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the social process of production’ (Horkheimer, 2002 : 197). While sensitive to how economic logics shape society, the founding members of the Frankfurt School did not embrace a crude ‘Soviet’ Marxism. Rather, Horkheimer was critical of purely economistic Marxists, stating explicitly that they ‘badly understood Marx’ ( Horkheimer, 2018 [1931]: 119). What was required
. Marcuse , Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis ( Boston : Beacon Press , 1964 ), 106 . 44 Fraser, ‘Identity, Exclusion, and Critique,’ 322. 45 M. Horkheimer , ‘ Traditional and Critical Theory ,’ Critical Theory: Selected Essays , trans. M. J. O’Connell ( New York : Continuum , 1972 ), 220 –221 . 46 J. Bohman , ‘ Critical Theory and Democracy ,’ in D. M. Rasmussen (ed), Handbook of Critical Theory ( Oxford : Blackwell , 1996 ), 190 ; Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society , 155. For more on the role of utopian thinking in critical
of Soviet Marxism and its artistic corollary in the form of Constructivism) are supplanted by consumerist nightmares of coercion, conformity, indifference, and subjective deformation. In recognizing that the ‘attempt to change the world miscarried’, the leftist imaginary turns decidedly grey, while its accompanying discourse becomes circumspect, mournful, hopeless. A brief affective history of the left (II): the exhaustion of utopian energies The utopian motif has been suspended.11 For many commentators, from both the right and the left, the deflation of political