#frankfurtschool — Public Fediverse posts

Weekend philosophy reading:

🐙 Marcuse Was Right. Capitalism Is the Cage. 💜

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher of the Frankfurt School who asked an inconvenient question: why do people defend systems that exploit them?

Not because people are stupid. Not because they secretly enjoy oppression. But because power does not merely control what we do. It can shape what we want, what we consider normal, and what we believe is even possible.

In One-Dimensional Man (1964), Marcuse examined how advanced capitalism integrates people into its own logic, offering comfort, consumption and the appearance of freedom while narrowing the space in which genuinely radical alternatives can be imagined.

Capitalism learned to sell us the cage, decorate the bars, and convince us that choosing the colour was an act of liberation.

And honestly? Look at your phone.

Your social media platform tells you that you are building community while an algorithm decides which voices you hear. Your employer sends you wellness tips while scheduling you into exhaustion. Your shopping app offers you a rainbow-coloured corporate Pride collection while queer people are still fighting for housing, healthcare, safety and the right to exist without being turned into somebody else's political football.

You can even buy a T-shirt saying EAT THE RICH from a billionaire-owned marketplace. The revolution is available in six sizes, free shipping over €49. Capitalism would monetise the guillotine if it could get a decent margin on the blades.

This is the problem Marcuse helps us see: a system can absorb the symbols of resistance while leaving the structures of domination intact.

And this is why the Frankfurt School matters. It asks us to look beyond the official story society tells about itself. It asks who benefits, whose needs are being served, which desires have been manufactured, and why we keep mistaking the familiar for the inevitable.

Marcuse's Great Refusal is the refusal to accept that this is simply how things have to be.

Not a refusal to think. Not a refusal to engage with reality. Quite the opposite. It is a refusal to let the limits imposed by the present define the boundaries of the possible.

Because liberation cannot mean merely getting a slightly better deal from an exploitative system. It must also mean transforming the conditions that make exploitation possible.

And that includes the intimate, everyday business of being human: our relationships, our bodies, our desires, our time, our imagination. A society that measures everything by productivity and profitability will eventually struggle to understand anything that cannot be turned into a commodity.

Friendship becomes networking. Rest becomes a productivity hack. Identity becomes a marketing demographic. Even rebellion gets a brand partnership.

No, thank you. 💜

Of course, Marcuse is not above criticism. Critical theory must itself remain open to criticism, including questions about agency, disagreement and the danger of assuming that somebody else knows what liberation ought to look like. Emancipation without the freedom to think differently would be a rather peculiar sort of emancipation.

But his central challenge remains: what would freedom mean if we stopped defining it in the language of the system from which we want to be free?

Your friendly neighbourhood purple octopus would like to remind you that having seventeen subscription services, forty-seven varieties of breakfast cereal and the theoretical right to become a freelance content creator does not necessarily constitute human emancipation.

We deserve more than consumer choice masquerading as political freedom. More than corporate tolerance masquerading as equality. More than survival with a wellness app.

We deserve a world in which human beings are not required to justify their existence through their economic usefulness.

Read Marcuse. Question the normal. Refuse the inevitable.

And please remember: the revolution does not become less radical because we approach it with kindness, good manners, purple hair and excellent socks.

Abolish the cage. Keep the cats. 🌸🐈‍⬛💜

You can read more texts like this on my Ko-Fi:
https://ko-fi.com/thepurpleoctopus
And if you like, you can support me there. My texts itself will always remain free.

#HerbertMarcuse #FrankfurtSchool #CriticalTheory #GreatRefusal #AntiCapitalism #Emancipation #QueerLiberation

Because I was recently asked which kind of Frankfurt School Dinosaur I was, to which I answered: "A Marcusesaurus", here is a small Herbert Marcuse moment for the age of AIshittification:

First things first, Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher and social theorist, one of the thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School. He wrote extensively about capitalism, technology, consumer society, and the rather inconvenient possibility that modern societies can make domination feel like freedom.

That last bit feels remarkably contemporary.

Marcuse’s point was not that technology is inherently evil. It was that technology does not exist in a vacuum. The question is who designs it, for what purpose, and within which economic and social structures.

And so, when we are told that AI will make everything faster, cheaper and more efficient, Marcuse gives us a useful little philosophical eyebrow raise.

Faster for whom?

Cheaper for whom?

Efficient towards what end?

Because there is a peculiar kind of technological progress in which everything becomes more efficient except the lives of the people actually doing the work.

Translation without translators. Writing without writers. Art without artists. Customer service without humans. And somehow the promised liberation repeatedly turns into more surveillance, more extraction, more precarious work and more things being optimised that nobody particularly wanted optimised in the first place.

That is where Marcuse meets enshittification.

A service begins by serving human needs. Then it becomes infrastructure. Then it becomes indispensable. And eventually the machine is reorganised around extraction, monetisation and control, while we are politely informed that this is all being done for our convenience.

Marcuse would probably have had some questions.

Not simply:

“What can this technology do?”

But:

“What kind of society does this technology help create?”

And perhaps most importantly:

“What does it make us become?”

That is a much nastier question.

Which is precisely why I like it.

#HerbertMarcuse #FrankfurtSchool #CriticalTheory #AI #AIshittification #Technology #Capitalism #DigitalCapitalism #HumanLabour #Philosophy

Wagner To Sleaford Mods: The Frankfurt School On Music In 10 Songs
#CriticalTheory #Music #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno
https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/frankfurt-school-adorno-music/

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”*…

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote a 75 page book in his twenties, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that he thought solved philosophy, then stepped away from the field. Years later, he came back and spent the rest of his life dismantling and reconstructing many of his own ideas (as reflected in his second book, Philosophical Investigations).

Marco Giancotti has created a new way to read the famously-difficult Tractatus…

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote most of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while fighting in World War I. When he was done, he believed this book made philosophy obsolete, so he found a job as an elementary school teacher. While he would later change his mind on its finality, the Tractatus remains one of the most important works of philosophy to this day.

The Tractatus has an unusual shape: it is not a sequence of chapters but a tree of statements and sub-statements and sub-sub-statements. At its root, it is made of only seven brief statements. In other words, it is not a linear read but a branching set of rabbit-holes.

This page is an attempt at making that tree maximally traversable and interactive. Use the tools available to explore, make cross-sections, annotate, fold and sculpt the book the way you prefer. Save any set of pins as a named thread in the control panel, or bookmark the page in your browser. Export the result as a Markdown or PDF file to keep, or share a special link that reopens your annotated version of the book in someone else’s browser...

A new way into Wittgenstein: “The Foldable Tractatus,” from @marcogiancotti.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy.

Read (Wittgenstein’s mentor, then later, antagonist) Bertrand Russell‘s introduction to the Tractatus on Project Gutenberg.

* Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

###

As we fumble with philosophy, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Theodor Adorno; he was born on this date in 1903. A philosopher, cultural, and music critic, he was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, he authored numerous works—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics—that strongly influenced the European New Left.

A classically-trained musician (who studied composition with Alban Berg), Adorno devoted his final (and posthumously-published) book, Aesthetic Theory, which he had planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, to arguing against the “fatal separation” of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy and to exploding the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion.

Adorno critiqued all forms of positivism as responsible for technocracy and disenchantment and sought to produce a theory that both rejected positivism and avoided reinstating traditional metaphysics. He has been criticized for over-applying the term “positivism,” especially in his interpretations of Wittgenstein (and Karl Popper) as positivist.

source

The Cultural Marxist conspiracy

https://anticapitalistresistance.org/the-cultural-marxist-conspiracy/

"#GabrielRockhill’s polemic against #WesternMarxism seeks to condemn a set of postwar left-wing intellectuals such as #HerbertMarcuse. Heavy on innuendo but light on evidence, the result is more like a show trial than a serious political indictment."

#RussellJacoby's withering review of #WhoPaidThePipersOfWesternMarxism

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/review-rockhill-western-marxism-cold-war/
#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #NewLeft #snitchjacketing #hacks #campism #Rockhill #books @bookstodon

Nancy Fraser on Habermas

'My ties to Habermas were multi-layered. He was an inspiration and a role model; a mentor and an antagonist; a figure who showed me early on how to practise ‘critique with an emancipatory intent’ but from whom I eventually had to distance myself'

#frankfurtSchool #habermas #philosophy #nancyFraser #marxism #criticalTheory #literature #bookstodon

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/march/after-habermas

R.i.P. Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas was a German philosopher and sociologist. For decades he was one of the world's most influential intellectuals as a representative of the Frankfurt School.

#German #philosopher #Habermas #JurgenHabermas #frankfurtokulu #frankfurtschool #entellectual #portraitdrawing #portrait #firuzkutal

RIP Jürgen Habermas #frankfurtschool #philosophy

“Though a disciple and eventual leader of the famed #FrankfurtSchool of critical social theory, Mr. #Habermas had more faith in the promise of #modernity than mentors like #TheodorAdorno and #MaxHorkheimer”

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:5zca2ola2zxpkw37w4f3wxtu/post/3mgzzxdvp7s2x

According to the (pseudoscientific) "California F-Scale" (Adorno, Frankfurt School, 1947), I am a "liberal airhead."
That should probably go in my bio. 😆🤣

https://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm

#FrankfurtSchool
#CaliforniaFScale
#PersonalityTests
#TheodorAdorno
#philosophy
#fascism
#authoritarianism
#liberalism

1/6
Ever feel like the more "rational" our world gets, the more nonsensical it feels? In 1944, while the world was on fire, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer dropped a philosophical pipe bomb: Dialectic of Enlightenment.
They didn't just want to critique the Nazis; they wanted to know why humanity was "sinking into a new kind of barbarism" instead of becoming truly free. #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Philosophy

"'Cultural Marxism' is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords – but what does this term mean and where did it come from? This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and neo-Nazi terrorists who believe that ‘Cultural Marxists’ are conspiring to trigger the demise of modern civilization. In this deeply researched account, Woods explains how the ‘Frankfurt School’ group of German thinkers were recast as the orchestrators of a plot to destroy the West. Instead of simply ‘debunking’ this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements who have advanced this damaging idea. Only when we identify the specific practices and agendas of those who promote the 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory can we hope to neutralize its repressive and often fatal consequences. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to understand the ideological currents that are shaping right-wing politics in the 21st century."

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3239-the-cultural-marxism-conspiracy

#CulturalMarxism #ConspiracyTheory #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool

From an amazing new publishing house:
#philosophy #psychology #sociology #history #psychoanalysis #politicalscience #religion #religiousstudies #academia #academicchatter #technology #war #Trump #frankfurtschool #criticaltheory #middleeast #MENA #newbooks

"Bourgeois economists are incapable of confronting the falsity of their understanding of competition: For the bourgeoisie, the fall of serfdom and mercantilism seemed to have abolished class distinctions, producing what they understand as the natural order of competition among free individuals. This order is supposed to be the correct way for human society to be organized, the realization of our innate propensity to truck and barter. In this vision of bourgeois society, every subject is both producer and consumer; there is no class. Anything that disrupts this picture is an intrusion of the non-economic into the sphere of the economic. To the extent that they are willing to acknowledge it, monopolization compels the bourgeoisie to admit that the unequal distribution of power continues to exist under their rule. Rather than accepting the falsity of their understanding of competition, however, the bourgeoisie understands monopolization solely as a regression to a prior mode of direct class rule. They admit that competition, as they understand it, no longer exists, but they believe that it once did, and that what exists today is no longer genuine competition.

Against this, Horkheimer understands pre-monopoly capitalism as characterized both by competition that reached all members of the population and by the unresolved problem of power. Whether by “birth or deceit, brutality or shrewdness, expertness in engineering machinery or human relations, by marriage or adulation,” there have always been groups that have managed the competitive processes within capitalism. Racketization is a reversion to more direct forms of domination, but these forms were always present, hidden behind the apparently rational market system, and this “was already clear to everyone except for the professors in the times of so-called liberalism.”"

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/Competition/

#FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #CriticalTheory #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Competition #Horkheimer #Capitalism

"Sourced from the Max-Horkheimer-Archiv (MHA), both fragments—“On The Relation Between Critical Intellectuals, the Proletariat, and the Communist Party” and “The Curse of Writing Today”—are located under the subheading “Miscellaneous Manuscripts (1946),”1 filed alongside three (of the four surviving) typescripts from Horkheimer’s “Conversations with Theodor W. Adorno,” recorded during the first two weeks of October 1946, about the planned sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment. These Diskussionsprotokolle were first published posthumously in Volume 12 of Horkheimer’s Gesammelte Schriften under the title: “Rettung der Aufklärung. Diskussionen über eine geplante Schrift zur Dialektik.”2 In addition to these discussions, the last two fragments under the same subheading were also selected for publication in the same volume of Horkheimer’s GS: “Towards a Critique of the American Social Sciences” and “The Fate of Revolutionary Movements,” each of which is also dated “October 1946.”3 One possible motive for the omission of the fragments below from Horkheimer’s GS is difficulty in determining authorship. Despite a number of indications to the contrary in the text of the fragments themselves, the archivists (tentatively) attribute them to Adorno alone—a problematic approach the archivists seem to have adopted for several other unpublished fragments from the archive with indeterminate authorship as well.4 In terms of content, there are two grounds for rejecting this attribution."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/HA_Fragments_1946/

#CriticalTheory #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Horkheimer

🎮

#capcom #frankfurtschool

Another great discussion w/ #RossWolfe about his trilogy of essays critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9QM64C1glw

(the trilogy is here:
https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/)

#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #socialism #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books #bookstodon @bookstodon

Fascinating trilogy of essays by Brooklyn Rail's #RossWolfe critiquing the late neo-Stalinist philosopher & historian #DomenicoLosurdo, w/ particular focus on #Losurdo's attacks on #WesternMarxism in his eponymously titled book.

https://newintermag.com/against-losurdo/
https://newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/
https://newintermag.com/revisionism-revisited/

Also a great pod discussion of the series w/ Ross: https://www.patreon.com/posts/138384057

#Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #politicalTheory #historyOfMarxism #Stalinism #campism #philosophy #books @bookstodon

"In his afterword, Gordon acts as an intellectual tour guide for readers who may be unfamiliar with Adorno’s oeuvre. Throughout the lecture, Adorno refers to a range of concepts and arguments from his other texts without fully explaining or clarifying them – Gordon graciously fills in the gaps. With a delicate touch, he also reflects on how we might read this text amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. While Adorno was willing to enlist police authority to stamp out antisemitism, Gordon points out that Germany’s strict anti-antisemitism laws have repressed legitimate criticism of Israel’s policies. To pick an ironic example, the translator of Fighting Antisemitism Today belongs to a pro-Palestinian Jewish activist group that had its bank account frozen after being accused of antisemitism by a state-funded research institute. Instead of trying to pin down the seemingly ever-shifting line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, Gordon counsels us to hold true to the universalist ethos of Adorno’s lecture: ‘the concluding injunction that such a thing must never happen again expresses an ethical requirement that applies to all peoples and states without exception’ (67). It offers, for Gordon, the only valid standard for judging Israel’s actions in Gaza today. It is a reminder that the very impulses that motivate antisemitism are also present in Islamophobia and racism.

We are, once more, living through the resurgence of militant and excessive nationalisms, where ingroups around the world seek to deprive some Other of personhood and pity. It is up to us to stand against it and to stand firm. As Adorno warns in this lecture, ‘the worst thing is to relent’"

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/22263_fighting-antisemitism-today-by-theodor-w-adorno-reviewed-by-a-j-a-woods/

#CriticalTheory #Adorno #FrankfurtSchool #Antisemitism #Germany

New in Artforum

Tools of the Trade
Yuk Hui speaks with Daniel Birnbaum about his philosophy of technology

[Technological reason's] distancing effects make it an enemy of more authentic forms of experience, like that of great art. For Martin #Heidegger—a thinker on the other extreme of the political spectrum from the Frankfurt School—what in German is called Technik represented the ultimate threat.

#FrankfurtSchool #YukHui
https://www.artforum.com/features/yuk-hui-daniel-birnbaum-interview-1234733869/

"To the extent early critical theory seems to us to have a tragic character, this does not derive from the fact it has largely been forgotten, but from the fact it is still needed at all. For us, as for the early critical theorists themselves, the enduring validity of the critical theory of society, of its critical diagnostic of capitalist society and its social theorists, is a bitter confirmation that its dream is still unrealized. Critical Theory is only right in a wrong world.

Following recent scholarship on the origin and formation of critical theory (a period stretching from the late 1910s through the early 1940s, though we focus on the 1930s), our recovery takes its point of orientation from the intersection of two premises. First, early critical theory was—and can only be adequately understood and evaluated as—a development and extension of the Marxian critique of political economy, which inherited the impulses of dissident (and particularly councilist) communism. Second, the traditional, and still predominant, reception of early critical theory has not interpreted it as such given, on the one hand, the popular context, intellectual and political, in which it has been received since the student movements of the late 60s, 2 and, on the other, the neglect in academic scholarship of the esoteric form of writing consciously cultivated by early critical theorists. 3

This esoteric form of early critical theory is configured by three elements: tactical self-censorship, esoteric technique, and the negative method of presentation required by the dialectical conception of the critique of political economy."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/MarginNotes_1_1/

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Capitalism #Marxism #PoliticalEconomy

"This introduction to the special section “Critical Theory after Frankfurt” reflects on recent demands to reorient Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the wake of its centennial toward the critique of political economy, capitalism, colonialism, militarism, and the climate crisis. It reviews concerns that critics have raised about Jürgen Habermas’s inheritance of Critical Theory, and it considers several of the alternative paths proposed for charting the Frankfurt School’s future. It argues that, in place of simply reviving the Critical Theory of the 1930s and 1940s, Critical Theory’s reorientation should also consider its diffuse receptions and trajectories among abolitionist, feminist, and left-wing activists and intellectuals in the United States, beginning with the student voices of 1968."

https://read.dukeupress.edu/new-german-critique/article/52/2%20(155)/1/402174/Introduction-Critical-Theory-after-Frankfurt

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #PoliticalEconomy #Capitalism

"The texts collected here belong to the materials on ‘racket theory’ composed by members of the Institute for Social Research between 1941 and 1944. More specifically, they were mostly (probably) written by Max Horkheimer, albeit with considerable input from Theodor W. Adorno and occasional feedback from others.
(...)
The history of the ‘racket theory’ corpus is difficult to reconstruct. We have found it helpful to divide our subsequent analysis of the racket theory project into three major sections, which are not exclusive in terms of content. Our narrative starts with the earliest use of the term in Max Horkheimer’s essay “The End of Reason” (1942). After this, we turn to analyzing the stream of texts which were explicitly composed for or about publication(s), mostly written between spring 1942 and fall 1943. Then we treat the topic of reflexivity and the specific character of the racket theory project that flows from its particular form of reflexivity. Finally, we briefly discuss some particularities of the core racket theory texts before concluding. Translations from additional German sources are our own."

https://ctwgwebsite.github.io/blog/2025/RacketIntro/

#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #RacketTheory #StateCapitalism

Happy birthday Walter Benjamin! His theoretical piece “The Work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction” changed my entire theoretical outlook. One day I’ll write a book about the fascist aesthetic..someday.. #theorists #frankfurtschool #politicaltheory

🧵 1/2

I've just finished reading Herbert Marcuse's "The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics".

Marcuse makes a powerful case for the the autonomy of art, as neither an escapist refuge nor a simple tool or superstructural reflection of social forces, but as a radical emancipatory force in its own right.

Even though proponents of the orthodox Marxist aesthetics he criticizes must be as rare as hen's teeth today, his argument, mutatis mutandis, can still be read with profit today by all on the left.

I read it in hard copy, but it's short enough to read online as a PDF:

http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/aesthetic-dimension-_-marcuse.pdf

The work was originally published in German under the title "Die Permanenz
der Kunst: Wider eine bestimmte Marxistische Aesthetik" in 1977.

In that same year....

#Philosophy #Aesthetics #Marcuse #FrankfurtSchool #CriticalTheory #Marxism #PhilosophyOfArt #LiteraryTheory

Good Stuff ->

Critical Marxist Theory: Political Autonomy and the Radicalising Project of Modernity

Lukas Meisner

(Springer Nature, 08/06/2025 - 409 páginas)

"This book argues why Critical Theory – as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung – must be updated to help us tackling today’s capitalist polycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises. Yet, following the dissolution of the Institute for Social Research in New York, and the latest with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. To understand and overcome this domestication, the book traces, with the means of philosophy and sociology, its two affirmative steps in a liberal and in a postmodern turn. As an alternative to both, it defends Habermas’ project of modernity, yet only by disentangling it – in Marxian fashion – from the capitalist process of modernisation. This disentanglement is at the same time a political radicalisation. It is necessary because the cultural-political ideal(s) of the project of modernity – from human autonomy via rational society to qualitative individuality – can only be realised beyond the framework of capitalism. As their conceptual concentrate, the book proposes political autonomy as a key concept confined neither by Kantian or liberal approaches nor by autonomist or operaist traditions. Rather, it draws on thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Martin Hägglund to rephrase Marxist concepts such as social freedom, democratic socialism, and the end of prehistory. In this way, political autonomy is developed both as a legit criterion for justified critique and as the philosophical foundation and emancipatory goal of a pluralist yet transcapitalist Critical Marxist Theory."

https://books.google.pt/books?id=0R9kEQAAQBAJ

#CriticalTheory #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Modernity #Capitalism #PoliticalAutonomy #Marcuse #Philosophy #Sociology

"Desde su recepción por la Nueva Izquierda anglófona en la década de 1970, la Teoría Crítica de Horkheimer y Adorno ha sido criticada por marxistas y habermasianos por abandonar la economía política. Luego, tras la crisis financiera de 2008, teóricos contemporáneos de la Escuela de Fráncfort, como Nancy Fraser, han desarrollado críticas al capitalismo, mientras que marxistas como William Clare Roberts, han reconstruido la teoría crítica de la dominación abstracta e impersonal de Marx.

Retomando estos debates teóricos, en la conferencia “Una teoría crítica de la dominación social”, Chris O’kane nos ofrece una interpretación de una rama particular de la teoría crítica que se originó en el pensamiento de Horkheimer. De esta rama se puede derivar un programa de investigación distinto de la crítica de la economía política, entendida como una teoría crítica de la dominación social, y opuesta al marxismo tradicional y a la teoría crítica habermasiana."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mR22IB5AyeQ

#CriticalTheory #Marxism #SocialDomination #FrankfurtSchool #Marx #Horkheimer #Adorno #PoliticalEconomy

🧵 1/5
A few weeks ago, I picked up Theodor Adorno's "Minima Moralia", started it, but was then distracted, and so put it aside.

Being distracted from Adorno is easily explicable, as I don't think even his admirers would describe him as an easy read.

Nevertheless, I have struggled through some Adorno before, so I went back to "Minima Moralia" more recently and read the collected essays and aphorisms from cover to cover.

I am aware, of course, that were Adorno to be alive today, he would point to my beliefs and preoccupations as evidence of the "damaged life" he describes and deplores. For critical theorists, my reformist social democracy, my belief in the possibility of a science of society, and the joy I take in Richard Strauss, Jean Sibelius, and Kpop are all signs of a pitiful enslavement to a naive positivism and the kitsch culture of capitalism.

Nevertheless, I found "Minima Moralia" rewarding, if at times frustrating, reading. I read the Verso edition; I have heard criticisms of older translations of Adorno, of which this is one, it having been first published in 1974 by New Left Books. In this thread, I'm going to link to a newer translation by Dennis Redmond.

Overall, Adorno puts forward a number of arguments about culture, intellectuals, and commodification under capitalism. For many years from the mid seventies onwards, he was regarded a grouchy elitist whose high modernist cultural critique could, in the light of Birmingham School cultural studies, be seen as at best guilty of a simplistic, uninformed by Gramsci, and demobilisingly moralistic approach to popular culture and at worst of a marxisant high toryism.

These criticisms are not without foundation. Reading "Minima Moralia" can be at times the trying experience of being subjected to page upon page of western marxist curmudgeonry.

Yet some of thoughts on the culture of capitalism struck me as meriting my renewed consideration, even though....

https://www.versobooks.com/products/1035-minima-moralia?srsltid=AfmBOoqFv94K1G91IPlOuAP1ZbMfVnqa-PjpM5dR3FFq2tleYY0p-viE

#TheodorAdorno #MinimaMoralia #CriticalTheory #CulturalCritique #CulturalStudies #Marxism #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Philosophy #SocialTheory

I just returned to the US from Granada, Spain, where I presented my work at the annual Islamophobia conference. Below is a short write up about the event. #academia #academicchatter #islam #islamophobia #philosophy #habermas #FrankfurtSchool #sociology #religion #university
https://dustinjbyrd.org/2025/05/27/islamophobia-in-granada-spain/

Richard Wolff interview of Stanley Aronowitz
Labor unions and the Democratic Party have not provided (and will not provide) effective resistance to the forces from the right. Stanley Aronowitz explains why this is so and what needs to be be done about it.
Wolff and Aronowitz talk about the state of labor, unions and the left (from the May 31, 2013 edition of Wolff's "Economic Update" radio program)
#Marx #CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #StanleyAronowitz #Sociology
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3Jf086mz0w

A panel discussion of Adorno and the Antifascist Geographical Imagination
Chris Philo (University of Glasgow), Stuart Elden (University of Warwick), Felicitas Kübler (Alpen-Adria-Universität, Klagenfurt)
#CriticalTheory #FrankfurtSchool #Adorno #Sociology
https://www.history.ac.uk/events/a-panel-discussion-adorno-and-antifascist-geographical-imagination