Horkheimer saw capitalism’s split working class as crippling both German workers’ parties
Evidence
In one of the very few concrete political analyses Horkheimer wrote during the pre-emigration period, “The Impotence of the German Working Class,” published in 1934 in the collection of aphorisms and short essays known as Dammerung18 (the German word means both dawn and twilight), he expressed his reasons for skepticism concerning the various workers’ parties. The existence of a split between an employed, integrated working-class elite and the masses of outraged, frustrated unemployed produced by capitalism in its current form, he argued, had led to a corresponding dichotomy between a Social Democratic Party lacking in motivation and a Communist Party crippled by theoretical obtuseness. The SPD had too many “reasons”; the Communists, who often relied on coercion, too few. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 118
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Capitalist proletarianization reproduced internal divisions rather than unifying the working class — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 267
Broader Connections
- Capitalist proletarianization reproduced internal divisions rather than unifying the working class
#expands(0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 267