3. Marx’s Influence on the Early Frankfurt School

The International Workingmen’s Association was founded in London, England in 1864 as an organization of Left labor and socialist parties. Karl Marx attended the founding meeting and subsequently wrote the “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association” that same year (Marx 1864). The First International, as it would later be called, split in 1872 and dissolved in 1876 due in large part to the irresolvable differences between the communalist/anarchist and Marxist/statist groups. The Second International was founded in 1889.

One could say that Marxism was born shortly before Marx’s death in 1883, but Marx found its first interpretation disagreeable. “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist,” he purportedly said in reaction to the news that French socialists were self-identifying as “Marxist” (Engels 1882: 356). He was referring to the socialists of the French Workers Party (Parti Ouvrier Français), founded by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, in 1880.

Although Korsch wrote explicitly of a clash between “Russian and Western Marxism” (Korsch 1970: 120), it was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s use of “Western Marxism” in his Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955 (Merleau-Ponty 1973) that popularized it (Jay 1984).

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) made significant contributions to Western Marxism, but his writings, penned while imprisoned in fascist Italy, were not published until the late 1940s and early 1950s (Gramsci 1992) and thus had no direct impact on the early Frankfurt School.

Cited in Anderson 2007: 123.

There were, however, Marxists engaging Bernstein’s critiques of Hegel and dialectics during the time of the Second International. Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), for example, was a sophisticated reader of Hegel and it deeply informed his Marxism and his critiques of Bernstein, as in his “Cant Against Kant or Herr Bernstein’s Will and Testament” (Plekhanov 1976). Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) entered into an intense debate with Bernstein and forcefully argued to retain the dialectical structure of Marxist thought. In her “Social Reform or Revolution,” she accused Bernstein of “saying goodbye to the mode of thought of the revolutionary proletariat, to the dialectic, and to the materialist conception of history” (Luxemburg 1902: 167)

In their coauthored book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “it is no longer the objective laws of the market which govern the actions of industrialists and drive humanity toward catastrophe. Rather, the conscious decisions of the company chairman execute capitalism’s old law of value, and thus its fate, as resultants no less compulsive than the blindest price mechanisms” (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 30).

The definitive statement of Dialectical Materialism as the official position of the Marxist-Leninist party was published in the fourth chapter of The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Commission of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. 1939: 105–131).

Korsch was expelled from the Communist Party in 1926. Lukács walked back his analysis in History and Class Consciousness rather than face expulsion (Goode 1979; Halliday 1970; Kellner and Korsch 1977). See Lukács own analysis in his 1967 Preface (Lukács 1971).

“Critical Theory was initially developed in Horkheimer’s circle to think through political disappointments at the absence of revolution in the West, the development of Stalinism in Soviet Russia, and the victory of fascism in Germany,” writes Jürgen Habermas. “It was supposed to explain mistaken Marxist prognoses, but without breaking Marxist intentions” (Habermas 1987a: 116).

In Capital, Marx argued that the commodity form produces a kind of fetishism, structurally concealing the origin of the commodity’s value in labor, that is, their social nature. Commodities “do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between persons and social relations between things” (Marx 1982: 166).

Perry Anderson (1979) rejects Hegelianism or Marxist humanism as a defining characteristic of Western Marxism. For a discussion of his argument, see the Introduction to Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality (Jay 1984).

Erich Fromm started working as a researcher at the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute in the Institute’s building in 1929 (Wiggershaus 1994). His two articles in the first issue of the new journal were “Über Methode and Aufgabe einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie” and “Die psychoanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie” (Horkheimer 1980). In the former, Fromm concluded that analytic social psychology “investigates a factor that plays a decisive mediating role between the economic base and the formation of ideologies” (Fromm 1932: 495).

In general, it is difficult to find satisfactory categories to capture the nature of the work of the Institute. Not only did the methodological orientation of their research change over time, as noted already in the transition from Grünberg to Horkheimer, but shortly after Horkheimer became director, the National Socialists came to power, seized the Institute’s building, and instigated a series of emigrations to Geneva, New York, and California. Also, the periodization employed by Dubiel (1985) is not intended to apply to the methodology employed by all of the members. In his inaugural address, for example, Horkheimer notes the difference between the group research program he outlines, and the concurrent “independent research of the individual in the areas of theoretical economics, economic history and the history of the labor movement” (Horkheimer 1931: 35–36). Henryk Grossmann, Franz Borkenau, and Friedrich Pollock, for example, continued to pursue traditional Marxist economic and historical research, which was published in the journal alongside the programmatic texts of critical theory.

Although Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) would not officially join the Institute until 1933, his article “The Foundations of Historical Materialism” (Marcuse 1932) was a reassessment of historical materialism in light of Marx’s recently discovered Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

See Marx on the “mystification which the dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands” (Marx 1982: 103).

“Identity is the primal form of ideology,” writes Adorno (1966: 148). See also Adorno’s later essay “On Subject and Object” (Adorno 1969).

By invoking the ideal of a universal Marxist science to judge the fragmentary social conditions where Western Marxism took root, reminds one of a section in Hegel’s Phenomenology, titled “The law of the heart and the frenzy of self-conceit.” There, Hegel writes: “This heart is confronted by a real world; for in the heart the law is, in the first place and only for itself, it is not yet realized …” (Hegel 1977: 221).