“After one has enjoyed the first taste of Marxist criticism, one will never again be able to stand ideological hogwash.” – Ernst Bloch, Spirit of Utopia, 1918

The relationship between art and society has always been a central question for artists, thinkers and activists on the Left. In the twentieth century, it was commonplace to believe that art has the power to change the world. It was this conviction that motivated Georg Lukács to defend the literary realism of writers like Thomas Mann over the stylistic innovations of a James Joyce. For Lukács (1977: 33), literature was “a particular form by means of which objective reality is reflected,” and as such it was “of crucial importance for it to grasp that reality as it truly is.” By displaying social reality in all its contradictory complexity, Lukács believed, art could serve the interests of class struggle and social emancipation.

With the hindsight of history, Lukács’ comments seem rather naïve. In the Soviet Union, realism functioned not to highlight oppression and injustice, but to enforce it. Only “socialist realist” works had the censors’ seal of approval; stylistic experimentation was perceived as a direct challenge to ideological orthodoxy. If art today often escapes that kind of direct political control, it is nonetheless subject to the ruthless censorship of the market. Does not mass culture serve only to inculcate the values required to reproduce capital? Are not museums little more than theme parks celebrating the history of colonial violence? Is so-called “high art” anything other than an elitist pursuit for the wealthy and well educated? In short, given capital’s near-total colonization of the lifeworld, one might well ask what space and power for critique art really has today.

When considering the critical potential of art today, one can do worse than to revisit the theories of the Institute for Social Research (a.k.a. the Frankfurt School) and related figures. Writing in a twentieth century in which art became a major political battleground, their ideas still offer enormous resources for Marxist approaches to culture. While thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer emphasized the corruption of culture under conditions of technologized capitalism, others like Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin were more hopeful about the utopian potential of art in the age of its “technological reproducibility” (cf. Benjamin, 2008). What was ultimately at stake for all these thinkers was the question of culture’s ambivalent relationship to social freedom, which is why engaging with their ideas remains essential for anyone interested in the cultural contradictions of capital today. This article offers an historical introduction to the ideas of Bloch, Adorno and Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer concerning the relationship between culture, technology, and politics.

Irreconcilable political and theoretical differences with leading members of the Frankfurt School like Horkheimer and Adorno meant that Bloch was never officially involved with the Frankfurt School. Yet he nevertheless made a bold and original contribution to critical theories of culture in the twentieth century. No other thinker went so far in insisting on the ability of art and literature to reveal the utopian potentials inherent in society, even as it simultaneously expresses oppressive ideologies.