No, actually Max Horkheimer is a super cool guy

The new socialist Left’s purification of Marxism from the bastardizations of Marx’s epigones is often as simplistic and inconsequential as the criticisms of Marx’s supposed inadequacies by those same epigones.

Ingar Solty’s recent examination of the life and times of Max Horkheimer revolves around a pot kettle black accusation: in mistaking one regime of capital accumulation for capitalism itself, Max Horkheimer’s critique of cultural reification unwittingly reified what it aimed to demystify. According to Solty, Horkheimer viewed the demobilization and integ…