Adorno, Marxism and Art

Orthodox critics of Adorno draw bold-face lines between their own traditional Marxism and critical theory, which, it is alleged, derives from liberal bourgeois currents which had become an anachronism sometime before the appearance of the Communist Manifesto. It is repeatedly underscored that the work of Adorno and Horkheimer “has nothing in common with a real dialectical materialist analysis of bourgeois society.” Meanwhile there is certainly no love lost from the other side; one need only recall Adorno's polemic against Lukács in order to demonstrate his desire to distance himself from the heritage of the Second and Third Internationals, no matter how ambivalent his intellectual relationship to the works of Marx may be.