So much that I still feel enough optimism to go on pointing out how very little the larger situation differs, today, from the one Adorno and Horkheimer described. It faded because the last generation revolted against that regimentation - and all of us exchanging ideas in this forum are in some way children of that fabulous revolt, which lent an extraordinary openness to Western thought and allowed it to throw off much of its bourgeois past, to embrace the diversity that we now enjoy. I love the openness of today's world, which we no longer need to divide up into a first, a second and a third. But those wide-open possibilities are still only available within specific precincts of experience. Elsewhere the instrumental reason of capitalist growth goes unquestioned, has no outside.
Bitter exploitation goes on.
And the irony is that our new freedom of thought satisfies us, we on this list and in the cultural world generally, so that we rarely undertake the systematic analysis and critique that Adorno and his friends did. As though, despite best intentions, there were no longer a possible outside or limit to the mechanisms for the generation of surplus value. They are double. Wallerstein made it possible for me to see how transnational capitalism maintains its growth dynamic by constantly shifting its centers within a single, fully accessible, but never homogeneous world. The transnational rich will move with the shifting flows and generally stay on top - or better yet, their capital will simply move, at electronic speed through private computer networks.