Critical Theory is a Revisionist Marxist social theory developed in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1930s at the School for Social Research at the Univerrsity. It sought to explain the failure of Marxism to bring about the social revolution which Marx had predicted. His political-economic theory (published as Das Kapital in 1867) suggested that the tendency of the factory owners to get rich from the profit born of the commodification of labour and the exploitation of workers would eventually lead to unacceptable maldistribution of wealth, to the rising up of the proletariat and to worldwide revolution.

Marxist theoriists believed that the 1917 October Revolution in Russia heralded the beginning of this process and predicted that other States would follow the lead of the Russian peasants. When, by 1930 this had clearly not happened, theorists at the Frankfurt School attempted to develop an understanding of the apparent failure of Marx's theories. They turned to Marx's theory of the Base-Superstructure.

Marx had suggested that the form of social life and culture was essentially determined by the economic structures and circumstances existing in any society. Under capitalism, the structure revolves around the means of production being owned by other than those who work or operate it - that is, the "bosses" own the factories and fields and the workers produce the wealth from them. The owners of the means of production then take the things produced by the workers and sell them at a profit (iew. a price greater than all of the costs of production including the labour of the workers). It is therefore important to the owners of the means of production to minimise the costs of production, including labour costs. As wages are reduced, profits increase, so that there is a built in tendency for economic disparities to grow and increase. Marx suggested that the only way to prevent this was for the workerrs to actually own the means of production - that is, Communism. Only through Communism, he suggested, could harmonious cultural and social relations be realised and ensured.

The first works of the Frankfurt theorists challenged the Base-Superstructure model promoted by Marx and conduct wide-ranging research into social forms. They suggested that the cultural superstructure had much more of an ability to influence the economic base than Marx had realised. Their research included an analysis of what they called the Culture Industry, through which they saw the forces of capitalism able to pacify the masses and thereby maintain the social, political and economic status quo.

They sought to understand the processes and structures of cultural forms in order develop more successful ways of bringing about social transformation. This, in essence, was the foundation of Critical Theory. With the rise of Hitler, nost of the Frankfurt theorists (being Jewish) fled to the USA and Britain, exporting their theories also. In this way, Critical Thyeory grew and developed to embrace widely differing areas of knowledge. Its chief characteristic is its challenge to received notions of reality, seeking to demonstrate the ways in which our conceptions and perceptions are socially constructed.  Critical Theory is reflexive - that is, it is aware that the “reality” that we experience “out there” does not exist independently of ideology, but that it is shaped (along with our perceptions of it) by forces of power and hegemony that have a human agency. It follows Marx's astute observation that:

"The owners of the material means of production are also the owners of the mental means of production"

Through the means of mental production (the media, the Culture Industry, the Church, the Law etc) the State (and its controlling capitalist elite) are able to shape common perceptions of the social, political and economic reality and thus to maintain their hold on power.

See: Held, D., Introduction to Critical Theory, University of California Press, 1980.

This website contains critical analyses of many of the facets of Critical Theory itself. These studies, in the form of freely downloadable PDFs interrogate the mechanisms of mental production in a range of fields. These include:

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