FROP etc

kelley oudies at flash.net
Mon Feb 21 14:18:41 PST 2000


jlgulick:


>> I have long been skeptical of Frankfurtian-type claims that Marx's
>> discourse is riddled w/instrumental-rationalism or Prometheanism, or
>> that there is some fundamental break between an early humanist Marx
>> and a late "economistic" Marx.

dennis:
>This may be Habermas' position, but Adorno makes it absolutely clear that
>Marx was critiquing the economic laws of capital, not defending such as
>the key to human happiness. Just as Marx was far more Marxist than most of
>his followers realized, so too were the Frankfurters far more Marxist than
>their self-proclaimed followers.

i don't know where anyone got the impression that the frankfurter's or habermas posited some fundamental break!? much of the work was about making a link between the early and later work, to demonstrate a kind of logic that explains the connections but not as some sort of progressive "correcting" of work that he later went on to reject. they denouced, more, it seems to me the marxist contemporaries who subscribed to an overly economistic marxism and tried to examine the development of capitalism as also involving the process of rationalization which took place organizationally and institutionally, rather than simply culturally as weber as examined it. that is, they were locating a material basis for the cultural rationalization that weber explored.

kelley



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