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Stu Woolman 33
Van der Walt’s observations are not new. After the Holocaust,
Stalin’s purges and the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and after the victory of Allied forces and the creation of the
various international institutions founded at Bretton Woods, members
of the Frankfurt School articulated a trenchant critique of modernity
that remains difficult to admit in full, but equally impossible to reject
out of hand: That liberation and domination in the modern democratic
constitutional state are flip-sides of the same coin. That is, the
liberation from one form of political economy, that of monarchy and
mercantilism, invites new forms of domination that flow from
another, that of the bureaucratic, democratic capitalist state. Adorno
puts this basic thesis as follows:
The dual nature of progress, which always developed the potential of
freedom simultaneously with the reality of oppression, gave rise to a
situation in which peoples were more and more inducted into the control
of nature and social organisation, but grew at the same time, owing to
the compulsion which culture placed upon them, incapable of
understanding in what way culture went beyond such integration. ...
They make common cause with the world against themselves, and the
most alienated condition of all, the omnipresence of commodities, their
own conversion into appendages of machinery, is for them a mirage of
closeness. ... The concept of dynamism ... is raised to an absolute,
whereas it ought, as an anthropological reflex of the laws of production,
to be itself critically confronted, in an emancipated society, with need.
The conception of unfettered activity, of uninterrupted procreation, of
chubby insatiability, of freedom of frantic bustle, feeds on the bourgeois
concept of nature that has always served solely to proclaim social
violence as unchangeable. ... It was in this, and not in their alleged
levelling down, that the positive blue-prints of socialism ... were rooted
in barbarism. It is not man’s lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be
feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal
nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity. The naïve supposition of
an unambiguous development towards increased production is itself of a
piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development in only one
direction because, integrated into a totality, dominated by quantification,
it is hostile to qualitative difference. If we imagine emancipated
society as emancipation from precisely such totality, then vanishing lines
come into view that have little in common with increased production
and its human reflections. 14
14
T Adorno Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life trans EFN Jephcott
(1951) 146–156. Horkheimer describes the French Revolution as a ‘condensed
version of later history’ and in words even more prescient for the common era
writes:
More and more, economic questions are becoming technical ones. The
privileged position of administrative officers and technical and planning
engineers will lose its rational basis in the future; naked power is
becoming its only justification. The awareness that the rationality of
domination is already in decline when the authoritarian state takes over
society is the real basis for its identity with terrorism.