societies glutted with monopoly capital, neoliberal logic, decadent and commoditized cultural values, mediatization and consolidation of information, and empty and individualistic slogans such as “my vote is my power” suffuse throughout increasingly corrupt public life and narrowing civil societies. Some have even pointed to the alarming international resurgence of fascism.[6] The evidence suggests a revolutionary process adhering to Adlerian formulas has proven the objective historical failure.

Notes

[1]. Rafael Khachaturian, “Review of The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method,” New Political Science 43, no. 1 (2021): 119-21.

[2]. Mark E. Blum, “Otto Bauer and the Philosophy of Praxis – Then and Now.” Historical Materialism 24, no. 2 (2016): 248, DOI 10.1163/1569206X-12341462.

[3]. Blum, “Otto Bauer,” 249.

[4]. Ibid.

[5]. Stathis Kouvelakis, “Lenin as a Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s The Science of Logic,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 195.

[6]. Frederico Finchelstein and Jason Stanley, “The Fascist Politics of the Pandemic,”Project

Syndicate, May 4, 2020, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/coronavirus-fuels-fascist-politics-by-federico-finchelst ein-and-jason-stanley-2020-05.

Citation: Joel Wendland-Liu. Review of Adler, Max; Blum, Mark E., ed., The Marxist Conception of the State: A Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method. H-History- and-Theory, H-Net Reviews. June, 2021. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56434

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