Here’s an interesting show about The Frankfurt School, a group of leftists who switched their critique from Marxist economics to culture:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/hi…
This group of influential left-wing German thinkers set out, in the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, to investigate why their country had not had a Revolution – despite the apparently revolutionary conditions that spread through Germany in the wake of the 1918 Armistice.
To find out why the German workers had not flocked to the Red Flag, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin and others came together around an Institute set up at Frankfurt University, and began to focus their critical attention not on the economy, but on culture, asking how it affected people’s political outlook and activities….
They connected the economic left with ideas about art, especially the avant-garde variety. If art made you feel good, then it was reaching some kind of pleasure principle, and evoked a feeling of relaxation and a connection to a “false consciousness”. A painting or movie that made a worker happy therefore was obtuse and untrue, most clearly because any society known was exploiting the workers. Art was used by “the culture industry” to keep workers complacent in a society which was abusing them.
I think if you listen to this show, you will find in plain language the origin of many ideas in current use about the misled worker, and the purpose of art and its oppositional character to the middle class. This is where much of the academic hostility to middle class culture comes from, and why periodic attempts by academics and politicians to reconnect to the middle class are so poorly aimed.
One difference apparent to me is the utterly coherent (if mistaken) philosophy of the left of the past. Today’s left is not nearly so strong in its presentation — the downside is that weak efforts never really get tested and refuted.
kbusch says
You are probably right that the Frankfurt School was quite influential on the left — certainly influential on the academic left a few decades ago. Walter Benjamin is a famously difficult writer and I’ve never attempted Marcuse. When young, Erich Fromm had a huge influence on me but I find the very books that so changed my adolescence unreadable as an adult. So I simply don’t know enough to comment. I’d guess that’s probably true of most in BMG.
seascraper says
In our time, it’s a good show!