Occupation as Critique: Left-Wing Student Organizing in Frankfurt and San Diego, 1969

This article offers a transatlantic student perspective on the theory-practice debate at the center of Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s 1969 correspondence, famously bookended by the occupation of the Institute for Social Research in January and Adorno’s death in August. Noting that there were not one but two student occupations that occurred during this period, with Marcuse supporting the second led by Black and Chicanx students at the University of California, San Diego, it undertakes a comparative reading of the insights and activities of the self-named Spartacus Department in Frankfurt and Lumumba-Zapata College in San Diego. It first recovers a multidimensional critique of the role of the postwar university in advancing capital accumulation and entrenching racial segregation—twinned processes that students recognized as posing an existential threat to the exercise of critical thinking within the university. It then argues that the Spartacus Department’s and Lumumba-Zapata College’s mutual attempts to occupy and refigure corners of the accredited university as sites of horizontal teaching and learning encode the missing theory of organization in the Frankfurt School’s corpus. By recentering the insights and motivations of these two campaigns and two of the students who led them, Angela Davis and Hans-Jürgen Krahl, this article illuminates a path for a more political iteration of Critical Theory after 1969.