Wendland-Liu on Adler and Blum, 'The Marxist Conception of the State: a Contribution to the Differentiation of the Sociological and the Juristic Method'
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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 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. 1 H-History-and-Theory vague preferences for the community over individualism. 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.” 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. 2 H-History-and-Theory 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.