Brecht, bewildered and unnerved, reacted to this revolt of the masses with a mixture of truculent bluff and sentimental pathos in his private diaries.

Summary condemnation of the actual insurgency of the working-class was combined with ouvrierist exultation of its in-dwelling virtues

Adorno's recourse to tendentious terms such as 'the people's community'

Adorno was right to point to the epistemological aporia of realist aesthetic theory

Adorno's essays were not so much a Marxist defence of modernism as the expression of a distinctively modernist Marxism: his positions were, mutatis mutandis, those of modernist ideology itself

Brecht's disorientation before the revolt of the proletariat that belied (realized) his politics