Adorno did in fact speak of the pathology within certain expression of Communist practice, particularly in its Stalinist variants. Did these claims in fact destroy communism as a movement, or was Adorno actually describing a “Communism” that was in the process of eating itself? What we know, unless you are invested in conspiracy theories, is that Adorno made all of these claims as a communist who was concerned with communism. Just as people are doing now against Gabriel Ropckhill and his supporters, who have launched a crusade against Adorno. I am sorry to say that those on that side of the debate have precluded communism through their demands of a specific kind of practice. Their conformation with Adorno is this fact attempting to reveal itself.

Adorno shows quite adeptly how even a communist can speak against “Communists”. An understanding of what communism requires leads you in that direction, inevitably, when confronted with the historical expressions of the communist movement. Ye the many examples of Adorno picking apart the psychology of authoritarianism does not affirm Rockhill’s claims about Adorno’s “anti-communism.” That one can’t admit that communism itself isn’t wholly contained by those now-dead Communist projects, and feels pressured to depict those projects as non-contradictory, is where confusion starts. No one has ever been obligated to refuse being critical. The demand to silence that process of self-criticism, and refuse it expanding across the entirety of the socialist world, is more to blame for why those projects collapsed. Adorno is a scapegoat for that, simply because he so accurately described it.

Now that these parties are dead, gone, and can’t be resuscitated, means it is probably time to permit criticism of their methods, especially as criticism had no bearing on their downfall, at all. The USSR did not fall because Adorno observed its contradictions. For the sake of the communist movement itself, we have to finally give an account of the failure, and stop playing dress up, dragging around the corpse of dead movements. A demand that no one ever be critical as a precondition for social formation is a part of why we are stuck. Nothing “Communists” offer society now could escape ruthless criticism. That it refuses facing judgment is why no momentum can be established, but any new momentum will have indeed killed off most of these forms of action.

The illusion that parties “accomplished socialism” and “won” in the past would make no difference, even if it were true. What matters is that you are abiding by those older rules and they are not helping you establish a communist practice broadly across society in the current moment. It hasn’t just been a few years of effort, where you could write off failure as just a matter of capitalism’s strength. It has now been nearly a century of these kinds of party formations failing in the US, and they aren’t proving themeless resilient to capitalism elsewhere. It is not simply a matter of leftists not taking the advice of MLs. What MLs want, generally, across their many expressions, is to implement what will functionally be a weight around the neck of social movements. Those in struggle now rightly refuse the kind of abuse that has been modeled in these formations for years, and the organizational structures are just not nimble enough to reach the collective capacities that revolution will require. What MLs see as efficient and streamlined is exactly the opposite, as it denies meaningful conscious expression to all. The orgs become a lifeless body that the leaders must drag around, and slowly that body becomes a rotten, festering corpse. It feels streamlined because no one is permitted meaningful expression. Communists and Marxists must adapt, or they will die under this model.

The problem is that when Adorno talks about things like “personality structure” in relation to authoritarianism, he is talking about the very people who call the Frankfurt School a CIA op. I don’t know what you do about that, but don’t be surprised when “comradely” appeals among these people get you nowhere. They want that simply affixing the label “communist” on a massive society somehow renders any pathological personality structure non-existent. Yet it is their exact manner or organization that fixes this pathological structure in place. The ML mode of revolution is to attempt to use revolutionary struggle as a means of tethering everyone to a group ego. As we have not transcended capitalist society, this amounts to tethering everyone to a pathologically capitalist ego. It should be no surprise why many of the communist experiments had totalized environments that rendered their societies into something akin to factories. The revolutionary practice we take up under capitalism must not mimic its structures, but should permit all social individuals to become more than “one.” Their “individual” identity must be given a new kind of container, that permits depth. This is what would transcend both of capitalism’s “individual” and “collective” individual poles. The communist practice must attempt to secure life for all without question, so this universally sustained life can give birth to unlimited new social expression.

The traditional “Communist” refuses this attempt to rethink evolutionary subjectivity, as if communists, demanding all members of society take reasonability for their relations, wouldn’t want to face down the problems of this personality structure. The “Communist” double down, calls theoretical interrogation a CIA plot, and only demands further that we break society into fetishistic divisions and groupings. Any countering opinion is labeled postmodern CIA Frankfurt School devil magic, even though the roots of this theory all resides in Marx. No, that structure supposedly becomes non-existent when society is given the right label, and the right group of people are put in charge. Such an idea tells you everything you need to know about the Rockhill crusaders, and clues you in on what they find so frightening about Adorno. They are the actual obstacle to the very project they have built their identity around.

To escape capitalism, we must face how it pathologizes us, and we must use forms of organization that act against these effects, and free us from them. We can no longer do what the Stalinists demand, which is double down on the fetishistic, pathological formations, given over to ideological appeals around necessity. These appeals are capitalism in disguise, luring us into a trap. The “Communists” throw on their uniforms and conceal themselves through aesthetics, because in plain presentation you might see them for what they are. The “Communists” of the fetish-form dress themselves up to fool you into thinking they have something to offer.

They only have an appeal to what is. There’s nothing substantive beyond an initial appeal that you kneel to inevitability, based on what they say is an omnipresent truth, but is just capitalist ideology in a disguised form asserting its necessary divisions of labor and politics. Communism as a movement starts with forms of organization that negate capitalist ideology about “necessary” structure. Under no circumstances do we have to be “realists” about such forms and give in to the “necessity” of letting them rule over us. They must be shattered at the start. The adaptable forms of social mediation under communism take a conscious form, passing over from capitalism’s reified forms through a hammer blow. We must shatter the reified forms of capital, only to lay a new foundation from which to navigate society. This new mediation must itself aspire to secure life for all, and must give all involved say over our shared project. We must all be allowed to be the motion that carries communism from the future into the present.