Towards a New Manifesto

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (Translated by Rodney Livingstone)

Verso, 2011

Verso has released a text of a 1956 dialogue between Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno which was intended to result in a philosophical updating of the Communist Manifesto. The project is a worthy one, but neither thinker a) was stylistically well suited for the literary genre of the manifesto nor b) thought social revolution was objectively possible by this point in history.

Google Books has a preview excerpt available.

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The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory (Forthcoming)

Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell

Lexington Books, 2012

Raya Dunayevskaya engaged in a long and productive correspondence with two other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm (the latter much more loosely associated than the former). Dunayevskaya held Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution (original edition 1941) in high esteem and Marcuse contributed an interesting introduction to her Marxism and Freedom, one that is still worth reading today. Fromm invited Dunayevskaya to submit a chapter for his collection Socialist Humanism and wrote a preface to the German edition of her Philosophy and Revolution. Although the title of this book might mistakenly lead the reader to think Dunayevskaya was herself a Critical Theorist, having the texts of this correspondence widely available will contribute toward raising her intellectual profile closer to the one she deserves.

Several of  Dunayevskaya’s letters to Marcuse are available in The Power of Negativity. Douglas Kellner, editor of the Marcuse’s collected papers also included a selection of the correspondence in Towards a Critical Theory of Society (2001), the second volume of a still-ongoing series.

(Amazon lists a release date of February 16)