Frankfurt School founders declared Marxism but abandoned hope in the working class

Evidence

Taken as a whole, the articles by the members of the Horkheimer circle published in the first volume of the journal showed several noticeable common traits. All the authors enthusiastically declared their belief in the materialist conception of history in the sense of the general results summed up in Marx’s famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy' and the Feuerbach section of The German Ideology. None of them put any hopes in the working class. Pollock simply identified a lack of subjective interest in socialist change among the working class. Horkheimer, where he spoke of the lower social classes’, only mentioned their reliance on vicarious satisfactions. Adorno expressly denied that the working class had any progressive role to play. Only Fromm, in the first of his articles, distinguished the proletarian, leading his class but identifying himself with it, serving its wishes', from the commanding leader, facing the masses as a strong man, as a powerful, magnified paterfamilias’. In the second article, he wrote that The proletariat'like big businessmendoes not show evidence of anal character traits to nearly the same extent as the petty-bourgeoisie’, but he did not engage in any consideration of the possible dynamics of such phenomena. None of the authors concerned themselves with topics such as the constitutional welfare state, Weimar democracy or Italian fascism. But none of them doubted that the future belonged to socialism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 499

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Condenses the founding contradiction of the whole project: professed historical materialism with zero faith in the proletariat, a tension that defines the School’s trajectory.
• XREF: connects to: Frankfurt School theorists pioneered analysis of mass culture and working-class integration — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 22; Frankfurt theorists rejected socialism as a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 294; Marxism and communism retained respectability among the affluent young in late-1920s Frankfurt — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 131 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Frankfurt School members espoused proletarian solidarity while maintaining bourgeois lifestyles. #exemplifies (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 171
• Frankfurt School theorists pioneered analysis of mass culture and working-class integration #expands (0.80) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 22
• Frankfurt theorists rejected socialism as a necessary outgrowth of capitalism. #contradicts (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 294
• Marxism and communism retained respectability among the affluent young in late-1920s Frankfurt #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 131
• The Frankfurt School preserved Marx’s libertarian impulse through the Stalinist era #contradicts (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 883