ABSTRACT
Until the success of the Russian Revolution, the largest and most prestigious Marxist organisation had been the German Social Democratic Party. The tradition was carried on by the Communist Party of Germany, formed after the abortive 1919 Revolution and the proclamation of the Third International. Walter Benjamin's work as a whole is complex and convoluted. It includes brilliant unfinished studies of Baudelaire's poetry and its place in 'Paris, capital of the nineteenth century' and essays on various literary themes. Nazi Germany, with its total domination of every aspect of social life offered a manifest example, but T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer also found this 'one dimensional' structure in capitalist America. The group of thinkers associated with the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt practised a 'critical theory' which was in a symbiotic relationship with Marxism, rather than part of the Marxist mainstream.
