Horkheimer rejected labor as a transcendent human category, calling it capitalist propaganda.

Evidence

When Marx seemed to go further in defining the categories of human self-production in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Horkheimer drew back. The central position of labor in Marx’s work and his concomitant stress on the problem of alienated labor in capitalist society played a relatively minor role in Horkheimer’s writings. In Ddmmerung he wrote: “To make labor into a transcendent category of human activity is an ascetic ideology… . Because socialists hold to this general concept, they make themselves into carriers of capitalist propaganda.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 229

Categorization

• XREF: This marks a major split between Horkheimer and orthodox Marxism, relevant to the Institute’s later empirical turn. — connects to: Horkheimer’s core indignation was that capitalism blocked publicly responsible rational action