This is Richard Wolff from Democracy @ Work responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question
from our Patreon community, and this one comes from Liam Kirscher. And Liam Kirscher asks me
to talk a little bit about Critical Theory, what it is, and to lead from that into
Critical Race Theory; which is what many parts of the United States are
now fighting and debating over whether it could or should be taught in classrooms and so forth.
All right this is a very very important topic. Critical Theory, that was a name given to a group
of Theorists who got together in Germany after World War One was over. They were young,
mostly men, but some women, who were Marxists— that is they studied the work of Marx
and they were persuaded that that was the way to understand how society worked—but they were also
shaken by both the Russian Revolution in 1917 during World War One, and by the evolution of the
regime their first under Lenin but even more they were shaped by what happened after Lenin died:
Trotsky was expelled and Stalin became the leader. To make a long and complicated story short,
they decided that what they wanted to do was to carve out a way forward for Marxism to
develop itself, its understanding of society, its literature of analysis, without either giving up
on the anti-capitalist class analysis they believed in, and yet also without falling into
a mechanical kind of Marxism that they associated with Stalin and the Soviet Union. They were mostly
German, but they also came from several other parts of Europe, and they gathered at an institute
that was not part of the University of Frankfurt in Germany but was associated with it.
It came to be called the Frankfurt Institute (or the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research)
and for short it came to be known as The Frankfurt School or The Critical Theory School.
Probably the most famous product of that known to Americans was the thinker Herbert Marcuse,
who left Germany because of Hitler and became a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts
for the rest of his life. But other very significant writers from that period:
Walter Benjamin, an analyst of the arts and music who made extraordinary contributions,
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and many others. Erich Fromm is another name that is sometimes
derived from that. A remarkable body of work, all the names I just mentioned to you are
people whose work has been translated into English, it's all available. It's an attempt
to develop Marxism in ways that had enormous influence all over the world and still does.
I would recommend it to those of you that are interested
in a deeper understanding of the Marxian tradition, its diversity, and its richness.
People like Bertolt Brecht, people like Antonio Gramsci,
all kinds of people were influenced, and affected by the work that the Frankfurt School did.
One of its most important contributions (and this is my segue into critical race theory) was to say
something like this: to go beyond capitalism, to build a society better than capitalism,
required you to attend not only to the economic bases of society—the situation of producing and
distributing goods and services the material basic foundation of society— but you also had to
attend to the subjective side of society:not only the work and labor that people did,
but also to their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, their imaginary lives.
These Frankfurt School Theorists were also heavily influenced by Freud’s developments of psychology
in Vienna a few years before them, this was becoming more and more important.
They were interested in the subjective, like Antonio Gramsci in Italy, they understood that
there could have been revolutions not just in Russia in 1917, but all over Europe. The
objective conditions (the terrible conditions of the working class) weren’t that different, but
they had different mental pictures of their own situation and those mental pictures blocked them
from doing outside of Russia, what the working class was able to do inside. Gramsci saw it,
but the Frankfurt school saw it also because there had been efforts at making a revolution
inside Germany. They all knew about those, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and the others.
So this is a kind of Marxism that explores the way people think in order to see
whether it is consistent with and supportive of a revolutionary breakthrough coming out of the
economic base of society, or whether it is a break on all of that, countering all of that.
Where critical race theory comes in is to say that last point is crucial.
In the United States, particularly, race has become an idea
that has worked to undercut, to block, to thwart revolutionary transformation.
The reality of white and black people being employees, being guarded and over
ruled by capitalists in the workplace, that is a shared experience of white and black.
And if that shared experience were to create, as it often does, a shared sense of the need to do
better than capitalism, and the reality that we the workers are the majority and can make that
happen. Then you need in such societies (if you're a capitalist) to prevent the shared experience of
being a worker from being understood for what it is. And you need concepts that separate people,
you need to develop ideas, identifications, that make people who might otherwise get together
keep apart. Race: the idea that you really are a different thing,
a different species, a different kind of human, or maybe not even a human.
This idea of race, and especially in this country associated with the color of your skin,
is a divisive mechanism, and it becomes important to understand how and why the idea arose to play
that role. Critical Race Theory does that for the United States. How, where, when,
and why were these ideas of race developed, rather than assuming, for example, that there’s anything
given or natural about it. So yeah, there's a link between Critical Theory and Critical Race
Theory. It's a link worth exploring because you’ll better understand both the Critical Race Theory
and the rich body of work that Marxism represents if you explore these kinds of issues further.
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