The Missed Revolution and the Crisis of Marxist Orthodoxy
When the guns fell silent after the First World War, many Marxists believed they were standing at the threshold of a new historical era. The old European empires had crumbled; the working classes had suffered unspeakable sacrifices; the social contradictions of capitalism had sharpened to breaking point. According to the classical Marxist script, revolution should have followed as night follows day.
Yet revolution, in Western Europe, largely failed to materialize. The German Revolution of 1918–19 dissolved into compromise; the Spartacist uprising was crushed. In Italy, Spain, and elsewhere, attempts at radical transformation were either defeated or diverted. Instead of proletarian emancipation, the twentieth century witnessed the rise of fascism, authoritarianism, and a new, more resilient form of capitalism.
This failure prompted a profound crisis within Marxist thought. Could history no longer be trusted to fulfill the promises of theory? Was the working class still the revolutionary subject? Had capitalism developed new forms of stability, new methods of ideological integration? These were the questions that set Western Marxism—the broad current of thought that includes the Frankfurt School, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and others—on a different path from the more deterministic traditions of the East.
The Emergence of Western Marxism
Western Marxism distinguished itself by turning its critical gaze not only outward at capitalist society but also inward at Marxism itself. It rejected the mechanical materialism that had overtaken Soviet orthodoxy, with its blind faith in economic inevitabilities. Instead, it emphasized the importance of culture, ideology, consciousness, and the subjective dimensions of social life.
Georg Lukács, in History and Class Consciousness (1923), laid crucial foundations. He argued that the working class had been caught in a process of "reification"—a mode of experience in which human relations appeared as fixed, thing-like structures. Revolution, therefore, would not arise automatically from economic suffering; it required a profound transformation of consciousness, a revolutionary "awakening" to the underlying social totality.
Antonio Gramsci, working from a prison cell under Mussolini’s regime, further deepened this insight. He emphasized the role of "hegemony"—the subtle, everyday forms of ideological consent through which ruling classes maintained their power. In modern capitalist societies, domination no longer relied solely on force; it was sustained through culture, education, religion, and mass media. The frontlines of revolution thus shifted from the factories to the realm of ideas.
The Frankfurt School, emerging in this context, took up these challenges with particular intensity, weaving together Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology, and philosophy to understand how domination had been internalized into the very fabric of modern life.
The Critique of Ideology: Unmasking Invisible Power
Central to the Frankfurt School's project was the critique of ideology—the systematic effort to expose how ideas, images, and social norms served to reproduce domination even in the absence of overt coercion.
In their analysis, ideology was not simply a set of lies imposed from above. It worked precisely because it intertwined with real experiences, fears, and desires. It offered individuals frameworks for making sense of the world—even as it concealed the deeper structures of exploitation and alienation. Modern ideology, in their view, operated less through crude propaganda than through the saturation of everyday life: in consumer habits, entertainment, education, and even private aspirations.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s concept of the "culture industry" captured this dynamic. Mass media, they argued, no longer merely reflected society; it shaped and disciplined the desires of individuals, producing conformity and passivity under the guise of pleasure and choice. Meanwhile, Erich Fromm’s studies of the "authoritarian character" explored how psychological needs for security and belonging could lead people to embrace systems that ultimately enslaved them.
The critique of ideology was thus not merely an intellectual exercise. It was an act of resistance: an attempt to render the invisible visible, to break the spell of naturalized domination, and to reopen spaces for critical reflection and emancipatory action.
The Continuing Challenge
The failure of revolution forced Western Marxists to confront an unsettling reality: domination had grown more sophisticated, more intimate, more total. Yet it had not become absolute. For the Frankfurt School and their contemporaries, critique remained both possible and necessary—indeed, more necessary than ever.
Their legacy is a sober one. They teach that the road to emancipation is neither guaranteed by historical necessity nor easily grasped through economic analysis alone. It demands an unflinching examination of how power permeates thought itself, how freedom can be confused with conformity, how hope must be wrested, with difficulty, from a world that constantly threatens to extinguish it.
In the face of ideological domination, the first revolutionary act is to think—to think critically, stubbornly, and without illusions.
Next article: Gramsci, Lukács, and Early Influences
