Horkheimer rejected Marx and Lukács’s heroic proletariat theory for material-improvement ethics

Evidence

What was lacking in Horkheimer were the audacious theoretical constructions produced by Marx and Lukács, and their view that the proletarian class was driven by the development of history to become a class for itself and to continue, with self-confidence and under its own leadership, what it was already doing anyway in an alienated formthat is, carrying out the reproduction of society. Horkheimer’s emphasis was on establishing that those living in misery had a right to material egoism and that it was not base to think that the improvement of material existence by a more useful structuring of human conditions' was the most important thing in the world’. It was not merely the principal, immediate goal, a better provision of the necessities for humanity' which depended on this improvement, but also the realization of all so-called cultural or ideal values’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 202

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts Horkheimer’s grounded materialist ethics against Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, which elsewhere in the book is a key influence on early critical theory. — connects to: The name ‘critical theory’ actually distanced Horkheimer from explicit Marxism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 756; Horkheimer and Neumann grounded incompatible versions of Marxism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1178; Both Schumpeter and ordoliberals rejected Marx’s internal-contradiction thesis of capitalism — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at…, 947