In this 2007 essay, Robert Kurz examines the question of theory and practice from the perspective of the “categorical” “critique of value-dissociation”, with extensive discussions of Marx, Engels, Bloch, Adorno, Horkheimer, Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, Debord, Negri, and Holloway, and concludes, in the face of the prevalent urge for immediate “action” and the equally widespread denigration of theory, that “critical theory must consciously maintain a distance from all existing praxis”.

Grey Is the Golden Tree of Life and Green is Theory – Robert Kurz

The Problem of Praxis as a Recurring Theme of a Truncated Critique of Capitalism and the History of the Left

“Those brief sparks, the ‘“Theses on Feuerbach”’, light up every philosopher who comes near them, but as is well known, a spark dazzles rather than illuminates: nothing is more difficult to locate in the darkness of the night than the point of light which breaks it. One day we will have to show that these eleven deceptively transparent theses are really riddles.”

Louis Althusser, For Marx

1. Theoretical Malaise

In the worldwide crisis of the Third Industrial Revolution, the radical critique of capitalism faces an unprecedented challenge. In order to continue to be a radical critique that is worthy of the name, it has to jettison the form in which it had previously become known, it must distance itself from that form, it must replace it and go beyond itself. For, just as capitalism has really come up against its absolute immanent limits, so, too, has the critique that was formulated against it also become obsolete and is revealed to be an integral part of the object of its attack.

In response to this new historical situation, a theoretical approach to the transformation of Marx’s theory has been articulated since the 1980s that goes by the name of “value critique”. From the point of view of this approach, both the Western workers movement as well as the socialism of the East and South are merely aspects of the history of the rise and imposition of capitalism. In both, theoretical reflection as well as practical activity operate on the level of the modern system of commodity production. The Marxism of the workers movement accepted the ontologization of this context of the form of Modernity from bourgeois Enlightenment philosophy. Particularly, “labor” (“abstract labor” in Marx), as the substance of the value form, assumed over the course of this process a trans-historical status. In the worldwide crisis of the Third Industrial Revolution, the “mode of production based on value” (Marx) has come up against its absolute immanent limits, precisely by virtue of the fact that its own substance, “labor”, is being undermined and rendered obsolete. Its allegedly ontological determinations are revealed to be historically limited and decrepit.

Starting from the standpoint of this radical critical theory, the new transformative reflection undertook a critique of the value and commodity forms, a critique that necessarily had to encompass the Marxist ontology of labor as well. This fact is ineluctably associated with a profound rupture in the basis of actions to transform society: in this development, the critique of value as a critique of labor, although it must be articulated on the basis of capitalist immanence, can no longer assume any ontological criterion of identity, or any positive criterion of interest. As Negative Ontology (cf. Kurz 2004), as a critique of capitalist ontology, its goal is an “ontological break”. Both the ideas as well as the actions of the new critique are essentially negative, as the processing of the experience of suffering in crisis-ridden capitalism, insofar as positive determinations can only be developed on the basis of that negation, by means of a historical movement of mediation, but not as an a priori stipulation.

However, the new theoretical elaboration of value critique at first referred to the determinations of the general form of the modern system of commodity production without reflecting on its implications for gender relations. For the most part, the Marxism of the workers movement “inherited” from Protestantism and from Enlightenment ideology not only the modern metaphysics of labor, as an ontology of labor and “work ethic”, but also the gender relations associated with these tendencies, as a patriarchy objectified in those forms, in which the moments of social reproduction that are not represented in the form of value are dissociated, having been largely determined to be “feminine” and relegated to women. In response to this, value critique continued to develop over the course of the 1990s with respect to the critique of the relation of dissociation associated with value. In this view, dissociation is “coeval” with the relation of abstract labor, that is, it does not consist of either a secondary or a derivative aspect of abstract labor. It is not just the seemingly gender-neutral political-economic forms of the modern system of commodity production which constituted capitalism, but also, in the broadest sense, the relation of value-dissociation as the Gender of Capitalism (Scholz 2000), or the commodity-producing patriarchy.

This has two consequences. First, it opens up a new epistemological dimension, because the entire history of theory since the Enlightenment, including Marxism, had previously been confined within the framework of a false universalism based on the concealed relation of dissociation. The modern language of theory, with its conceptual apparatus, is implicated in this framework, that is, it operates within a horizon of androcentrically universalist conceptualization. The extension of value critique to the critique of dissociation is therefore the last stage of the task of breaking out of the modern conceptual framework. This raises enormous problems with respect to expository methods, problems which are still far from being resolved. This difficulty is also reflected in the burdensome dual nomenclature of the new theoretical elaboration, expressed as the critique of value-dissociation [Wert-Abspaltungkritik].

Furthermore, this theory of value-dissociation also implies an analogous extension of critique beyond the kind of feminism that has been practiced up until now, which, like the workers movement, restricted itself to the field of action of the modern fetishistic relation. For the reasons mentioned above, the same fundamental break that applies to the critique of labor applies here, too, at the very roots of transformative action: the critique of value-dissociation is not a mere point of view of gender identity or interest, within the integument of the given form, but is intended to shatter that form and therefore to abolish the patriarchy of Modernity that is objectively inscribed in the general and abstract forms of society.

What is revealed here, in the theoretical elaboration and determination of transformative action, is a tense relation between the androcentric-universalist (and therefore limited and incomplete) value critique and the critique of value-dissociation, a relation that must yet be clarified. This tense differentiation of the correct theoretical elaboration of value-dissociation was paralleled by a desire for self-affirmation on the part of the now-anachronistic social theories of the left. Thus, a complex field of theoretical confrontation took shape. The framing of this problem with reference to the dimension of action, however, extends beyond the boundaries of this confrontation, which is no longer merely a confrontation within theory. A desire is expressed to the effect that theoretical critique should become practical critique. This telos that is immanent to all critical theory is also applied to the critique of value-dissociation, but must be newly determined in the perspective of the “ontological break”. Separately from this, the question of the dimension of action is also presented externally as the categorical “exigency of praxis”. It is not so much a new critical theory that is turned against the dominant social praxis, but rather the indeterminate postulate of a putative relation between theory and praxis that is “inserted into” this theory, entirely in the old way and without reflection. The pretense of praxis utterly swamps theoretical elaboration and actually itself becomes theory as it is more deeply embedded in the latter, and theory itself is distorted and rendered almost unrecognizable.

This postulate is verified again and again; it characterizes not only traditional Marxism and its present-day remnants, but also, in different way, contemporary postmodern theories. For quite some time now, the elaboration of the critical theory of value-dissociation, for its part, has been spared the effects of the “problem of praxis” or the dimension of action; not because of the absence of any meaningful kind of “activism”, but rather due to its lack of contact with the theme within theoretical reflection itself, which wore itself out redefining its relation with the dimension of action under changed conditions. For “praxis” is not purely and simply action, it is also at the same time a theoretical concept to be subjected to historical and critical reflection. And what that requires is a theoretical determination that consistently separates itself from the traditional understanding of the “relation between theory and praxis” that was custom-made for the required profiles of action within the integument of the capitalist form. First of all it will be necessary to clearly explain what this really means, as well as the meaning of the break that can thus be consummated, a break with the ontology of labor, the commodity form and the relations of gender dissociation, which are also affected by this problematic.

Under the pressure of the pretensions of an unexamined praxis that is transmitted with the new contents of critique, all questions and confrontations that are internal to theory cease to be apprehended according to their own significance; the “problem of praxis” superimposes itself on theoretical elaboration and fixes the latter’s horizon, rather than the other way around. There is a risk that the affirmation that theory, as theory, is an indispensable moment precisely in relation to a practical historical transformation that really penetrates the foundations of the dominant order, will never be more than just words, and that the “ontological break” will be reduced to a mere catchphrase.

The need felt by some people to engage in “some kind” of practice and to be involved in an activism that does not want to receive and continue to develop theory as such, but which seeks to “realize” itself in an immediate practical form, and which generally apprehends an a priori “horizon of application”, seems to be as strong as an urgently felt need to urinate. Thus, getting bogged down “in” theory provokes an unpleasant feeling similar to that caused by a full bladder, even when only at the threshold of theory, before having apprehended much of the theoretical point of view. Before one has surrendered to the new problematic of reflection, before one has engaged in theoretical thought in general, it is not possible to be sure of oneself, and yet now one wants to “get down to brass tacks”, which generally ends up meaning getting your clothes dirty. What matters is that it is “practice”. Such incontinence with respect to the so often invoked relation between theory and praxis is indicative of a truncated understanding, one that is rooted in traditional Marxism, an understanding that always links theoretical reflection with a “capacity for action” or with a pre-established praxis. According to this perspective, critical theory must therefore be, on the one hand, a “directive for action”, and in this sense is deserving of the highest esteem; on the other hand, however, insofar as it is something inferior and non-autonomous in the face of the ominous “praxis”, it must only be valid in relation to its application as “praxis”.

For those who understand the question in this way, it is always necessary to appeal to that famous passage from the “Theses on Feuerbach” of the young Marx (Thesis 11): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx, 1845). Now, the point is to know what importance critical theory has, as theory, in this change, because Marx himself was above all else a theoretician, and his works are anything but a “directive for action” in the sense of some kind of immediate “possibility for realization”. The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach is often considered in a context that would be more appropriate for the interpretation of the Lebensphilosophie [philosophy of life] evoked in the famous passage from Goethe’s Faust I: “Grey is, young friend, all theory: And green of life the golden tree” (Goethe, 1828). These were the very words, of course, that Mephistopheles used to lead a naive student astray. Through this lens, the whole thing boils down to the capitalist credo of action with which everyone is familiar, but which is ambiguous, if it has to be employed as a criterion precisely for the telos of an “ontological break”.

If our starting point today is the situation in which the absolute immanent limit of capitalism, or the commodity-producing patriarchy, has been reached, then, to the contrary, it can be said in the words of Hegel that “a form of life has grown old” and is no longer “green”. The latter attribute, on the other hand, would be fitting precisely for the new theoretical critique that is being articulated without the respect of the dominant praxis that has turned grey. Only in appearance does the unexamined passion of “praxis” constitute a triumph of ontological, traditional or postmodern-inflected Marxism, which pull answers out of a hat, answers that are useless, thus legitimating a false activism. The more acute that social contradictions become amidst the new dimension of crisis, the less they can be expressed in the old conceptual field. In this zero-point situation, invoking the preeminence of the problems of the crisis (“we are running out of time”), many people turn to a passage from Goethe’s Faust I: “Enough words have been exchanged; Now at last let me see some deeds!” (Ibid.). Here, tellingly, the speaker is the theatrical director, and it is precisely today, after the end of the movement of modernization, that the pretension of a reduced practice and the need for action on the left is leading, right before our eyes, merely to staged performances. It is precisely this trend that is rendering it impossible to critically address the harsh reality of the crisis of the beginning of the 21st century. The gymnastics of the pretensions of traditional praxis are merely pitiful. In the changed world situation, it has become necessary to examine the concept of praxis that has prevailed up until now, and to reexamine the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach in the light of the critique of value-dissociation, and to submit its interpretation to a critique of ideology.

2. Adorno on the pretensions of reduced praxis and “pseudoactivity”

In many respects, Adorno’s critical theory constitutes a transitional stage between the Marxism of the workers movement and the critique of value-dissociation, although Adorno himself never took the decisive step. This is also true with regard to the relation between theory and praxis as it is usually understood by the left, insofar as Adorno examined this relation in scattered notes and occasional observations, in which he responded to the usual incontinent “theoretical malaise”. On the eve of the movement of ’68, in his lectures on Negative Dialectics of 1965-66, Adorno apprehensively called attention to the destructive myopia of the categorical demand for immediate “practical becoming”: “… there is a very great risk that the idea of practice will lead to a shackling of theory. By this I mean that ideas of all sorts are restricted by the insistence on the question ‘Yes, but what must I do in practice? What can I do with this idea?’ Or even ‘If you think in this way, you will stand in the way of some possible practice or other.’ It is always happening that when you address the enormous barriers facing every conceivable political intervention stemming from the relations of production and the social institutions built around them—that when you address this, you instantly receive the reply, ‘Yes, but …’, an objection that I regard as one of the greatest dangers in intellectual life. Indeed, how can we hope ever to get anywhere if we think in this way? We shall never be able to achieve anything since we shall be forced to sit around twiddling our thumbs! And I would say the feature that seems to me to be characteristic of the application, the consistent application, of the Feuerbach thesis I referred to earlier is actually the idea that theory itself should be captured from the endpoint of the terminus ad quem” (Adorno 2003, p. 77).

Adorno therefore insists that the eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach must not be understood in such a way as to subsume critical theory under the undeclared pretensions of action and thus become “shackled”. For him, the dialectic of a relation that is truncated in this way consists in the fact that theoretical reflection cannot expand and develop, precisely in its own domain and in its own logic, extensively enough to become an integral part of a really emancipatory transformation of the world. In Adorno’s analysis, the pretension of reduced praxis in theory by no means represents the “concrete”: to the contrary, here “praxis” itself becomes an abstract element, it becomes “praxis in general”, which is unreflectively confronted with theory as such. In its quality as a merely abstract demand, however, it contradicts its own concept, as Adorno makes clear in the Lecture in Negative Dialectics quoted above: “But what I mean here by refusing to operate with the concept of practice, as many people do and as I am sure many of you do find tempting, is that I would not like to confuse practice with pseudoactivity. I would like to prevent you from becoming involved in this, no so as to set myself up as an authority, but simply to impress you a little bit with the arguments I have put forward today in the hope that you will think these matters through yourselves; that you will not image that you are achieving anything essential if you become an ‘organizer’—to use the term thought up in America to describe people who bring people together, organize them, agitate and such like. In every activity, there has to be a relation to the relevance, the potential it contains. Nowadays especially, precisely because decisive activity is blocked and because, as I have already explained often enough, thinking itself has become paralyzed and impotent, chance practice has become a substitute for the things that do not happen. And the more you suspect that this is not true praxis, the more doggedly and passionately you become attached to such activities” (Adorno 2003, p. 83).

Naturally, one must keep in mind the historical situation in which Adorno formulated this critique of the pretensions of reduced praxis. It was during the last years of the Fordist “economic miracle” after the Second World War, a time of political-social tranquility in the FRG, in the absence of any social movements that expressed transcendent qualities with which critical theory in general could have established some kind of relation. There was, at most, “partisan-political” engagement on the left wing of social democracy, in the illegal Communist Party (KPD) and in other traditional Marxist groups, as well as in the context of unionized labor. Adorno’s reference to “true praxis”, by implicitly calling for “something else” as opposed to the models at the end of the line of the workers movement and party-Marxism, might be legitimate in this context; but in this instance he seems to be assuming a utopian discourse, because there was just as little possibility of having a “true” praxis as there was of having a “true” theory, in the sense of something definitive. A critical theoretical elaboration and an activity of practical critique, always understood in relation with the capitalist constitution, are above all open-ended processes of a movement from immanence to transcendence. From these processes, points of rupture and change result, but they do not install any “final truth” of theory and praxis.

In any case, the term also makes perfect sense in another way, as one may discern in the problematic alluded to by Adorno, with respect to what he calls the “very great risk that the idea of practice will lead to a shackling of theory”: that is, by virtue of the fact that praxis can only be “true” insofar as it has as a goal the transformation of the negative and destructive capitalist mode of socialization, whereas all praxis that envelops its telos within this mode of socialization becomes “untrue”, because it absolutely does not approach the threshold of a really emancipatory transformation of the world. It ends up, very much in conformance with Adorno’s term, a “pseudoactivity”, whose practitioners would still like to be viewed in the light of the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach.

It is precisely the difficulty of critical and transcendent intervention in the totalitarian context of socialization that is presently leading, more than ever before, to “theoretical malaise”, because it is precisely at this level that critical reflection in the new elaboration of the critical theory of value-dissociation operates. Those individuals who are eager for immediate “practical becoming” (Adorno) are viewed by the critique of value-dissociation as being confronted by an impenetrable opaque wall, because now there can no longer be any mere extrapolation of a pre-established practice within the dominant forms. That is why those who are oriented towards reduced practice would like, in accordance with deeply rooted patterns, to pass the buck of this immanent difficulty of intervention beyond the hitherto-ontologized capitalist categories to theory; and they also demand from theory a form and a mode of presentation in which the problem, which is an unavoidable problem of praxis itself, will be theoretically eliminated as if by magic, in such a way that then everything would take place by way of an “application”, as if “on its own”, in a supposedly practical form, like the famous little man depicted in the HB cigarette ads of the 1970s.

With regard to this question, Adorno’s conclusion to his lecture on Negative Dialectics is still valid for our current situation, and is indeed especially valid now: “This explains why I wish to proclaim my reservations about those who are too quick to call for action, about the ‘passport inspectors’ who no longer ask every practice for its theoretical justification—which is certainly just as misguided—but, conversely, demand that every thought produces its visa: OK, but what can you do with it? My view is that such behavior impedes action instead of promoting it. And I would add that the possibility of a valid practice presupposes the full and undiminished awareness of the blockage of practice. If we measure a thought immediately by its possible realization, the productive force of thinking will be shackled as a result. The only thought than can be made dialectical is the thought that is not restricted in advance by the practice to which it is applied. So dialectical, in my view, is the relation between theory and practice” (Adorno 2003, p. 84).

We must point out that here Adorno also draws the obverse conclusion, that is, he refutes not only the “visa” of the immediate pretension of praxis demanded of theory, but also the imposition of the demand on all praxis that it must be “theoretically justified” in an equally immediate way. Under capitalist conditions of life, and even more so under the new crisis conditions of our time, zones of conflict are constantly appearing that cause diverse forms of confrontation to erupt (and even destructive forms and forms that are pervaded by negative ideologies), in which the stresses of the internal confrontations and structural absurdities of this kind of socialization are discharged. The struggle for life interests within capitalism, however, which as such cannot be absolutely denied, is not transcendent per se, and does not go beyond the ontology of labor, value and dissociation.

It is precisely here that the problem for the critique of value-dissociation resides, because it needs to redefine the existing relation with these existing “struggles”, which can no longer be prolonged in a straight line and without any ruptures in the name of a “socialist” perspective that is beyond capitalism, as in the context of the Marxism of the ontology of labor and of dissociation, and of its “praxis” that is immanent to that form. In this sense, the problem is not “theoretical malaise”, but, to the contrary, “practical malaise”; the malaise in the submission of critical thought to the needs of action, which undoubtedly exist and are to a certain extent legitimate, but which inevitably imply a retreat to a position that falls far short of the historically mature exigency of the liquidation of the capitalist ontology. It is exactly for this reason that contemporary “struggles” have such minor resonance and are so impotent. As a result, one cannot subject the needs expressed in any given action to criticism; they are up against the same limit as theory. The criticism must be directed at the pretension to want to turn them, for their part, into a limit for theoretical reflection, as has unfortunately been the case up until now.

3. “Theoretical praxis” and the real interpretation of capitalism

In order to discover an orientation for addressing the problem of theory-praxis, an orientation that would take the place of traditional Marxism and its postmodern derivatives, it is first of all necessary to once again shed light on the immanent dialectic in the relation between theory and praxis within capitalist society itself. One cannot begin to make a break with the capitalist ontology from the starting point of an external point of view; instead, this requires work, not to say a battle, starting from immanence, by way of negation. In capitalism, the separation between theoretical reflection and practical action which, according to the prevailing understanding, is criticized in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, is by no means an absolute and external separation, but a separation that is embedded in a superimposed [übergreifend] process of praxis of the “automatic subject” (Marx) and of the gender dissociation associated with the latter.

Capitalist reproduction is an all-embracing social praxis in which theoretical reflection inserts itself. Thus, theoretical elaboration in capitalism is by no means a kind of “thumb-twiddling” approach, but a kind of activity, albeit a sui generis sort of activity that can be understood as “theoretical praxis”. This claim, surprising and paradoxical for everyday capitalist common sense, and also for leftist common sense, has already been a focus for reflection in social critique, in theoreticians such as Adorno and Althusser, for example, who in other respects are so very different from one another. Here the concept of “theoretical praxis” is generally confused with the exigencies of social critique itself. In order to be able to elaborate the difference between critique and affirmation, it is first of all necessary to determine the status of “theoretical praxis” in its capitalist immanence. From this perspective, an essential aspect is the understanding that theoretical elaboration itself represents a moment or a specific field of social praxis in capitalism.

This must not be misinterpreted as meaning that the difference and the tension between theory and praxis is supposed to be eliminated as if by magic, by some cheap sleight of hand trick. “Theoretical praxis” confronts praxis in social relations and in the “process of metabolism with nature”, but as a different factor, separate from social praxis itself. One could speak of a social praxis of the first order (material and social reproduction) and a social praxis of the second order (the reproduction of theoretical reflection), or even of a relation between “practical praxis” and “theoretical praxis”, structurally separated from each other. This formulation, too, might seem paradoxical to everyday capitalist common sense, but it is nonetheless indicative of the real paradox of social relations.

Thus, the question of the reason for this structural separation, for this difference and this tension, is posed. The reason resides in the fact that “practical praxis”—social activity and the activity of production—is fundamentally pre-formed by way of the a priori matrix of the fetishistic constitution; in Modernity, by way of the relation of value-dissociation, that is, by way of the “automatic subject” of the valorization of value, on the one hand, and the sexually connoted dissociation of the moments of reproduction that are not included in the valorization process, on the other hand. The result is patterns of activity that seem self-evident, and which are not subject per se to any kind of reflection: the patterns of activity of the valorization of value and of the always simultaneous activity of sexually connoted dissociation, determinant patterns of the quotidian “life and labor”. It is a directly fetishistic activity, that is, people “act before they think” (in Marx’s formulation in the chapter on fetishism); they act in the already constituted and pre-established relations of the famous “second nature”, yet this action really needs to pass through their consciousness.

Therefore, the patterns of action are already established a priori without the conscious reflection of intellectual labor and, as a result, are almost ontologically presupposed for reflection. What does this mean? In relation to certain separate things or circumstances, thought, as “conception”, planning, intellectual construct, etc., “really” precedes action (or at least it should), as Marx sets forth in the famous example of the difference between the bee and the architect. With regard to the fetishistic social relation of value-dissociation, however, precisely the opposite is the case: in relation to their own social context and to their “processes of metabolism with nature”, people are not architects, but practically “bees”. By means of this inversion, a structure is erected in which there is no unity between “concept” and “execution” in action (not even “experimental” action), because the latter is presupposed a priori in accordance with its form, just as in the case of bees. Under these conditions, (theoretical) reflection necessarily arises as a sphere that is subordinated to “practical praxis” and is consequently separated from the latter. This is why we also see that people, even though they are still capable of reflection, are overcome with despair with regard to the ecologically destructive consequences of their own compulsive activities which are only subjected a posteriori to reflection and “mental processing”.

On the other hand, thought thereby ceases to be a “free” conceptual act, in order to converge with the presupposed “bee-like” form of social and material reproduction, in accordance with its own form that has been conditioned by that structure. In this way, an identity between the form of action and the form of thought comes to prevail precisely by virtue of the “tacit a priori” of the former. This is just as applicable to the everyday type of capitalist common sense as it is to the thought associated with theoretical reflection. Only to the extent that the latter also takes place in the constituted form of thought is the modern concept of theory as “theory form” constructed, which thus becomes an integral part of socialization in the commodity form and therefore, as Adorno points out in the lecture quoted above, a “reified consciousness” (ibid.). Due to the identity between the form of thought and the form of action, which has arisen through this inversion, a “unity” of theory and praxis also then arises, once again “behind the backs” of the pre-formed actors and thus behind the backs of the pre-formed thinkers; what this amounts to, however, is a paradoxical unity that is negatively structured precisely by the structurally conditioned separation.

This paradoxical unity conditions an unconscious objectivization, both on the part of action as well as on that of (subordinate) thought, which, in accordance with its form, is similar to that of the bee, insofar as people’s capacities for reflection, for conceptualization or for being “architects”, become mere secondary appendages. Here the mediating instance is the “subject form”, in which people once again reproduce in nature and in themselves the “tacit a priori” of its fetishistic form of constitution. At the same time that they, in the form of acting subjects, transform the things of the world into mere objects of the motion of the presupposed form, they are themselves transformed into objects. This is why the negative identity between subject and object is included in the negative identity between the form of thought and the form of action. It is not by chance that the concept of the subject, which seems so obvious to us, only arose in the context of the modern constitution of the fetish. The fetishistic form of value and of its process of valorization, which goes hand in hand with the constitution of the subject, did not appear as such, but took on, according to Marx, a “spectral” appearance”; the form always emerges only indirectly in things and relations that have been transformed into commodities, as well as in the institutions that are derived from them. This gives rise to the illusion that this fetishistically-constituted subject is quite capable of “freely” shaping the conditions of the world, when he moves in his a priori matrix and, as we shall soon see, when he engages in an ideologically affirmative processing of the resulting contradictions (this is the other side of the subject’s own labor). The frequent evocation of “subjectivity” against negative objectivization, in Marxist thought as well as bourgeois thought, succumbs to an ideological (self-induced) illusion. The critique of value-dissociation, in its further consistent development, was extended to include the critique of the “subject form”, which represents that paradoxical and negative unity between the form of thought and the form of action, between theory and praxis, within the fetishistic constitution.

This negative unity must not be understood in a superficial sense, however, as an integral aspect of the differentiation of the diverse social “spheres” established by the modern fetishistic relation, in which the field of praxis or that of the reproduction of theory are simply “the other side of” other fields, such as the economy, politics, culture, family life, etc. The negative paradoxical unity between theory and praxis, precisely in their separation, also consists, even more importantly, in the fact that theory contains within itself, as its object, all the praxis of all the spheres and of the totality of capitalist reproduction. As separate reflection “on” the social totality mediated with itself, as well as on the parts and moments of that totality, it is the theory of praxis and, actually, of all dominant praxis, including its own (that is, also as an affirmative meta-reflection on the character of theory in these relations, of theory as a separate moment of social praxis).

Since “theoretical praxis” is subordinated to “practical praxis” as a form of thought, it reproduces within itself the fetishistically-constituted modes of action of the social relations and of production in the theoretical form or as the theoretical expression of those modes of action. Insofar as theory reproduces the categorical context of the form of capitalism within itself, unlike unreflective everyday capitalist common sense as well as all reified forms of reasoning, the same thing also takes place with regard to the relation of gender dissociation; and also, indirectly, in the conceptual apparatus of the theory form itself, which obscures the respective real underlying structures and “renders them invisible” in its intervention, which at the same time also has an impact on the theory of knowledge. In the superficial classification, woman = nature, dissociation is determined per se as the non-conceptual, or as a non-affair, which cannot or “must not” be given any concept. With regard to this point, the modern form of theory is a “reified form of consciousness” not only in the meaning of the theoretically reproduced real categories of labor, commodity, money and capital or, on the other hand, law, State and nation, but also, at the same time, in the meaning of the relation of dissociation that was in theory “coevally” reproduced as an “invisible” category.

The modern theory form is an extension of the continued development of Protestantism and of the philosophies of the dawn of Modernity in the 16th and 17th centuries, primarily in the thought of the so-called Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries—which accompanied the development of capitalism “on its own foundations” (Marx), starting in the period of manufacture and the beginnings of industrialization. In this form, as a result of the processes we have addressed above, it is always a matter only of interpreting the ontologically presupposed social context, as was addressed by Marx in the “Theses on Feuerbach”.

This does not at all mean, however, that the theory form, as “reified consciousness”, is not per se relevant as praxis. To the contrary, it has an eminently practical function, directly as the ideal legitimization of the capitalist constitution via its ontologization. However, the affirmation of the fetishistic a priori matrix as “natural necessity”, ontological “reason” or “human essence” does not appear in this context as simply an external justification, one that could very well be replaced by any other, but it is already contained a priori in the form of thought, in the mode of thought and in concepts themselves. As a priori legitimization, it always enters in advance into the practical action of the capitalistically constituted “subject form”. Capitalism may thus even be understood as a real interpretation of being-there [Dasein], in which interpretive theory enters as an integral part and as an expression in thought.

Here it is not just a matter of the a priori legitimization of the context of the capitalist form, as the only imaginable form for all eternity, which must practically have always existed (although in an incomplete manner in the past) and which must represent human existence in general; the theory form becomes at the same time the “supplier” of ideas for capitalist praxis, ideas which consist of a permanent real interpretation not only of the world in general, but also of capitalism itself in its progressive development. By way of their constitution, the natural and social sciences furnish patterns of interpretation for the practical modeling of the dominant relations in the “process of metabolism” with nature, as well as in social relations, with a basis in the theoretically reproduced a priori matrix; they always comprise, at the same time, a constantly developing fundamental pattern of legitimization and pattern of interpretation, for the “practical praxis” of the real interpretation of capitalism.

Here there is a displacement of priorities in the historical process: if at the beginning the legitimizing theoretical reproduction of the capitalist ontology occupied center stage, along with its “self-certification” (frequently misunderstood as an almost critical self-reflection, in Kant, for example), with the progressive development of capitalism upon its own foundations, the theoretical production of patterns of interpretation for practical “action” came to occupy the leading position (not seldom misinterpreted as a merely positivist superficiality, whereas positivism actually represents the fully consistent immanent consequence of the original ontological self-certification). In this development, the legitimizing moment of the form of thought is not lost, but only readapted in the production of the supply of patterns of interpretation.

4. The treatment of the contradiction and “ideological praxis”

The negative unity thus brought about between (interpretive) theory and the material and social reproduction of capitalism, as a relation between “theoretical praxis” and “practical praxis”, therefore does not refer simply and one-dimensionally to the objectivizations of thought and action that are established in advance by the fetishistic relation. This pre-formation needs to pass through consciousness and cannot take place otherwise, and for that reason it can by no means take place in the form of an automatic physical or biological process. To the contrary, capitalist reproduction pre-formed by the a priori matrix is also a “contradiction-in-process” (Marx); a “contradiction-in-process” not only with regard to its own progressive dynamic, which is constantly rendering the “old form” of capitalism obsolete, but at the same time a fundamental self-contradiction, which gives rise to periodic crises and, finally, to the absolute “immanent limit” (Marx). For this reason, “theoretical praxis” and “practical praxis” are always already implicated in the capitalist self-contradiction that is constantly unfolding. This must be reflected as theoretical interpretation and handled as practical interpretation.

There is thus, on the one hand, a “silent coercion” (Marx) in relation to action determined by the form of the valorization of value or to the action of dissociation. On the other hand, the dilemmas of the capitalist self-contradiction interfere to an increasingly greater degree in this action. Since the objectified patterns of action are not by any means “automatically” performed as in the case of bees, the internal contradictions and the zones of discord associated with them which result from fetishistic reproduction also enter the consciousness of the individual actors, and permanently belie their pretensions to be “architects”, almost turning them into bees, but not quite. Practical action thus constituted therefore acquires a structure that is in a way aporetic, by submitting to a permanent tension between, on the one hand, a bee-like objectivization (“second nature”) and, on the other hand, consciousness or the (negative) experiences contained in consciousness. First of all, this only means that the action pre-formed by the a priori matrix is never the mere realization of an internal mechanism of the “automatic subject” and of the moments dissociated from it, but always also the “treatment” of the immanent contradictions associated with it. Capitalist reproduction does not consist only in linear and mechanical action of valorization and in the action of dissociation, but at the same time, inevitably, in a constant treatment of the contradiction [Widerspruchsbearbeitung].

The exigencies of this treatment of the contradiction accompany the entire process of reproduction of “practical praxis”. One aspect of this treatment is, on the one hand, the administration of persons in the domains of business management and public administration, which today, after the extinction of the capitalist capacity for internal development, has become crisis management that is attempting to manage a permanent crisis that is constantly getting worse. On the other hand, another aspect is comprised by the forms of immanent “counterpraxis”, that is, the forms of interest-based struggles involving vital needs that are always addressed capitalistically, which are directly no more than an immanent component of this treatment of the contradiction. Insofar as strikes, social movements, protests and struggles for the preservation of social programs or against the termination of means of reproduction (closures of factories or hospitals), alternative projects of all kinds, actions of resistance against crisis management, etc., have to be carried out on the field of capitalist immanence (because otherwise they would not even be able to exist), vital needs are necessarily conceived in terms of the capitalist forms (in the form of the commodity and of money, as well as in the relation of gender dissociation).

Pursuing this line of thought, we have here an “expression” of the contradiction and we are dealing with a permanent conflict concerning the real interpretation of capitalism itself. It is not only among those who are employed in capitalist functions and positions, in politics or the economy (Keynesians and neoliberals, for example), that this conflict develops; it also arises as an internal conflict between the capitalist administration of persons or of crises, on the one hand, and the immanent “counterpraxis” in diverse fields of reproduction, on the other hand, since capitalist contradictions are manifested in action as real interpretation. Thus, the immanent forms of “counterpraxis” that always recur in the treatment of the contradiction are, despite their external opposition to the administration of persons and crisis management, integral components of capitalist reproduction itself and are, from their beginnings, necessarily particularized; they are only critiques that affect isolated phenomena of capitalism and refer “naturally and spontaneously” (as Marx so often said) to the pre-established social forms. In and of itself, this is by no means a factor of emancipation, in the sense of shattering the capitalist ontology. To the contrary: in this case, capitalism must itself be interpreted in a different way, in accordance with duties to the vital interests that are always manifested in the capitalist form, thus clashing with the limit of this a priori matrix which as such is not subjected to any reflection. For this reason, it is precisely by way of praxis that the world is simply “[differently] interpreted” in its dominant constitution, and it is exactly this that is repeated in the reflections of the “philosophers” (theoreticians), as long as they do not recognize and do not break with the negative identity between the form of thought and the form of action.

Actually, insofar as “theoretical praxis” reproduces in itself the totality of social praxis, as its interpretive theoretical expression (and, in this sense, as the “form of reified consciousness”), it also needs to express or theoretically reproduce the permanent treatment of the contradiction, in the forms of the administration of persons and of immanent “counterpraxis”. Therefore, within its specific domain, it is a constitutive part of the debate concerning the real interpretation of capitalism, established in the context of the fields of conflict, and supplies the respective oppositional patterns of interpretation for the treatment of the contradiction, of which it becomes a particular moment. In the process of doing so, however, “theoretical praxis” comes up against the limits of the a priori matrix in the same way as “practical praxis”, even in reflective thought itself.

With this we come to the problem of ideologization. Ideology can basically be understood as a reflective form of the affirmative treatment of the contradiction in the struggle of the real interpretation of capitalism; in a certain way, as the paradoxical pretension of the “architect”, but in the unsuperseded and unquestioned status of the “bee”, in which the inversion of the relation between pre-formed action and thought (subordinated and, thus, structurally separated) is blindly maintained, which for its part is pre-formed by the former. One could say that ideology is composed of affirmative contents of reflective thought “in” the form of pre-established thought. These contents are only “conceptual” as destructive reactions to the experienced contradiction, but not in relation to the underlying social relation. This affirmative reflection is formed on the basis of the treatment of the contradiction in the different fields of social praxis, including theory. Precisely because, unlike the case of real bees, they are not automatic, these realizations also always contain moments of reflection, “images of the world”, modes of imagination, patterns of explanation, etc. People always need to find explanations for their social actions.

Imprisoned within the limits of the fetishistic a priori matrix and breaking out naturally and spontaneously, this tendency of thought consists in reflective affirmation as a component of the will to self-preservation within these relations; it therefore consists in the effort to find such explanations for these relations (the capitalist “relation with the world”) or in interpreting capitalism in such a way that the individual himself can exist in it. This results in the fact that the a priori matrix is almost naturalized, as is the case with “making money”, and just like the attributes of “femininity” [Zuschreibungen an “Weiblichkeit”]. Furthermore, the treatment of the contradiction is ideologized in a process of exclusion and embodied in the course of universal competition, in patterns of racist and anti-semitic interpretations, for example, that enter into the struggle of real interpretation. Here we also include cultural interpretations, attributes foisted on foreigners and self-defined attributes, in the ideological conceit of the “happy poor” or in dichotomous patterns of the hegemonic relation, for example (“We, the humble folk”, “you, those who are on top; we, those who are on the bottom”), or in pejorative subjectivizations (“the politicians are pigs”, “incompetents in suits”), etc. And last but not least, in the treatment of the contradiction, these ideological patterns of interpretation refer to a dichotomous reading of the economic nucleus and of its self-contradictory imprisonment in the worsening crisis, above all in the confrontation between a “good” productive capital (good because it creates jobs) and a “bad” speculative financial capital (bad, because it is supposedly associated with “income without work”); in the Nazi regime this took the form of the dichotomy between “creative” (German-Aryan) capital and “rapacious” (Jewish) capital.

What we are dealing with here are, on the one hand, “ideologies of everyday life” or “religions of everyday life” (which must not be confused with religion as a fetishistic relation and a pre-modern relation of reproduction), of private or collective “creations of meaning”, of many different types. And, on the other hand, after 200 years of the development of capitalism on its own foundations, the affirmative reflections of “theoretical praxis”, mainly those of Enlightenment thought and its counter-Enlightenment derivatives, immersed in the everyday common sense of “normality”, for example, the ideology (of circulation) of “freedom and equality” (democracy), the ideology of “nationality” and of the nation-state as pattern of interpretation and frame of reference, “politics” as form of social action of the permanent treatment of the contradiction, the ideologization of the universal fetishistic relation as “the common good”, as well as basic ontological and anthropological hypotheses (“the human being” as the subject of abstract interests), etc.

It can be concluded that the treatment of the contradiction at the level of “practical praxis” in its multiple spheres and mediations is never original, direct and, so to speak, reflectively innocent, but instead is always pregnant with ideology and impregnated with “theory”, although everyday consciousness is not aware of this. In the (real) permanent and “suffered” interpretation of capitalism, “theoretical praxis” and “practical praxis” are equally ideological praxis and are united precisely by this quality. This “ideological praxis” represents the real mediating relation of the negative unity between theory and praxis; it constitutes a pivotal component of capitalist reproduction, once it enters into the fetishistically constituted material and social action of the valorization of value and of dissociation. Only on that basis is all reproductive praxis developed, as a real interpretation of capitalism, in the forms of its concrete trajectory, whose most terrible form was, up until now, Nazism; not as an industrial accident of history or as a “false supersession” of capitalism, but as its historically specific real interpretation, on the basis of a determinate form of its trajectory (which is in a way “objectively” determined) of the treatment of the contradiction. The ideological processing of the contradiction is not carried out by people who are “architects”, but rather, in the worst case scenario, by people who take on the form of “killer bees”.

5. Capitalism as transformation of the world: affirmative critique and categorical critique

Viewed from the perspective of the critique of value-dissociation, the question of the “Theses on Feuerbach” presents a much more complex picture than the one that is ordinarily associated with the way the leftist organizer usually understands it. It is even more complex than it is in Marx’s 1845 formulation, which still falls far short of critically analyzing capitalist reproduction and conceptualizing the fetishistic relations as a priori matrix. In dealing with Feuerbach, Marx emphasized above all a program that consists in a generic analysis of the historically specific “process of real life” in capitalism and took the latter as his starting point, instead of the historically indeterminate “abstract person”. “Changing the world” will therefore have to result from the real revolution of this real historical capitalist mode of production and way of life, rather than from a mere “transformation in thought” or some other kind of conduct on the part of the “abstract person” in relation to the world (as was the case with the Young Hegelians). This had nothing to do with a relation between theory and a praxis that has been transformed in an “activist” way, but rather with a radically transformed understanding of theoretical reflection itself.

Marx certainly did not formulate his “Theses on Feuerbach” with the intention of producing an incipient “concept of application” of theory. To the contrary, he understood theory itself precisely in opposition to the merely interpretive character of all bourgeois theory, that is, as theoretical critique. Nonetheless, critique is in this latter sense something different from interpretation. In Marx, on the one hand, it refers to the dominant political economy, as the theoretical expression of the praxis of the historically specific capitalist way of life, that is, precisely as a critique of the latter; and, on the other hand, and in connection with that same point, it refers to the interpretive character of this bourgeois theoretical elaboration, as a mere reproduction of ontologized categories, which, precisely for that very reason, cannot arise as historical and consequently finite categories.

Thus, the distinguishing criterion resides first of all in the field of theory itself; this by no means involves the difference between theory and praxis the way these terms are commonly understood, as an external opposition between theoretical reflection and directly participatory action, but rather the difference between interpretive-affirmative theory and critical theory. It is in this latter opposition that the telos of material intervention is contained. However, the question is how to define this intervention and where it is supposed to lead. Whereas interpretation, as a form of thought, presupposes its object as such in an essentially positive way, considering only those accidental transformations “pertaining to its object” to be possible, critique, on the other hand, understood as opposition to mere interpretation, calls into question its object as such and therefore contains the essential negation of that object, and therefore also the negation of the pre-established form of action and of thought. Understood in this sense, however, critical theory or theoretical critique (critique in the theoretical form) must develop on its own terrain, in such a radical form that it can even go beyond its own terrain, participating in a radical revolution of the real relations that it essentially negates (not only in an interpretive-accidental way). Yet this is something totally different from the subordination of critical theory to a pretension of external action as such, a pretension that is not identified in the content of theory.

It is necessary, however, to address the possibility that it was an insufficiency in the “Theses on Feuerbach” that made possible the common misunderstandings of that text. The starting point for this inquiry is the relation between (theoretical) interpretation, on the one hand, and praxis or “changing the world”, on the other hand. As we have seen, the reproduction of capitalism is always also the treatment of the contradiction and the progressive real interpretation of the world as an in-itself—and likewise it is also an ongoing transformation of the world itself, and this in a quite interpretive manner. That is: the categorical forms of capitalism and the relation of dissociation are ontologically presupposed, and the transformation of the world is presented as a real interpretation in the process of historical development “pertaining to” the latter and “within” this formal context. Furthermore, by supplying the ideal patterns of legitimization and interpretation for this process, “theoretical praxis” itself participates in this capitalist transformation of the world. The common and hardly profound opposition between the phrases, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world”, and “the point is to change it”, completely bypasses the critique of capitalism, because it does not address the character of changing the world as real capitalist interpretation as praxis in itself, and because an indeterminate “praxis”, par excellence, is already assumed to be opposed to mere “interpretation”.

However, if the opposite of “interpretation” is not “praxis” in itself and generically (“doing something”), but critique, or more precisely an essential critique, then the problematic of the “Theses on Feuerbach” resides in the very concept of critique. This is the exact specification of that to which its negative content really refers. With this step, however, the concept of critique itself becomes ambiguous, just like the concepts of “interpretation” and of “changing the world”. In fact, in the character of the real interpretation of the capitalist transformation of the world an “interpretive critique” is also included. The modern concept of critique owes its original emergence to the history of the imposition of capitalism and capitalist modernization.

When all is said and done, capitalism is, in a way, “critical” and, more precisely, critical in a triple sense. On the one hand, it preserves the critique of pre-modern relations, from which it developed and which it denounced as “irrational” (or as belonging to a lower level of the metaphysics of “reason”). In some respects, this already began with Protestantism. On the other hand, in this new “relation to the world”, affirmative thought always ends up once again transforming itself into critique, in opposition to particular stages of the history of the imposition of capitalism that have become obsolete; in the critique directed by Enlightenment ideology and the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries against the absolutist regime, for instance, whose machinery, however, as Tocqueville observes, was adopted in a modified form and subsequently further developed by the enemies of absolutism. Finally, one of the distinctive features of the crisis of capitalism today, which is now fully developed as a planetary system and which has come up against its own immanent limits, is the rise of a critique of the systems of social welfare and of the conditions of the historical expansion of integration into the framework of capitalism itself (the social welfare state, publicly owned infrastructure, etc.), and of a “dismantling of the safety net” in the new situation of crisis advocated by a bipartisan neoliberalism in the name of “freedom” and “individual autonomy”.

In their legitimizing and interpretative character, affirmation and critique are identical, to the degree that critique aims precisely at the preservation and extension of the capitalist system at any price. In this sense, in Modernity theory arose and still exists, even for the left, by virtue of its interpretive character, as “affirmative critique”. In the final accounting, it is reproduced as such in the truncated understanding of the “Theses on Feuerbach”, that is, merely in a critique of capitalism that remains within the framework of the capitalist mode of production, itself ontologically presupposing the basic capitalist categories. On the other hand, the (implicit) meta-critical content of the “Theses on Feuerbach” must be radically demarcated precisely from the modus of the interpretive critique of capitalism. Reading the text in this way, the demand contained in the “Theses on Feuerbach” does not call for a change in the direction of direct “practical becoming”; it points to a new direction in critique itself that now, as the critique of the capitalist transformation of the world, is turned against its former character as the determination of the affirmative interpretation of capitalism, as the demand for a transformation of the fetishistically constituted world, as a break with the prevailing notion of the transformation of the world as real interpretation.

Such a critique is very different from the immanently affirmative critique, that is, it is a categorical critique, a critique of the ontologized capitalist categories themselves, without omitting the relation of gender dissociation that has become “invisible”, a critique that must also always be a critique of ideology. The critique of ideology in general can only be consistent as a categorical critique. One may thus speak of a “second-order critique”, such as is in fact contained in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, if the latter is to be read in the light of the critique of fetishism of Marx’s later works. Only on this basis can such a “second-order critique” abandon the interpretive framework and become the negation of the essential capitalist determinations, in order to consciously turn its back on the “affirmative critique” and to become a categorical critique in the theoretical form (for which it primarily lacks a concept of this distinction). Only in the light of this other critique, as well, does the task of a transformation of immanent “counterpraxis” into a “second-order praxis” become clear, one that is no longer a task of real interpretation, but rather one that breaks with the objectivized action of capitalist ontology, one in which people become, for the first time, “architects” of their own relations.

It is obvious, however, that the Marxian critique of political economy, as a categorical critique of the modern fetishistic constitution and consequently as a critique of ideology in the theoretical expression of its reproduction in political economy, is oriented towards exactly this “second level” of critique. In Marx, however, since he was a man of the 19th century, a critique of gender dissociation is lacking, and not only that. At the same time, he is a “theoretician of modernization” when he explains that capitalism is both a “necessary” and “progressive” historical formation, in the metaphysics of Hegelian history set back on its materialist feet, as well as a “model of development” that had not yet exhausted the productive forces of his time. To the extent, however, that he, as the “double Marx”, is simultaneously the critic of fetishism as well as the theoretician of modernization and development, he was also compelled to alternate between an understanding informed by the categorical critique and an understanding informed by the immanently affirmative critique, as well as between a transcendent understanding of praxis that goes beyond the fetishist relation and an understanding of praxis in its form as treatment of the immanent contradiction (real interpretation). This is a problem that has persisted throughout the entire history of Marxian theory. Traditional Marxism, or the Marxism of the workers movement, one-sidedly transformed this contradiction into an immanently affirmative critique and into a practically immanent treatment of the contradiction, or the real interpretation of capitalism, while the “difficult” critique of fetishism was relegated to a secondary level of importance. And it was precisely this one-sided solution that led to the subsequent misunderstanding of the “Theses on Feuerbach”, a misunderstanding that, for the reasons adduced above, was already displayed in Marx himself.

As a result, in such a way as to render implausible any unitary understanding of Marxism, but also inevitably, the “class struggle”, as the alleged axis and pivot of the critique of capitalism, was nothing but a “historic praxis” of the treatment of the immanent contradiction on the horizon of the affirmative critique, that is, a critique associated with the determinations of the form of the modern fetishistic constitution, a critique that proceeds within the integument of that constitution and that, despite all the frequently evoked “moments of excess”, in accordance with its immanent telos and consequently with its concept, must rule out any “ontological break”. The conflation of critical theory and the “class struggle”, in its quality as short-term incremental praxis, could only lead to the theoretical reproduction of the capitalist categories in the “struggle” by the real interpretation of capitalism itself; the theory associated with this “class struggle”, which expresses this struggle, remains for this immanent praxis the respective theory of modernization and of development.

Now, however, the critique of value that has arisen in the world crisis of the Third Industrial Revolution, which developed as the critique of value-dissociation, once again brings the critical dimension of the fetishist constitution of society to the foreground, which had only subsisted obscurely or had been concealed and mutilated in the Marxism of the workers movement, and reverses the contradiction in Marxian theory precisely in the contrary direction. In the historical “immanent limit” of the capitalist mode of production and way of life, the task of engaging in the categorical critique of the context of the form itself becomes unavoidable, which, in the previous history of the imposition and development of the commodity-producing patriarchy, could always be postponed or reversed in favor of the treatment of the immanent contradiction and of its interpretation, in the context of the capitalist transformation of the world. As the capacity for capitalist accumulation diminishes towards zero, so too is this possibility also rendered null and void.

For precisely this reason, the phenomena of social crisis and social contradictions could only be expressed in the category of “class struggle”. There has been no return to this determination of praxis after the end of the period of Fordist prosperity; to the contrary, it is historically obsolete, since the very matrix of the modern fetishistic relation that conditions it is also obsolete. With this development, however, the treatment of the immanent contradiction has not disappeared, nor has the debate concerning the real interpretation of capitalism in general; what has come to an end, without finding any substitutes, is the moment of an ongoing process of modernization that suffused the “class struggle”, as well as its imposition in the name of a perspective that implied a categorically immanent “socialism”, as self-deception in the treatment of the contradiction, in real interpretation and in the respective “counterpraxis”.

Now that, despite the pre-formative a priori matrix of theoretical thought and of the praxis of social production, the two modes of action must permanently become aspects of conscious deliberation and must no longer be realized automatically, in principle we could expect the possibility that, in the treatment of the contradiction, the patterns of action themselves that are obscured and constituted in the genesis of the form, against whose limits both the action of thought as well as the action of praxis clash, will be examined and exposed to critique. At the immanent limit of all dominant social praxis itself, this possibility becomes a necessity; not in the sense of a logical or historical determinism, but in the sense of the survival of the human species and of nature on Earth. It remains to be seen whether consciousness will recognize that the social limits themselves to which it is subject also comprise part of a connection that, for its part, is also coming up against an absolute limit. Consciousness encompasses this possibility, whose reality, however, is not determined and, for that reason, cannot be derived. For the shattering of the fetishist matrix would truly be the end of the “bee-like character” of social reproduction; that is why it is so frightening and does not arise by itself, it does not naturally arise from “capitalist malaise”. Everything that “naturally arises” in social affairs is a processing of the malaise that is characteristic of the fetishist and per se ideological “second nature”. The categorical critique is the enemy of everything “that naturally arises”.

6. Theory of structure and theory of action

In order for us to approach more closely to the concept of the categorical critique, it is necessary first of all to examine in more detail how the problem of the fetishistic constitution arises indirectly in “theoretical praxis”. This problem is basically manifested as the classical opposition between theory of structure and theory of action, an opposition that has existed throughout the entire process of theoretical elaboration since the Enlightenment, and which still reverberates in Marx, as well, and also in the conceptual apparatus of the “class struggle” in the sense referred to above. In the broadest sense, I understand these two concepts of theory as the principal patterns of reflection in the form of bourgeois theory, which can be expressed in completely different configurations. In the opposition between these two patterns of theory the insoluble polar contradictions of the modern fetishistic constitution arise: the contradiction and the simultaneous negative identity between “free will” and determinism, or between subject and object, or even between “theoretical praxis” and “practical praxis”, and the mediation of these polar identities.

Here, the approaches of the theory of structure affirmatively take as their starting point the objectified character of the a priori matrix or of “second nature”, explaining action as derived and determined, while the patterns of the theory of action, on the other hand, take as their starting point the subjective character of action, understanding social structures as mere expressions of this action or as “congealed action”. Both approaches are correct, but they are both based on a shared error, that is, the obscuring of the fetishistic constitution and of the context of its form. One could also say that both approaches involve abstraction from the historically specific formation “within” which one thinks and acts, in order to a-historically take as a point of departure, on the one hand, “structure” or “objectivity” in itself and, on the other hand, “action” or “subjectivity” in itself. In fact, the categories of subject and object strictly pertain, as we have seen, precisely to the modern commodity-producing patriarchy; in these concepts the paradox of the fetishistic constitution is reflected, according to which all actions have to pass through consciousness and consequently also through decisions of the will. This will, however, and, consequently, also action, at the same time exist in an a priori form, one that is always already formed. This a priori form or matrix, for its part, in fact arises by way of human action, but its results unconsciously become autonomous in an impenetrable autonomous structure that confronts the actors.

The opposition between theory of structure and theory of action remains insoluble in the interpretive character of theoretical elaboration, that is, in the identity of the a priori form of action and thought, because the level of critique in the constitution of the form itself, which will only then generate the immanent contradiction, cannot be reached in the form of theory as “form of reified consciousness”. In accordance with the way this central contradiction is elaborated theoretically from the interpretive point of view, on this basis diverse ideological concepts are developed that, for their part, have an impact on “practical praxis” and co-determine the real form of the trajectory followed by the real ongoing contradiction. “Practical praxis” is itself pregnant with ideology, and all the more so the more it is affected by “theoretical praxis”, as the theoretical elaboration of ideology or the ideological elaboration of theory, in the sense of theory of structure or of theory of action.

As “interpretive science”, bourgeois social theory is ideological per se, because it can per se only be theoretical scientific affirmation or affirmative critique, as the theoretical reproduction of the presupposed capitalist ontology and of the treatment of the latter’s contradiction. It is true that Marx distinguishes between ideology and “science” (understood as “impartial” reflection, a concept that he inherited from the origins of the constitution of modern theory). However, this differentiation, too, belongs to the “double Marx”, as a result of the remnants of Marx’s own partiality towards Enlightenment thought. It is not Marx, the critic of fetishism, who makes this distinction, but Marx, the theoretician of modernization, who sought to understand as “progress” the capitalism of his time that had not yet developed to the mature state of crisis, in consonance with the metaphysics of history that he inherited from Hegel. What Marx did not yet reflect in this distinction is the fundamentally ideological character of all interpretive reflection, which arises in the insurmountable immanent opposition between theory of structure and theory of action. Ultimately, even the natural sciences are subject to this ideological character, due to the fact that they are integrated into the fetishist social constitution and are thus just as “partial” as social theory.

It is precisely the model of the natural sciences that enters in a certain way into the reflections of the theory of structure. By analogy with nature, society and history must be determined, in the modern understanding of “natural laws”, as processes that are subject to objective “laws” that can be “employed”, but neither negated nor replaced. Human activity is denigrated to the “execution” of inexorable “laws”. This is a reflection of the “iron cage” (Max Weber) of the fetishist, pre-formative a priori matrix of action. The theory of structure in the broadest sense, in its dynamic form as the theory of development, extends from the Enlightenment metaphysics of history systematized by Hegel to structuralism and systems theory. It always implies an “explanation” of society and of history in accordance with the (physical or biological) patterns of the natural sciences.

On the other hand, the reflection of the theory of action emphasizes the independence of human consciousness and the subjective “dimension of will” (intentionality). People make their own relations, and thus the latter must be susceptible to change in a web of deliberate acts or “intentions”. This view can be traced back to Giambattista Vico, who proclaimed the comprehensibility and accessibility of the “autopoietic” character of society and of history, as opposed to non-anthropic, external nature. The theory of action, in its broadest sense, dates back to the Enlightenment itself, when reflection was not yet differentiated from the theory of structure, and was subsequently taken up during the Romantic period, then by vitalism, then by the phenomenology of Husserl, pragmatism and similar sociological approaches (symbolic interaction, etc.), and was finally embraced by existentialism and its postmodern derivatives. It always implies an “understanding” of society and of history in a subjective sense of intentionality, which is different from the “explanation” characterized by a quasi-scientific determination on the basis of overarching laws [Gesetzmäßigkeiten]. This is why the reflection of the theory of action always takes the form of a social and historical hermeneutics, which in German historicism (Dilthey, among others), in the context of the dawning of the German Ideology, was demarcated from the Hegelian law-based metaphysics, and would also draw a solid line of opposition between the theory of the natural sciences, on the one hand, and social and historical theory, on the other hand (the “two cultures”).

Since they could not fail to be affirmative and interpretive theoretical elaborations, which always had the context of the capitalist form and dissociation as their ontological presupposition, both the theory of structure and the theory of action remained bound, in an equally one-sided way, to the contradictions of the fetishistic constitution. Either the level of action is eliminated as an autonomous force, and action is positivistically transformed into a mere “function” of an autonomized or almost natural structural process; or else, inversely, the structural level of the a priori matrix is eliminated, and action is transformed into a sum of acts of will, intentionalities and interactions. Both types of approach are entirely and equally ideological and consequently affirmative. In the process of the permanent treatment of the contradiction (which is also theoretical), they take on the form of interpretive “objectivism” and interpretive “subjectivism” which, with equal consistency, are always being transformed into each other, without being able to comprehend the fetishist constitution that is their basis.

This mutual transformation of both patterns unconsciously reflects the existence of the obscured and ontologized a priori matrix. Thus, the objectivist model of the theory of structure ultimately requires that the intentional actions of subjects should be “epiphenomenal” [“carried as an appendage”], since the social process does not proceed, by any means, the same way as physical-chemical reactions, the geological movement of tectonic plates, biological metamorphoses or even instinctive action on the part of animals such as the bee. The reason why “intentional execution” of some kind is necessary, which belies the rule of “law” over the process, nonetheless remains unexplained. In reality, acts of will therefore arise above all as a kind of “contaminant”, as the constant source of error and mistakes, through which the objective course of development is executed and the (bee-like) “conformity to the laws of nature” of social affairs is obtained. Human consciousness tends to be demoted to a kind of “confounding factor” of its own social context. Inversely, the subjectivist model of the theory of action cannot completely ignore the fact that action itself is objectified in “structures”. This objectivization, however, is in turn “epiphenomenal” of intentionality, as that “congealed action” that is manifested in social institutions. Nonetheless, the reason why this autonomized objectivization, which in fact negates mere “intentionality”, exists at all, remains unexplained. It is the simple reference, which remains implicit, that something else is at work here, that is, a historical constitution of the form that is more deeply rooted than the mere institutionalization of intentional actions.

The problem is also addressed by Adorno, in “Lecture Twelve” [of the English language Edition—Translator’s Note] of An Introduction to Sociology, dating from 1968, in which he takes a position against the hypostatization of the theory of action: “But if you have dipped into some sociological writings, especially those of Max Weber, you will have found that by no means everything done by sociology has to do with social action, and that to a very large degree sociological analysis relates to thing-like, objectified forms which cannot be directly resolved into action—in other words, all those things which, in the broadest sense, can be referred to as institutions. And in this respect there is no difference between, let's say, the Marxian analysis of the objective form of the commodity and the concept of the social institution … of all that which in Marx is called the relations of production, resides precisely in the fact that we are here concerned not with direct action but, if you like, with congealed action, or with some form of congealed labour and with something which has become autonomously detached from direct social action…. But first of all it has to be said that… that social destiny, and therefore the social action of each individual person … is dependent on these institutions, and can only be explained in terms of them. It would be far less correct to say that this action should be seen as the final and immediate substrate of the institutions, or that the social as such could be explained in terms of social action” (Adorno 1993, p. 177 et seq.; English Edition, pp. 105-106). According to Adorno, an approach of this kind would imply an “extraordinarily subjectivistic formulation” (ibid., p. 179; English Edition, p. 106) of understanding.

Here, although Adorno weaves a critique of the reduction of the problem of the theory of action, he also conceives the idea of “congealed action” and its “institutionalization”, without considering the different deep layers of this “congealment”, in the relation between the fetishistic constitution and ongoing institutional development. In any event, this is never possible on the purely sociological level. The Marxian analysis of the genetic constitution of the form is qualitatively different from the more superficial analysis and conceptualization of institutionalization—which is constantly underway and undergoing transformations in the process of capitalist development—and of the treatment of the contradiction and of real interpretation. The references to the more profound level of the problem of constitution in Adorno are composed of mere scattered observations, since he never systematically addressed this problem. In any event, in the reflections quoted above, an opening to this level remains possible and is not ruled out. Since his critical reflections did not explicitly proceed towards that goal, however, he was incapable of superseding the mutual transformation between the reductionism of the theory of structure and the reductionism of the theory of action.

In this way, a “structuralism” of both theories is possible, but with different starting points and with different ideological connotations. What was known as “structuralism” in the second half of the 20th century was in part influenced by the theory of action, but with an inclination towards the ontologizing determination that intentional actions are in turn “always” determined “in conformance with laws” by objectified structures (which are normally identified with institutions). It is precisely in structuralism that both approaches began to converge. So, either the objectified structure is presupposed, and it conforms to a priori physical or biological patterns, and intentional action is derived from those structures, or else, to the contrary, intentional action is a priori presupposed, in the sense of a specifically human mode of existence, and the objectified structure is, for its part, derived from intentional action. In both cases, the historical constitution of the form of capitalist Modernity remains enveloped in ontological darkness and escapes critique.

This mechanism of obscuration and ontologization makes both these currents of the theory of the bourgeois form, both with regard to their polar contradiction as well as their mutual transformation, comprise the matrix of “ideological praxis”. Liberal ideology, with its origins in the Enlightenment and in the Enlightenment basis in political economy, insists as a matter of principle and precisely during crises on the “natural laws” [Naturgesetzlichkeit] of the capitalist forms and, consequently, of history (that are derived) from the real interpretation of capitalism and from the transformation of the world as an inexorable “natural social process”, to which we must adapt regardless of the cost, under the penalty of catastrophe. The treatment of the contradiction, in this sense, starting from the interpretation based on biology and the natural sciences, is also an aspect of social Darwinism, as the “law” of the survival of the fittest, which is also proclaimed by conservative and fascist ideologies, and is related to racist-nationalist meta-subjects. Here we see a trait that liberalism and fascism/National Socialism have in common, with deep roots in the metaphysics of law-governed systems based in the theory of structure. On the other hand, the ideology of the theory of action, with its basis in the current of phenomenology, vitalism and existentialism, insists, starting from the vision of the unreflected-upon intentional subject, on the critique of “laws”, without noting their constitutive conditions. Thus, it proclaims a “heroic” intentionality or even a “quotidian” intentionality, whose treatment of the contradiction issues into the “hunt for culprits” (negative and hostile intentionalities). Anti-semitism and National Socialism may thus be understood precisely as irrationalist ideological amalgamations of the metaphysics of law-governed systems and the metaphysics of intentionality.

To the extent that Marx, starting with the “Theses on Feuerbach”, began to negate the modern form of theory as the interpretive reproduction of the capitalist connection of the form and of its contradictory character, the author of Capital paved the way for the categorical critique. This critique, however, was by no means totally and conclusively developed. Thus, just as the Marxian argumentation in Capital oscillates between the theory of modernization and the theory of fetishism, it also oscillates between an interpretive law-governed metaphysics of the theory of structure, in which the “class struggle” is inserted as intentional action, and a meta-theory of action whose goal is the categorical critique of that same law-governed structure, whose practical relevance Marx occasionally referred to as “the highest kind of consciousness”. In the Preface to Capital one may already read, in the positivist sense of a reflection of the theory of structure, the reference to the “iron necessity” of “the natural laws of capitalist production”, which are compared to the laws of physics, which also corresponds to Hegel’s metaphysics of history, but with a materialist slant.

Just as the Marxism of the workers movement and of the class struggle underemphasized or completely obscured the dimension of the critique of fetishism of Marxian theory (and even in its truncated understanding of the “Theses on Feuerbach”), it also had to reproduce in itself the bourgeois interpretive unilateralism of the theory of structure and the theory of action, keeping in mind that the former was predominant for a very long time. In Marxist social democracy, the transformation beyond capitalism was increasingly objectified as a “law”. Critique itself appeared in an objectified form, it appeared to be the “execution of history”: action itself was evaluated in the understanding of social emancipation as that which “objectively” exists, and not as a break with the false objectivity of “second nature”. So, too, was the understanding of ideological elaboration thus reduced to a “function” of “objective” interests, with characteristics approximating those of natural laws, which simply had to be recognized as correct; a reduction that would wreak a terrible vengeance with the victory of anti-semitic National Socialism over the German workers movement.

7. “Catch-up modernization” and the postulate of an “inseparable unity” between theory and praxis

The conceptual penetration, which at first necessarily had a powerful impact, of the problematic implicitly contained in the Thesis on Feuerbach, which even today has not been resolved, can be further clarified, if we take a look at the historical background formed by the predominant views with respect to which this reduced interpretation developed in traditional Marxism and on the left. In our examination of this perspective, we shall now return to the topic introduced above, concerning the profiles of the exigency of action in the integument of the modern form of the commodity-producing patriarchy. Starting from the retrospective critique afforded by reflection on the new quality of the contemporary crisis, the horizon of action of the left and of the social movements of the past are viewed within the framework of the problem of “catch-up modernization” [nachholende modernisierung].

This term conceived by the critical theory of value-dissociation is intended to refer to all the variants of Marxism and of the traditional workers movement in the history of capitalist modernization, as an element and motor force of the latter. Characteristic of the profile of exigency connected with this tendency was the postulate of an “inseparable unity” between theory and praxis, taken directly from the “Theses on Feuerbach”. In this case an attempt was made to reject the structural separation between theoretical reflection, as a merely contemplative “interpretation” carried out by “philosophers”, and practical, participatory action. Theory must be, a priori, “connected” and “integrated” into the historical praxis—which it already presupposes—of the class struggle, and only on this basis can it acquire legitimacy.

In order to further clarify the problematic of this postulate, it is necessary to briefly recapitulate the critical concept of “catch-up modernization”. As we have already mentioned, “catch-up modernization” was not an attempt to break with or supersede the modern fetishistic constitution; instead, efforts for emancipation were reduced to a “struggle for recognition” within the categories of the form of the modern commodity-producing patriarchy, including the relation of gender dissociation. It was precisely in this that the historical praxis of the “class struggle” consisted. On the one hand, it involved the imposition of bourgeois rights and benefits for the wage workers in their quality as subjects of the commodity, of money and of state citizenship (the right to strike, the right to vote, freedom of assembly, improved working conditions and higher wages, a safety net in the framework of the welfare state, etc.) in the industrialized countries of the West. On the other hand, the revolutions and national liberation movements of “catch-up modernization” in the countries of the East and South of the planet pursued the goal, expressed in a Marxist terminology, of “a struggle for recognition” as national subjects of the world market, independent and enjoying equal rights. They were thus essentially “catch-up bourgeois revolutions” (here, the “bourgeois” character is not understood in the sociologically reduced sense, but as the modern fetishist constitution of value-dissociation). This connection has been subjected to theoretical analysis for many years in the theory of value-dissociation (see, for example, Kurz 1991) and will continue to be investigated. This is not the place, however, for such further elaboration; here we are merely interested in noting the relevance of the emancipatory effort directed towards a “struggle for recognition” within the modern fetishist relation for understanding theory and praxis.

To the extent that the intention of “catch-up modernization” of the Western workers movement, of the “class struggle” and of the Third World revolutions can be deciphered as treatment of the contradiction in the sense described above, it corresponds to the real interpretation of capitalism itself; not, however, as the treatment of the “quotidian”, customary and institutionalized contradiction, within the already completely developed capitalist fetishist relations, but rather as a certain kind of treatment of the contradiction in world history, and real interpretation in the context of the still-incomplete process of the constitution of Modernity. For this reason, here, too, one cannot speak of a simple “pseudoactivity” in the Adornian sense; to the contrary, it is a matter of the way of “changing the world” that has dominated a whole historical period and consists of imposing bourgeois subjectivity on the masses, and therefore within the capitalist process itself that overlies the changing of the world. It was the contradiction between capitalist industrialization, on the one hand, and the forms of legal rights and of the state that were not suitable for this “changing the world” in material production, on the other hand; between the development of the world market, on the one hand, and the deficient political formation of the nations located in the periphery (as a function of their participation in the world market), on the other hand. As a final aspect, it brought to the fore the paradox that the ideology of “class struggle” was transformed into a vehicle for the implementation of a social relation that only then created, in general, the pre-condition for its own existence, that is, the generalization of “abstract labor”. The consequence of this is well known: the “working class”, as agent of “catch-up modernization”, was confronted with its own institutionalization and was compelled, so to speak, to carry forward with it the “class struggle” in a statist form (as became clear in the contradictions and movements of “real socialism”).

At this level, once the spearhead of the forces of emancipation was directed towards an immanent treatment of the contradiction in world history, theory and praxis had to appear as “a different interpretation” of the capitalist categories. Thus, the critique of capitalism became an immanently affirmative critique, as an integral part of the very process of the imposition of capitalism; the idea of “socialism” was measured using that yardstick; and precisely for that reason Marx’s critique of fetishism was downplayed or totally concealed. What remained was, as we have seen, essentially the current of the “theory of modernization” of Marxian argumentation, while the contrary aspects of the categorical critique or the “second-order critique” were eliminated, as has been demonstrated in detail in the theoretical elaboration of the critique of value-dissociation (see Kurz 1999, pp. 154-178, pp. 237-249, pp. 400-403, pp. 459-466). On the other hand, in the field of “theoretical praxis”, this provoked a relapse into the dichotomy of bourgeois interpretation, of the theory of structure and the theory of action. This is why the objectivization of the theory of structure necessarily had a greater impact, because it really dealt with the further imposition, “[differently] interpreted”, of the modern “second nature” and of its one-track objectivity. The Marxism of modernization systematically confused, on the basis of its implicit intention (which seemed to it to be the only imaginable critique of capitalism), the real interpretation of capitalist categories, in their process of development in world history, with the supersession of the interpretive character of theory in general, when Marxist theory was, in reality, demoted to being the supplier of interpretations for “catch-up modernization”.

In this historical constellation, the Marxism of the workers movement and the Marxisms of the East and South of the State Capitalism of “catch-up modernization” acted strictly in accordance with the “social and historical laws” that Marx had supposedly discovered; in this process, the intermittent critical aspect of Marx’s thought, that is, the approach characterized by a radical critique of a sociability that operated in the form of pseudo-natural laws, was discarded in the context of the functionalization of the theory of modernization and was rendered unrecognizable in favor of a positivism of the objectified categories. In the domain of the scientific activity of “real socialism”, which did not go beyond (at the very most) a structural stereotype of the respective bourgeois institutions qualified with the adjective, “socialist”, this positivist understanding was accepted by generations of “socialist scientists” in frankly ritualized formulas concerning the “objective laws” of economics and of history. Thus, according to a popular Soviet manual on Objective Laws and the Scientific Administration of Society: “The laws of social development were discovered and formulated for the first time in the history of human thought by the classics of Marxism-Leninism…. As natural laws (!), these laws express determinate contexts and relations” (Yermolayev 1973, p. 30).

Nor is the argument on this topic formulated by the celebrity scientist of the GDR, Jürgen Kuczynski, any better. In his essay on “social laws”, he praises the founders of bourgeois political economy precisely for having recognized the “natural laws” of (economic) reproduction, comprehending the entire subsequent capitalist development: “The economic law is just as brilliant, clear and inflexible in its effect as a law of nature. For if someone opposes it, he is defeated—in one way or another…. It is like a natural law that is imposed in every circumstance—even if it is not entirely recognizable” (Kuczynski 1972, p. 10). Human intentionality in relation to these same relations must thus appear as a mere “execution” of objectivizations; Kuczynski conceives the “… participation of people in a certain way as an objective factor (!)—and also as a subjective factor that consciously facilitates or impedes the imposition of the laws” (ibid., p. 12). Intentionality is therefore reduced to a simple function of presupposed principles which functions, more or less, in accordance with the degree of comprehension of “law-governed structures”. In this way, the difference between nature and society is largely erased: “We distinguish between laws of nature and laws of society—without having the right, however, to exaggerate this difference” (ibid., p. 14).

With this reasoning, Kuczynski can invoke Engels who, in his essay, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, also posited the analogy with nature: “Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature…. But where on the su