The Crisis of One-Dimensionality

When the one-dimensionality thesis was fully enunciated in the early 1960s, it was already historically obsolete, not because of the student activism and anti-war militancy that exploded in the following years, but because it described a phase of capitalist development already in the process of being superseded.

Abstract

Abstract When the one-dimensionality thesis was fully enunciated in the early 1960s, it was already historically obsolete, not because of the student activism and anti-war militancy that exploded in the following years, but because it described a phase of capitalist development already in the process of being superseded. Furthermore, the critical theory that had formulated such a thesis from 1940 on, turned out to be structurally unable to anticipate and explain the new social process. This failure was the result of key theoretical commitments made in the 1930s to explain those social developments which orthodox Marxism seemed unable to grasp, while retaining unchanged most fundamental Marxist assumptions.