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#FrankfurtSchool

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Jonathan Emmesedi

🧵 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:

marginalutility.org/wp-content

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
Miguel Afonso Caetano

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."

books.google.pt/books?id=0R9kE

Google BooksCritical Marxist TheoryThis 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.
#CriticalTheory#Marxism#FrankfurtSchool
Miguel Afonso Caetano

"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."

youtube.com/watch?v=mR22IB5Aye

YouTubeChris O'Kane | Una teoría crítica de la dominación social | FrankfurtianasBy Secretaría de Cultura Comunidad y Territorio UNSAM
#CriticalTheory#Marxism#SocialDomination
*
Jonathan Emmesedi

🧵 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....

versobooks.com/products/1035-m

www.versobooks.comMinima Moralia
#TheodorAdorno#MinimaMoralia#CriticalTheory
B. Ricardo Brown, PhD

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
youtube.com/watch?v=d3Jf086mz0

Jonathan Emmesedi

"One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse."

Theodor Adorno -- Minima Moralia.

Image: German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, by Leandro Gonzalez de Leon -- Primitivojumento -- Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 --Wikimedia Commons

#TheodorAdorno#FrankfurtSchool#Philosophy
Real Syntactic

following the news that @Gargron is placing Mastodon’s infrastructural core in the hands of a nonprofit: I’ve been thinking that the #FrankfurtSchool folk most relevant now are #Benjamin (machinic reproduction>machinic societies/fascism; the angel of history) and #Adorno (the dialectic of enlightenment; “reality is becoming indistinguishable from the movies”; resistant intellectuals as “salaried nuisances”.) But we really need to add #Habermas, from the second generation. 1/x

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