A Theory Devoured by Thought 417the supporting reality, while, on the other hand, it would become clear
that a changing social practice would assume political form: politics for
the elimination of politics.’^26 Horkheimer, too, believed that politics was
a second-order phenomenon, namely ‘the immediate function of the
economy. Even the fear of atom bombs is nothing compared to the
concern for the good conduct of business.’^27 Horkheimer was evidently
tormented by this concern when he warned Adorno that, as the ‘propa-
gandist of the anti-nuclear movement’, Habermas might gain undue
influence in the institute. After all, ‘the institute was dependent, in part
at least, on industry for research commissions.’ ‘But we must not let the
institute be ruined by what is probably the heedless attitude of this one
Assistent.’^28 This anxiety would soon be shown to be wholly without
foundation.
In the initial phase of the Federal Republic, the Social Democratic
Party had rejected a market economy based on tax concessions for
business and low wages. But in the light of the sustained success of the
governing conservative party, it was forced to review its position. With
the aim of winning votes from sectors of the electorate that went be-
yond its traditional supporters, the party convened an extraordinary
congress in Bad Godesberg in November 1959. There it produced a new
fundamental programme in which it committed itself firmly to a policy
of integration in the West and also to a market-based economy. This
new policy was the brainchild of Carlo Schmid and Herbert Wehner,
with some support from Willy Brandt. It alienated a number of more
strongly left-wing delegates, who regarded it as a capitulation and the
complete abandonment of Marxism. This triggered a lengthy debate
about the programme of the SPD, which was further exacerbated in
1966 by the formation of the Grand Coalition in which a government
was formed from an alliance of the CDU/CSU with the SPD.^29 Seven
years after the publication of the Godesberg Programme, Adorno wrote
to Enzensberger that he wanted to write a fundamental critique of the
Godesberg Programme, modelled on Marx’s famous critique of the
Gotha Programme of 1875. His idea was that Enzensberger would pub-
lish this critique in Kursbuch, a magazine edited by him and published
by Suhrkamp.^30 Even if Adorno was not fully in agreement with the
cultural revolution propagated by the magazine and its general renun-
ciation of bourgeois literature, he was attracted by the idea of writing
and publishing such a critique in the tradition of Karl Marx. He had
in fact already begun to make notes in the margins of a copy of the
Godesberg Programme. It is evident from these that he was highly crit-
ical of the new programme. Where its authors had written of the danger
that man had ‘unleashed the primal power of the atom’, he noted,
‘regression to “man”’; furthermore, he observed, ‘they point to contra-
dictions, not the contradiction’. At the point where the programme
discusses the justice of the material distribution of goods, he wrote
in the margin: ‘ambiguous, i.e., formulated as if it could be achieved