Karl Marx and Theodor Adorno, the inventors of postmodernism...

>They don't read and don't know much.

This is the key, I think. It allows them to discredit academia and philosophy so they can feel superior in their lack of education (or, as they'd call it, indoctrination).

What's truly disheartening to me is I'm a conservative and I've found the ideas and tools of the Frankfurt School very useful.

Cultural marxism doesn't exist as an actual term. It's just coopted Nazi propaganda (but they used to call it Cultural Bolshevism. It's a sweeping statement you throw to invalidate entire philosophical and political movements, by using a term that is essentially meaningless, but still charged with meaning (in this case it directly implies a conspiration).

For Foucault start from his mainstream works: Discipline and Punishment, History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. That said he is not a leftist, nor a Marxist. For his entire life he mantained a completely apolitical stance (yet he has been an activist when it comes to social policies). i don't think he ever gave his approval to any Socialist government.

The alt-lite's heart is in the right place in hating degeneracy and they've just had some very complicated theory misrepresented to them. They confuse all the vulgar transgressive urges of the last century and the collapse of modernism into postmodernism with all forms of "critique" of "traditional culture." There are too many categories to understand so they lump everything together.

I'm a right winger and I love the Frankfurt school and Marx and most of the poststructuralists because I know how filled with despair they (mostly) were over how capitalism had transformed humanity into cultureless goo.

One element of truth in it is that many or most of the followers of these thinkers have been bourgeois themselves. People remember "Derrida" as if he personally wrote every graduate thesis in his heyday, but the real inheritors of his work were millions of talentless trust fund kids whose underlying ethics and reasons for taking up his work were along the lines of WOOOO FAGETS R GRATE

Same with the hippie generation being full of absolutely degenerate garbage human beings, who choked out and ultimately consumed all the thinkers and artists who originally had good ideas about free expression and cultural engagement by the proletariat and things like that. Same thing with Weimar and modernism too, where the transgression of stale bourgeois values was taken as a license to fuck horses in public because that's New.

By cultural marxism I mean people like Adorno or Gramsci. You know, theorist of the dialectical nature of culture.

Thanks for the recommendations.

>What's truly disheartening to me is I'm a conservative and I've found the ideas and tools of the Frankfurt School very useful.
Know that feel. People like Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse may have been politically biased, yet everything they said on the culture industry was 100% right, to the point where simply looking at what our music, literature and art industry has become, without any philosophical guidance, will bring you to their exact positions.

Such a shame that /pol/ won't ever read them.

>Adorno and Horkheimer and the rest of the Frankfurt schoold are clear enough to be actually understood, it's not like they're Heidegger or Derrida
They use use an Hegelian style that makes it rather difficult for the untrained to read them. It's far too dense for anyone whose career isn't in studying this stuff.

And academia can't do anything to defend themselves. Their business model doesn't allow for it. It's great seeing them undermined by the intentional obscurity of the thinkers they've enshrined.

>For his entire life he mantained a completely apolitical stance

Foucault & Neoliberalism

Foucault & the Iranian Revolution

Foucault & the May '68 events

Foucault & Israel/Palestine

Foucault was very political and travelled in Sartre's circle

>They use use an Hegelian style that makes it rather difficult for the untrained to read them. It's far too dense for anyone whose career isn't in studying this stuff.

I agree with you that it is dense, but it is not obscurantist in the slightest. Their texts may be difficult to read, but so are Kant's. It's not a flaw per se, it becomes one only if those texts were mediocre in the first place.

Watch this, you will see that Adorno's conclusions are far closer to the right pop culture critics' than they will ever be willing to admit:
youtube.com/watch?v=S9AbuFhT0W4

Here's Habermas on postmodernism:

The postmodernists are equivocal about whether they are producing serious theory or literature;
Habermas feels that the postmodernists are animated by normative sentiments but the nature of those sentiments remains concealed from the reader;
Habermas accuses postmodernism of a totalizing perspective that fails "to differentiate phenomena and practices that occur within modern society";
Habermas asserts that postmodernists ignore that which Habermas finds absolutely central – namely, everyday life and its practices.

And here's him on Christianity's role on social life:

For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or catalyst. Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we must draw sustenance now, as in the past, from this substance. Everything else is idle postmodern talk.

>For his entire life he mantained a completely apolitical stance
No

>The works of these people are so unclear that practically any words can be put in their mouths

That might be true of Adorno, but Fromm is almost painfully clear to the point that he's not even fun to read because he's always repeating himself as if to make absolutely sure that he won't be misunderstood by anyone.

And Marcuse (who seems to be the worst of the bunch according the the paranoid right wingers) is fairly straight forward. If you know even just a bit about German philosophy you could probably understand Marcuse.

Honestly I'd be surprised if greater than 5% of the conspiratards had actually read any of the writers they take issue with. And besides I don't really see what philosophers can do to appeal to the common man. There are already plenty of great introductory books and other resources on philosophy. People don't read them because most people have busy lives and probably think philosophy is boring anyways. It's not as if every writer can start every book with an intro-philosophy course just in case his readers are unfamiliar with philosophy.

Try the redpill

children don't have souls and I don't care about their feelings. Depression isn't real.

This post went from mildly interesting to dog shit in 0 flat

I did.

Then I stopped being a faggot and did my homework with the history of philosophy, and took what I wanted from everybody.

And for every Marx, Saussure and Derrida you can find a Weber, Peirce, Wittgenstein or Heidegger.

You're just venting your dislike of the /pol/ milieu. Your biases against it color how you read my post, so you get pissy and have to lash out.

The vast majority of people deploying "critical theory" in academia are spoiled bourgeois brats. The vast majority of pomo theorists are incredibly shitty at theory, and genuinely are susceptible to all the accusations of short-sighted nihilism that the average joe hurls at the Cultural Marxist boogeyman.

I know because I have to sit through classes with them, these days usually rich children of rich immigrants who apply slivers of Derrida and Judith Butler to prove that everything is oppression. Unreflective retards who learn a small fragment of a reader's digest version of the genealogical method so that they can ape the jargon of their teachers. Those people are the ones creating the Tumblr crowd.

I didn't have anything against Marcuse until I actually had to read and study him in school.