The Institute located Marx within the Enlightenment tradition itself

Evidence

Moreover, not only did the Frankfurt School leave the vestiges of an orthodox Marxist theory of ideology behind, it also implicitly put Marx in the Enlightenment tradition. Marx’s overemphasis on the centrality of labor as man’s mode of self-realization, which Horkheimer had questioned as early as Ddmmerung, was the primary reason for this argument. Implicit in the reduction of man to an animal laborans, he charged, was the reification of nature as a field for human exploitation. If Marx had his way, the entire world would be turned into a “giant workhouse.” … In fact, the repressive technological nightmares perpetrated by his self-proclaimed followers in the twentieth century could not he entirely dissociated from the inherent logic of Marx’s own work. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to how the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason extended to Marx’s own labor metaphysics.