I. The Problem and Its Stakes

This article is written to diagnose a symptom. That symptom is the fascination with Martin Heidegger displayed by intellectual circles that adopt Marxist vocabulary while rejecting class politics, the revolutionary party, and the struggle for power. This fascination is not accidental; it serves a theoretical need. The source of that need is the internal impasse of the anti-communist left.

These circles are familiar enough. The Frankfurt School is their scripture, Adorno quotations their password, and "critical theory" has been reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise secreted from the ivory tower of the academy. Having no acquaintance with the shop floor, with class struggle, with organisation, these circles have found in Heidegger a garment cut precisely to their measure. That garment is a language that makes it possible to indict technical domination without naming capitalism, to produce critique without defining a subject, to generate thought without reckoning with practice. The success of this language is not merely philosophical but, above all, political: it offers a perfect formula for remaining "oppositional" while threatening nothing.

The argument of this article is unambiguous: to press a figure as contested as Heidegger into this service is both a philosophical counterfeit and a cover for political surrender.

II. A Note on Marxist Method

One thing must be stated at the outset. This article is not written to consign either Heidegger or the Frankfurt School wholesale to the dustbin. The intellectual history of Marxism is a history of learning even from its adversaries. Marx did not discard Ricardo; he superseded him by criticising him from within. He did not reject Hegel; he extracted the dialectic and left the husk behind. He did not condescend to the utopian socialists; he inherited their anger and left their fantasy aside. Where any criticised system of thought contains something of use, to examine it carefully, to develop it, and to surpass it critically is the very essence of Marxism's epistemological stance.

This stance will be applied to the Frankfurt School as well. Adorno's thought deserves serious criticism. His severance from praxis, his tendency to dissolve the historical subject, his covert intellectual contempt for the working class — these head the list. But Adorno's reading of Heidegger is a tool worth keeping to hand. We take it from Adorno, in spite of Adorno. This is not capitulation; it is the method itself.

III. Gestell: A Genuine Concept, a Defective Foundation

To dismiss Heidegger's concept of Gestell would be an intellectual mistake. Rendered into English variously as "enframing" or "positioning" — and carrying, at its core, the sense of "placing within a particular frame of reference" — this concept operates with real precision in Die Frage nach der Technik (1954). Gestell defines the essence of modern technology not merely as an ensemble of instruments but as a dispositif of domination that discloses the totality of beings as Bestand — standing reserve, exploitable resource. The Rhine is no longer a river but a water supplier for the hydroelectric plant. Everything, including the human being, is reduced to a calculable and exploitable resource. This observation possesses a certain truth; it cannot simply be dismissed.

Yet within the Marxist framework, this question already has an answer. That answer is Lukács's concept of Verdinglichung — embodiment. (To render this concept as mere "reification" is to drain it of its ontological weight.) It is the process whereby the social relations that human beings create through their own labour rise up before them as a rigid, alien, unalterable object — embodiment, objectification. Why, then, if this concept is already available, do we make room for Gestell as well? Because the two operate on different planes. Embodiment answers the question of why: relations of production, commodity fetishism, class exploitation. Gestell answers the question of how it appears. It describes the mental and practical framework through which modern technology converts everything into exploitable resource. Lukács explains the ground; Heidegger describes the surface. When we situate Gestell on the ground of embodiment — restoring its agent — we genuinely gain a new perspective. To see what Heidegger could not see, against Heidegger: this is the Marxist method itself.

For Heidegger, when treating Gestell, never names capitalism, has no wish to name it. Relations of production, surplus-value extraction, class interest — none of these figure in his agenda. Technical domination is stripped of historical and class determination. Critique thereby abandons any structural footing and dissolves into the mystical drama called "the forgetting of Being." What remains is a crime without a perpetrator, a destruction without a culprit, a history without a subject. This is precisely the form of critique most cherished by the ruling order.

IV. Adorno's Tool

Adorno understands why Heidegger appears attractive; this understanding is his valuable quality. In Negative Dialectics (1966) he demonstrates how Heidegger's ontology, built on "the forgetting of Being," converts concrete historical contradictions into a primordial drama of existence and thereby performs an ideological function. In Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (1964, The Jargon of Authenticity), he goes a step further. Heidegger's language is ideology in its own right. Words such as authenticity, anxiety, originality, homeland and the like convey the impression of philosophical content; in reality they are the ontological sublimation of petty-bourgeois existential distress. When distress is converted into fate rather than being traced to a historical agent, it becomes politically neutralised — indeed dangerous.

We take Adorno's analysis. But in doing so we also say this: the Frankfurt School's evaporation of the historical subject, the divorce of negative dialectics from practice, and the covert contempt for the working class do not exonerate Adorno. To use Adorno against Heidegger is not to surrender to Adorno. This is Marxist method itself: to extract the sharp tool from within the criticised system, without swallowing the system whole.

In Türkiye, saying this carries a double risk. The dogmatic Trotskyist will cry "Adornoite bourgeois intellectual"; the Frankfurt admirer will protest "you are instrumentalising Adorno." Both criticisms are different faces of dogmatism. One conceals its scripture in the Transitional Programme, the other in Negative Dialectics; both liquidate criticism from within rather than from without. Marxist method allows room for neither surrender nor a claim to exemption from criticism. The thinker takes what can be used; the remainder is set aside with a critical notation.

V. The Anti-Communist Marxist's Need for Heidegger

The Heidegger infatuation of the anti-communist left serves a structural need. Class analysis has been abandoned, party politics scorned, revolutionary practice equated with "totalitarianism." What remains after this liquidation is critique alone — but critique without a subject, without practice. Gestell settles precisely into this vacancy: it makes it possible to bypass, overlook, and negate the relations of production. It substitutes Seinsgeschichte (the historical destiny of Being) for class struggle, and "the call to authentic existence" for the revolutionary subject. Critique continues; but it no longer threatens anything.

There is a further dimension that must be noted. This theoretical choice, beyond political ambiguity, is functionally protective of the dominant order. A critique that avoids naming capitalism cannot move toward overcoming it. A theory of domination that conceals the agent serves reconciliation, not struggle. When the concept of "technical domination" is severed from its class context, what, then, remains? A diffuse pessimism, a directionless anger, and ultimately a kind of paralysis. That Heidegger never confronted this outcome is understandable given his ideological position; the same cannot be said of those who deploy him as a political instrument today.

These theories, produced in the academic comfort of the metropolis, open local branches through comprador intellectuals in non-metropolitan countries — among them Türkiye. They survive as an intellectual pastime entirely disconnected from the material conditions, relations of production, and historical reality of the society in which they are practised. The Heidegger infatuation of these circles is, at its core, a positional choice. The aim is to appear radical while remaining safe; to criticise without disturbing power; to speak Marxist language while evading its political consequences.

This is the philosophy of critique without politics — and it lodges safely within the very domination it professes to critique.

VI. Conclusion

Gestell is a genuine concept. The problematisation of technical domination is legitimate and necessary. Adorno's reading of Heidegger is a usable tool. We are discarding none of these.

But we are saying this. To use these concepts independently of relations of production, class contradiction, and the historical subject is to neutralise critique. Heidegger's language points to technical domination but conceals its agent. A certain vein of the Frankfurt School diagnoses alienation but relinquishes any claim to transformation. The anti-communist Marxist blends these two traditions to construct an intellectual comfort zone; within that zone he exists, at ease, inside the very order he professes to criticise.

The Marxist position is clear. Critique must be bound to practice. Diagnosis must produce a subject. Every tool taken from any thinker must be used by critically surpassing that thinker.

The real danger is not the forgetting of Being. It is the forgetting of capital, of relations of production and ownership, of class struggle. It is against this that we must remain vigilant.

1. Özcan Buze, "From 'Reification' to Embodiment: From Academic Captivity to the Cold Reality of Practice", Substack, April 2026. https://ozcanbuze947071.substack.com/p/seylesme-kavramndan-tecessume-akademik

2. Özcan Buze, “The Marxism That Served the Master”, Substack, April 2026. https://ozcanbuze947071.substack.com/p/the-marxism-that-served-the-master