“Which Side Are You On?” is a classic union song written by Florence Reece. Written from the standpoint of a union miner’s child, Reece depicts the confrontation between miners and mine owners in Harlan Country, Kentucky. The story goes that Reece wrote down the song after Sheriff J.H. Blair sent men to her home to apprehend – or shoot – her husband Sam Reece [i]. True to the title, the verses appeal to the workers:
They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there,
You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J. H. Blair.
This puts into lyrical form the precarity of the working class. “Will you be a lousy scab/ Or will you be a man?” The chorus rhetorically interposes the scene with the question, “which side are you on?” To waver in the fight is criminal. Whether consciously or not, a “neutral” remains but an agent of the ruling class.
Reece’s song expresses all the resoluteness and determination of a militant working-class that has been exalted by those intellectuals who have called themselves “Marxists.” Vladimir Lenin once wrote of the workers who hid him in the Autumn of 1917 that they:
The phrase “Which Side Are You On?” reflects the popular sentiment behind radical politics. It has its roots in the deeper socialist movements of the 19th century and early 20th century. It draws on a form that may be inevitable in the process of emancipatory politics, but its modern inheritors seem to have lost the narrative.
Historically, “in view of the tangible possibility [of freedom],” individuals were willing to subordinate themselves to a vehicle “which was supposed to solely represent the generality in the antagonistic world.” This meant the party for socialism. The “tangible possibility” raised the necessity of the existence of the party and their path to superfluity was capable of being drawn on as a critical resource against the tendency to become an ends-in-itself. True solidarity “had as a prerequisite the recognition and freedom of the decision [to subordinate self-interest.]” It was therefore an achievement, acquired not out of browbeating, but out of the clarity with which the objective necessity of combination revealed itself over-and-against the differences of people. [ii]
This past genuine solidarity has become absurd in the face of the collapse of effective Left politics. Solidarity hasmelted into brute conformism and sectarian exclusion. Today the language of “taking a side” is instead used by and between petty-bourgeois intellectuals. They ask each other, do you want to be on the wrong side of history – a history which bends towards justice? The point is almost never honest but interrogative. One is found guilty of betraying a cause by the mere act of the question being posed. Such false questions are fit for the capitalist society that poses them, but not for the task of its radical transformation.
The Locomotive of History
You can’t be neutral on a moving train – Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn wrote that while he encouraged his students to disagree with his famous injunction, nonetheless, if “events [were] already moving in certain deadly directions…to be neutral means to accept that.” For Zinn, he “never believed that [he] was imposing [his] views on blank slates, on innocent minds,” but felt he could assume his students had received a “a long period of political indoctrination before they arrived in [his] class[.]” He simply wanted to offer his “wares along with the others, leaving students to make their own choices” [iii].
But what kinds of choices did he expect his students to make? What was the “political indoctrination” that he felt he could assume? Were the students supposed to organize as students, or as some other “revolutionary subject?” Were they supposed to jump off the train, pull the lever, or honk the train horn? Much is contained here that may paint a misleading image of the events “moving in certain deadly directions….”
Zinn’s image of a moving train also raises a specter from revolutionary history.
Karl Marx had famously described revolutions as the “locomotives of history.” That locomotive which had steamrolled through 1848 France, “forced a question of politics…onto the masses of society.” While Conductor Zinn was asking passengers if they were enjoying their trip (and need I remind you, you can’t be neutral), Marx was more focused on the locomotive itself. He did not ask what the “right side” of history was, but rather tasked the locomotive of history to recognize what it truly is: prehistory.
When observing the poems of the workers’ rebellions in his own time, Marx remained true to this goal. Writing about Heinreich Heine’s poem, The Silesian Weavers, Marx claimed that the “theoretical and conscious character” of the poem demonstrated the Silesian weavers’ rebellion as an advance in proletarian consciousness.
Why?
The Silesian weavers, as depicted in the poem, began from “where the French and English workers [finished]” – out of the factory and onto “the society of private property in the most decisive, aggressive, ruthless and forceful manner.”
What was important for Marx was not simply their “courage, foresight and endurance,” but rather that the workers had progressed from “visible” to “hidden” enemy [iv]. Driven by a sense of injustice, the proletarian class has an interest in showing all social forms to be not final but rather one-sided. This was not simply the path to a higher horizon; stopping short would mean accepting eternal agony. But this also meant that the proletariat, as a class, embodied the growing problem of the dialectic in practice. Critique had gripped the masses and became a material force. The drive to overthrow all “fixed, fast-frozen relations” was also in the interest of Wage-Labor’s other pole – Capital. Thus, the proletariat found itself in the position where it would “seem to throw down [its] opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever[.]”
This brings into critical relief, then, the notion of taking a “side.” Society wasn’t simply two sides, but rather made so by the proletariat. Zinn, on the other hand, reveals that he considers the problem to be the passengers making the moral choice to stop a train from going off its tracks. Even if he was encouraging his students to “organize” and stop American imperialism, to pose the question as he did, implicitly takes the political horizon as is. The forms are taken as self-evident, and Zinn clearly believed it would be wrong to overthink them [v]. But then this remains at the level of a wronged liberal society, rather than the need to radically transform such a society. For the Marxists, historically, the whole point of socialism was to first create a subject that could even intervene in any rational way. As Max Horkheimer put it regarding the relationship of capitalism to socialism:
“Insight is not enough, of course, to change this state of affairs [- Capitalism]. For the error is not that people do not recognize the subject but that the subject does not exist. Everything therefore depends on creating the free subject that consciously shapes social life. And this subject is nothing other than the rationally organized socialist society which regulates its own existence. In the society as it now is, there are many individual subjects whose freedom is severely limited because they are unconscious of what they do, but there is no being that creates reality, no coherent ground.” [vi – my emphasis]
For Lenin, not even “seventy Marxes” could grasp the entirety of capitalist society. But the creation of these seventy Marxes was not the next step. Rather the highest task of the age was to “[adapt the evolution of social life to] the consciousness of the advanced classes of all capitalist countries in as definite, clear and critical a fashion as possible.”
How was this to be done? What exactly was to be organized? What was the advanced class?
The “sides” of class society had been formed by the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party[.]” The very organization of the proletarian class – and its correlative, the capitalist class [vii]– implied that “the productive powers already acquired and the existing social relations should no longer be capable of existing side by side.” But then it follows that by time the proletariat spoke, it “merely [proclaimed] the secret of its own existence, for it is the factual dissolution of that world order.” The organization of the proletarian class was not simply a reaction to the crisis; it was the organization and transformation of the crisis.
Indeed, Marx and Engels were bourgeois intellectuals who had “desert[ed] their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.” But to be on their side meant to facilitate the process of the proletariat’s own self-abolition. In other words, the mastery and overcoming of the crisis. The side-taking only made sense to the degree that it was a part in the process of organizing the self-overcoming of the proletariat. Thus, Marx set himself the task of “[explaining consciousness] from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production,” because he wished to remain immanent to the organization of the crisis i.e., to the proletarian socialist movement. What Engels later called “false consciousness” meant the false character of the opposed sides i.e., “the contradiction between socialized production and capitalistic appropriation manifesteditself as the antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie” (my emphasis).
Marx’s whole concern from 1850 onwards was the independence of the proletariat. This was despite its coalition with others in the democratic movement. Was this not splitting ranks? The indepdence followed from the need to advance and deepen the self-contradiction of the proletarian critique through capitalism’s own tendency to revolutionize. Otherwise, the workers would be but an ideological veil for capitalism’s periodic transformations. Independence ultimately was a political concern. The workers were most proletarian when they pushed beyond the forms of struggle in the present; they were most petty bourgeois when they treated them as final. Hence, the battle-cry for the “Permanent Revolution.”
In linking all the preceding stages – from machines to capitalists to international finance – and showing all to have been one-sided, the proletariat reveals the full totality of alien forces to be its own self-estrangement. Thus, Lenin just bluntly states that “[a] worker who takes an anythingarian attitude towards the history of his own movement cannot be considered class-conscious.” Class consciousness doesn’t follow from which side of the picket line you are on or which regional power you tail.
Rather, class consciousness is historical consciousness. It becomes.
Ultimately, the seeming two sides would be revealed to be one side – a product of self-contradiction. To be on the side of the proletariat would then mean leading them to the ultimate conclusion: their self-abolition. “Hic Rhodus, hic salta!”
People vs Class
In the 20th century, the class struggle was transformed into “The People” versus “The Ruling Class.” This was a regression to pre-capitalist struggle; at best, an obscure bourgeois emulation. When it was adequate, to be on the “right side” of history meant the recognition of the reality of bourgeois society against the increasingly irrational pre-bourgeois forms. “The People” was the form of modern society, as the Third Estate, against the privileged elite who were outside “The People” (the 1st and 2nd Estates). Simply put, it made more sense at that time to ask, “which side are you on?” When this is repeated under the changed condition of class society, one now affirms pre-history. G.M Tamas puts it straightforwardly:
The task of overcoming capitalism will not be achieved through a People’s revolution. But worse, it is not simply insufficient – the revolt of the “People” is the greatest resource that capitalism has. The “tradition of all dead generations [that] weighs on the brains of the living like a nightmare” is the classic People’s revolution. Only a short-while before Engels passed away, he wrote that “[the vulgar democrats] reckoned with an imminent, once for all decisive victory of the “people” over its “oppressors”; [Marx and Engels] reckoned with a long struggle, after the elimination of the “oppressors,” among the antagonistic elements concealed among that very “people.” What is even more absurd is that no one claims to be against “The People” – and clearly, no politics is even possible if you are perceived as an “enemy of the People.” Everyone is anti-oppression. Indeed, Marxism would be superfluous if it was the old task of the People overthrowing their oppressors.
No wonder Tamas’s reflection on class is colored with the anxiety of saying the uncomfortable truth: “[i]t is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.” Marxism is and was the critique of that “main reason people become socialists.”
Morality
The interrogation, “which side are you on?”, carries with it a latent anxiety. Pressed further, it becomes “what have you done?” The overwrought question betrays a feeling that one has no effect on the world. This is accommodated in two ways: either by taking a “moral” stance and/or taking the “correct” position.
The moral stance appeals to a truth that may or may not be actual but is believed to be self-evident. Wherever the world goes, I have done the best I could do. I have taken the moral stand.
The discovery of Society in the 18th century revealed the basis of morality and gave it a historical character. No longer did it come divinely from without but rather, it played a part in the broader, historical task of freedom. As such, it belonged to social practice and had a history – values had come into being through the transvaluation of other values. “The ideal of morality belongs to culture,” writes Kant in his Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View. The use of morality out of “love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization.” The reason for morality, then, was to engender life, not excuse oneself in the court of public opinion. For in modern society, the purpose of life was no longer to make the world go around, but rather forward. Louis Menand sums this up:
“Meaning is no longer immanent in the practices of ordinary life, since those practices are understood by everyone to be contingent and time-bound. This is why death, in modern societies, is the great taboo, an absurdity, the worst thing one can imagine. For at the close of life people cannot look back and know that they have accomplished the task set for them at birth. This knowledge always lies up ahead, somewhere over history’s horizon. Modern societies don’t know what will count as valuable in the conduct of life in the long run, because they have no way of knowing what conduct the long run will find itself in a position to respect. The only certain knowledge death comes with is the knowledge that the values of one’s own time, the values one has tried to live by, are expungeable.” [viii]
Thus, the sham “moral conscience” of being “opposed” to something that happens anyways. In justifying the disaster by doing the “right thing,” one covers up the potential that it could have been otherwise by the sound of patting themselves on the back. There is no right side of history in pre-history. Hegel’s point that world history stands on a “higher ground” than morality-for Freedom is the truth of morality- is even more forceful now.
One’s moral posturing becomes but a deceptive “anthropology… indifferent towards that in human beings which is by no means grounded within them as the subject but rather in the process of desubjectivization[.]” [ix] In other words, it is apologia – the wrong thing.
Correct Positions
Like moral posturing, there is also the practice of taking “correct positions.” This too acknowledges that one is presently helpless but feels that by acting as if they could intervene, one can contribute to a future praxis. Did not Marx write during a trough in mass activity? Is one not generalizing about the lessons of the present for the future working class? However, this turns back around on the relation of theory and praxis.
The dubious dualism that presents the masses on one side and the intellectuals on the other was already ridiculed by Marx in his polemic with the Young Hegelians. Intellectuals are as much a part of the world as the stomach in the body [x]. Rather, the value of the “theoreticians of the proletarian class” was to the degree to which they could bring a “real differentiating force” on practice. It is the opposite of theory “serving” practice – after all, that is already demanded by every capitalist enterprise.
This then means that the problem of sectarianism is not really that is actually isolated from the masses – after all, religious institutions have existed for millennium as sects that are deeply ingrained in the masses – but rather, it is part of mass society and thinks of itself not to be. It creates the illusion of a hard-kernel outwards. It remains obscure to itself, a “practice in abstracto.” Consequently, it accommodates to the present circumstances.
The isolation, then, follows from the inability to give form to the relation of theory and practice, so that one can judge the actuality of the critique. This was the role that was played by the organizations of the proletariat. The retrogression of the socialist internationals into mere interest-groups carried with it the collapse of the horizon for overcoming capitalism. This meant that the organization of the proletariat, which was supposed to mediate the contradiction of theory and practice [xi], was instead liquidated by “dogmatization and thought taboos,” [xii] in order to assure the semblance of agreement within the socialist parties adapting to defeat. Consequently, the means of working through forms of misrecognition, such as the “sides” of the class struggle, have been lost. So-called “parties” seem to have no justification except for being “a contractual discipline to stop individuals from going off the rails[.]”
But if the organization of the proletariat was the organization of the crisis of society, then without this, the “correct position” gets put in a double bind. On the one hand, it seeks to justify itself by finding itself confirmed in the course of history. But in squeezing out a “correct position,” one must abstract from the ideological character of the forms that necessitated a critical theory in the first place. Sectarianism germinates in the fight over the correct analysis of society. It becomes the commodity that is sold to prospective members.
“…the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism”
This is the peculiar position that “Marxists” find themselves in if they wish to impart “Marxist” positions. That the “living soul” of Marxism is “a concrete analysis of a concrete situation,” means more than giving a comprehensive and holistic picture of the interrelation of different socio-historical factors in each moment (as this phrase is often explained). It means that half of the truth content is whether the subject that is supposed to be formed even recognizes what is being offered. For Lenin, “correctness of the political leadership exercised by [the proletariat]…[and] the correctness of its political strategy and tactics,” was only to the degree that “the broad masses [saw], from their own experience, that they are correct.” In other words, one can give an accurate and deep “Marxist” analysis of the situation and yet, this can be false because it fails to play in the formation and overcoming of the proletariat.
“Quietism” and Coldness
This doesn’t mean there is no value to analyzing the world or that one should withdraw sympathy- both will happen anyways. But one should have the courage to acknowledge what they are doing, without inflating it into something more than they are at the present.
Theodor Adorno has been slandered as “quietist,” and as not wanting to get his “hands dirty.” The idea is that he was concerned with the things of the “mind,” and not with real praxis. But as he noted, if he contributed to the dissolution of ideologies that inhibited people, he will have “[inaugurated] a certain movement toward political maturity, and that, in any case, is practical.” What he rejected was the false posing of sides that enclosed the horizon of politics. Materialism, for Adorno, meant the critique of the “unintentional” contained in the false oppositions generated by “analytically isolated elements” [xiii]. For Adorno, following Marx, knew that the opposition was but the “ideology [of] men and their circumstances…upside-down as in a camera obscura[.]”
In commenting on the Congolese civil war that erupted after the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, Adorno stressed the need to “escape from this process of exchanging like for like as the telos of history, namely as the goal of liberating history from everything that history has been up to now” [xiv]. This may be denounced by the knee-jerk Left as “false equivalence,” as “apologizing” for imperialism- after all, weren’t the former colonialists, the Belgians, intervening in Stanleyville on behalf of Moïse Tshombe? And yet it is blatantly obvious that emancipation is not going to happen through the same exchange of equivalents, whether as commodities or causalities, that already organizes capitalist society.
The value of a philosophy of history, for Adorno, was that it was a means of reflecting on the possibilities of history and not being overdetermined by the present controversy. Through a historical critique, one could grasp how the same sense of injustice that impelled them forward was the principle of the same society that they were seeking to overthrow. This was not unique to Adorno – he was a Marxist. For Marx, the socialists were not morally superior to the bourgeoisie but rather expressed a “sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system” – they manifested the contradiction of the present regime’s morality. This point was not lost on French Socialist Jean Jaures who reminded the proletariat “that cruelty is a holdover from servitude, for it attests to the fact that the barbarism of the oppressive regime is still present in you.”
Those who wish to settle scores are truly on the wrong side – prehistory. This logic would eventually have to be interrupted to make any meaningful change. When asked about his feeling towards the Israel invasion of Gaza in October 2023, Yuval Noah Harari responded that:
While Harari is by no means a Leftist, let him serve as a challenge to all those who call for “no justice, no peace!” An emancipatory politics would have to strive to be independent, to struggle to intervene freely in history.
Such a resource is more readily available than we often consider. The same callousness that is regularly denounced by the Left could itself be dialectically reappropriated for emancipatory ends. Thus, Adorno wrote to the student activists of the 60s:
“Whoever imagines that as a product of this society he is free of the bourgeois coldness harbors illusions about himself as much as about the world; without such coldness one could not live. The ability of anyone, without exception, to identify with another’s suffering is slight….To claim from a distance that one feels the same as they do confuses the power of imagination with the violence of the immediate present. Pure self-protection prevents someone who was not there from imagining the worst, and even more, from taking actions that would expose him to the worst.
Whoever is trying to understand the situation must acknowledge the objectively necessary limits to an identification that collides with his demand for self-preservation and happiness should not behave as though he were already the type of person who perhaps can develop only in the condition of freedom, that is, without fear.
One cannot be too afraid of the world, such as it is. If someone sacrifices not only his intellect but himself as well, then no one should prevent him, although objectively false martyrdom does exist. To make a commandment out of the sacrifice belongs to the fascist repertoire. Solidarity with a cause whose ineluctable failure is discernible may yield some exquisite narcissistic gain; in itself the solidarity is as delusional as the praxis of which one comfortably awaits approbation, which most likely will be recanted in the next moment because no sacrifice of intellect is ever enough for the insatiable claims of inanity.” [xvi]
[i] He was able to narrowly avoid capture.
[ii] All passages from this paragraph are from Theodor Adorno, 2005. Minima Moralia, Verso: “Cat out of the Bag.”
[iii]: Howard Zinn. You can’t be neutral on a moving train: A personal history. Beacon Press, 2018: 16.
[iv]: In this particular case, from industrialist to banker.
[v]: “I didn’t pretend to an objectivity that was neither possible nor desirable. ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train,’ I would tell them. Some were baffled by the metaphor, especially if they took it literally and tried to dissect its meaning. Others immediately saw what I meant: that events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.” Zinn, 16.
[vi]: Max Horkheimer. “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dawn & decline: notes 1926-1931 and 1950-1969, translator Michael Shaw, The Seabury Press; First Edition (January 1, 1978)
[vii]: Coke and Pepsi do not form the “capitalist class” on their own but only in relation to the organized proletariat.
[vii]: See Louis Menand’s 2003 preface to Edmund Wilson. To the Finland station: a study in the writing and acting of history. Vol. 6. New York Review of Books, 2003.
[ix]: Theodor Adorno, 1969. “Function of the Concept of the Existent,” in Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B.Ashton, Routledge, 2003.
[x]: “The same spirit that constructs railways with the hands of workers, constructs philosophical systems in the brains of philosophers. Philosophy does not exist outside the world, any more than the brain exists outside man because it is not situated in the stomach.” Karl Marx, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung: Rheinische Zeitung No. 193, July 12, 1842, Supplement.” MECW, Volume 2, p. 184.
[xi]: “Organization is the form of mediation between theory and practice. And, as in every dialectical relationship, the terms of the relation only acquire concreteness and reality in and by virtue of this mediation. The ability of organization to mediate between theory and practice is seen most clearly by the way in which it manifests a much greater, finer and more confident sensitivity towards divergent trends than any other sector of political thought and action. On the level of pure theory the most disparate views and tendencies are able to co-exist peacefully, antagonisms are only expressed in the form of discussions which can be contained within the framework of one and the same organization without disrupting it. But no sooner are these same questions given organizational form than they turn out to be sharply opposed and even incompatible.” Georg Lukacs, 1923, “Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,” in History and Class Consciousness, translated by Rodney Livingstone: Merlin Press, 1967.
[xii]: Theodor Adorno, 1969. “Relation to Left-wing Hegelianism,” in Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton, Routledge, 2003.
[xiii]: Theodor Adorno, “The actuality of philosophy.” Telos 1977, no. 31 (1977): 120-133.
[xiv]: Theodor Adorno, 1964-1965, “Lecture 10: ‘Negative’ Universal History’” in History and Freedom, Polity Press, 2006.
[xv]: Yuval Noah Harari interviewed on Piers Morgan Uncensored, October 26, 2023.
[xvi]: Theodor Adorno, 1969, “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,” in Critical models: Interventions and catchwords. Columbia University Press, 2005