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In the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt school's academic 'Marxism': "organised hypocrisy" Details Daniel Morley 21 April 2023 Image: public domain Share TweetIn the 1960s, especially in radical student circles, there were many fanciful ideas floating about. The most pernicious and erroneous of these was the view represented by Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, that “neo-capitalism” had evolved ways of avoiding capitalist crisis, and that the working class had been integrated into the system as passive consumers in the “affluent” society. As Daniel Morley explains, these were the pseudo-Marxist ideas of the so-called Frankfurt School.The idea that the working class has been bought off and is too conservative to carry through the socialist revolution has been widespread amongst the so-called left intelligentsia and its leaders for a long time. Such ‘Left’ intellectuals tell us that the socialist revolution is ‘unrealistic’, has been ‘tried before’, or better still, that the workers are too engrossed in material things to organise a revolution. This argument is always presented as if it is brand new. In reality, it has been rehashed by generation after generation of petty-bourgeois intellectuals. Those who want to justify their own political opportunism have always found a way to blame the working class.The Frankfurt School, or the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research), is guilty of giving such bankrupt ideas the appearance of intellectual credibility and for spreading them far and wide. Its key thinkers – Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse – are often described as ‘Marxists’, even, if you can believe it, as some of the most innovative Marxists of the 20th Century. The fact that these so-called ‘Marxists’ argue that the working class is incapable of abolishing capitalism provides a quasi-theoretical cover for smug pseudo-left intellectuals to abandon their ‘radicalism’, as they accommodate themselves to bourgeois society.Their supporters point to the fact that capitalism is still around. They maintain that capitalism has changed a great deal since Marx’s day, and therefore, surely Marxism needs to be updated. They assert that the working class has lost at least some of its revolutionary ‘agency’, and that this is a result of the increasingly powerful role of mass culture, which Marx overlooked. They claim that the ‘superstructure’ of ideology and culture has gained a great deal of autonomy over the economic base, contrary to what Marx famously explained.To answer such critics, we must start by comparing the fundamentals of Marxist philosophy with that of the Frankfurt School. This will not be an easy task, since like all other 20th century petty-bourgeois philosophers, they appear to be allergic to explaining their ideas with any clarity.Historical MaterialismMarxism is first and foremost a materialist philosophy. There is only one universe, which is composed of matter. Consciousness does not exist independently of matter, rather it is an expression of matter organised in a particular way, namely the product of a material nervous system.Philosophical materialism when applied to the study of society is what is known as historical materialism. As Marx and Engels explained in the German Ideology:“[M]en must be in a position to live in order to be able to ‘make history’. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing, and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life”.[1]The ‘production of material life’ obliges men and women to develop tools of production and enter into definite relations, ‘relations of production’ as Marx explained, which are independent of our will. In such conditions, the forms that society takes are not determined by our conscious desires, or by the ideas that we hold, but ultimately by the given development of the productive forces. It is on this material basis that different forms of consciousness arise. Thus, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but their social being that determines their consciousness.” [2]In other words, classes arise not from our ideas, but due to the development of the productive forces. In pre-capitalist class societies, we had patricians, plebians, slaves, lords, vassals and serfs. Under capitalism, society is divided into two main opposing classes; the capitalist class, which owns the means of production, and the working class, which produces all the wealth, but which itself owns nothing. In order to survive, workers must sell their labour power to the capitalists.For the Frankfurt School, modern society is one of sheer domination of the capitalist system over the masses / Image: Fred Romero, FlickrIn the...