Critical theory can be understood as a whole as a crisis theory. Central is the insight that crises are more than just annoying side effects of the capitalist exploitation, accumulation, and valorization process. They can be overcome in individual cases when the exploitation process steers the next economic phase in the course of a new accumulation regime, but in principle they cannot be avoided or circumvented, and ultimately they threaten not only individual capitals, but the system of valorization of value as a whole. Because the crisis is per se constitutive for the economy of industrial capitalism. In the early 1930s, Horkheimer examined the socio-economic crisis of the liberal democratic states. There, the transfer of power to fascist leaderships was looming, and counteracting attempts were made to install welfare state models that were more or less socialist-oriented. In view of these experiences, he developed a research perspective that Türcke and Bolte aptly summarize as: “Turning away from the Marxian future prognosis—by applying the Marxian crisis theory”. The crisis-theoretical program of the Institute for Social Research was therefore not based on “a revision of Marxian theory”, “but its application to itself, its critical elaboration with its own means or, philosophically expressed: its self-reflection”.