Gramsci And The Frankfurt School

Originally published 3/25/23 on Dupont Lajoie - The angry French man

Karl Marx dreamed of a communist revolution initiated by the workers united as one. He speculated that the international proletariat would comprehend that their interests of class were universal and they’d inevitably rise against the perverse capitalist system.

However, when the First World War broke out, the workers’ loyalties to their country was stronger than their class consciousness. The ideals of the Russian Revolution (1917) failed to spread over Western Europe. One of the leaders of the Italian communist party, Antonio Gramsci concluded that this failure was intrinsically inherent to the cultural hegemony.

Gramsci was born on January 22, 1891 in Ales, Sardinia, Italy. He was a philosopher, journalist, linguist, writer, and politician. At the beginning of the 20^th century, when Mussolini came to power, he was put behind bars where he remained until his death in 1937.

While in Prison, Gramsci wrote more than 30 essays, famously known as the Prison Notebooks, covering a wide range of topics including the concept of hegemony. He used this concept to analyze how the bourgeoisie thrives in a capitalist society.

According to him, the power and control exerted by the upper class are not only coercive (physical) but also occurs through cultural hegemony. In short, the dominant group i.e. the bourgeoisie, reinforce and legitimize its preeminence thanks to cultural works. The culture, the stories that we tell, and the image we produce, support a certain status quo. In virtue of this cultural hegemony, the proletariat voluntarily consents to be ruled by the dominant class.

While in traditional Marxism, class warfare is in the mode of production thus the battleground is at the economical level, for Gramsci, the battleground is at the ideological level. With the cultural hegemony reinforced through media, the legal system, education ..., the doctrine of the dominant group is widely accepted in society.

In summary, the bourgeoisie maintains its power not with coercion but consent, by propagating its values and norms via the cultural institutions so that they become common sense, the values of everyone, particularly those of the subordinated. With cultural hegemony, the bourgeoisie efficiently convinces the working classes that capitalism is the natural order and that its dominance is legitimate.

According to Gramsci, as long as the dominant classes are able to control influential institutions such as the media, they would prevent the working classes to perceive the intuitional socioeconomic exploitation made possible by cultural hegemony.

And so, for Gramsci, communism would succeed only by winning the “war of position”, the cultural war, via a “long march through the institutions”, a conquest of the culture: arts, cinema, literature, schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, radio, television…. The takeover of key institutions would initiate a cultural paradigm shift and the working classes would naturally embrace Marxist ideas.

In 1923 in Germany, Felix Weil, the son of a grain merchant, similar to Gramsci, examined the defeat of the communist ideology in the West and the failure of the people to rise against capitalism.

In order to answer those matters, Weil financed the Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (First Marxist Work Week), a number of conferences attended by almost two dozen eminent Marxist scholars. However, convinced that something more permanent was needed, Weil persuaded his wealthy father Hermann to sponsor a think tank, an institute for advanced Marxist studies.

As a result, on June 22, 1924, the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research) opened its door in Frankfurt. Weil appointed Carl Gruenberg, an economist and social historian, as the first director. The institute aimed to revitalize Marxism through a re-examination of its theory, explain past errors and prepare for future actions. In the early years, studies published by scholars working at what would be famously known as the “Frankfurt School”, centered on economics, in other terms traditional Marxism or orthodox Marxism. They concluded that the revolution failed because the time was not right.

All changed in 1930, Gruenberg fell ill and resigned from his tenure as director. He was replaced by Max Horkheimer, who unlike Gruenberg was neither an economist nor a historian but a trained psychologist and philosopher. Horkheimer brought a different perspective and proposed an alternative set of theoretical influences to the institute.

In line with Gramsci’s hypotheses, Horkheimer believed that capitalism, instead of inspiring insurrection, had successfully integrated the working classes into its structure. He introduced to the institute new scholars such as Theodor Aderno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse who via the study of social and cultural forces sought to understand the various ways the proletariat was discouraged to overthrow capitalism.

From traditional Marxism research, the Frankfurt School moved to social sciences, the study of people, society, and culture. From revitalizing Marxism, scholars attempted to critique and change what they regarded as a pathological society as a whole.

The philosophers of the Frankfurt School translated orthodox Marxism economic terms into cultural terms. They placed the political and cultural superstructure, not the economy, at the core of their works. They studied how capitalism shapes social and cultural forces and in turn how society and culture shape the western population. They deduced that the social changes envisaged by Marx were destined to be subverted by the development of the cultural industry, most particularly the entertainment industry.

In his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Horkheimer christened the school intellectual weapon: critical theory. Inspired by Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, critical theory is a social theory oriented toward critiquing and reshaping society as a whole (critical of the historicity of the western world) in contrast to traditional theory oriented only toward understanding or explaining society.

According to Horkheimer, traditional theories in social science are never neutral, but reinforce the status quo by uncritically reproducing ideological narratives that supported forms of exploitation. Critical theory, as an alternative, aims to identify how power flows and shapes our system including language and types of communication, and overcome the oppressions inherent to western societies.

In summary, critical theory draws from diverse fields, from economics to sociology, from political science to psychology, to foreground the ways in which capitalism encourages conformity. Critical theory problematizes traditional social institutions, the structures of western societies, and explores how they can potentially contribute to oppression or exploitation (rather than exploring individuals’ responsibilities). As per Horkheimer words, critical theory aims to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them”.

Subsequently, the Frankfurt School engaged in a constant critique of the social structures understood as a system of power from which originate societal issues (how institutions promote inequalities). With critical theory, they applied the Marxist idea of oppressed and oppressor groups to various aspects of social life. In their theories, oppression does not derive only from the class (bourgeoisie) but also from race, sexual preferences, and gender...

Basically, they translated the concept of class warfare from social into societal terms. They turned it into a multitude of conflicts between the (alleged) oppressive majority and the (alleged) oppressed minorities – misogynist patriarchy vs. women, racist whites vs. non-whites, homophobic Christians vs. homosexuals.

While classical Marxists argue that under capitalism the working class is oppressed, the addition of Freud enabled the Frankfurt School to claim that under the hegemony of western culture, everyone lived in a constant state of psychological repression. Only a social and cultural revolution would overthrow capitalism. However, Horkheimer disbelieved that the working class carries the promise of emancipation and could be the agent of the revolution.

In 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. As the majority of the Frankfurt School scholars were Jewish, Horkheimer decided to close the institute and exile to Geneva before finding a new home at Columbia University in New York in 1935.

In 1940, Horkheimer and Adorno moved to California while Marcuse relocated to Washington. They carried on working on understanding the failure of the communist revolution as well as the reason that makes people embrace totalitarianism.

Ultimately, in 1950, the Frankfurt School returned to its original home. Critical theory scholars were at the forefront of German sociological thinking and their philosophy influenced many universities around the world. Critical theory gave birth to feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and post-colonial theory.

Marcuse, who had remained in the US, became the figure of authority for the new left. He completed the conceptualization of postmodern class warfare, the struggle between disparate minority groups perceived as oppressed, who hopefully one day will be able to come together (intersectionality) in their fight against the oppressive Western culture (civilization and Christian values).

Marcuse had answered Horkheimer doubts about the agent of the revolution, the minorities would substitute the working class and carry the promise of emancipation.