Hans-Jürgen Krahl's Authorities and Revolution
Translator’s Introduction
This introduction will be brief and, frankly, somewhat aggressive. My reasons for translating this piece here and now should be obvious (just check the news). The complete moral, political, and theoretical bankruptcy—and that is the word for it, because ‘failure’ would imply they made an effort—of the doyens of critical and “democratic” theory in the present moment recalls the weakness of their forebears (and, in the case of Habermas, that of his own past self) in the era of the Vietnam War, decolonization, and the New Left. The archons of the academic system are as ethically worthless and politically inhumane as ever; just as Talleyrand said of the Bourbons, the capitalist academy has “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” from their own revolutionary interregnum—the global revolt of 1968. From Manhattan to Berlin, bringing anti-imperialism into the university is forbidden. Supposedly humanist intellectuals expend their oh-so-valuable time nitpicking the language of those who protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza while the Democratic Party and its decrepit poobah Biden throw their entire weight behind the police and the fascist apartheid State of Israel, thus setting up American “democracy” to be hoist by its own petard and confirming Krahl’s claim that “an authoritarian State means that democracy can be transformed into the state of exception with no break in legal and political legitimacy.”
But enough about that: who is Hans-Jürgen Krahl? Once a leading figure in the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), he is today mostly forgotten. (If you want to know more, read this and the related texts in the Viewpoint dossier). More than forgotten, he is repressed, and, even worse, the few who do not repress the very memory of his existence are mostly Anti-Deutschen. (One of the founders of the tendency, Joachim Bruhn, once expressed his disdain for the Marxist-Leninist movement in Germany with the observation that “nobody [among them] had read anything by Hans-Jürgen Krahl” 1 Krahl himself, however, thought the fact that the works of Che Guevara and other revolutionaries were not being closely studied was evidence of the “decline of theoretical consciousness” 2.) Against his oblivion in mainstream Habermasian critical theory and cult status in German subcultural leftoid critical theory, his texts still testify to the possibility that things could have gone differently. That’s one reason why he’s worth reading. Things could have gone differently then; things can go differently today.
Krahl wanted to advance from the theoretical self-criticism of the bourgeoisie to the practical betrayal of it, from the mourning of the bourgeois individual to the birth of a socialist society. The problem of how to move from the one to the other is the essential problem of his whole project, and in this regard his project was personal: he was the son of a petty-bourgeois family from a reactionary country town and had been a member of a few different reactionary youth and student organizations in the past. (That said, his talk of class betrayal and repeated run-ins with the law did not keep his parents from funding him 3.) At the same time, however, it was universal: the orthodox Marxist conceptions of practice and organization, which found their highest expressions in Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, seemed to him to have retained certain bourgeois presuppositions, and so did not represent a complete break with the bourgeois social forms they were meant to overthrow.
The problem in this text is political and organizational, but, like Lukács, Krahl saw organizational and theoretical questions as inextricably linked. The task of turning critical theory into revolutionary theory meant grappling with organizational problems. Accomplishing that task in the reality of 1960s West Germany and the student movement meant grappling with the academy and its scholarly authorities in their concrete existence. In this text, Krahl mounts a critique of two academic authorities who have failed to support the student movement: Habermas and Adorno. His criticism of these two is biting, but what makes the text truly notable is the way which Krahl weaves together the organizational problems of SDS with theoretical reflections on the nature of capitalism and the State, re-activating concepts from Horkheimer’s decisively political texts from the 1940s. Along the way, he poses crucial political and organizational questions for which we still have no convincing answer. (This is another reason to read him: his texts are the testament of a mind engaged in the same problems which still haunt us today.)
I mentioned Habermas above. Krahl’s criticism of him in this text is informed by a faith in his character that is no longer tenable today, a faith which indeed has been untenable for many years. His claim in a 2012 interview with Ha’aretz that Germans essentially have a duty to cover up, or at least ignore, the crimes of the Israeli occupation 4 should have been more than enough to put an end to Habermas als Institution.
What about Adorno, who despite being present at the discussion receives less flak than Habermas? Some background may be in order here. Krahl went to the University of Frankfurt specifically to study under him. The two, however, developed mixed feelings about one another. While Habermas was more open to practical engagement in politics, his theory was less radical. Adorno was more radical in theory, but completely unwilling to engage in practice beyond the occasional conversation with SDS members. There are two notable apocryphal stories about Krahl and Adorno 5. In one, Adorno is supposed to have written on the wall of the Institute for Social Research, after Ludwig von Friedeburg had the police expel and arrest the students occupying it 6, either “This Krahl is inhabited by wolves” or “The wolves howl from this Krahl,” punning on the rhyme Krahl/Saal (hall). In the other, Adorno allegedly had a dream in which Krahl held a knife to his throat. When Adorno protested this, Krahl retorted in good Adornian fashion with something like, “Come now professor, you mustn’t personalize.” In another version of this story Krahl was sat incubus-like on Adorno’s chest during the whole affair—that version has much clearer libidinal undertones to it. The context of this latter story is that Adorno was somewhat disturbed by Krahl’s ability to separate the political from the personal: Krahl once turned to him after a speech and whispered, so Adorno wrote to Günter Grass, “that he hoped I would not take it amiss since it was purely political and not meant personally” 7. For Adorno this was not admirable but rather evidence of “something pathological” in Krahl’s personality 8.
Adorno’s callousness towards Krahl, his accusations—made in bad faith?—that the student movement either stood to provoke a fascist restoration or was fast approaching a form of “left-wing fascism” itself 9: what to make of these? In his correspondence with Marcuse, Adorno musters the traumatic memory of fascism to justify his weariness of the student movement 10, but gay men like Krahl were also victims of the Nazi regime and continued to be persecuted under the Federal Republic. And isn’t there something, I don’t know, ironic in the horror at Krahl’s ability to separate the political and the personal coming from someone permanently unable, indeed proud of his inability, to unite the political and the theoretical? (Adorno even criticized Angela Davis, another student of his for a time, for her militancy, showing that his reticence towards practice was not at all attached specifically to the conditions in Germany 11.) Adorno grounded his critique of practice in the concept of “pseudo-activity,” a concept originally critical of late-capitalist society which Adorno later employed for a backhanded defense of that same society which used many of the same tropes employed in the anti-left canards of reactionaries the world over. The condescending and psychologizing accusation that the “actionists” of the SDS or APO cared more about doing something, anything, than doing something effective is wrong. Krahl addressed such accusations in this text and elsewhere: for him the spectacular protest actions of SDS were “forms of appearance afflicted with growing pains” (kinderkranken Erscheinungsformen) of a movement which was still in the process of constituting itself and wanted to one day be capable of “essentially correct pre-revolutionary practice” 12. In general, Adorno’s critiques of practice should be met with the question Krahl poses to Habermas in this text: what function do such arguments have if one does not assume that SDS are so stupid that they don’t already understand them?
I could critique Krahl, for there are, of course, some questionable moments in his corpus, but this is neither the time nor the place. His project was left unfinished, both politically and theoretically. It has been fifty years since his death and we are by and large still in the same position. Banal remarks about this faulty assumption or that naïve expectation would be worse than worthless, and so I haven’t bothered.
Last thing: I have put a few translator’s notes in the text. They are set off in their own paragraphs and enclosed in square brackets. These notes either provide information, summarize the proceedings of the discussion, or denote interjections. The text of this translation uses the main body and notes from Konstitution und Klassenkampf and the transcript reprinted in Volume II of Wolfgang Kraushaar’s Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung: von der Flaschenpost zum Molotowcocktail 1946-1995 (1998, pp. 458-470). The translation may sound awkward at points, but I assure you that this is only partly my fault: Krahl’s sentences are often highly unwieldy and grammatically complex.
Authorities and Revolution
A Contribution to a Discussion held September 23, 1968
[*Before Krahl’s address, Frank Benseler, an editor at Luchterhand and organizer of this discussion; Ludwig von Friedeburg, the Hessian minister of education; and Kurt Lenk, a political scientist, make contributions to the discussion. Krahl does not directly respond to any of them in his contribution, and so I will not summarize them here.]
I would like to relate [my contribution] to what has happened over the past three days. Firstly, a paradox must be explained: namely that the student movement, which conceives of itself as anti-authoritarian, has need of so many authorities with regard to both its nature [in Sachhinsicht] and personnel. Anyone who followed the last SDS delegate conference could establish that the anti-authoritarian revolt had continued to a certain degree and had also begun with the de-mythologization and disenchantment of its very own authorities. This is, at least for a Marxist movement, a principle of organization in an emphatic as well as historical-philosophical and revolutionary-theoretical sense; it means that a movement has an irrational need for authorities to the extent that it is not organized and has not built up any sort of qualification structure based on the division of labor, and then, afterwards, this authority, as Georg Lukács critically noted [3] contra Pannekoek and Luxemburg, turns to the propaganda phase, to agitation. And it is typical that in the SDS the agitators, who lead the discussions at teach-ins, are to a certain extent authoritarian. The extra-parliamentary opposition, most of all its anti-authoritarian faction, has still not yet built up a sufficient division of labor in this sense, namely that on one hand there should be nothing without a qualitative function, an old principle of the communist division of labor, which demanded of everyone a corresponding authoritarian pressure to perform, even today in a society wherein the abolition [Abschaffung] of labor has emerged so far out of the dimension of the utopian; on the other hand, however, this pressure to perform is supposed to be made up for by the development of solidaristic collectives, which are supposed to anticipatorily sublate the separation and atomization of individuals which capitalist society nurtures on the basis of its abstract division of labor. This is exactly the question that Georg Lukács posed in his speculative summation of the European debate over organization: how can the realm of freedom be anticipated in a communist and thoroughly authoritarian form of organization? This question is still insufficiently considered today, because the Leninist type of party corresponded only to the conditions of a country that was still in the phase of industrialization, where authoritarian work discipline had, in general, to first be constituted and could not already be abolished in society as a whole, and so surplus-norms—thus, surplus labor time—had to be internalized. Today the problem is posed in an inverted fashion: these surplus-norms, “surplus-repression,” as Marcuse says, have become superfluous as authoritarian performance-principles. And for us in the SDS the question is posed as to how is it possible to develop a form of organization which, under conditions of coercion and violence, develops both autonomous individuals as well as those who are capable of a certain disciplined subordination to the requirements of struggle and to the conditions of coercion. This problem is fully unresolved. We are in the process of realizing an anti-authoritarian revolt of the same provocative style as that which we had in the college. This anti-authoritarian revolt aims at making something like a collective learning process possible. At the same time, in no way may a form of collectivism hostile to individuals be allowed to develop in the SDS. I want, further, to discuss the role that journalistically definable critical authorities represent. This should be discussed with regard to two prominent individuals who are present here in the hall, Habermas and Adorno. I believe that these authorities falsely define their relation to the extra-parliamentary opposition, above all to its Marxist and socialist section. Jürgen Habermas, in the illusion that one could still construct something like a liberal counter-coalition ranging from Brenner to Augstein*, that one could still mobilize something like a liberal counter-public-sphere through work in the institutions, thinks that he must tactically distance himself in certain volatile action situations where we have need of his solidarity. With the fatal accusation of “left-wing fascism,” [4] which was immediately seized upon by the liberal press—to which any plebiscitary-egalitarian movement already seems fascistic from its form alone, fully abstracting from its content—Habermas has for the first time realized this tactical distancing. He realized it a second time when he hurled the accusation of pseudo-revolutionism at us. I am not even going to discuss whether this accusation is justified in terms of the content of the dispute between different factions of the extra-parliamentary opposition; rather only which function it has in a definite volatile moment of the movement. Daniel Cohn-Bendit relays that a sociologist, who politically plays a similar role in France to Habermas here [in Germany], explained during the May revolution: “I strongly disagree with many of your actions, especially with regard to the structure of violence, but in this moment it is necessary that I stand in solidarity with you all.” Why is it necessary that we lead such authorities into the field? In the authoritarian, performance-oriented society of education, manipulation, and executive indoctrination, the masses are so fixated on authorities that they initially have need of authorities—that is, ones who understand themselves as critical authorities—for their enlightenment. And so we need the public, pronounced solidarity of critical authorities; they can, in a certain way, help destroy the principle of authority in society with the weapon of authority itself. I believe that neither Habermas nor Adorno have upheld this to date.
[*Augstein. Founder and editor of Der Spiegel, which was targeted by the government of the BRD in the 1962 Spiegel-Affäre. Augstein was a liberal who went on to briefly hold office as a deputy from 1972 to 1973 for the Freie Demokratische Partei, still the foremost liberal party in the Federal Republic today, but a party which was not part of the contemporaneous 1966-9 Große Koalition of the CDU and SPD. The GroKo held 90% of the seats in the Bundestag and, from the extra-parliamentary opposition’s perspective, seemed poised to turn the BRD into something like the authoritarian State prophesied by Adorno and Horkheimer.]
It’s different with Adorno. This may be discussed rather as the question of theory. Here I want only to summarize it as an anecdote: as we were besieging the [university] council about half a year ago, Mr. Adorno came to the students for the sit-in as the only professor there. He was overwhelmed with ovations, ran immediately up to the microphone, and then just before reaching it swerved into his philosophy seminar; thus, moments away from practice [he went] back again into theory. That is basically the situation of critical theory today. It rationalizes its resignative and refined-individualistic fear of practice, [claiming] that practice is somehow impossible, and so one must go back home to philosophy.
A third thing. Just in the last [few] days it has been shown here, or at least been formally indicated, that something has changed since the enactment of the emergency acts** without becoming drastically and immediately manifest in the structure of the State. From a book fair, which is by definition something like the stage of a critical public-sphere, even if a somewhat antiquated and regrettable one, was made an emergency-camp. We have experienced the systematic targeting of individuals for beating, [for example] yesterday when police stormtroopers surged out of the mess hall. In such a situation, where brutality has become just as manifest as the fact that we stand alone, we need the solidarity of these [critical] authorities. My thesis is of a theoretical kind, concerned with principles. What does it mean, if exactly in the end-phase of our struggle against the enactment of the emergency acts we time and again think back to the concept of the authoritarian State? With this [concept], we wanted to take the problematic of the emergency acts out of the frame of reference of the traditional politics of defense against restoration-tendencies as were current in the fifties, i.e. the defense against the reapproval of corporations, re-armament, and atomic weaponry, collectively a politics which was out to save democracy in the bourgeois sense. With the concept of the authoritarian State, we wanted to posit a different frame of reference, one of revolutionary theory. I would also like to ask, in this regard, what does [the concept of] “authoritarian State” mean in terms of principle for the structure of late-capitalism? This concept has risen to [the status of] a theoretical dictum, not least from the tradition of the Frankfurt School; I have in mind Max Horkheimer and Franz Neumann, and also Adorno. In his essay on the authoritarian State, Horkheimer handled it not merely as an isolated problem of the welfare state [sozialstaatliches] and the philosophy of law, rather he meant with [the concept of] the authoritarian State a change in the whole constitution of the system itself. That means in basic outline that, with the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, the mediating instances of bourgeois society, specific forms of association [Verkehrsformen] such as parties and parliament, have lost their economically load-bearing substance. Parliament and parties had [for their] substance the free commodity exchange of commodity owners who are equally valid and equally validating for another. Parliament was thought of as the political market in which the different factions of the bourgeoisie could politically negotiate their economically differentiated interests without violence. Compromise, in the concept of bourgeois Realpolitik, is the political rationalization of economic competition.
[**Emergency acts (Notstandsgesetze). A series of laws passed on May 30 1968 which gave the government of the BRD the power to establish a state of exception and abrogate certain rights guaranteed by the constitution of the BRD—the Grundgesetz—in a state of emergency. Critics saw similarities between these laws and the clauses concerning emergency powers in the constitution of the Weimar Republic which had been used by the NSDAP and its bumbling accomplice Hindenburg to turn the Weimar Republic into a dictatorship.]
With the growing eclipse of free exchange by oligopolistic and monopolistic market concentrations at the end of the last century, these instances of parties and parliament, the forms of association of the bourgeoisie, lost their economic substance; an advancing self-assertion of the State over and against society took place. For Marxist theory, the legal person is the character-mask of the commodity owner; in place of the Rechtsstaat came the authoritarian welfare state [Sozialstaat]. That means that the State made itself the subject of social reform in order to keep the wage-dependent masses from organizing and coming together. The great organizational forms of the working class forged in days past amidst the struggle for the right to combination, [namely] unions and parties, were, due to this socially reforming tendency of the authoritarian executive, progressively integrated into the structure of that very same authoritarian executive. Max Horkheimer’s theorem that monopoly capitalism is potentially fascism is justified. Fascism, taken fundamentally, is the consequence of the social-reformism of the authoritarian State. An authoritarian State means—and this is becoming manifest with the emergency acts—that democracy can be transformed into the state of exception without a break in political and legal legitimacy. Indeed, one can destroy democratic instances—parliament, for example—by means other than terrorist ones; precisely due to those theoretical presuppositions which I have just mentioned they can be manipulatively integrated into the arsenal of the authoritarian executive.
I’ll summarize it in three levels:
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Over and against the function that parliament and parties have in the State today, where they are no longer mediums for critical will-formation, it is evident that a revolutionary organization cannot adopt the Leninist concept of discipline. It must rather cultivate within its organization autonomous individuals who are capable of imposing on themselves a pressure to perform in the revolutionary sense.
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With the present state of the anti-authoritarian movement, we require critical media [publizistisch-kritischen] authorities and their authoritarian weight for critical enlightenment. We require their concrete solidarity; the theoretical dispute would have to play out as a fractional dispute, not as a contemplative critique from outside.
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The authoritarian State can have society transform into the state of exception without a break in political and legal legitimacy. For the conclusions I will take up the old controversy with Habermas again. He has accused us of infantile pathology; we confuse, he thinks, symbolic actions—building barricades, occupying institutions—with factual situations of struggle for power [5]. When we were occupying the university here in Frankfurt [6], the Hessian minister Rudi Arndt said about it, “We will not let this State be destroyed by them.” It was thus suggested that we, who are still a minority, would be capable of immediately destroying the State. The State must produce a tactical power-struggle ideology and behave as if [the situation] is already concerned with the struggle for political power in the State for two reasons; for one, it cannot, due to the authority-principle in society, endure even the beginning of the emergence of a mass-movement. This became distinctly evident when the student movement stepped over the limits of the academy for the first time and mobilized a strike movement with workers, particularly young workers. For the other, it must produce this power-struggle ideology because a terroristic and brutal approach to the extra-parliamentary opposition is only legitimizable to begin with by suggesting in some way that we could already immediately bring about the collapse of the State. Therefore it needed corresponding falsifications: since July 2nd we’ve known the familiar topoi with which the State authorities transform tomatoes into knives, which demonstrators are supposedly throwing. And so, Mr. Habermas, it is not us who suggest a situation of struggle for power on the basis of the authority-principle in society, but rather the State which is compelled to produce a power-struggle ideology in order to legitimize the attack on the extra-parliamentary oppositions from the start.
[Krahl’s initial address stops here. After him, Karl-Dietrich Wolff, the president of SDS at the time, briefly builds off of Krahl’s points before Adorno interjects to defend his failure to give a speech at the sit-in. He claims that he had to go give an examination and that a student had already been waiting for him half an hour. He also denies that he “swerved away from the microphone” instead saying that he had “not even seen it.” He asserts his conviction in non-violent, “immanent” protest, but refuses to judge his actions as right or wrong. When Wolff then responds by asking Adorno if it would not have been meaningful and symbolically powerful for him to march with them against the ban on protests, Adorno rhetorically asks if portly old men are really the right ones to be participating in marches. Moreover, he asserts, it is his right as an individual not to participate, and SDS is—so Krahl just claimed—not a vulgarly collectivistic organization in the first place. After this exchange, Werner Hofmann—maybe the art historian, I don’t know—criticizes the SDS’s mode of action, accuses them conceiving of themselves as a “substitute class,” insists that the most important thing is “breaking through to the working masses.” Habermas follows Adorno by responding to Krahl’s address, calling him a “party chief who calls the insubordinate intellectuals to order” and accusing him of being authoritarian. Afterward, the Marxist philosopher Hans Heinz Holz gives his address, which Krahl does not respond to and which I will therefore not summarize. Lenk then questions Krahl’s dismissal of the utility of political parties for radical oppositional movements before Krahl begins again.]
Mr. Hofmann has used an argument that is always used against us: that we, the intellectuals and students, should not conceive of ourselves as a substitutional class, rather an alliance of the intelligentsia and, as he puts it, ‘working people’ is what’s important. This argument is constantly falsely advanced. The SDS and the extra-parliamentary opposition, insofar as they define themselves as socialist, do not conceive themselves as a class which takes action in [the form of] Blanquist substitution. Now, we did once rather blindly take up the vulgar-Marcusian formula [7] that only groups on the edges of society [Randgruppen] could still be a revolutionary subject; then, on May 1st of this year we issued the slogan, “class struggle instead of social partnership.” In essence, this is a great turn towards the proletariat. We no longer believe that only groups on the edges of society can be a revolutionary subject of change. In all this, however, the class question in today’s society, the question as to how class structures have changed, is theoretically completely unsettled. All these formulas are more a blind reflex of our own practice than a reflected-upon strategy. The second theoretically unsettled question is how the role of the critical intelligentsia has changed in a society where science is a more and more important factor of production, if not outright the primary one. I pose these questions so that we don’t just issue formulas [to the effect] that we have to connect to ‘the working person’—that [phrase itself] being more of an expressionistic formula than a really class-specific term. Posed in terms of content, the question means this: is it the case today that the intellectual has a natural solidarity with the bourgeoisie, which at least phenomenologically no longer exists, although there’s obviously a capitalist class; is it really the case that intellectuals can only exit society as individuals; is this also the case today with the role that the sciences have taken as a productive force? If now the relation of the State to the economy has thereby changed, [i.e.] because the State itself has become a factor of production and an elementary regulator of the economic process, if this relation of politics and economy, in which ultimately even classes, as they are conditioned in themselves, are constituted, has changed, [then] how has the class position of both the capitalists and the wage-workers themselves changed? All these questions are theoretically open, and we essentially proceed in an orthodox way when it comes to agitation, education, and activation for the working class, but in an orthodox way with the pragmatic disposition that we experience changed class structures in our practical work itself. The orthodox work that we carry out presently advances tentatively: we work with a view towards left-wing union members where there is still a revisionist labor center, as in Frankfurt; we work together with comrades from the Communist Party, and this is by no means over even with the expulsion of the Communist Party wing; we try to form our own cells chiefly with young workers. All this is certainly very orthodox work; this cell-work basically corresponds to the politics of the ultra-left opposition among the German communists at the beginning of the twenties. One must consider this educational agitation work in terms of and with regard to the working class and within the context of the pragmatic disposition that we ourselves gather qualitatively new experiences during this work, experiences which [however] only through theoretical reflection give information about the class structure, about the factual constitution of the class structure in society. Otherwise one runs the risk, like the orthodox dogmatists, of only ever working with reified and analytical, in no way mediated oppositions of class in itself and for itself.
Now, as to what Mr. Habermas said: he has the impression that I speak as the party chief who calls the insubordinate intellectuals to order. He has not justified this impression at all, but there may be something correct in it. To the extent that one identifies with certain functions in the practice of SDS and the extra-parliamentary opposition, it can indeed be relatively natural to gradually assume the reified mode of behavior of a party chief. In this respect, the remark can serve as an occasion for practical self-reflection.
Habermas has misunderstood my demand for unconditional solidarity. This misunderstanding originates from a very specific theoretical approach of his own conception. It’s clear from what he said about the action of the last few days, namely that it had been very brave and escalatory, but not well prepared in terms of reconnaissance. This is, in fact, the case. I would only like to know what function such an argument has if one does not take SDS to be so stupid in their organizational self-understanding that they already didn’t know that themselves. Is it supposed to follow from this that the action should have been refrained from?
[Habermas interjects: “I mean that exactly!”]
If you mean that, then I must contradict you. We did indeed do a bad job preparing this action, but everyone knows the reason. The mass actions against the emergency acts have had a disintegrative and chaotic effect on the pre-existing organizational structures of SDS. At the moment we are truly badly organized. The qualitatively new organizational forms, the informal cadres that have been newly cultivated—and this [goes also for] the college during the ‘political university’ and during the strike in France and [our work with] with young workers—could not yet be introduced into a coordinated organizational framework. But it is not the case that only organizational chaos has been created; we have also developed new forms of organization. But if, with this background in mind, I now take seriously his (Habermas’s) claim, namely that we should have given up on the action, it would mean that the extra-parliamentary opposition should withdraw back into its organizational snail shell—so to speak—and give up on actions until it has organizationally regenerated. That, however, would be fatal for a socialist and anti-authoritarian movement which has constituted and reproduced itself so much in and through action. Secondly—and especially with regard to the action against Senghor—it was poorly prepared in terms of information for the reasons mentioned. The question, however, is whether, despite the overwhelmingly negative reactions that are to be expected from this action, it is not precisely such actions which could initiate a process of enlightenment. We must first of all create the potential that provides this enlightenment ourselves. This action itself can have an enlightening effect in retrospect. We have plenty of examples of such things. Enlightenment does not mean addressing in abstracto the population, which is an abstract statistical mass, but rather addressing certain relevant strata, just as the extra-parliamentary opposition itself developed by first mobilizing the university students, then secondary students, and then finally young workers.
[Habermas interjects again: “Mr. Krahl, I mean only that an action must be justified such that one can themselves be convinced with good reason that they…”]
Yes, naturally! If you are demanding a minimum of enlightenment, i.e. that those who act must themselves be enlightened about that which they are acting against, then that has been completely accomplished. The minimum of information has been given. It is sufficient if one is informed about which means a head of state uses in their own country against the proletariat (for example, the parachutists in France), informed about the means by which the basic foodstuff of a country—rice—is kept at a price level which is scarcely affordable for the poor, namely the fishers and peasants of the country. We have attempted, insofar as it was possible, to give this minimum of information in our teach-ins and furthermore to say something about the ideology which Senghor represents. I believe that such informational minimums, however imperfect, were warranted precisely in the context of such an action, an action which was not directed at a definite campaign, but was on the whole a single action. No one is demanding that the critical authorities run out in the streets with us and join in the Ho Chi Minh chant. Surely, however, they should be capable of devoting enough working time to be active not just with their pens, but also in the context of actions, if only in an advisory role. And then, Mr. Habermas, you could indeed—and this is again the typical topos—have said it beforehand and not once again post festum and retrospectively. One must be resolved to participate in the action in an organized manner, even if this organized participation consists only of enlightenment beforehand. Otherwise you will be exactly the type of intellectual that Max Horkheimer was talking about when he said that critique is only legitimate if one decides to participate in the organization and in action, but that bourgeois critique of proletarian struggle is a logical impossibility.
[The discussion ends with von Friedeburg accusing Krahl of demagoguery for this invocation of Horkheimer.]
Notes
[1] 23rd Delegate Conference. See neue kritik 50, Oktober 1968
[2] Lukäcs, Methodisches zur Organisationsfrage, in: Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein, Berlin 1923
[3] Bedingungen und Organisation des Widerstandes. Der Kongress in Hannover, VoltaireFlugschrift 12, Berlin 1967, p. 101
[4] Habermas, Die Scheinrevolution und ihre Kinder. Sechs Thesen über Taktik, Ziele und Situationsanalysen der oppositionellen Jugend. First in: Frankfurter Rundschau of 5 June 1968; then in: Die Linke antwortet Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt 1968, p. 5ff. [Reprinted alongside related texts by Habermas in Volume II of Kraushaar’s Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung]
[5] Ibid., p. 12
[6] On 29/30th of May [1968] the University [of Frankfurt] was occupied; it was renamed to Karl Marx University and a call for a political university was issued. See: Universität und Widerstand. Versuch einer politischen Universität in Frankfurt, Frankfurt 1968
[7] Marcuse, Der eindimensionale Mensch, S. 267ff.
Appendix
“Refusal Requires a Guerilla Mentality” by Dutschke and Krahl
Other texts by/about Krahl in German and English
Seminar on Krahl in English (ironically at Columbia University)
Website about the German student movement
Adorno-Marcuse correspondence on the student movement
Intro Notes
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Link. https://www.ca-ira.net/verein/positionen-und-texte/bruhn-who-are-the-anti-germans/ ↩
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Reinicke, Helmut. Für Krahl. http://www.mxks.de/files/kommunism/Reinecke.FuerKrahlt1.html ↩
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Koenen, Gerd. “Der tranzendental Obdachslose — Hans-Jürgen Krahl.” p. 4 ↩
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Limone, Noa. “Germany’s Most Important Living Philosopher Issues an Urgent Call to Restore Democracy” Ha’aretz 2012. ↩
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Versions of both stories are recounted in Koenen’s essay “Der tranzendental Obdachslose;” the ‘incubus version’ of the nightmare story appears in Jäger’s Adorno: A Political Biography, as well in the comic I included. ↩
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Contrary to the received idea, it seems that Adorno himself did not dial the phone, rather he had the Hessian minister of education Ludwig von Friedeburg do it after Krahl and co. refused to leave “despite being asked three times to do so.” (Jäger, Adorno: A Political Biography, tr. Spencer. Yale UP, p. 203). In any case he had no problem with the decision to call the cops and followed it up by having Krahl charged with trespassing. ↩
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Claussen, Detlev. Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. tr. Livingstone. Harvard UP, 2008, p. 336 ↩
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Ibid. Claussen, p. 336 ↩
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See his correspondence with Marcuse on the student movement and the texts “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” and “Resignation” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. ↩
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Link. https://field-journal.com/editorial/theodor-adorno-and-herbert-marcuse-correspondence-on-the-german-student-movement ↩
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Angela Davis, “Marcuse’s Legacy,” in Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, ed. John Abromeit and W. Mark Cobb (New York: Routledge, 2004), 46-47. ↩
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Krahl. “The Political Contradictions in Adorno’s Critical Theory.” Translation modified. https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/2021/04/20/the-political-contradictions-in-adornos-theory-krahl-1971/#more-10079 ↩