Some Emphases within Neo-Marxist Critical Theory

Neo-Marxist critical theory is a paradigm of research concerned with human emancipation. It seeks liberation from oppressive, totalitizing structures and attempts to create a world satisfying the deepest aspirations of human beings. Whereas traditional social theory endeavored simply to explain the existence and contour of actual societal structures, critical theory both explains and seeks to transform these societal structures thought to exploit human beings.

Critical theory thus seeks to increase freedom by decreasing the domination of oppressive, exploitative structures conducing to human alienation. It does this by providing both descriptive and normative bases for social inquiry. This inseparability of description and normativity marks one of the decisive points at which critical theory departs from value-neutral social science and enters contested philosophical—and, as will later be seen, theological—territory. Accordingly, critical theory seeks to distinguish its forms, aims, and theories of explanation from standard (traditional) views, primarily within the social sciences.

The term “critical theory” is most closely associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Founded in 1923 by Carl Grünberg, the Institute was initially financed by Felix Weil. The general thrust of the Institute was to rethink classical Marxism in the context of the Weimar Republic. Scholars of the movement had noticed that social reality did not conform to the predictions of Marx. Why did the proletariat not overthrow the bourgeoisie as was predicted? Why did the working class not want to effect revolution?

Instead of regarding these empirical results as disconfirming Marxism, many early thinkers of the School adjusted Marxist theory to be consistent with the empirical results. Especially in its early phase, the Frankfurt School tended to operate under the conviction that Marxism remained fundamentally correct as a critique of capitalism, even if its original explanatory categories required significant revision. The effect of all of this was a brand of neo-Marxism focusing upon the structure of contemporary culture and the concomitant alienation human beings experience within that culture.

Max Horkheimer offered the initial address of the Institute in 1929 and became its Director in 1930. Other luminaries of the School include Adorno, Fromm, Pollock, Kirchheimer, Loewenthal, Neumann, Marcuse, and, in later generations and with increasingly explicit revisions, Honneth and Habermas. The maverick thinker Walter Benjamin is often regarded as associated with the School as well. Thinkers of the movement were united in their understanding of social theory as one which would combine philosophy with the disciplines of the social sciences, even as later figures increasingly distanced themselves from revolutionary Marxism while retaining the critical impulse that animated it.

While thinkers differed in accents and emphases, I attempt below to identify and summarize some of the common themes emerging within the Frankfurt School’s paradigm of research. As with any attempt at generalization, there is some loss of accuracy. The Frankfurt School is not monolithic in its affirmations across all areas of its research. This being said, and especially with reference to its early and middle periods, I believe that the School in general holds to the following:

While the economic and materialistic determinism of Marx had predicted an overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, this did not happen. If Marxism is taken to disclose something deeply true about the structure of capitalism and the production of alienation, then there must be some explanation for this that is consistent with this truth.

The explanation for the working classes not revolting is that they have not sufficiently understood their exploitation within the capitalist system. They have somehow become distracted from their true plight. This diagnosis already presupposes a normative account of what human flourishing ought to be—an assumption whose status will later require careful scrutiny.

The sources of this distraction are found within the structure of capitalism itself. Whereas Marx had claimed that religion is the opiate of the masses—functioning to distract workers from their actual exploitation—contemporary capitalism offers many secular kinds of distractions, notably “mass culture” and the entertainment industry in general.

Art in pre-industrialized societies had been an active concern for people as they both made, shared, and appreciated that art. This is important because art, in fact, offers human beings the chance to see the world in new ways, ways crucial for the process of social transformation and amelioration. However, art in the twentieth century has become a commodity, something that people merely passively consume.

In the twentieth century, technological developments have made possible the distribution of cultural products like art, music, and film on a large scale. The result of this has been that art, film, and music have become formulaic, designed to be purchased by people in satisfaction of their particular wants. Instead of these cultural products opening one to possible new ways of being, they simply exist to be consumed by workers in their leisure time. These commodities provide pleasant times of distraction between the times of work. Instead of engaging and challenging human beings actively to pursue truth and transformation, they are purchased and passively consumed by the masses in order to anesthetize themselves from the exploitative relationships in which they find themselves, and in so doing, make their intolerable lives more livable.

Mass culture functions through these cultural products ideologically; people’s values and their very consciousness are thereby affected by the consumption of these products. Natural human intellectual curiosity is dulled and people become intellectually inactive and politically passive.

The sameness of the cultural products available to humans in art, film, and music is predicated on what will ultimately sell to consumers. Nobody is, in fact, designing a system of capitalism that exploits the working class. Moreover, nobody is intending to feed people mindless artistic commodities in order to keep them distracted and satisfied enough to go to work the next day. It is simply that this is what occurs because of the practice of capitalism as it functions in the modern world. Everything has a price and people consume that which is pleasant to them. On a daily basis, more people want to watch romantic comedies than view Schindler’s List. They would rather listen to pop music than reflect upon Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositions. They prefer three-chord rock to late nineteenth-century German chromaticism (I don’t know how that is possible!). They prefer landscape pictures of trees, hills, and lakes to cubist paintings.

In a capitalistic society people are consumers. In order to sell products to consumers, advertisers must create needs in the consumers so that they will buy the product. The creation of these needs actually functions as a type of human alienation because most of the needs advertising endeavors to create are things consumers really do not need. Accordingly, advertising and marketing really are in the business of creating false needs, needs that displace the person further from his or her true self. Advertising thereby effects alienation.

In order to bring about human liberation and transformation to more humane conditions of existence, many early Frankfurt theorists concluded that capitalism must be replaced. It cannot be fixed or adjusted to work because it begins with the assumption that human beings are consumers, assumptions that ultimately lead to human alienation. Whereas Marxism potentially treats human beings as ends in themselves, capitalism interprets human beings as means to the end of building up capital. Men and women become commodities within capitalism. A person is identified as one who fixes roofs, or pipes, or electrical panels, or drives trucks, or places a certain bolt in a machine built on the conveyor belt.

While it is true that Marxism seeks to treat human beings as ends in themselves, this did not happen in the Marxist-inspired Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet-style communism unfortunately also produced human alienation and turned human beings into mere means to some other end. This historical failure forced later critical theorists to rethink not only capitalism, but also the philosophical grounds of critique itself, giving rise to attempts to reconstruct normativity without revolutionary metaphysics.

Most education within capitalistic societies is itself commodified. Instead of education having intrinsic value for the purposes of human flourishing, most education merely teaches skills so that people can become skillful workers within a consumer-dominated, capitalistic society. Instead of freeing people from the tyranny of assumed limited possibilities, this type of education merely functions to teach people how to fit within an alienating structure. It thereby binds one to a system of exploitation rather than freeing one from such exploitation, even though later theorists increasingly appealed to education, discourse, and recognition as possible sites of non-revolutionary reform.

What is needed to diagnose the current ailments of society is a hermeneutic similar to that of classical depth psychology. In depth psychology, the individual’s unconscious is explored at its depths for clues on how to interpret the existence and behavior of surface consciousness. The Frankfurt School sought to bring the hidden alienations and totalizations of society to the surface in order to grasp the existence and functioning of the present social order. Exploration of society and culture at its depth provides the key for interpreting social and cultural behavior.

Moreover, psychoanalytic theory helps explain how it is that people within fascist societies could feel as if their lives had meaning. Adorno, for instance, believed that Freud’s theory of narcissism was helpful in understanding how the “little man” could both submit to, and identify with, authority.

Whereas classical Marxism understood primary oppositions as based upon economics—e.g., the working class versus the bourgeoisie—critical theory of the Frankfurt School extended this list of oppositions. A similar domination of one group by another is thereby located in the relation between the sexes, in relations between the races, and in relations between people having different sexual orientations. Whereas traditional Marxism sought to free the working class from their economic exploitation, neo-Marxism attempts to free those marginalized and dominated from all of their numerous oppressions. It believes a better world is possible when traditional structures of oppression are negated. Whether such negation itself requires a substantive account of the good remains an open and pressing question.

A theory of hegemony claims that the dominant class not only creates its own ideology, but that of all of the other classes dominated by that class. Proper social education --what critics outside the tradition might call “propaganda”--is needed to change the class consciousness of both the dominating and dominated groups, and thus to bring about political change.

Whereas the reason of the Enlightenment critiqued earlier mythologies in order to help protect men and women from the very real threats of nature, so too must reason today diagnose and expose the mythology of this Enlightenment critique itself to protect men and women from the dangers to human flourishing inhering within it. Enlightenment reason has become merely a means-ends instrumental reason which leaves outside of itself any reasonable valuation of the ends to which reason, as an evaluation of effective means, must relate. Accordingly, Enlightenment reason bears potential totalizations within itself, totalizations leading to domination and alienation. Reason, which showed such promise to liberate, carries within itself the very ideologies that bind human beings even more fully. Later Frankfurt theorists sought to rescue reason from this fate by reconstructing it in procedural or communicative terms, though whether such reconstructions succeed remains disputed.

At precisely this point, however, a decisive question presses itself upon the analysis—one that critical theory itself cannot finally resolve. For while critical theory is rightly suspicious of unexamined normativity, it nonetheless operates with strong normative claims concerning emancipation, flourishing, domination, and the good of human life. These claims are indispensable to its critical force, yet their ultimate grounding remains unclear. Critique can expose false needs, distorted consciousness, and alienating structures, but it cannot by critique alone establish why liberation ought to take one form rather than another, nor why certain visions of the human good should command allegiance rather than merely assent. It is here that theology cannot simply adopt the conclusions of critical theory without remainder, nor can it dismiss them without loss. The task, rather, is to discern how the critical impulse intersects with deeper accounts of truth, normativity, and human destiny—accounts that theology must articulate in its own voice and under its own conditions.

Examining critical theory more deeply demands, however, that we move past the generalities I have just sketched. However, I think the above list may be helpful in the examinations to follow. My hope is to provide summaries of major critical theorists of the Frankfurt School—summaries where one eye is focused on the potential appropriation of the thinker in the revolutionary rhetoric and action we are witnessing today, and where the other eye is allowed to gaze out toward the entire horizon of theology and religion more generally, where questions of normativity, truth, and human flourishing cannot finally be settled by critique alone, discerning how the thinker’s views relate to the deepest questions of the human heart.