ABSTRACT
On Marx's grave, in London, his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is recorded: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” After Marx, those philosophers who were not trying to change the world, those who were “only” trying to interpret it, were condemned by Marxists as “bourgeois,” as implicitly defending the status quo. Critical Theory wanted to remain faithful to Marx's precept that the point is to change the world, but the drastic change that can be witnessed in our contemporary society has to do with the social actor that can bring forth such revolutionary plans. In other words, who is capable today of changing the world? According to a classical Marxist perspective, it is the objective situation of exploitation that determines the revolutionary consciousness of the working class. The proletariat, as the social class that has achieved an objective awareness of their situation of oppression, can become the true subject of a revolutionary change of our social structure. While this held true between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, after World War II and the disastrous experiences of Fascism and Nazism first, and then of the Stalinist turn of the Soviet model, this faith in a revolutionary social actor gradually disappeared. At the same time, the standardization of culture in capitalist societies transformed the consciousness of the exploited class into the most passive acceptance of consumerism and conservative political models. Horkheimer clearly summarizes this problem: “not even the situation of the proletariat in this society is a guarantee of correct consciousness.”
