The Horkheimer circle combined orthodox historical materialism with total distrust of the working class.

Evidence

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. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 142

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The circle’s political pessimism is structural, not incidental: every member independently jettisoned the proletariat while retaining the materialist framework.
• XREF: Qualifies earlier notes on Adorno’s proletariat skepticism and Horkheimer’s ‘lower social classes’ as vicarious satisfiers.