/frankfurt/ general

What's the deal with the Frankfurt school? Are they really the Cultural Marxist boogeymen everyone makes them out to be? Are any of their theorists worth investigating? I've enjoyed the bits of Walter Benjamin that I've read and want to go deeper.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=IJeW-dyK3hA
youtube.com/watch?v=lyLUIXWnrC0
c2cjournal.ca/2009/06/where-marx-and-conservatives-meet-the-writings-of-paul-piccone/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Richard R. Weiner - Cultural Marxism and Political Sociology
Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson - Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture
Dennis Dworkin - Culutral Marxism in Postwar Britain
Fredric Jameson - Conversations on Cultural Marxism
Frederic Miller and Agnes F. Vandome - Cultural Marxism

>Cultural Marxism
Literally Nazi propaganda.

this irrelevant school people obsess about for some reason even though it had little to no effect on art, music or any of the other shit people claim it did

The Frankfurt School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was founded by Cultural Marx, the worst of all philologers.

Their satanic dialectics directly led to the deaths of a billion people, one third of the world's population.

I read a couple of Fromm books once, one was about love. Didn't seem like anything too radical or subversive. They're jewish so you're going to get the "love and accept all outsiders" stuff but that is to be expected.

Adorno has some good shit. Benjamin is great

But that's rarely the focus in their more hard-on theory. I mean, Adorno especially was a serious misanthrope. Like, sometimes in the dialectics of enlightment they have to actually remind people that they are FOR the grand emancipatory project because it's such a scathing critique of liberalism and what not.

The ironic thing about the "cultural marxism" conspiracy is that neo-reactionaries and similiar groups actually use a lot of the language and concepts straight out of Adorno without even realizing it.

Marcuse has great commentaries on social control and whatnot, but his solutions are absolutely retarded.
Benjamin is great.
I am yet to read Adorno.

It's not a conspiracy if it's theory and their works were openly published.

It's a conspiracy because it completely misunderstands their motives and what they actually wrote. Also, "cultural marxism" is a completely nonsensical discription, they never called themselves that and somehow spreading marxism was never the goal, just the underlying foundation of a very diverse group of thinkers trying to formulate a new way of theorizing the world.

To add, it's also retarded because it makes them out as some kind of political activist group, which they never were. Adorno especially was quite timid in real-world political terms and famously clashed with the radical 1968 student protestors because he didn't agree with their hasty and unconsidered methods.

>cultural marxism
>anything but nazi conspiracies and red scare

Just a convenient for the american right. Notice the word american. No one in Germany has even heard of the word "Kulturmarxismus". It doesn't exist.

Here's some proof that the world's far right is essentially copying each other

(For the non-German speakers: The guy pictured is a member of the NPD, one of the older far right parties, and he put on Facebook how the Frankfurt School is anti-German, he basically copy/pasted /pol/)

*convenient boogyman

Well, that sounds like he really has no clue what he's talking about.
The Frankfurt School(tm) is just a rightwing buzzword at this point. Sad!

>was vehemently against the 68' Revolutions, the true origins of today's cultural ideology
>was against the 'massification' of culture, the mass-produced pop-culture, and defended high art in the traditional sense
>when people talk about "Cultural Marxism" as inspiring this mainstream pop-culture they are actually talking about the massification of Cultural Capitalism and the degenerate Culture Industry that theorists of the Frankfurt School fought against

rly makes u think

>people obsess about for some reason

The right obsesses over them because they're Jews and moved to the US and worked with the CIA. Really gets the conspiracy retards going

>Are any of their theorists worth investigating
ADORNO
D
O
R
N
O

Also Habermas

Fuck Marcuse tbqh

Where exactly did Marcuse oppose the 68ers though?

Are you implying the alt-right are anti-semitic??????????
They don't hate jews, they only hate the international jewry!!!!

That Adorno isn't a folk hero on /pol/ has always confused me. He was a fan of Spengler who tried to better understand the underpinning mechanisms of the decline of the west, and identified capitalism (the culture more than the economic system) as a base force rewarding instant gratification and fostering a degeneration of art and ethics. The man was a closet traditionalist. And as far as traditionalists go, his theses were stronger than, say, meme authors like Evola with his new age "spiritual" garbage, or Rand with her belief that captains of industry and banking are the enlightened ones.

I think if more /pol/lacks were to read Adorno they'd be pleasantly surprised.

kek

Yeah man, people who work for the CIA don't have any vested interests at all

Of course. The "Father of the New Left", Herbert Marcuse, surely had absolutely no influence on modern culture whatsoever.

Theodor "Tonality is dead" Adorno is basically alt-right, right? The fact that he promoted Jewish 12-tone and serialist nonsense as being better than classical music is obviously irrelevant because he also didn't like jazz. This makes him a "traditionalist", apparently.

>Where exactly did Marcuse oppose the 68ers though?
Adorno did. Students tried to mess with his classes and he called the police.

Benjamin is the odd one out in the Frankfurt School though, and not even marxist in the original sense. I love him though, so based.

Dialektik der Aufklärung is a cool ass-text, and I can't fathom why the redpilled attack Adorno/Horkheimer. They're basically trying to rescue western civilization from devouring itself.

In short, cultural marxism being equated with Frankfurt School is a meme (although maybe I see a bit of a point with Marcuse or Fromm).

Cultural marxism doesn't even exist.

not an argument

>it's not Cultural Marxism, it's Neo-Marxism
>mind my pronouns, shitlord!

You can argue that it's not as big of a deal as /pol/ makes it out to be, but there's definitely a strong line of thought in left-wing circles that challenging all forms of hierarchy such as heteronormativity, family and religion is necessary to bring about communism, these hierarchies normalizing ways of thinking which prop up exploitative systems, which I believe is what /pol/ means by cultural marxism.

/Pol/ack Frankfurter adorno-fan here! Blame the ignorance on too many burgers

>make up some vague term
>everything you don't like is now that term
>somehow attribute it to a school of thought that has not much to do with the definition of the term you made up
>imagine a huge conspiracy to undermine western society by that school of thought and "the sjws"

Your ideology is beyond fucked.

They had a vested interest in not letting the Nazis win.

That's because no one on /pol/ thinks that capitalism itself is responsible for the problems of 'degeneracy' that they constantly complain about and prefer to blame it on conspiratorial figures like Da Jooz or Da SJWs

Because the leftist and capitalist forces in society have joined together to push the same agenda. I don't think people blame Jews insofar as they blame a tiny subgroup of secular globalists that manage to disproportionately control the multinational corporations and culture industry. If your only efforts in the identification of the actors and causes are just saying "lol Frankfurt school go read a book" then you're part of the problem.

I fully agree that most of the Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, were more sympathetic than hostile to the idea of a degenerate society pushed by capitalism. I don't believe that it's inherent in capitalism, especially since traditional institutions can be such a powerful force to overcome. But that's what happened, especially by modifying curriculum, promoting degeneracy, and importing people.

Benji not being a marxist is Scholem revisionism. The only thing that could be said about him is that he sometimes sounds more like an anarchist than anything else, but he was sill clearly some sort of communist.

You might take care to notice that England and the USA had a significant amount of both conservative tradition and free-market capitalism for well over a hundred years prior to the 1960s. Clearly whatever caused the massive cultural shift in the 1960s was not caused by a change in the economic system (unless it was the shift AWAY from free-market capitalism in the 1940s).

The fact that the cultural Marxists failed to predict that destroying traditions and institutions would merely strengthen capitalism rather than undermine it does not change the fact that this was their goal, and that this ideology had a great deal of influence on the many people who have participated in the "March through the institutions".

here is an amusing reflection from Sloterdijk

>unimpeded by the ubiquitous barriers of critical kitsch, which sees domination in every form of ‘self-control’, and immediately suspects any discipline in one’s way of life of being a self-repression that doubles an external repression. We recall, to name one of the best-known examples, the discrepancies read into the Sirens chapter of the Odyssey by Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the Greek seafarer becomes a bourgeois with suppressed drives who instantly advances to the prototype of the European ‘subject’. One thinks back with trepidation to the times in which a younger generation of intellectuals viewed such gaucheries as the non plus ultra of critical thought.

jewish trash. I'd read it just to know how your enemies want to kill you.

youtube.com/watch?v=IJeW-dyK3hA

SJWs are essentially Cultural Marxists.

Looks like the CMs have finally made it into the mainstream.

Yeah and for them everyone that is white is nazi.

...

But the primary goal of critical theory was never just some banal idea of destroying traditions and institutions. Part of formulating an open ended, empirically based theory MIGHT be challenging these things but not as a primary motivator. And they weren't very enthusiastic about the 1968 movement destroying capitalism, hence why, while beimg somewhat sympathetic, only reluctantly engaged with it.

It's a stupid idea, but any figure esteemed by contemporary academia deserves to be slandered.

Fromm is barely Frankfurt

see

Get the fuck outta here you dirty commie

How the fuck can SJWs be cultural MARXISTS if most of them believe in neoliberal capitalism?

Stop projecting your white/black wee wees on everything you fucking burger, they never were particularily concerned with race in that sense.

on the low level discourse yeah. the problem is lefties get mad when this shit happens because they want to be against 'fascists' at all costs. they get hit with cognitive dissonance and act like retards which in turn makes them lash and act like a fascist.

>How the fuck can SJWs be cultural MARXISTS if most of them believe in neoliberal capitalism?
They apply Marxist ideas and methods to social institutions rather than economics. And no, a vast majority of SJWs are communists and are eternally buttmad at "economic inequality".

I don't know where you people get this idea that critical theory is this big thing in academia, it's been seriously out of fashion for decades. Read a few pages out of the Dialectic Of Enlightment, the scathing disgust for civilization seeping through every page is totally at odds with the tone of modern liberal academia.

s/cultural Marxism/alt-right
s/sjws/actual Jews

You are your own bogeyman

Modern academia carries the torch of that seething hatred by directing it all at "oppressive people" aka white males, and wreathing their vitriolic hatred in niggerworship

Being mad at economic inequality doesn't instantly make you a marxist. Most of them are into people like Sanders, who isn't a marxist because he doesn't want to abolish capitalism but merely reform it. If this many people were actual communists in the US there would be some kind of communist opposition, which there fucking isn't.

Nazis also invented rocket propulsion engines, If we had listened to people like you we'd never have gotten to the moon. 'Cultural Marxism' might not be an etymologically or philosophically accurate term, but it's an emotionally coherent and politically useful term. It captures the pavlovian fear reaction /pol/acks and normies in flyover country experience when faced with edgy stuff like this. America's history is about a series of scapegoat moral panics, first catholics, then jews, communists during the Joe McCarthy era, muslims in the 00s... 'Cultural Marxism' is an universal panic, formless, shifting and omnipresent. This is what postmanagerial control looks like, relying on human cattle's feelings of powerlessness and disgust at their own situation in order to coax them into the slaughtehouse.

i think thats the point. imagine a generation that applied these thoughts to nearly everything without a thought for an opposite view. you will literally eat yourself. trying to out-left each other.

>They apply Marxist ideas
>not to economics

How are they Marxist then?

>Of course. The "Father of the New Left", Herbert Marcuse, surely had absolutely no influence on modern culture whatsoever.

not an argument. he really didn't, you showed zero examples.

youtube.com/watch?v=lyLUIXWnrC0

this video was painful to watch seeing him blame postmodernism, rap music, twerking and other shit on Frankfurt School and then goes to praise fucking Hopsin.

The 'sjws' at elite institutions are managers in training, not revolutionaries. Their role is to regulate identities within the current system, while ultimately upholding the broader power structure and its models of success and achievement. The revolutionary spirit of the 60s has been domesticated, spliced with Oprah/ESALEN confessionalism, the protestant guilt/work ethic complex and the eternal spirit of the middle manager. Goldman Sachs, the military and its major contractors have invested in 'diversity training' et. al. I don't know how things might go under Trump, probably we are about to see a synthesis of old and new forms of control. The essentialism of pop identity politics was never far away from an outright reinvention of race science, anyways.

Marcuse got thrown the fuck out of the Frankfrut School before that anyways. He had major disagreements with Adorno and Hork

If someone can be at all considered a legitimate thinker by academic institutions, they deserve to be slandered.

I think the recent strain of this works so well because it exploits people's legitimate frustrations with academia. It's good that the people propagating this theory have branched out to attack the poststructuralists, but they should extend their criticism to other branches of academia ("fake science" would make a great complement to "fake news").

They're just transmitting revolutionary ideas in non revolutionary context. As soon as you've convinced someone that the term "oppression" accurately describes any relationship, you've justified all political violence in their minds.

Even the fabled neutral 'classical liberal state' of the reactionary imagination was at its core about the administration of violence and death. We just have more sophisticated methods now.

Are you implying that people who uses the term ''Cultural Marxism'' have actually read what they're criticizing? It's a buzzword, and it doesn't refer to anything in particular, if anything it obscurates the original meaning of said philosophers (who say, more often than not, things that are anything but controversial).

It is not a legit term, since it's a critique based on literally nothing but stereotypes that don't really apply.

It's simple, they aren't. You have to understand these are kids from /pol/ who watched a video that talked about cultural marxism then they started repeating it.

holy shit check the url of this video

No form of successful organization would be without it. Doesn't change the fact that academia is working itself to the none trying to prime the youth for revolution.

>Nazis also invented rocket propulsion engines, If we had listened to people like you we'd never have gotten to the moon.

Lmao and if the Nazis had listened to Einstein or any of the "Jüdische Physik" they would've gotten to the moon first. It's hilarious you make this point and shows how little you know.

>Are you implying that people who uses the term ''Cultural Marxism'' have actually read what they're criticizing?
Nope and it's irrelevant if they have. What matters is its instrumental effectiveness as a propaganda concept.

Realize the the Nazis were the greatest people of all time, bluepilled cuck

Are you justifying this propaganda cause of its effectiveness even if you're ready to admit that it's completely intellectually worthless?
Why shouldn't I shun everyone who conjure the concept of ''Cultural Marxism''?

Capitalism is a state of continuous revolution, but one in which everything remains the same in the end. 'All that is solid melts into the air'

>Realize the the

Please go back

>he likes tonal music

You're right, anybody who sees that pic as something bad is just a stupid reactionary, we liberals truly know how ignorant those stupid pedophobes are hehe

so what's wrong with revolution? it might be the only thing that can save us from total annihilation and dehumanisation by the forces of war capitalism. And isn't your Paleocon/Altright/Nrx ideology fundamentally revolutionary too? If anything the liberal identitarians are not revolutionary enough

Paul Piccone and Telos Press redeemed the retarded sides of the Frankfurt School desu

sad he has been forgotten

>On a host of issues, Piccone questioned the dominant liberal line. As noted, his views on affirmative action, race and gender issues were highly critical of the bureaucratic approach taken by liberals in the United States. As with many issues, he tended to view government programs to increase access for disenfranchised elements of society through the lens of emancipatory phenomenological Marxism. In this light, Piccone saw such programs as attempts to create “artificial negativity.” In other words, and contrary to an aspect of Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, the United States, through emancipation, progressivism and the New Deal, had actually co-opted and assimilated those groups who would otherwise have acted as a negative, i.e. as the oppositional force that would trigger the machinery of the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic. As such, there was no effective negativity in the United States. Of course, we have to understand how the dialectic works in Hegel and Marx. It is not purely oppositional, because negativity itself is necessary to the continued health of the whole apparatus. Without the opposition of negativity, the entire social structure stagnates and dies. A society must continue to produce its internal opposition in order to thrive (the fact that the Soviet Union collapsed without any new synthesis to take its place is itself a huge problem for this Marxist conception of progress).

>Lacking such negativity, the US set about creating it artificially. This is where affirmative action comes in, along with judicial activism. Piccone notes that two main court cases, Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade, had the effect of solidifying a constituency for race and gender activism. But what were the results of this clientelism? In terms of race, it tended to create a small African-American middle class, while turning most African-Americans into effective state wards living in slum neighbourhoods. Similarly, in terms of gender, a small upper-middle class group of women came to dominate the feminist movement through its various incarnations, especially its second and third waves so dominant now in the academy. A not uncommon result was the impoverishment of numerous women, especially divorced lower-class mothers left struggling with children and the stress of making a living.

c2cjournal.ca/2009/06/where-marx-and-conservatives-meet-the-writings-of-paul-piccone/

>Thus the main new political division now obtains between centralizers committed to an extension of the state redistributive apparatus allegedly meant to solve all social problems (hence “victimology” as the New Class’s favorite mode of ideological self-legitimation) and populists committed to local autonomy, fiscal austerity and participatory forms of democracy

>Are you justifying this propaganda cause of its effectiveness even if you're ready to admit that it's completely intellectually worthless
It's not trying to be intellectual, and we're not trying to be intellectually honest. It's goal is to encourage anti-intellectualism
> Why shouldn't I shun everyone who conjure the concept of ''Cultural Marxism''?
No one's stopping you. But that won't stop the idea from spreading.

((((((((((Frankfurt)))))))))) ((((((((((School))))))))))

But you're wrong. He was the primary in a large scale empirical research project at the Frankfurt School on the relationships between psychological orientations and political affiliation.

>so what's wrong with revolution? it might be the only thing that can save us from total annihilation and dehumanisation by the forces of war capitalism
In and of itself, nothing, but a society should be aware that some of its most important institution s are trying to undermine it. It's also reasonable for those who oppose the proposals of these would-be revolutionaries to oppose the wide-scale training that's currently occurring at universities.

As far as dehumanization is concerned, our conception of humanity has been so abstracted from the reality that we can no longer hope to know ourselves. The future should be post-human.

Based post.

bump

>The ironic thing about the "cultural marxism" conspiracy is that neo-reactionaries and similiar groups actually use a lot of the language and concepts straight out of Adorno without even realizing it.

Do you mean cultural hegemony (I.E., The Cathedral)?

So you are saying --- in a way --- The Frankfurt School were reactionaries critiquing degenerate democratized culture? Ironic: cultural elitists now decried as a cardinal cultural subversion.

They are phyletically Marxian by way of oppressor-oppressed dialects. Those who still espouse true --- dialectical materialist --- Marxism despise The New Left precisely because it denies class axiomaticity.

Sounds interesting. I am curious of Right-Wing Marxism outside of Land.

You didn't understand what I was saying. My post was to people who thought it WAS a conspiracy.

>Right-Wing
Piccone saw the Left-Right dichotomy as outdated in the age of manegerial neoliberalism, hence his interest in populist, federalist movements contra the 'New Class'. And unlike Land, Piccone actually thinks we have a chance at dismantling capitalism ourselves.

on the conflict between modernist ideology and universalism:
>It can remain ”progressive” in the traditional Eurocentric sense defined by a terminally incoherent, secularized Christian theory of history of which the concept of progress is an inextricable part, or else it can go ”multicultural” by dropping the old metaphysical groundings which have historically legitimated its claims to universality and provided it with a moral high ground. It cannot, however, remain ”progressive” while rejecting its traditional roots — even if, in the age of modernity, universality is now seen as part of a particular cultural project. It can either opt for equality (in the traditional Christian, liberal or Marxist senses of homogeneity of souls, legal rights or economic status), in which case allegedly qualitative differences are automatically reduced to contingent social pathologies, i.e., deviation from an allegedly universal identity; or insist on the irreducibility of cultural differences and stop privileging Eurocentric concepts of ”progress” and ”equality.” In both instances, the Left ends up in a ”conservative” predicament: in the first case it finds itself allied with the Right in defending traditional European metaphysics, while in the second it undermines the very possibility of universally-valid ”progressive” moral judgements by relegating all such judgements to expressions of particular cultural idiosyncrasies.

>The fading of the Cold War has meant the end of the two predominant universalisms, Wilsonianism and Leninism, and a redefinition of politics in terms of the primacy of culture, away from earlier questions of social, economic or technological modes of organization. Friend-enemy divides, the fundamental political determinants, are already being redefined along cultural lines inconsistent with traditional 20th century politics predicated on national cultural homogeneity and the neutralization of politics as mere internal administrative squabbles. Within such a framework, opposition to cultural homogenization (or ”Americanization,” as Europeans call it) is rapidly becoming not only a major international issue, but a domestic one as well — an issue of which the rise of multiculturalism is but a pathological symptom. Unlike futile past efforts to eliminate conflict altogether by devising appropriate organizational structures, today the task is to manage conflict and channel it in creative directions within new political institutions.

> "If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?"
>"No!" shouted her audience.
>"Would that end sexism?"
>"No!"
>"Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?"
>"No!"
>"Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?"
>"No!"

>tfw you realize every time someone brings up cultural marxism, sjws, social justice itself, etc. it's drowning out a discussion of the economic structures that lead to same.

>tfw you witness the mad cuckening of everyone on both sides of the argument

Hillary dropped a fucking meme on those kids, I hope Goldman Sachs paid her extra for that speech.

Is the Frankfurt Goethe Uni still good?

Even so called fascist philosophers today (dugin, de benoist) dismiss this notion of "cultural Marxism". It's just a fancy word for capitalist Liberal ideology

He was brave for publishing the New Right. Arthur Versluis is another Marxist critical of the left right dichotomy, his interview with Alain de Benoist 2 years ago is very good and still makes antifa academic Tamir Baron cry

Fucking disgusting.

savage

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Critique_of_Pure_Tolerance
> Revolutionary minorities hold the truth and the majority has to be liberated from error by being re-educated in the truth by this minority. The revolutionary minority are entitled, Marcuse claims, to suppress rival and harmful opinions.
lmao

I think it's a mistake to treat the Frankfurt school as a single entity. Adorno is shit, while Benjamin is maybe my favorite writer of any sort. Both were obviously brilliant, and have to be contended with by anyone who is serious about thinking critically, but at they same time, you shouldn't take either of them too seriously. Aside from those two, I've only really read a significant amount of Habermas, who is alright, but not quite as interesting.

It's probably helpful to already have a solid understanding of Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Marx, and to a lesser degree, Lukacs and 19th century sociology and existentialism.

t. vulgar Marxist

She isn't exactly wrong. It's just a shame that she doesn't feel that each all of these issues deserve equal attention.

Isn't that basically how leftists have defined "neoliberalism" since the 1980s?

Cultural Marxism is a valid term to define the strain of Marxism developed in the Western world since the 1910s that paid more attention to the superstructure than to the base of the society. Guys like Lukacs, Gramsci, Marcuse and Laclau can be then condensed into a single historical trend, as they should be, instead of separated into several meme movements like "Frankfurt School" or "Post-Marxism".

The only reason the left rejects this term is because the intelligentsia as a caste is jealous of its ability to dictate the terms of the political and intellectual debate, and don't want to surrender an inch to its enemies, so they reject any terminology that comes from the right, while the right foolishly accepts terminology that comes from the left, such as "neoliberalism" and even "capitalism".

Because he also wrote "The Authoritarian Personality", which is basically pic related.