03 - Marxismo Cultural e Revolução Cultural: Reação à crise marxista

World War I represented a theoretical crisis for Marxism, as it expected workers to unite against their employers, but the opposite happened: workers united against each other. The big question that arose was: who alienated the workers in this way? An alienated person, according to Marxism, is someone who has renounced their class rights to give them to another person. When they stop fighting for their class rights, they are serving another class. Who alienated the proletariat, the poor? Marxism's answer: Western civilization. Two different thinkers found the same answer to the dilemma of alienation: the first was Antonio Gramsci, who in the USSR saw the limits of Marxist theory, becoming aware of the need for a cultural shift to implement a socialist mentality; The other was Georg Lukács, who, together with Felix Weil, founded the Institute for Social Research in 1923, also counting on the collaboration of other thinkers, with the objective of studying Western civilization with the aim of destroying it. This Institute also became known as the Frankfurt School, with its main members being Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Wilhelm Reich.