You can read and enjoy Adorno in bits without swallowing a whole overarching theoretical foundation. As he also often wrote that way.
Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.
Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.
(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)
From this (mostly fine) article you linked to: "Marx was a left-Hegelian, which meant he filed the serial numbers off God and called Him “communism”."
I mean, no. That's a complete misreading of Marx. (Though perhaps one that was convenient to Stalinists or Maoists to continue to let breathe...).
For one, it would only apply to Marx in his 20s. Grown up Marx substantially threw out most of the Hegelian stuff, seeing it as superstitious nonsense while he studied commodity prices in the British Museum's reading room.
Or at least -- in his own younger-self terms -- he "turned it on its head" by throwing out the Idealist aspects of the dialectic. Even a traipse through the Theses on Feuerbach shows him rejecting all the transcendent forces of history crap.
I'd argue by the time we get to Capital the dialectic and the Hegel stuff generally is barely present.
If he is speaking of dialectic, it's mostly as "here's a way to look at history as it has happened, let's go poke at the contradictions and see what's in there" not "here's a recipe for how history works and from this we can predict..."
And back to Adorno, this is actually precisely what he is getting at in Negative Dialectics. Reinterpreting the "dialectic" as a non-Platonic, non-Hegelian process of looking at contradictions in reality and history but without expecting any kind of unification or resolution to a more perfect form. Living with the negative and the unknowable. Because the alternative, in Adorno's mind, was the path to Auschwitz.
Honestly, Marx's work is like "the Bible", nobody is really reading it honestly "from scratch". They are all coming in with an existing identity / framework / world view, and getting it to say what they want it to say.
Something about people pretending it was the official ideology of half the world tends to do that. The old man himself would have thrown up into his soup if he knew.
> I’ve long complained that communists refuse to specify the details of how a communist society will work, or why it would be good.
Did capitalists do this in any comprehensive or satisfactory way prior to the advent of capitalism? I’m not a communist, but this seems like a fairly weak criticism.
I'm not sure why that's relevant. My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order. While it might be nice in theory to have such a thing, it's not clear that it's really a reasonable thing to ask for.
> My point is that it's never really possible to provide a detailed plan for a complete changing of the social order.
That's correct, but if the communist avantguarde says (as they did) "we have to completely change the social order by force, uproot everything, to build communism", there might be questions if it's at least going to be directionally good or bad. And if the answers can't be provided, then perhaps they shouldn't be doing it at all?
Yep, that’s the classic small ‘c’ conservative argument against revolutions or sudden changes. It’s a fine argument, but it’s not specific to communism.
Yeah it's not specific to communism, one just needs to look at the sudden changes the US admin is implementing to see it's broadly applicable, only they don't even pretend to be interested in societally good outcomes.
Minimia Moralia for example is a collection of more personal and essay form writings.
Also I absolutely love Negative Dialectics as a piece of theoretical writing but I am not convinced it fits into the standard "Frankfurt school" label. It's more about epistemology than it is about culture.
(He was, however, more than a bit of a snob. I wouldn't take his musings on culture at face value unless you truly believe -- like he did -- that jazz and other popular music is just intrinsically and objectively worse than Bach forever and always absolute truth. Ahem.)