Page 29 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Ch-01.qxd 5/9/2007 5:56 PM Page 18

••• John Scott •••

contradictions explained the observable pattern of market relations and predicted
the future course of economic change.
These ideas were explored in Horkheimer’s discussion of class consciousness, and
of proletarian consciousness in particular. He saw the German proletariat as marked
by a sharp division between an employed fraction and the submerged and deprived
fraction of the unemployed. This class division fragmented the labour movement
and undermined its chances for political unity. The employed section of the working
class in Germany, for example, had allied with the reformist tendencies in the SPD
and other moderate parties, while the unemployed, with no capacity for political
organization or class consciousness, were naïve and uncritical supporters of the KPD.
Horkheimer saw Marxist intellectuals as able to generate a critical reconstruction of
the partial perspectives found in the fraction of the working class, but he was more pes-
simistic about actual proletarian consciousness than Lenin and Lukács. The proletariat
had become subject to ever-stronger ideological forces of domination that strengthened
its false consciousness. Its objective conditions push it towards truth, but ideology lim-
its and restricts it. Parties become agents of this ideology and so cannot be regarded as
reliable sources of revolutionary change. A properly progressive and critical theory,
therefore, has to be developed by intellectuals with an autonomous base, independent
of both party and state. It can be produced by a small circle of intellectuals, united by
their common commitment to developing a theory that will contribute to the elimina-
tion of exploitation and oppression. Horkheimer saw intellectuals such as himself devel-
oping their ideas through dialogue and debate with the most ‘advanced’ sections of the
working class. The theoretical consciousness that corresponds to the proletarian stand-
point, then, can be developed only outside the proletariat and taken to them from this
autonomous, external base. The intellectuals of the Institute of Social Research were
able, in principle, to use their ideas, to bring the two sections of the German proletariat
into a political unity in which their differences are recognized and understood but are
subordinated to their common opposition to the bourgeoisie.
To understand the role of Marxist intellectuals, Horkheimer drew a distinction
between their ‘critical theory’ and the bourgeois forms of ‘traditional theory’
(Horkheimer, 1937). Traditional forms of theorizing, such as positivistic science,
obscure the practical interests that organize them, hiding them behind a mask of
objectivity and absolute impartiality. In representing particular interests as if they
were universal, they are ideological. By contrast, critical theorizing, in demonstrating
the partiality of all perspectives, exposes and articulates the links between knowledge
and interests. It shows the limitations inherent in traditional theorizing by showing
how its results can be placed within a larger practical context. What gives critical the-
ory its progressive character is its orientation towards the emancipation of people
from all forms of domination – from domination by market relations and from the
political relations of totalitarian control that have become such a marked feature of
contemporary capitalism. Unlike Lukács, Horkheimer does not see the adoption of
this emancipatory interest as requiring that intellectuals actually take the standpoint
of the proletariat. Critical theory, he argued, must retain its independent commit-
ment to the achievement of a rational form of society that will achieve full human
• 18 •