I’ve been catching up a bit on the Frankfurt School (broadly construed) lately. Not just the Institute for Social Research itself, and not just ‘Critical Theory’s’ ‘biggest names’ – Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm, Horkheimer, Marcuse, later on Habermas – but the full array of women and men broadly associated with this remarkably fluid, multidisciplinary, and productive institution over its many decades in multiple locations.

I am interested both in what ITS membership said and did, AND on what OTHER folk SAY that that they said and did. This has proved more interesting even than I had anticipated, in part because I had not done much new reading since Douglas Kellner first spoke to one of my undergraduate classes years back. In those I was so dedicated to Marx himself that I had no time for his successors. 

But much has happened since then … 

So from the looks of it, there appear to be broadly two families of ‘bad take’ loosely based upon bona fide grounds that the relevant takers seem simply to MIStake or ‘over-take.’ Then there’s a SENSIBLE take that sensible people, I think including my Closest Comrade and I, are more apt to take. I’ll take the time here to reprise all three.

The bad takes divide into shallow rightwing and pseudo leftwing positions. I’ll start with them, in the order just stated. 

The shallow right take calls the Frankfurters ‘cultural Marxists,’ evidently thinking that phrase ‘self-executing,’ as it were, in no need of further explanation. The notion trades, I take it, on the Pavlovian axiom that ‘Marx = Baaaaaad,’ along with the corollary that ‘X-Marxism’ accordingly = ‘Bad X.’

‘Cultural Marxism,’ accordingly, means ‘bad culture,’ and the Frankfurters who ‘invented’ or ‘perpetrated’ it are accordingly a bad bunch. 

This is a pretty ‘BAD’ take, it has to be said, even though some who (falsely) claim to be Frankfurt-inspired can indeed be quite unhealthily, and Oikophobically, uncritically critical. And this is not only because the shallow right’s complaint doesn’t SAY much of anything, but also because what little it DOES suggest – e.g., that the Frankfurters are somehow the inspirers of the new nazism now rampant among Zionophobe idiots – is if anything 180 degrees OPPOSITE the relevant TRUTH here. 

More on why below. But first on to the pseudo-left … 

The pseudo-LEFT, for its part, calls the Frankfurters ‘Western Marxists,’ which they, almost as axiomatically as the shallow right, denounce as a bad thing in comparison to the only remaining true Marxism by their lights, Soviet Marx-Leninism or flattened determinist ‘historical materialism.’ 

This takes a little unpacking…

In the terms laid out by the great Rosa Luxemburg (whom these people mostly don’t seem to read), the pseudo-left’s beef with the Frankfurters seizes on the latter’s allegedly having wimped or whinged out of ‘REVOLUTION’ in favor of (at BEST) mere ‘REFORM,’ a la Bernstein or Kautsky, after the disillusioning spectacle  of European labor’s enthusiastic embrace of militant nationalism, or even quasi-nationalist imperialism, at the time of the First World War. 

Rosa having been murdered and a gutless Kautskyism in effect having won out in the West, this take has it, the only respectable thing left to do was to sign on with Lenin and Soviet socialism as Lukács in Hungary ultimately did. Since the Frankfurters didn’t do that, they became ‘renegade’ (Lenin’s term) Kautskyites at best, shameful Ebertian turncoats at worst. 

The pseudo-left take on the Frankfurters as just sketched has more basis than has the baseless right’s take inasmuch as it considers actual members of the Institute, but it is still a mistake. It is true that the Frankfurters determined, after the shock of the First War, that a re-think was needed – that revolutionary conditions were not yet fully ripe after all, and both ideological and social psychological factors must be part of the story.

This of course WASN’T PER SE UNREASONABLE OR IMPLAUSIBLE – indeed it seems pretty obvious in retrospect, and probably even more salient now given the mass imbecility of many of those who now (quite falsely) ‘identify’ as ‘left’ than it was in the Frankfurters’ own day. 

What the pseudo-left actually dislikes, then, is not really ‘the Frankfurt School’ itself, but rather the many useless ELITE pseudo-leftists, many on university ‘humanities’ and ‘social sciences’ faculties, who routinely namecheck the Frankfurters and emit sundry terms that they coined, all while at best merely POSTURING as somehow ‘revolutionary’ while in fact merely gassing like cafe intellectuals.

With this affect I find it easy to sympathize. Indeed, I’ve often called these types ‘faculty lounge Marxists’ or ‘Gitane revolutionaries’ who wouldn’t recognize a proletarian if she was au paring for them or trimming their college town hedgerows. As my Closest Comrade, Sally Mju has argued quite trenchantly, cosplayers of this sort have brought the academy itself to a state of crisis.

But to direct, as some on the pseudo-left do, this important critique as irredeemably damning of the full Frankfurter enterprise itself is to MISdirect,, for the same reason that Marx said that he was no ‘Marxist’ – viz., these useless posturers aren’t Frankfurters. They are mere cosplayers and name-droppers. 

All right then, so who or what WERE the Frankfurt Schoolers, and what is the SENSIBLE take on their work? 

And perhaps more importantly, can such work be valuable NOW? Can anything WORTHWHILE be MADE of it?

The answer here’s clearly YES. And this is so whether you are a bona fide Burkean (not pseudo-) ‘conservative or a bona fide Marxian (not ‘Marxist’) labor-emancipationist. 

How so?

Well as suggested above, what set the Frankfurters apart was their intense attention to what Marx and Engels had called ‘ideology’: the modes of thinking and feeling, the convictions and ideations, that tended to accompany and entrench particular regimes of production. 

Marx and Engels had pioneered this mode of inquiry, of course, as importantly ancillary, even crucially complementary, to their concern with regimes of production, accumulation, and reproduction. But as involved practical revolutionaries during heady times they could only give so much time to the subject. 

Marx, moreover, had to complete Kapital, which was so ambitious an undertaking that it was still incomplete when he died at age 65 after decades of prodigious research and writing and organizing and leading.

But workers’ responses, Europe-wide, to the outbreak of war in 1914, then the enthusiasms of working class people for fascisms and nationalisms from the 1930s onward, made clear that the provisional project that had been Marx & Engels’ German Ideology had to be much further developed and extended if the revolution was truly to succeed rather than merely being submerged under more reactionary populisms.

This in turn meant relentless interdisciplinarity in the mode shown originally by Marx himself: philosophy, politics, psychology, social-psychology, culture, and, crucially, all of these things’ linkages, with causality operating symbiotically rather than unidirectionally, to each society’s dominant technologies and relations of PRODUCTION.

And, heavens, the achievements the Frankfurters logged along these lines were impressive. The political economists among them did great work on profitability and crisis that will doubtless prove useful as AI use spreads. The political scientists in turn produced astonishingly full-faceted analyses of fascist state structures that seem chillingly relevant right now.

The Frankfurt social psychologists and sociologists, in turn, produced monumental work on nazism and antisemitism that is AMAZING applicable to the mass Zionophobe psychosis overtaking most ‘western’ societies now. And the cultural analysts diagnosed mass-culture and culture ‘industries’ in ways that say much about how the media-mediated mind viruses infecting us now are still propagated.

This is precisely the mind of MARX HIMSELF had planned to do, and these are the subject areas he’d planned to cover, after finishing with political economy in Kapital – the latter amounting, for all its immensity, still to no more than about 1/10th of what Marx had planned! He simply did not live long enough to cover the ground he’d provisionally mapped. 

In this sense, then, the Frankfurters were the most authentic imaginable successors of Marx himself.

There is as much need of this succession NOW as EVER there’s been – and still, as per Marx’s own plans, FOR THE CAUSE OF PROMETHEAN HUMAN EMANCIPATION. 

Surely no one who cares about liberation can deny this, as the current permutations of capitalism – ‘commercial,’ ‘finance,’ ‘platform,’ ‘consumer’ and other forms diagnosed as early as Kapital’s Volume III – now make not only ‘CLASS consciousness,’ but even mere sustained CONSCIOUSNESS ITSELF, all but impossible. 

Two cheers, then, for the Frankfurters and their combined scientific and liberatory project. But THREE cheers for those who’ll now UPDATE AND FURTHER ADVANCE that grand project.

This continuation of Marx’s true mission will NOT be advanced by those who want merely to TALK about PAST FIGURES, with FELLOW-PRIESTLY ELITES at cafes and lounges. 

It will advance only through those whose main commerce is with the actual struggling people whom current production modes keep desperate and whom current cultural modes keep inert. 

It is ultimately they, not the name-droppers, book-clubbers, and gossip-mongers, whose freedom will determine our successes and failures.