The Frankfurt School is one of the traditions in Marxist theory that has drawn our attention to the importance of studying culture. It does so with profound engagements with ideology, the culture industry and communication. In the twenty-first century, digital culture and digital communication have become important phenomena. It is therefore an interesting task to revisit some of the writings of Frankfurt School thinkers in the light of these developments. This book is not an introduction to critical theory, a textbook or a historical account. Rather, it focuses on some selected key areas of critical theory as building blocks for the foundations of a critical theory of communication that goes beyond Habermas.
Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (1992) argue in the introduction to the first volume of the three-part collected volume Open Marxism, that with the rise of neoliberalism and postmodern thought, it became fashionable in the 1980s to turn against Marxism and criticise it as outdated, old-fashioned, reductionist, deterministic, and a closed system of thought. They question this tendency and argue for open Marxism as a methodological approach. Open Marxism sees the ‘openness of Marxist categories themselves’ (Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis, 1992, xi).
“Closed Marxism” is Marxism which does either or both of two interrelated things: it accepts the horizons of a given world as its own theoretical horizon and/or it announces a determinism which is causalist or teleological as the case may be (xii).
They mention Adorno and Lukács as two of the figures in the tradition of open Marxism (Bonefeld, Gunn and Psychopedis, 1992, xii).
The Open Marxism project does not aim to reconstruct Marx’s thought, in the sense of presenting an interpretation which masquerades as the sole ‘correct’ one. Such an approach would not be helpful, for it would presuppose the possibility of a uniform and finished interpretation of Marx’s work (Bonefeld, Gunn, Holloway and Psychopedis 1995, 1).
Comparable to Bonefeld, Gunn, Holloway and Psychopedis, Wolfgang Fritz Haug (1985) argues for plural Marxism, a project that is based on the dialectic of unity and diversity (Haug 1985, 12).
Marxism does not simply exist, but is becoming. Marxism can only exist as process. Marxism’s truth cannot be organised in a number of phrases, but only in the process of the inconclusive engagement of diferences with each other. […] Marxism is not a given, there are Marxisms. Marxism exists in the plural. […] [Marxism requires] convergence in divergence. (Haug 1985, 20)
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Critical Theory of Communication