people as the solution, late 20
century radical thought began to single out the people
themselves as the problem. A key tradition reflecting this new view of politics was the
Frankfurt School, a school originated in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s that numbered
some of the century’s greatest thinkers, including Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, in
its ranks. The Frankfurt School, inspired by Marxism, saw the crisis in society in terms of
what they call “mass culture”—the suppression of human freedom and critical thought in a
mass-manufactured popular culture.
“Instead of treating the masses as an ally, the people began to be regarded to an ever-
increasing degree, as an object of suspicion. Before long, the people—that is,
‘mainstream’ society—came to be seen as the problem, not the solution.” (p. 19)
This shift in critical thought was prompted by the disappointment many Marxists experienced
when the long-anticipated revolution didn’t come, despite the fact that the Great Depression
led many to question their faith in capitalism. Marx himself had argued that it was ideology—
in the form of what Marx called “false consciousness”—that hid their oppression from the
eyes of workers. Within capitalism, workers invested their humanity in goods and services
that were then removed from them, entered into the marketplace, and thus could no longer
reflect their humanity back to them on authentic terms.
Rather, through the process 英语论文网 【http://www.51lunwen.org】of what Marx called “commodity fetishism,” workers have to
trade the wages they earned for their labour and buy back their humanity in the form of goods and services. This relationship was anything but satisfactory; and the general result
was the experience of “alienation,” where working people and their human potential were
divided and opposed to each other. Goods thus represented a “fetishized” form of their life’s
energy, a kind of mocking substitute for meaningful labour of the kind that enlarges our
humanity. The terrible irony of fetishism is that goods take on human attributes, while
workers become more like objects. Every TV commercial on the air is a kind of
advertisement for commodity fetishism, insofar as we are required to purchase back our
youth, sexuality, love, friendship, success, family values, etc. through the mediation of
consumer products rather than “owning” these human qualities on authentic and
emancipatory terms. Advertising constitutes thereby what Raymond Williams described as
the “magic system” where enchanted commodities are the defining element.
As it became clear to neo-Marxist traditions like the Frankfurt School and Antonio Gramsci,
the Italian theorist, that the revolution wasn’t going to come and workers wanted reform—not
radical change—the theory of ideology itself become more nuanced. False consciousness—
the old Marxist concept of ideology—was transformed into Gramsci’s notion of ideology as
“hegemony.
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