reading adorno and benjamin, or for that matter sartre, one cannot but be struck by their bizarre distortion by marxism. adorno is the most refined aesthete and snob. how are you going to throw marx into that? why would you? how could you? adorno despised the bourgeoisie. of course. but the idea that he was going to hang around with the proletariat or embody their values or interests is absurd. benjamin is a talmudic scholar of literature and life, gnomic. throw in a marxist demystification of all reality and all you've got is colossal incoherence. sartre is, come down to it, a kierkegaardian individualist, confronting you with your own infinite responsibility. and then...a marxist? bitch please. obviously these folks were swept up in the "progressive" intellectual culture of the era, and probably the alternative appeared to be heidegger's reconciliation with national socialism. fair enough, but of course there were other alternatives, and of course, like heidegger, these folks are implicated in a totalitarianism that is ultimately completely incoherent with their own intellectual practice. whatever the context, i hold them individually responsible for their choice. they owed more to their own thought than to keep nodding at some orthodoxy. and they had plenty of other ways to go; they could have hopped off at any time. consider orwell, or arendt. adorno and benjamin and sartre are geniuses or whatever, but they're marred all the way down by their self-enslavement. they wanted to be on the right side of history, not to miss the train to the future: a terrible idea, at once arrogant and slavish.