Max Horkheimer

And I'll explain why.

One of the earliest works of the Frankfurt School was something in 1927 by Horkheimer, who's one of its perhaps three key figures.

He wrote an article titled The Impotence of the German Working Class.

The title obviously gives it away.

It doesn't mean it's a good explanation of things, but you can clearly see that tendency with them.

Just to give some quotations from them that really show exactly how they think on this.

Adorno and Horkheimer wrote a book called Dialectic of Enlightenment, possibly the most central book of their school.

It says the following in it.

Um, so Gramsci's work echoes on, obviously we're talking about him, his writer on writing on cultural hegemony, working class, intellectual life, Italian history, fascism, adjustments to economic determinism, and more cannot be overstated following the second world war academics, such as those of the Frankfurt school found him as a source of deep inspiration for their writing and the fit about the failed promise of revolution.

If you see like Max Horkheimer is the father of critical theory.

Gramsci is kind of, it's like grandfather or weirdly influential uncle.

That's like just hanging around the house.

Yes, of course, once you arrive at the age of monopoly capitalism, the intensity with which capital needs to repress working people grows so that it becomes an added temptation.

But, you know, there, Horkheimer's very famous statement, you know, before he went all mainstream and practically anti-communist, you know, he said those who do not wish to talk about capitalism should stay silent about fascism.

I think that the two are very deeply connected.

Because also, remember, it is capitalism that enables mass society.

If you look at the courses I teach, I assign people, among the readings you'll see me assigned are Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian Marxist.

Frankfurt School thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno and even Herbert Marcuse, people on the Marxist left.

Now, why am I assigning those people? Well, it's not because I agree with them.

I radically disagree with them.

You know, like I said last session, it, it-- these people basically broke with Marx completely.

You know, the, uh-- Like don't get me wrong, people like Max Horkheimer, um, Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, they saw capitalist organizational models and the sociological aspects of those models as, as a profound source of psychological scarring.

But they didn't, they didn't view it as some problem in and of itself.

And they, and they didn't view capitalist organizational modalities as some primary target that once eradicated would usher in some sort of perfect paradigm of social justice or something.

Um, you know, so the, the-- So in other words, the Frankfurt School's account of the capitalist system was that labor modalities being, uh, one aspect of systemic alienation owes to, you know, the philosophical turn towards scientism.

Which is another way that they deviated from the Marxian paradigm, because Marxists held out- Their historical paradigm and the, you know, and, and the dialectical materialist process, they held this out as a scientific, uh, process or something that could be interpreted scientifically according to rational criteria.

Um, Horkheimer in particular rejected that.

He said that any total theory of society, you know, had to account for the basic irrationality of human desires and things.