The “functional context which [we] cannot know” is capital, which generates not only (critical) subjectivity, but the theory-practice problem itself, as a non-identity of subject and object of practice. For Marx, “alienation” is not empirical but social-contextual. By comparison, the 1960s radicals had anticipated overcoming the separation of theory and practice immediately through their own efforts at (personal) transformation. Such a mistaken configuration of the problem was to the detriment both of practice and of critical consciousness, including to the present. In this they had been encouraged by thinkers like Marcuse in their abandonment of the emancipatory desiderata of history accumulated in the most radical exponents of Marxist politics that the critical theory of the earlier Frankfurt School thinkers had sought to preserve against the “vulgar Marxism” of both Social Democracy and Stalinism in the 1920s-30s — in the aftermath of failed and betrayed revolution after 1917-19, the moment in which social-political possibilities for overcoming capitalism opened to their greatest extent to date.

articles by this author:

May 2008 | "Let the dead bury the dead!" Response to Principia Dialectica (UK) on May 1968
May 2008 | "Race" in social-historical and political context
November 2007 | 3 Rs forum: "Resistance" and the Left: opening remarks by Chris Cutrone (Platypus)
2006 | Adorno in 1969: Adorno's Marxism and the problem and legacy of the 1960s Left in theory and practice
[edited and revised for Rethinking Marxism 2006 conference]
2006 | Adorno in 1969: Adorno's Marxism and the problem and legacy of the 1960s Left in theory and practice
[expanded draft for University of Chicago Social Theory Workshop]
October 2008 | Capital in history: The need for a Marxian philosophy of history of the Left
October 2008 | Iraq and the election: The fog of "anti-war" politics
November 2008 | Obama and Clinton: "Third Way" politics and the "Left"
September 2008 | Obama: Progress in regress: The end of "black politics"
November 2008 | Obama: three comparisons: MLK, JFK, FDR
February 2008 | On anarchism and Marxism: response to Mayday magaine (UK)
February 2008 | Organization, political action, history, and consciousness: on anarchism and Marxism
November 2008 | Remember the future! A rejoinder to Peter Hudis on “Capital in History”
March 2008 | Review: Angela Davis "How does change happen?"
April 2008 | The 3 Rs: Reform, Revolution, and “Resistance:” The problematic forms of “anticapitalism” today
November 2007 | Vicissitudes of historical consciousness and possibilities for emancipatory social politics today

discussion for this author: