Old ideology shapes world today

Frankfurt School paving way for 21st century tyranny

- SHANE FUDGE

THE Frankfurt School has gained a lot of attention in recent times as a noted long-term influence on the evolution and longevity of leftist politics.

The emergence of the school's critical theory has now emerged as having a powerful hold on not only party politics, but the current technocratic agenda.

Originally organised by the neo-Marxist Carl Grunberg as part of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1923, the Frankfurt School was interested in the emergence of 'mass culture'.

While Karl Marx had argued that culture was itself a reflection of society's economic infrastructure, the Frankfurt scholars argued that this missed the complex dynamics of human psychology, the pragmatism of social relations and assumed the inevitability of revolution.

The associates of the school also highlighted the dark side of the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Russia and the rise of Nazism in Germany, arguing that both events suggested societies were driven by more complicated social, cultural, and economic forces than Marx had been able or willing to comprehend.

Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps the best-known work to have emerged during the school's heyday a book which encapsulates the principal themes that the movement itself was all about.

Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Marx's ideas of alienation and exploitation but positioned these within the rise of the entertainment industry, and the growing ideological influence of the mass media, film, television and radio.