Critical Thinking for Transformative Justice

socialized ownership of the means of
production in contemporary Western
societies. [35] The dialectic through which
Marx predicted the emancipation of
modern society is thus suppressed,
effectively being subjugated to a positivist
rationality of domination.
Of this second "phase" of the Frankfurt
School, philosopher and critical theorist
Nikolas Kompridis writes that:
“
According
to
the now
canonical view
of its history,
Frankfurt
School critical
theory began in
the 1930s as a
fairly confident
interdisciplinary
and materialist
research
program, the
general aim of
which was to
connect
normative
social criticism
to the
emancipatory
potential latent
in concrete
historical
processes. Only
a decade or so
later, however,
”
having revisited
the premises of
their
philosophy of
history,
Horkheimer
and Adorno's
Dialectic of
Enlightenment
steered the
whole
enterprise,
provocatively
and selfconsciously,
into a skeptical
cul-de-sac. As a
result they got
stuck in the
irresolvable
dilemmas of the
"philosophy of
the subject,"
and the original
program was
shrunk to a
negativistic
practice of
critique that
eschewed the
very normative
ideals on which
it implicitly
depended.
Kompridis claims that this "sceptical culde-sac"
was arrived at with "a lot of help
from the once unspeakable and
unprecedented barbarity of European
fascism," and could not be gotten out of
without "some well-marked [exit or]
Ausgang, showing the way out of the
ever-recurring nightmare in which
Enlightenment hopes and Holocaust
horrors are fatally entangled." However,
this Ausgang, according to Kompridis,
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