he suggested that the Institute would be an alternative to a German university system that served as a training academy for ‘mandarins’ who who would go on to uphold the status quo

the Frankfurt School would change after 1928 when Pollock and later Horkheimer became directors of the Institute, unleashing an era of speculative neo-Marxist theorising inimical to Grünberg and older Marxists such as Grossman

from disenchantment to the ultimate reification: the making of thing into human and human into thing with the result that humanity, ultimately, is expendable

[...] The Marxist Jewish intellectual son was once more standing against the capitalistic values by means of which his businessman father had achieved material success. And yet, once more, that son was dependent on daddy’s money in order for him to fulfil his manifest destiny – to castigate the economic system from which his father had prospered, and to theorise its downfall. Felix became, as he self-deprecatingly put it, a ‘salon Bolshevik’, one who consorted with those who wanted to destroy the capitalist system under which his father had made his fortune. Felix wrote his PhD on the practical problems of implementing socialism, which had been published by the German Marxist theoretician Karl Korsch. In the early 1920s, Felix asked his father for some money. He could have asked for anything – a yacht, a country estate, a Porsche. But instead he asked Hermann to fund a Marxist, multidisciplinary academic institute. [...]

Thus, from its inception, the Frankfurt School was riddled with paradoxes. Marxist, but not so Marxist that it would declare its philosophy in its name. Marxist, but not so Marxist that it would live up to what Marx wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, words that have been deemed so key to his work that they are inscribed on his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in London: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.’ Marxist, but bankrolled by a capitalist. Marxist, but without party affiliation. It was affiliated to the University of Frankfurt, and took students, but was still autonomous and financially independent.

To account for the gap, Lukács developed the notion of reification, extending Marx’s analysis of the ‘fetishism of the commodity form’ in Capital.

At the level of culture, Fordism made the world modern. Those mass-produced goods included not just Model T Fords, but also Charlie Chaplin films

Through that gap came the corrupting flood of commodities. Here comes one now: it’s Apple launching a fatuous new iPhone minimally different from its predecessor.

Hypostatisation, a term that runs through Frankfurt School writing like a thread, refers to an effect of reification which results from the fallacy of supposing that whatever can be named, or conceived abstractly, must actually exist

Classical economists such as Smith and Ricardo saw nothing mad in the free-market capitalist economy; rather, they treated prices, profits and rents, the law of supply and demand, as natural phenomena. Marx’s incendiary point was that these were historically specific features of a particular economic system. They had not existed under feudalism; nor, moreover, would they under communism.

much of Grossman’s work was directed against those who thought that the revolution could be successfully launched irrespective of the propitiousness of the circumstances

between the chthonic force of Beethoven and the fissured landscapes of Schubert

history is not the simple unfolding of some preordained noumenal realm and that existence is therefore ‘ontologically incomplete’

[...] Most likely, the term dialectical image obscures the simpler truth Benjamin was trying to convey. Under capitalism, he thought, we fetishise consumer goods – imagining that they can fulfil our hopes for happiness and realise our dreams. By considering old fetishes for now obsolete products or innovations, we might liberate ourselves from our current fetishes and so from our delusive belief that capitalism can provide us with fulfilment or happiness. By meditating on past disappointments, we might free ourselves from future disappointment. That liberation would have involved the reform of consciousness that Marx sought. [...]

[...] so many of the world’s leading metropolises have turned sclerotic – socially stratified cages to keep the riff-raff out and the rest of us polishing our must-have Nespresso machines. In Paris, the poor are banished beyond the périphérique so that when they revolt, they destroy their own banlieues rather than the French capital’s fussily maintained environment. London’s key workers strap-hang on laughable trains from distant commuter towns to serve the wealthy before being returned to their flats in time for the de facto curfew each day. Manhattan island is today a pristine vitrine on which the lower orders don’t even get to leave their mucky paw prints, but inside which the rich get to fulfil with unparalleled freedom their uninteresting desires. [...]

this doesn’t sound like a communist society premised on solidarity and shared activities, but a prelapsarian paradise wherein material needs are satisfied

what Brecht and Weill dramatised on stage was not the traditional Marxist hell of exploitative production relations, but one of unfettered consumerism