After there is no longer a Party

Academic theory formation loves gaps. If there is no book on the state by Marx, we can diligently work out or rework what he would have said about the state on the basis of suitable fragments. If critical theory supposedly lacks its own political theory, all kinds of derivations are made here too. The difference between elaborations and derivations on the one hand and reconstruction and continuation on the other lies in the method. If Marx has something to say to us about the state, it is not as a state theorist in disguise, but as a critic of social fetish forms, which also include law, politics and the state (see Neupert-Doppler 2020: Im Bann des Staatsfetischismus). If Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Marcuse & Co. contribute anything to political philosophy, it is not as half political scientists, but as critics of capitalist society and bearers of socialist utopia (cf. Neupert-Doppler 2021: Zwischen Grundriss und Bilderverbot). The situation is similar with questions of political organization.

In 1956, Adorno and Horkheimer discussed theory and practice. Horkheimer asks: “Out of what interest do we write now that there is no longer a party, now that the revolution has become improbable?” (Horkheimer Nachgelassene Schriften 13: 51). Three things are conspicuous that are otherwise mostly missing in the published texts of the two. Firstly, the indirect acknowledgement of a revolution whose opportunity has passed (cf. Neupert-Doppler 2020: Nach der verpassten Gelegenheit). Secondly, the linking of the revolution to at least a preparatory organization, the party. Thirdly, the question of how the lack of organization and the unlikelihood of revolution affect one's own writing. The improbability of revolution from the point of view of critical theory does not need to be explained again here. But what role does the party - or, more generally, the organization - play? Answers to this question can be found, as in the 1940s, in Horkheimer's criticism of the failure of socialist parties and trade unions (1.). Anarchist positions have found their way in through Benjamin since the 1920s (2.). Finally, it is Marcuse who poses the question of organization in an interventionist way in the 1960s (3.). In retrospect, the differences between the 1920s, 1940s and 1960s, as well as the distance to our time, are also made clear.

Horkheimer's Critique of Traditional Organizations

In March/April 1956, Adorno and Horkheimer discussed theory and practice; the KPD was not banned in West Germany until August 1956. It would therefore be too simplistic a conclusion if we were to relate Horkheimer's diagnosis of the absence of the party only to the banning of the KPD. Although there were links between communist party intellectuals such as Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in the 1920s and 1930s, Horkheimer himself was probably never a member of the KPD. In the early 1930s, he commented on the relationship between the SPD and KPD: “In both parties exists a part of the forces on which the future of humanity depends” (Horkheimer GS 2: 377). The will to revolution, as a subjective factor, was much greater in the KPD, whereas the SPD was the larger and more united organization, which is reflected in the objective factors.

More important, however, especially in retrospect of the joint failure of both organizations, is the fundamental criticism that Horkheimer formulated of organizations in the 1940s. “The fact that capitalism can survive the market economy has long been foreshadowed in the fate of proletarian organizations. [...] The party campaigned for social legislation; life under capitalism was to be made easier for the working class. The trade union fought for advantages for occupational groups. The phrases of workplace democracy and growing into socialism emerged as ideological justifications. [...] Utopia was still filled with measures. [...] Insofar as the proletarian opposition in the Weimar Republic did not perish as a sect, it too fell victim to the spirit of the administration” (Horkheimer 1940/1968: p. 44f.).

Two of the three traditional organizational forms of the Old Left are directly addressed here: parties and trade unions. The missing third is cooperatives. All three so-called pillars of the labour movement share three sociological characteristics of all mass organizations. Firstly, they have a membership that distinguishes itself from non-members. Secondly, they have a formulated purpose or program. The purpose of the (social democratic) party is social legislation, which is advocated in the bourgeois public, whether on the street or in parliament. The purpose of the trade union is benefits for occupational groups, which are fought for in the workplace public sphere. From the perspective of critical theory, both purposes are inherent to the system. The political and legal form is just as much a part of capitalism as the commodity form of labor power. Which policies a state makes, which laws are passed or how high wages are depends to a certain extent on the balance of power that parties and trade unions shift. Revolution is different.

However, a third characteristic of organizations is more important: Division of labor. In order to fulfil their purpose of achieving goals for their membership, organizations rely on an internal division of labour that allows them to establish continuity, coordinate large resources and wage struggles across regions. As much as this speaks in favour of organizations not being short-term, powerless groups, the division of labour also justifies a sociological suspicion formulated by Robert Michels (1876-1936), for example: It is precisely the power and resources of large organizations that create an oligarchy that knows how to direct the organizations. Michels was a member of the SPD from 1903, and from 1907 he turned to the left towards syndicalism. It was during this time that he developed his theory of oligarchy. His way out? The revolution: “Only a policy of the ruling classes which, in sudden blindness, overstepped the mark, would be able to drive the party masses onto the stage of history as active actors and abolish the power of the party oligarchs” (Michels 1911: 156).

When this actually happened, with the First World War from 1914 to 1918, the November Revolution took place at its end. Workers formed councils that briefly unseated the power of the party (SPD) and the trade unions (ADGB), which had supported the war. However, the hegemony of these organizations was by no means broken, but the councils themselves were already disempowered in December 1918 and relied on a government of People's Deputies from the SPD and USPD. The KPD was only founded at the turn of the year. Michels, disappointed by this attempt to abolish the party oligarchy, became a fascist in 1928. What his organizational sociology heralded can also be found in Horkheimer's work. According to Michels, what the bureaucratization of large organizations destroys is awareness of the “cultural purposes of socialism” and “international diversity” (ibid.: 159). Internationalism was the first thing that the leadership of the SPD and trade unions gave up in 1914. According to Horkheimer, the cultural purpose of socialism, which went beyond political and economic reform work, was lost with the development of the organizations. If even “utopia was [...] filled with measures” (Horkheimer 1940/1968: p. 44f.), this is no wonder. Utopias, like ideologies, are not free-floating entities, but accompany practice. For social democracy, which integrated itself into the German state, the goal could only be the 'future state', as it was called at the time. For the trade unions, which concentrated solely on economic issues, this was 'co-determination'. Where utopia dies, ideologies emerge that bind the expected to the existing; Horkheimer calls this “the phrases of industrial democracy and growing into socialism” (ibid.). The newly founded KPD also tied itself to a state: the Soviet Union. According to Stalin's ideology, socialism did not mean socialization, but nationalization, statism.

So what similarities did Horkheimer see between the tendencies of capitalism, which are the subject of critical theory, and the fate of the proletarian opposition? In both, in the economy as well as in politics, the spirit of administration prevails over the spirit of utopia, a bureaucratization occurs, the self-image becomes ideology. Of course, what Horkheimer summarized from exile in 1940 was already visible earlier. In 1931, the social democrats Fritz Bieligk, Ernst Eckstein, Otto Jensen, Kurt Laumann and Helmut Wagner published the collection of essays 'The Organization in the Class Struggle'. Their daring effort was to save social democracy from itself. Their critique of state fetishism first hits the organizational form of the trade unions. “Instead of the struggle against the state as the ruling organization of the bourgeoisie, it was precisely from the ranks of the trade union leaders that more influence was demanded through cooperation with the state” (Bieligk et. al. 1931/1967: 39). But the party itself was also criticized: “It is in the nature of things that the delegates to a district party conference will largely consist of the veterans of political practice, especially the employees of the party and the trade unions. But these, as Michels seems to me to be right to remark, are predestined to opportunism” (Eckstein ibid.: 158).

Unlike Horkheimer and Michels, who make similar diagnoses, Eckstein outlines a therapy. Firstly, the eligibility and limitation of all party secretaries (ibid.), secondly the direct election by the lowest organizational unit (ibid.: 160), thirdly the limitation of the salary to the level of a commercial employee (ibid.: 161), fourthly the limitation of representatives of the party institutions at party conferences to advisory functions (ibid.: 169). In other words, democratic control of the necessary division of labour and prevention of the oligarchic tendency, ultimately through imperative mandates in parliament: “Only those who undertake to recognize the right of the proposing or delegating organization to recall them may be considered candidates” (ibid.: 173). Similar proposals, which could not be implemented in the SPD of the 1930s, were put forward 50 years later by the German Greens, but also failed due to the integrative power of the political form. So better no organization? No functionaries? No party?

Indeed, at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, radical left-wing organizations emerged, primarily of the council communist and anarcho-syndicalist variety, which sharply distinguished themselves from state-supporting and system-loyal parties and trade unions. Instead of politics, they focused on direct action, instead of wage strikes on the general strike, which had already fascinated Walter Benjamin in the 1920s. Horkheimer only mentions these efforts indirectly, as “the proletarian opposition [...] [which] perished as a sect in the Weimar Republic” (see above). What exactly perished here?

Benjamin's Critique of Oppositional Organizations

The oppositional organizations of left-wing radicalism, which Lenin regarded as an infantile disorder, also moved in the same public spheres as the traditional organizations. In the factories, they confronted the trade unions as workplace organizations; instead of becoming parliamentary parties, they wanted to remain movement organizations; even the cooperatives were repeatedly confronted locally by socialist grassroots organizations. Their self-image is exemplified by this long passage from the programme of the General Workers' Union / Unitary Organization, coined by Otto Rühle (1874-1943). “3) The final goal of the AAU is a society where all power will be abolished, and the road to this society passes by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the exclusive determination of the political and economic organization of communist society by the will of the workers, thanks to the council organization. 4) The most urgent tasks of the AAU are: a) the destruction of the trade unions and the political parties, the principle obstacles standing in the way of the unification of the proletarian class and the further progress of the social revolution, which can be the affair of neither the party nor the trade unions; b) achieving the unity of the revolutionary proletariat in the workplaces, the cells of production and the foundations of the society of the future. The form assumed by this unity is the Workplace Organization; c) the development of the self-consciousness and the solidarity of the workers; d) the preparation of all measures which will be needed for the work of political and economic construction. 5) The AAU rejects all reformist and opportunist methods of struggle, and is opposed to any participation in parliamentarism and the local enterprise councils; such participation would be tantamount to sabotage of the council idea. 6) The AAU fundamentally rejects all professional leaders. Its only relation with official leadership will take an advisory form.”.2

At the level of its self-image, the difference to the traditional organizations criticized by Horkheimer is clear: dictatorship means council democracy, not social democratic party democracy or trade union economic democracy. Participation in parliamentary elections and works council elections is rejected, as are functionaries, in order to avoid the oligarchy feared by Michels, Eckstein and Horkheimer. The sole purpose of the organization was to prepare for the expected revolution. Benjamin examines its utopian goal in the 1920s with regard to the propagated means: the general strike.

Benjamin thinks of anarchism primarily in terms of anarcho-syndicalism/anarcho-communism. Although he takes the idea of the general strike from George Sorel's (1847-1922) 'Myth of the General Strike', he wants to redeem it from the myth. For Sorel, the general strike is an expression of an irrational collective feeling, whereas for Benjamin the general strike transcends the rationality of the wage and mass strike. Benjamin calls the wage strikes of the social democratic trade unions, which merely want to force higher wages, “blackmail” and thus conventional violence (Benjamin 1921 in: GS II.1: 184). He distinguishes the “political general strike [...] (whose formula, incidentally, seems to be that of the past German revolution)” from such economic wage strikes, which can be integrated through collective wage agreements and minimum wage laws (ibid.: 194). In the jargon of social democracy at the time, such actions were called mass strikes and were intended to be political in the sense that they served to implement political reforms. In contrast, as far as mass or general strikes were concerned, “the proletarian set itself the sole task of destroying state power” (ibid.).

For Benjamin, parties and trade unions in the traditional sense belong to the legal form that legally mitigates and fetishistically veils capitalist exploitation. For him, this gives rise to the distinction between reformist and revolutionary actions, because “the first of these undertakings is legislative, while the second is anarchist” (ibid.). Benjamin calls a strike that is not a wage strike for higher wage agreements, but also not a mass strike for political reforms or a change of government, a general strike. It is the general strike that council-communist organizations such as the AAUE (see above) or the syndicalist Free Workers' Union of Germany (FAUD) wanted to prepare. In fact, however, this is an organizational principle that can only be maintained shortly before, during and after a kairós, a revolutionary situation.

Benjamin was able to write about the general strike in 1921, during revolutionary unrest. Rühle, as an AAUE activist, noticed a problem as early as 1924, after the fighting had subsided. “Since the Union is not yet in a position to influence the development of conditions in its favor, the situation automatically arises that union comrades are drawn into the collective bargaining strikes of trade union-oriented workers. In such cases, the union members in employment have to raise the necessary solidarity funds by means of the pay-as-you-go system” (Rühle 1924: 23f.). The activist claim, which Rühle shares in line with Benjamin's theoretical considerations, does not hold water. Especially in times of strike, workers went where the strike funds were fuller. The FAUD, which had 150,000 members in 1921, shrank to 25,000 by 1925 and to a few thousand by 1932 (cf. Wienand 294 and 337/338). It became, as Horkheimer says, a sect.

If Rühle believes that the Union was not yet in a position to shape conditions in a sustainable way, Benjamin could counter that the Union was no longer in a position to do so. Its Kairós would have been 1918/1919, when the organization did not yet exist. However, according to Benjamin, it is precisely at such historical moments that forces capable of action are needed: “The image of ‘rescue’ includes a firm, seemingly brutal grip” (Benjamin 1938/1939 in: GS I.2: 677). The wave of new organizations founded, from the KPD in 1918/1919 to the FAUD in 1919 and the KAPD/AAUD in 1920 to the AAUE in 1921, on the other hand, began late. Benjamin reflects on their revolutionary strategy in 1921, but the revolution was already almost over. Much later, Benjamin came to the conclusion that half a revolution is followed by a full counter-revolution, fascism. In Passagenwerk he proposes: “Definitions of basic historical concepts: Die Katastrophe - die Gelegenheit verpasst haben” (Passagenwerk vol. 1: N 10, 2, 593).

In 1918, the old SPD/ADGB organizations failed again, as in 1914, and new organizations only emerged and withered during and after the revolutionary moment. The FAUD lost 80% of its members between 1919 (150,000) and 1932 (25,000), and the council communist KAPD, which left the KPD in 1921 with half of the KPD members, never exceeded 80,000 comrades. The AAUD, which was close to the KAPD, shrank from 200,000 members in 1921 to 70,000 in 1922, while the AAUE started with 60,000 in 1921, but disintegrated into different currents (cf. Bock 1993: 196). All of these organizations, which wanted to stage Benjamin's general strike, ended up as Horkheimer's sects. Sects are characterized by the fact that they are concerned with the dissemination of ideas. The tendency, whether in company organizations (FAUD, AAUD, AAUE) or movement organizations outside parliament (KAPD), to constantly split is also a tradition of left-wing radicalism to this day.

Benjamin soon realized this too and in 1927 considered joining the KPD instead. “The only thing holding me back from joining the K.P.D. are external concerns. Now would be the right time, and it might be dangerous to miss it” (Benjamin 8.1.1927 in GS VI: 358). At the same time, Benjamin was alienated by joining the organization and wondered “whether a left-wing outsider position is not possible objectively and economically” through intensive work (Benjamin 9.1.27 in GS VI: 359)? Outsider can not only mean remaining outside of organizations, but also acting on the outside of them. As a kind of ideology-critical cleaner fish that helps the big fish in the political struggle, Benjamin worked as a revolutionary literary critic outside the big organizations. What Benjamin was more averse to than the idea of joining the KPD, however, was a purely intellectual positioning, which he criticized in other authors as 'left-wing melancholy', namely an “attitude that no longer corresponds to any political action at all” (Benjamin 1931 in GS III.1: 281). Benjamin's criterion of opportunity also applies here.

Marcuse's Critique of an Unorganized Left

According to the foundation, the Institute for Social Research was dedicated to researching the labor movement. Its party and trade union organizations (KPD, SPD, ADGB), which Horkheimer criticized as bureaucratic, failed to achieve their goal of socialism, as did the workplace and movement organizations (FAUD, AAUD, AAUE, KAPD), which Benjamin initially valued and which lagged behind the Kairós of the councils of 1918/1919. One lesson of critical theory is that organizational form and utopia are interdependent. The bureaucratized associations in the West lost their utopia and fascism triumphed. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, as a cadre party of professional revolutionaries, failed victoriously. “Instead of being absorbed in the democracy of the councils, the group can establish itself as an authority” (Horkheimer 1940/1968: 47).

It is understandable that after 1945, Marcuse and Neumann in particular, who had worked for the OSS during the war, as well as Otto Kirchheimer, continued to deal with organizational issues. Neumann and Kirchheimer as political scientists, e.g. on modern party systems, Marcuse initially as a critic of Soviet Marxism. For Adorno and Horkheimer, it was clear in 1956 that the question of the party could not be answered as it had been before 1933. Adorno: “Perhaps there will once again be a party in a country” (1956: 54). For the present, on the other hand, it is played through, rather alluded to, and rejected. Horkheimer: “Call for the restoration of a socialist party. Adorno: Strictly Leninist manifesto. Horkheimer: [...] We are not calling on anyone to do anything” (ibid.: 66). As little as informal discussions can produce philosophically valid results, the situation is expressed in the choice of words. Not an SPD, not a KPD, but an SP. However, bringing it into being is not a question of criticism, but of missed kairós and buried utopia. “Adorno: [...] We are not living in a revolutionary situation. The horror is that for the first time today we live in a world in which it is no longer possible to imagine the better. Horkheimer: There is no longer a party. Adorno: It is not possible to call for a left-wing socialist party. Such a party today would either be taken in tow by the Communists or suffer the fate of the SPD” (ibid.: 70f.). Both the welfare state in the West and state socialism in the East were, to some extent, false realizations of the socialist utopia of freedom and justice. The SPD and KPDSU were entangled in the administered world on both sides of the Iron Curtain. What remains? Certainly always to defend the bad against the worse and the worst, but in doing so one adopts the standpoint of liberalism, which is not a safe bulwark. Moreover, the worst is also determined in the light of utopia, but this is obscured. What to do?

For Marcuse, the New Left of the 1960s created a milieu with potential, a position that differentiated itself equally from the welfare state and state socialism, the SPD and the KPD. He also agrees with Horkheimer and Adorno that there is no longer a party. However, he sees this not only as a loss, but also as a new status quo. “The new radicalism opposes both the centralized bureaucratic-communist organization and the semi-democratic liberal one [...] The initiative shifts to small, widely dispersed groups with a high degree of autonomy, mobility and flexibility. Certainly, in a repressive society and against its omnipresent apparatus, spontaneity as such cannot possibly be a radical and revolutionary force. It can only become such through enlightenment, education and political practice, and in this sense it would actually be the result of organization” (Marcuse 1969, Schriften 8: 315).

Marcuse can gain something from the New Left's rejection of the organizational forms of the Communist Party and liberal, semi-democratic social democracy. At the same time, he assumes that widely dispersed groups are not a basis for political activity in the long term. The advantages may be a lack of formal hierarchies, a high degree of activist spontaneity and an immediate focus on needs. However, they also lack the strengths of traditional organizations. Informal hierarchies are often even worse than a formal division of labor. Spontaneity can also come at the expense of long-term resource building and coordinated struggles. Precisely because 1968 was also a student movement, it brought in private resources. The hoped-for satisfaction of the needs of those involved often turns groups into circles of friends that lack any orientation towards gaining members and having a broad impact. It is not the private that becomes political, but the political that becomes private. Marcuse was a friend of spontaneity, but not a spontaneous one; he preferred “organized spontaneity” (Marcuse 1972 Schriften 9a: 52f.). In doing so, Marcuse was by no means arguing against the vanguard function that can be heard, for example, in Adorno and Horkheimer's conversations about the party, namely the formation of consciousness. However, around 1968, traditional organizations were not the bearers of socio-critical consciousness. On the contrary: “Where this broke through the party and trade union apparatus, it happened under the influence of ‘external’ forces, mainly the intelligentsia” (Schriften 8: 286). Marcuse did not believe in a revolution without a working class, but at present, “its radicalization is tied to catalysts outside its ranks” (ibid.). The same applies to the radicalization of feminist women's and anti-racist civil rights movements. The dissatisfaction that manifests itself in social protests is not revolutionary, but it is a sounding board for socially critical interventions.

Vanguard parties, as the word Vanguard suggests, lead the way. A catalyst organization, on the other hand, should help to increase critical and practical activities.

In 2017, Detlev Claussen pointed out why Marcuse had an easier time in the USA than Adorno with his students. In the USA, the aim was to accelerate social change without any revolutionary illusions, as was the case with the German SDS, for example.

“The civil rights movement in the United States was very decisive [...], in which there was no claim to revolutionary practice at all at the beginning. [...] This made it much easier for Marcuse to perceive the protest movement realistically. Its goals - Vietnam, and later feminism - ultimately had a catalytic effect on society” (Claussen 2017). Anti-racist, ecological or feminist movements are supported by critical theory as a critique of ideology, nature and gender relations.

Marcuse is always aware that such movements remain the preserve of minorities. Activists in particular need a lot of personal resources for their work. In order to ensure relief, coordination and orientation, Marcuse sketches out the basic outlines of a movement organization that can tie in with ongoing movements. At the same time, he sees this as a grassroots organization that also incorporates elements of workplace organization. In this sense, he adopts aspects of the radical left-wing organizations that had initially inspired Benjamin in the 1920s and whose descent into a sect Horkheimer had to observe in the 1940s. In 1974, Marcuse wrote the following recommendation to the New Left: “Make a virtue out of necessity: The lack of a mass base for a radical mass party (in the USA) and the reformist character of the European mass parties fragment the movement - but at the same time this constellation makes possible, indeed forces, the building and expansion of real grassroots groups which, in the course of development, could become bases for unification on a national scale. Such an organization, which activated not only factories but also residential districts, campuses, etc., would correspond to a non-reified concept of the working class” (Marcuse 1974, Schriften 9b: 154).

For critical theory, it is clear that the revolutionary subject cannot be a fixed object. The utopia of a classless, free society does not arise from any class situation. Nevertheless, critique and utopia must be mediated with practice and organization. Marcuse's movement organization, which is not a party, trade union or cooperative, would therefore also be a workplace organization in the factories and a grassroots organization in the districts. Its emergence, which cannot be thought of as the founding of an association, did not take place in the 1970s. Instead, the march through the institutions - as Jens Benicke says - led from Marcuse to Mao, to the K-groups as a pseudo-avant-garde and later to the founding of the Greens in 1980.

Perspectives of Critical Theory of Organization

The first generation of Critical Theory, in this case Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer and Marcuse, had a distanced relationship to the question of political organization. Benjamin, the oldest among them (*1892), was enthusiastic at the beginning of the 1920s about the idea of the general strike, which at that time was the core idea of oppositional forms of organization that were replacing the three pillars of party, trade union and cooperative. However, it soon became clear that this left-wing radicalism could not be sustained after a missed kairós, as Benjamin shows in his philosophy of history. Conversely, Horkheimer (*1895) and Marcuse (*1898), who actively witnessed the November Revolution of 1918, recognized that bureaucratic parties and trade unions could not be trusted. Marcuse left the SPD after the revolution, while Horkheimer always kept a polite distance from the KPD. It is all the more astonishing that both remained fixated on traditional forms of organization.

Horkheimer reproached the social democratic trade unions and parties for their ideologies - “ workplace democracy and growing into socialism” (Horkheimer 1940/1968: p. 44f.), both of which are to be understood as expressions of state fetishism. Marcuse also used the example of Soviet Marxism to show that the policy of nationalization (of the means of production) does not redeem the utopia of socialization. Nonetheless, the question that Horkheimer repeated again and again in his discussions with Adorno remained in the 1950s:

What to do when there is no more party? Adorno's joke: Strictly Leninist manifesto. In 1970, Marcuse also began with this absence of the party in times without a mass movement: “Where these masses are missing, the Leninist cadre party is not a useful form of organization. [...] But that does not mean that the radical left could simply put aside the question of organization” (Marcuse 1970, Schriften 9d: 185).

Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno, he attempted to provide the New Left with answers that amounted to a unifying organization (cf. Neupert-Doppler 2021: Organization). Radical critique, internal democracy and anchoring as a workplace, movement and grassroots organization would be its hallmarks. Unlike Benjamin in the 1920s, Marcuse in the 1970s no longer believed that such bundling of oppositional forms of organization could lead to the short-term displacement of established parties, trade unions and cooperatives. It would only be a catalyst. “In general, the prevailing integration seems to rule out the establishment of radical mass parties for the time being; the focus of radical organization would be local and regional bases (in factories, offices, universities, residential areas); their task would be to articulate protest and mobilize for concrete actions” (Marcuse 1975, Schriften 9c: 167)

Where do such ideas resonate today? Certainly a constellation that Benjamin experienced as a tragedy in the 1920s also died with Marcuse (+1979): Revolutionary spirit among the anarcho-communist sects against the opportunism of the (social democratic) mass organizations. But even after large sections of the anti-authoritarian Spontis had united with the authoritarian K-groups in the Green Party in 1980, this constellation was repeated as an afterthought. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, the radical left-wing Autonomen, as successors to the Spontis, stood opposite the Greens, who were becoming a party. Critical theory, on the other hand, hardly played a role in the decline of the New Left in the 1980s. The following decades saw the reunification of Germany and autonomous Antifa politics (1990s), protests against the dismantling of the welfare state and globalization - instead of against the state and capital (2000s), and the international rise of right-wing populism (2010s). Social democracy and trade unions, as traditional forms of organization that still exist, are stagnating. Alternative cooperatives, such as the Tenement Syndicate, movement organizations such as the 'Interventionist Left' and 'Ums Ganze', which have existed since the mid-2000s, the small company organization FAU (since 1977) or tentative beginnings of grassroots district organizations in some German cities, are far behind the sects of the Weimar Republic and also behind the approaches of the New Left in terms of their strength. Reflections on this in the tradition of critical theory can be found, for example, in the 'Initiative sozialistisches Forum' (ISF), the 'Verein für kritische Gesellschaftswissenschaften e.V.', the 'Platypus Affiliated Society' or the Utopie-Netzwerk (utopie-netzwerk.de). All in all, what remains of the left is back to square one - and once again facing the O-question.

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Literature

Benjamin, Walter (1983): Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt a. M.
GS I.2: (1938/1939) Zentralpark, S. 655-690.
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Marcuse, Herbert (2004): Schriften, Springe.
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Bieligk, Fritz / Eckstein, Ernst / Jensen, Otto / Laumann, Kurt / Wagner, Helmut (1931/1967): Die Organisation im Klassenkampf, in: Archiv sozialistischer Literatur 7, Frankfurt a. M.

Bock, Hans-Manfred (1969/1993): Syndikalismus und Linkskommunismus von 1918 bis 1923 – Ein Beitrag zur Sozial- und Ideengeschichte der frühen Weimarer Republik, Darmstadt.

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Horkheimer, Max & Adorno, Theodor W. (1956/1988): Diskussion über Theorie und Praxis, in: Horkheimer Gesammelte Schriften, Band 13/ Nachgelassenen Schriften 1949-1972, Frankfurt a. M., S. 32-72.

Horkheimer, Max: Gesammelte Schriften - Taschenbuch-Ausgabe: Gesammelte Schriften in 19 Bänden:
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Neupert-Doppler, Alexander (2021): Organisation – Von Avantgardepartei bis Organizing, Stuttgart.

Rühle, Otto (1924): From the Bourgeois to the Proletarian Revolution.

Wienand, Paul (1981): Der geborene Rebell – Rudolf Rocker – Leben und Werk, Berlin.