The dialectic of reason and experience

According to Marxism, the proletariat is the subject of socialist revolution. Marx and Lukács share this notion, and even Adorno and Horkheimer, in their 1956 dialogue, can imagine no other revolutionary agent. Why this emphasis on the proletariat? There are several converging reasons. The spread of technology into the factory transforms work, workers, and the control of production, creating a compact social subject motivated to overthrow the system. Meanwhile, the unfolding dynamic of capitalist crisis makes it ever more difficult to sustain the population, and the emergence of a growing and better informed class of workers promises a democratic alternative to capitalist management of the system. The combination of motivation, crisis, and capacity underpins the classical doctrine of socialist revolution.

Unexpectedly, twentieth-century capitalism in the advanced countries adjusted sufficiently to the threat from below to defuse revolutionary motivations. At the same time, the spread of technology and management continues to produce resistant, if non-revolutionary, subjects in many areas of social life. These dispersed subjects have a tension-filled relation to the reified structures that form them. Out of these tensions come struggles that, whether the participants know it or not, are the direct descendants of the proletarian movements that inspired Marxism. The fact that these struggles have not been totalized in a singular confrontation with capital, the fact that no inevitable economic laws promise victory, all this is obvious today. But history has not ended for that matter. A new paradigm of social change is needed based not on the French and Russian revolutions but on a dialectical concept of mediation. I have suggested reasons for this in the discussion of resistance that concludes Chapter 5.

What is left of Marxism under these new conditions? We need to take seriously Lukács’s startling assertion at the beginning of History and Class Consciousness that the essence of Marxism consists not in factual claims but in dialectical method. By this he means not only the theoretical method of Capital but the method of practical critique arising in resistance to reified markets, bureaucracies, and technologies. That resistance is ongoing in new forms, if still far weaker than its object, but the fact that it exists at all holds open the utopian possibilities that encouraged Marcuse in his last work to keep the philosophy of praxis alive.

If we follow Marcuse in taking these resistances seriously, then we must return to the dialectic for a new approach. It teaches that modern institutions are not substantial “things,” but must be grasped in their contingency on the practices that constitute them. We must also cease thinking about the subject of resistance as a substantial, unified agent with stable characteristics and objective interests. Instead, it too must be seen as a relational aspect of the fractured and contradictory unity of the reified institutions that assemble it.

Those institutions have multiplied enormously since the days of Marx and now cover the whole surface of modern society with various systems of rational control, including state and corporate administrations, educational and medical institutions, and the media. Even leisure activities are structured by the same hierarchical division.⁴ Each such system assembles a latent subject capable of entering into conflict with the institutional base.

Modern society is neither a unity nor an aggregate. Rather, it is inherently divided into reified subjects and objects by the systems that found it. These systems are held together in dialectically divided “totalities” by their rational form. They impose those forms as the basis of social order in every sphere. Their heterogeneous content is never absorbed completely by the forms, nor is it indifferent to the incomplete process of formation imposed on it.

The social rationality of those systems is based on specific cognitive achievements, natural and social scientific insights that determine coherent configurations of human and natural resources. These are real achievements for the most part, not arbitrary or merely ideological. But they are underdetermined by rational considerations and biased formally by social interests, primarily by the interests that flow from the capitalist organization of production and distribution.

The nearly total rationalization of modern society entangles social theory with philosophy in unexpected ways. Concepts of will, interest, ideology, and power no longer suffice to understand the rationalized world. Insofar as it has a rational form it appears to realize universal and necessary laws. And yet its bias is all too clear and gives rise to conflict.⁵ What kind of society has the form of an argument? One that is split between rational domination and a lived experience that overflows instrumental boundaries and motivates resistances. Those resistances are the mediations that restructure rational domination, modifying its forms and reducing its power in order to accommodate the interests of the dominated. The essence of the Marxist dialectic is the process of mediation, as exemplified originally by Marx’s critique of political economy and the struggles of the labor movement.

The socialist movement conceived that process through class struggle because it believed the route to power led through the factory. This obscured the cognitive aspect of mediation and gave rise to unrealistic revolutionary expectations. Marxists believed they could create a socialist society by decommodifying the economy and substituting state planning for private ownership of capital. But the overthrow of capitalism does no more than inaugurate a new phase in the struggle with reification. Lukács is more aware of this fact than most of his contemporaries.⁶ He envisages a long-term struggle rather than a brief and decisive coup. But he equivocates on the role of reification after the revolution.

Lukács knows that no modern society can function without structures. The revolution cannot therefore institute a society in which all institutions are dissolved into temporary political arrangements. At one point he suggests the possibility of a new kind of non-reified stabilization, but this suggestion is not developed beyond a brief note. I wonder if he had any idea what post-revolutionary structures would be like if not some version of the market, bureaucracy, and technology evolved under capitalism. Workers’ councils might choose managers instead of boards of directors, and economic planning might replace the banking system, but these modifications of the capitalist inheritance do not abolish reification root and branch. Under socialism at best reified institutions would no longer be as well armored against change from below as under capitalism.

This conception of socialism has political implications. The conflictual interactions in which most mediation consists can only flourish in a democracy. The contestation in which the process of mediation goes on presupposes respect for basic democratic principles, human rights, and the will of the majority. It thus follows that socialism must be democratic, a conclusion that finds support in Marx’s enthusiastic description of the Paris Commune. Furthermore, socialism must be a “deep democracy” in which all forms of rational order, and not just law, are subject to dereification and transformation.

We already have significant examples of democratic interventions that prefigure a different regime of rationality. Struggles over technology most clearly illustrate the challenge to reification. In addition to continuing class conflict over technological innovation in production, many types of protest have emerged in recent years around environmental and medical issues, and the Internet. Demonstrations, lawsuits, hearings, and forums have turned environmentalism into a political issue and transformed public awareness of medical research. Online protests over control of the Internet and hacking have created a new information politics. Most remarkable is occasional lay participation in the work of scientific experimentation and technical design.⁷

Although their scope and effectiveness are still severely limited, interventions such as these enlarge the public sphere and anticipate a more democratic form of modern society. Yet they have been systematically underestimated and ignored by political theorists. Where they are noticed at all, resistances are generally viewed not dialectically but from the one-sided perspective of the dominant. From that perspective rationality stands opposed to ignorance and disorder. But the reality is quite different. Rational domination is biased not only by the usual errors, prejudices, and traditions that threaten everything human beings think and do, but by two problems of principle that stem from the very nature of reification and require democratic correction. These problems have to do with specialization and control.

Everything is connected in the real world, but reification differentiates the totality into fragmented parts. Disciplinary specializations follow the reified pattern in isolating particular cross-sections of the totality for analytical treatment. The cognitive advantages of specialization are undeniable, but it can lead to unanticipated problems in the application. For example, not infrequently engineers design a production process or a device that is hazardous for the workers who use it. Once it is deployed, medical complications ensue and another specialization must be called in to deal with non-engineering aspects of the concrete system formed by the device and the workers’ physiology. In the best of cases, the combination of specializations initiates an iterative design process that resolves the problems.

Who is likely to first notice the limitations of the engineers’ useful but narrow conception of reality? There is no meta-discipline able to predict the need to integrate multiple forms of disciplinary knowledge. Another source of knowledge must come into play, knowledge “from below” based on real-world experience. Such knowledge is frequently occasioned by overlooked harms of technology, or unexploited technical potentials that have not been identified by the technologists themselves but which users can imagine and even in some cases implement on their own. The chief contemporary examples of these two categories are the medical harms of industrial pollution, and the communicative potentials of the Internet.⁸

There is a second systemic problem with reification: the challenge of control. This is reason’s original sin. Technical control of human beings leads to decisions that inspire resistance not just for contingent motives but structurally, necessarily. Consider, for example, the dilemma of capitalist management that must keep up with technological advances while reproducing its control of a more or less antagonistic labor force. These twin requirements have determined the technical code of capitalism, based on authoritarian management, deskilling, and automation. Alternative and more humane paths of progress have been foreclosed and this pattern has been generalized to other social domains. For example, the politics of energy is biased by the imperative requirement of energy companies to enlarge their centrally controlled grids. Alternative sources of energy and conservation have been marginalized. The Internet originated in a decentralized logic but today is in the grip of struggles over control that threaten to bring it into conformity with the general pattern. The point is not to argue for the dissolution of all these rationalized systems, but the extent of centralization and its consequences are very much worth questioning.⁹

Resistance to heavy-handed controls and inhumane policies lead to conflicts and eventually to restructuring domination in less oppressive forms. This is not a conventional political process. Democratic interventions must be translated by technical professionals into new regulations and designs. Struggle gives rise to new technical codes both for particular types of artifacts and even for whole technological domains.

This is an essential form of activism in a rationalized society. It limits the autonomy of experts and capitalist management and forces them to redesign the worlds they create to represent a wider range of interests. The translated demands are assimilated by the institutions and may lead in turn to future iterations of the struggle, further contestation. This is the logic of reification and mediation and it is unsurpassable. I call it “democratic rationalization” because it reproduces rational institutions in response to pressure from below.¹⁰