Critical Marxist Theory

This book argues why Critical Theory – as first developed in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung – must be updated to help us tackling today’s capitalist polycrisis, from economic via political to ecological crises. Yet, following the dissolution of the Institute for Social Research in New York, and the latest with the death of Adorno in 1969 and the death of Marcuse almost exactly ten years later, there has been a ‘domestication’ of the main strands of the Frankfurt School. To understand and overcome this domestication, the book traces, with the means of philosophy and sociology, its two affirmative steps in a liberal and in a postmodern turn. As an alternative to both, it defends Habermas’ project of modernity, yet only by disentangling it – in Marxian fashion – from the capitalist process of modernisation. This disentanglement is at the same time a political radicalisation. It is necessary because the cultural-political ideal(s) of the project of modernity – from human autonomy via rational society to qualitative individuality – can only be realised beyond the framework of capitalism. As their conceptual concentrate, the book proposes political autonomy as a key concept confined neither by Kantian or liberal approaches nor by autonomist or operaist traditions. Rather, it draws on thinkers like Herbert Marcuse, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and Martin Hägglund to rephrase Marxist concepts such as social freedom, democratic socialism, and the end of prehistory. In this way, political autonomy is developed both as a legit criterion for justified critique and as the philosophical foundation and emancipatory goal of a pluralist yet transcapitalist Critical Marxist Theory. Lukas Meisner is fellow at the Berlin Institute of Critical Theory (InkriT) and the Institute for International Political Economy Berlin (IPE). Since 2025, he is editor-in-chief of Das Argument. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften. He is the author of Fluch(t). Die Sintflut heißt Westen (2025), Wrackmente. Novelle (2024), Medienkritik ist links. Warum wir eine medienkritische Linke brauchen (2023) and coauthor of Capitalist Nihilism and the Murder of Art (2020, with Eef Veldkamp).