Institute members split over whether fascism was capitalism’s political form

Evidence

In light of National Socialism, the question emerged as to whether the ‘command economy’ of Nazi Germany had rendered capitalism as such inoperative. While some of the members of the Institute – Franz L. Neumann, A.R.L. Gurland, Otto Kirchheimer16 and Herbert Marcuse17 – championed the thesis ‘that the fascist state merely represented the political form appropriate to advanced monopoly capitalism’, Friedrich Pollock and Horkheimer maintained that the contemporary political-economic order of both Nazi Germany and the United States was aptly described by the term ‘state capitalism’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 509

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the Frankfurt School’s own internal debate and with later ‘state capitalism’ debates in Marxism — connects to Pollock-Horkheimer vs Neumann-Kirchheimer split that shaped later state theory discussions. — connects to: Neumann rejected orthodox Marxist accounts of fascism as finance-capital dictatorship — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 509; The Institute’s fascism debate turned on how capitalism’s role had changed — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 482; Early communist analysts divided on whether fascism was novel or a bourgeois unity (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Fascism’s essence was disputed among revolutionaries in 1926 #corroborates (0.95) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 31
• Early communist analysts divided on whether fascism was novel or a bourgeois unity #corroborates (0.90)