In debates about capitalism, social transformation, and what makes people docile or rebellious, we often hear two main stories. One comes from the Marxist tradition that claims societies are shaped by the relationships that emerge from the mode of production. In other words, what matters is who owns what and who works for whom. The other perspective, critical of Marxism, says we must also consider culture, ideology, and how people come to accept the world as it is.
This latter perspective is often associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of mid-20th century thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. They argued that capitalism shapes how people see the world. Capitalism functions by narrowing and guiding what people desire and what they imagine the world could be. Through mass media, consumer culture, and what they called the "culture industry," capitalism, they claimed, had trained people to find comfort and even pleasure in an oppressive order. They have come to view the irrational system of capitalism, a system which produces peace and prosperity for some at home through war and poverty for the majority abroad (and at home!), as supremely rational.
Critics of the Frankfurt School—like the author of this article by Daniel Morley—say this is a defeatist attitude. Morley argues that these Frankfurt thinkers abandoned the working class, saw people as too brainwashed to ever rise up, and gave up on revolution altogether. Instead, critics of the Frankfurt school of thought defend a more traditional Marxist view: wages, working hours, ownership of production, and other material conditions are still what matter most. They defend this traditionalist Marxist view even today, an age in which the conditions those in the Frankfurt school identified have exacerbated significantly alongside the advance of technology and luxury comforts. No matter how much people watch TV or scroll social media, when capitalism goes into crisis, people will fight back.
So, who’s right?
The truth, I believe, is that both sides illustrate valid dynamics and must be reconciled. We need a new way to diagnose our current situation, one that doesn’t dismiss either material conditions or cultural manipulation, and one that refuses to give up on people while still taking seriously how deeply trapped all of us are, albeit to varying degrees.
Let’s try to reframe and speak directly to the situation we confront today, taking the insights of the Marxist and Frankfurt thinkers but grounding them in the realities shaped by contemporary technology, digital saturation, and the intensified comforts and pressures of twenty first century life.
Money and Attention
Under capitalism, labor is systematically undervalued because wages only reflect what’s necessary to keep workers coming back, not the full value of what they create. The logic of capitalism is to use money to make more money. Profit growth is the aim and must be pursued at all costs. If businesses were to ignore this structural logic, settle at a steady profit figure, and choose not to pursue growth by increasing productivity, cutting wages, or automating labor, they risk being outcompeted.
This logic is what Marx identified and it hasn’t changed. But since the capitalist project is one of continuous expansion, its reach into our lives has expanded as well. Capitalism’s reach is not limited to the hours we spend working. The system reaches into every part of daily life. It shapes how we think, how we feel, how we act, and even how we rest. Today, capitalist has expanded to create what is known as the “attention economy,” which profits as it turns our attention into a product that can be sold. Social media collects data from our conversations and habits to generate a behavioral profile of us, which they use to make predictions about which ads will catch our eyes. They then sell ad spaces on our feed based on these predictions, which continue to improve the more we scroll.
Thus, under today’s economic structure, your attention itself has become a site of extraction. What you look at, how long you look, what makes you pause, what you type, and what you click are all converted into data points. It’s important to stress (since Marx himself did so) that the attention economy didn’t emerge because of some evil actors pulling strings. Rather, it is the logical result of a system who’s logic demands constant growth, continuous profit, and efficiency in prediction and influence. Corporations compete to meet those demands, and that competition drives them to develop increasingly sophisticated methods of capturing and monetizing attention.
When human behavior can be turned into data, and data can be used to predict and influence spending, it becomes profitable to design apps, platforms, and environments that capture more of our mental space. Addiction is an optimization problem. The more time you spend scrolling, the more advertising slots are sold. The more anxious you are, the more products can be pitched. The more isolated you feel, the more you’re likely to seek stimulation or relief through things that generate profit for someone else.
Curiously, none of this happens through coercion. That’s part of what thinkers like the Frankfurt School were warning about. Capitalism has conditioned us to to interpret these conditions as normal, even enjoyable. Entertainment, convenience, and personalization are felt as rewards. People willingly provide their attention and behavioral surplus not because they’re being directly forced to, but because the surrounding social world has made alternative forms of life hard to even imagine, let alone live. The system persists through material deprivation, that is unquestionable. However, increasingly it is through internalized habits, desires, and routines shaped by culture, media, and economic pressure that capitalism has been able to expand and reproduce itself.
In this system, people are reduced to inputs in a vast feedback loop. Capitalism is not concerned with anyone’s well-being. It doesn’t need to care about this. In a world increasingly dependent on data, profit growth now requires that attention can be captured, behavior can be nudged, and data can be sold. We’re woven into the machinery of profit during our downtime, in our social interactions, in the way we process the world.
There’s no single villain. Just an accelerating system powered by millions of individual choices, habits, and adaptations, each one understandable on its own, but together, reinforcing a world where the boundaries between life and labor, self and product, are increasingly hard to draw.
Capitalism now depends on both workers’ physical labor and their psychic submission. This is what the Frankfurt School saw. They weren’t saying people are too stupid to revolt, rather they were arguing that the system had grown more sophisticated in containing our capacity to think differently.
The Enlightenment
One of the Frankfurt School’s most famous critiques was of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century movement that championed reason, science, and human progress. The Enlightenment helped free people from religious dogma and monarchy, but, subtly, it introduced a new kind of domination: the belief that everything can be measured, managed, and controlled.
The same mindset that led to modern medicine also led to factories, prisons, and bureaucracies that manage people like objects. Cutting reason off from compassion, it has become a tool of domination.
Aldous Huxley, in his novel Brave New World, warned us about this too. In that world, no one was oppressed by force. Rather, they were numbed with pleasure, distracted by entertainment, and trained to love their place in the system. It was a dictatorship of comfort and distraction. Sound familiar?
But Huxley also imagined an alternative. In Island, he pictured a society rooted in cooperation, mindfulness, education of the heart, and collective joy. For him, liberation was primarily a task of philosophical orientation. People needed to be free inside to be free outside.
Fragmented but not Hopeless
The classic Marxist idea is that it is the working class who produces value but this class doesn’t own the means of production, and this gives them unique revolutionary potential. However, the working class has never been and still isn’t a single, unified group. It's fragmented across race, nationality, gender, job type, geography, and ideology. Many workers are struggling just to survive, and are often overwhelmed by anxiety, debt, or shame.
It’s easy to say, “the working class has been bought off,” or “they’re too passive.” I feel this is a misunderstanding. Most people aren’t apathetic by choice. They’re exhausted, distracted, overworked, or deeply disillusioned. Others are trying to survive inside systems that punish resistance through job insecurity, police violence, or mental burnout. People do have intense concerns, it’s just that when they aren’t distracted by the pleasures of doom scrolling, they are often concerned with their own material condition and their own survival.
This doesn't mean there's no hope. It means the conditions for social transformation may not be what we thought. We have to update our worldview and incorporate the insights of those like Marcuse and Adorno. The textbook model of revolution rests on Enlightenment assumptions: that society is a system of knowable parts, that linear progress and centralized control can steer it toward justice. But reality is quantum, relational, unpredictable. Capitalism has evolved alongside this complexity, integrating itself into our emotions, relationships, and attention. The old model failed because it was based on the wrong map. Transformation requires attuning to complexity. The spread of transformative ideas happens through ongoing dialogue, shared struggles, and lived relationships, not top-down declarations.
Consciousness Is the Battleground
Social transformation isn’t just about changing who owns the factories. It’s about changing how people see themselves, each other, and the world. And that takes more than slogans or economic struggle. It requires a shift in awareness.
The Frankfurt School saw how capitalism trains people to internalize their own lack of freedom. Huxley saw how pleasure and comfort could be used to contain rebellion. So how do people break free? Not in mass all at once, but in waves, in cracks, in moments of realization. One person teaches another. Someone has a breakdown, then a breakthrough. A worker realizes they’ve been lied to. A friend shares a book that changes someone’s life.
The people evicted, incarcerated, stuck in underfunded schools, pushed out of hospitals, or trapped in jobs that wear down the body before forty are the ones who know, through lived experience, what’s wrong with the world. If they can’t express it in theory, they can feel it in their bones. It’s the role of the vanguard intellectuals to enter into dialogue and help these individuals put words to their experience.
A New Diagnosis for a New Era
So how do we understand our current world?
We have to understand and interpret our capitalist society as something that’s expanded far beyond the workplace. It still controls who gets paid and who doesn’t, who owns and who rents, but now we realize it reaches deeper. It shapes what we see, how we feel, and even what we think is possible. Our attention, our emotions, and our sense of reality itself have become points of extraction.
The Enlightenment taught us to measure, sort, and control. Over time, this way of thinking turned into systems that organize people like data, treat nature like a machine, and define success by who commands the most.
The working class has been divided, distracted, and stretched thin. They’re not a mythic revolutionary class, but they’re not passive sheep either. They’re stuck in worlds that make resistance hard and isolation easy.
Mass culture conditions us to accept things we don’t agree with, because we’ve been taught there’s no other way. But cracks are forming. The future won’t come from trying to revive old blueprints for revolution. It’ll come through building new forms of life together, in the gaps left by a system that’s falling apart.
Genuine transformation depends on how we direct our attention, how we treat one another, how we organize our time, care, and labor. We’re not as free as we’d like to believe, but I feel we’re not as trapped as we’ve been told.
Peter S. Baron (http://www.petersbaron.com) is the author of If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society.
