Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1943-1970)
For Anglophone
readers, Hans-Jürgen Krahl’s name is most distinctive as a marker for a
possible alternative path within the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
Hans-Jürgen Krahl
| Personal
Information
The anti-authoritarian
revolt was precisely a process of Marxist training, in which we have gradually
detached from bourgeois ideologies, in which we have revealed the purely
ideological character of its promises of liberation, and definitively understood
that the classic forms of liberalism and emancipation, which still drive the
liberal capitalism of competition, have definitively passed away. We have
understood that now, in the struggle against the state, against bourgeois
justice, and against the organized power of capital, in a long and certainly
difficult process, it is a matter of conquering conditions that allow us to
enter into organized contact with the working class and to create the
historical pressures necessary for the education of class consciousness. It was
a long process of education which also had to impose itself within the SDS.
Detlev Claussen
| Krahl
and His Conjuncture: An Interview with Detlev Claussen
The task for
intellectuals is not to propagate the revolution from the outside, but to
develop emancipatory needs which go beyond work—an emancipatory consciousness
of the totality. In 1969, the world in Europe still seemed so open, the Italian
Hot Autumn and the September strikes in Germany made such a task seem
appropriate.
Andrea Cavazzini
| Class
Struggles in Advanced Capitalism: Adventures of the Dialectic in the Work of
Hans-Jürgen Krahl
Subjectivity is never
identical, then, with subjection. Insofar as it emerges out of a fractured
social synthesis, subjectivity virtually extends the possibility of an
antagonistic constitution, of a different social and productive synthesis; in
short, the structural mutations of the proletariat and the determinate
possibilities of its organization need to be incorporated
within Critical Theory.
Massimiliano Tomba
| Hans-Jürgen
Krahl: New Emancipative Desires (1943-1970)
[Krahl’s] use of
Marx is not only a weapon against reformism, but also against the practice of
many extra-parliamentary groups which emerged following the dissolution of the
SDS. Krahl’s rereading of Marx intended to wrest him away from groups who
sought to legitimate their own practice by appealing to a Marxist theory
isolated from the historico-political context. Krahl contested the abstract
character of the positions taken by those who assumed their own
actions for the proletariat as a declaration of faith, a ritual of
self-confirmation in absence of a real revolutionary class.
Marco Assennato
| “A
Work of the Self on the Self”: Krahl and Intellectual Labor
1968 therefore
expresses a radical change of the processes of antagonistic subjectivation, and
consequently a major change in the composition of the productive
subject. Krahl knew how to grasp this nexus, cultivated in many experiences
of heretical European Marxism, in his own way: cultural labor is
increasingly determined as common, salaried, alienated, and
exploitative by industry. From this major premise, what follows is the refusal
of the traditional figure of the committed intellectual, by now inscribed in a
trajectory of progressive proletarianization.
Andrea Cengia | Krahl,
Panzieri, and Technological Capitalism
For both Krahl and
Panzieri, the massive introduction of technology into the capitalist mode of
production must not be seen as a sign of the advent of the final phase of
capitalism, but, on the contrary, as the expression of this mode of
production’s capability for greater exploitation, an increase in real
subsumption. The movement of the decomposition of antagonistic subjectivity
corresponds, with disturbing symmetry, to the increase in the organic
composition of capital. The idea of a final stage of capitalism should be
considered a “mythology.”
Strategically,
subjectivity reminds us that no preconceived revolutionary recipe is possible,
that no mechanism exists behind the revolution, that, in the last instance,
there is a concrete enemy to depose. And that this task
belongs to proletarians, no matter whether they work in material or immaterial
production.
