How is the Frankfurter School different from other Marxist and Liberal schools of thought?

good one

It's a Marxist school of criticism that looks at how capitalism effects culture and art. It thought the Enlightenment sought to disenchant the world, and the Nazi holocaust was its own reductio ad absurdum. It's also pessimistic that meaningful positive change will ever happen.

marxists and liberals are both fundamentally nihilistic hedonists, their endgame is exactly the same, they both want a world of atomised hedonist consumers unbound by evil social constructs like family tradition or morality.

Man, I don't fucking know. I don't even read philosophy, fuck that shit. How would I know the Frankfruit school, universities and what-not. Give me a quick rundown on philosophophie.

They're called spooks, kid

Yep. Erasmus, Jefferson, Paine, Smith, Mill, Rawls, Tocqueville, Roy, Rousseau, Hobbes. Nothin but Nihilistic Hedonist Globalist Nigger Jews.

This is Veeky Forums, not Veeky Forums, brother.
We read philosophy books for the prose.

Fuck off back to the Vatican father

these

Memeing aside, why does the so-called "alt-right" love to hate on pomo and nihilism when they are the most aggressively cynical and nihilistic political group there is.

I know they love to wank over "Western culture" and the classics but whenever I go to their spaces I rarely see these topics discussed in any meaningful capacity. From what I can tell, what they define as Western Culture is merely a commodity they identify themselves with to differentiate themselves from the liberal mainstream.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School

Basically invented Critical Theory-- essentially an extension of Marx's dialectic process. Compared material conditions to capitalist ideology, examined how this ideology manifests itself in social norms, codes, culture, etc. Not that they necessarily contained themselves to just Capitalism, they wrote about the Soviet's too, but that's the big focus.

They both have morality just not a retarded racist morality that justifies the holocaust and lynchings that morons like you do.

they incorporate elements of idealism as oppose to rigorous materialism.....They incorporate the individual(psychology) as oppose to aggregating people into large groups (class). This is justified as, they argue, if marx was writing int he wake of Freud and 20th century psychology etc then he would've incorporated it into his body of thought.

THey're not so overtly concerned with economic determinism.

I'm sure you'll get 50 different answers as although it is name-dropped often not many people have actually read any of the frankfurt school etc.......most people's understanding of "cultural marxism" etc is based on anders breiviks "manifesto"

leftists moralism is paradoxical. the ideal normative subject of the left is an 'unspooked' degenerate hedonist wholives only for individual pleasures, anyone who dares to rise above the status of the animal, of the consumer machine, of the conformism of the neon haired polyamorous herd, is immediately perceived as a threat. you sense a very real sense of moral outrage when you tell leftists you would prefer to have children and continue the species and what not. b-but you cant do that, that's a spook! haven't you read the sacred writings of stirner? Leftists want to reject everything that makes humanity great for content free hedonism.

Good point. I think it comes down to "Western Culture" being a stand-in for their identity and ideology. It's less "muh Shakespeare" than it is about being a hetero white male, which, for a long swath of European history, implicitly guaranteed superiority over other groups.

Look at all of these meaningless buzzwords. Can you actually articulate what you think "Leftist Moralism" is, before you start shouting nonsense?

>all leftists are the same
>there are no disagreements in left-wing thought

>hates hedonism
>talks like a bank clerk
>wants children

The Last Man is here

No one is stopping you from having children or forcing you to not have children, permavirgin. Stop projecting your failure onto the world.

if you want to see leftist moralism at its shrillest, go to one of those gay pride parades. this is what leftists think is morally laudable. leftist morality is an oxymoron. they limit themselves to inverting morality, celebrating the immoral and condemning the moral as an evil white social construct.

>leftism
>individual pleasures

did you bang your head recently?

>individualistic_hedonists_jpg

>moral
>moral
>moral
>moral

I can't hold all these spooks

I bet you have sex with a bathrobe on

actually you definitely don't have sex

why do leftists become angry at anyone who dares suggest being a childless gay furry isn't the very pinnacle of human experience? It is the leftist's conformist and levelling impulse that seems Letzer Mensch-like to me. leftist concepts like 'spooks' or 'shaming' being the ultimate evils boil down to exhortations not to think inconvenient thoughts

You do realise nobody talks about spooks outside of here?

Stirner is kryptonite to the modern left.

because solipsism is true and you imagine them that way

yeah I'm definitely the angry one here

I'm definitely leftist too because everything you dislike must be left-wing, right?

do you watch porn?

Not with degenerate women. Only with strong white, national socialist men

Again, you've defined nothing. You point at things you don't like and assume it speaks for itself. You have to argue things here, you know.

How do gay pride parades have anything to do with "Leftist Moralism"? Isn't it just a logical extension of the values put forth in major Liberal documents like, say, The Constitution, A Letter Concerning Toleration, etc?

That's obviously why he's asking the question.
Must you see everything as rhetorical?

Every Marxist I've met hates fags and views homosexuality as individualistic degeneracy.

also, they hate identity politics as it deviates from the importance of class politics.

I suspect you live in america

>Implying Marx and Engels didn't devote a whole book to destroying The Ego & Its Own

The basic idea of critical theory is that reality is an ideological conspiracy which deceives the "masses" about their "real" interests due to various forms of "false consciousness." This ideological conspiracy is propagated by the culture industry which causes a collective form of brain damage, causing the "masses" to become completely stupefied by action films, cartoons and hardcore pornography.

>Critical theory is a conspiracy that attacks how ideology blinds the masses to their material conditions through media, propaganda, and social norms
>This ideological conspiracy is propagated by the very things it set out to critique
What?

Cultural focus based on Gramscian and orthodox Marxist traditions, avoiding the linguistic fuckery of other postmodern Marxist intellectual movements. Still has its own issues.

>Marxism Causes Atomised Hedonist Consumers
>Not Capitalism
Nice Spooks Nerd

well they did lambaste basically all Western institutions for being manifestations of gentile pathology. most of their critique was AT LEAST as applicable to Semitic cultures

Lol what? Stirner is a meme among young edgy fags the world over, get out of the house a bit more.

Also, kryptonite to the left? LOL. My niqqas M&E bodied Stirner irrevocably more than 150 years ago.

M&E =/= the modern left

Not even a little bit user. I saw a Stirner meme used in the normie/sjw section of the twitter sphere and they all thought spook was either a racist slur or something to do with Russian spies.

>most of their critique was AT LEAST as applicable to Semitic cultures
There's a whole nifty essay that already did most of that

>marxist don't have a morality that justifies lynchings

I find it interesting how much Marxist's hamfisted rants about the nature of Capitalism line up with Marxism itself: working its way into everything, existing solely to give its creators power, viewing people solely as disposable drones to be used for profit and nothing more, subverting and perverting everything, censoring any and all views that disagree with it, constantly shifting blame away from itself and adopting new forms so as to find a new batch of gullible hosts.

I guess it just goes back to what Alinsky said: accuse your opponents of everything nefarious about yourself and everything scandalous you intend to do. That way, no one can point out your flaws without it looking like "no you!" It's a clever little trick, I'll give him that.

Plenty of people who read books don't use Twitter or make image macros of Stirner. He's still a meme IRL, try going to a college or university in the German or English speaking world

So to you Marxism involves the exploitation of workers for profit? Using them as mindless drones as opposed to giving them the means to express their ideas and expertise in the management and organization of their workplaces?

You haven't read Marx.

>working its way into everything, existing solely to give its creators power, viewing people solely as disposable drones to be used for profit and nothing more, subverting and perverting everything, censoring any and all views that disagree with it, constantly shifting blame away from itself and adopting new forms so as to find a new batch of gullible hosts.

Can you show how this manifests itself in Marx's actual theory? Both Capitalism and Marxism are materialist; but that doesn't necessarily mean it does all of the things you say it does.

>inb4 you post a picture of the soviet union
Not marxist theory.

>look mom, I posted it again

>Both Capitalism and Marxism are materialist
Marxist "materialism" is different to the ordinary sense of the word associated with capitalism

That's certainly true. But both operate under the idea that world as it exists and presents itself to us, our every day condition, is defined by the physical things we interact with and are affected by. That's really all I was getting at.

nice pasta

just copy-pasted it for the (you)s

Well, I could come up with all sorts of utopian descriptions about capitalism if I felt like it, big deal.

I don't know what else to tell you user. I like Stirner. I'm tertiary educated. He's still a fairly obscure meme outside of Veeky Forums/leftypol/small sections of reddit.

>a few retards protesting
>ethnic cleansing

Literally the same thing.

Their whole project turns on the vexatious issue of "false consciousness," does it not? What they say is that, for reasons unknown, the "masses" are just a bit too stupid to realise how exploited they are. This obviously implies that critical theorists have an epistemological advantage which the "masses" do not, which I think is unjustifiable.

>for reasons unknown
The whole point of their fucking books it to show the reasons, you illiterate
>implies that critical theorists have an epistemological advantage
Nope. They use immanent critique meaning they take societies own principles at face value and show the internal contradictions. They don't assume an outside, privileged position

Soviets did some ethnic cleansing. But since this ideology is a religion to you, i think there's no point in arguing over this. It won't count as communism as long as there's flaws in the system

>it didn't live up to the basic definition of communism and didn't call itself communist but it's still communist because I say so

>for reasons unknown
They present pretty explicit reasons, their whole project is to articulate those reasons.
>Class hierarchy has become embedded in social norms and institutions (Patriarchy, Company management, state structure)
>Poor education
>Lack of choice
>Social Democracy movements of the '60s (some would say)
>Intervention by state
of which have pretty expanded upon by thousands of other academics, recently and most famously by Zizek and Mark Fisher (pic strongly related)

>too stupid to realise how exploited they are
That's also not really what they say either. People damn well know they're being exploited, but their anger and frustration tends to be misplaced, as provoked by these stated forces.
So instead of going after the system itself, you have people like /pol/, SJWs, neoliberals and conservatives alike, who are led to believe that the system itself is basically fine, it just needs some fine tuning: Gas the Jews, Deport the immigrants, redistribute wealth just a tiny bit, destroy the white cis pig patriarchy through commercial means, show more brown people on television, etc. It's a critical misunderstanding of what's really going on. (So the the Frankfurts say)

>This obviously implies that critical theorists have an epistemological advantage which the "masses" do not, which I think is unjustifiable.
What does this have anything to do with epistemology? It's an education gap, sure, the Frankfurts were a select few who were able to go to college and spend a lot of their time just sitting around and thinking hard about this stuff, but hardly epistemology. It's not about superiority, it's about liberation.

Oops, wrong pic

>it didn't live up to the definition of being a society free from classes, and it didn't engender the new soviet man

There's traditional liberalism and modern liberalism you know, they differ enormously.

That's what people say. But I honestly don't see that much of a difference from traditional liberalism to Rawlsian neoliberalism. Just sounds like the former is a bit more skeptical of the state and predates capitalism, while the latter isn't and has capitalism implicitly in mind.

But then again it's been like two or three years since I read all that stuff.

honestly, liberalism has basically nothing to do with economics. it's a conceptual framework.

The old guard doesn't save for Smith, certainly. But Rawls' whole project, in my mind, was to articulate the philosophical groundwork for the liberal welfare state by defining justice.

The only consistent reason they give for the ignorance and myopia of the masses as to the political and economic facts of our time, the real conditions of the "material circumstances of existence," is AFFLUENZA. Read what our friend Herbert had to say:

>As to today and our situation, I think we are faced with a novel situation in history, because today we have to be liberated from a relatively well-functioning, rich, powerful society...The problem we are facing is the need for liberation from a society which develops to a great extent the material and even cultural needs of man: a society which, to use a slogan, delivers the goods to an even larger part of the population. And that implies, we are facing liberation from a society where liberation is apparently without a mass basis.

Are you not astonished by this confession by a first-generation critical theorist? Epicures don't need emancipating. You still get the sense today that Marxists prefer periods of economic contraction over growth because they think mass immiseration provides the best basis for insurrection.

Exploitation is the natural way of things. Life feeds on life to sustain itself and the most ruthless and exploitative organisms win. Weaker organisms die out.

>is AFFLUENZA
Did you not read any of what I just posted? None of those have to do with "Afluenza". They're articulating a massive massive structure in which capitalist ideology allows people to ignore how things actually function. It has very little to do with individual/group laziness, disinterest, morality, etc. Meme man Zizek himself consistently goes after Liberals and non-Liberals alike who think that wrongdoing is, essentially, due to a couple of bad eggs. They're blaming an ideology, not any individual.

That quote also doesn't especially support what you're saying. It assumes, for one, that contemporary western society is well-functioning, and rich; despite the fact that Marxists and Frankfurts' whole theories are critiques of how society exactly isn't any of those things. They're articulating the massive contradictions that, so they say, have caused the major crises that face Humanity today (Starvation, Environmental failure, '29, '08, and impending market crashes, destabilization in the middle east, access to education and health-care, happiness levels in the US, social strife caused by class conflict, failure of the Suburb, etc.)

Marxists don't deny the wealth and prosperity brought on by technology and capitalist infrastructure, they just believe that you don't need the capitalists to do any of those things. You can have a functioning oppressive society for awhile--it's just not one that most of us would really like to live in.

I've gotta go, but before I do I'd really recommend that you sit down and actually read these texts, watch some lectures, or hell even watch Pervert's Guide to Ideology as a primer, before you claim that they're bullshit or meaningless. I'm not all that convinced that you're grasping what they're really after or what methods they use. Pic related, although ironically made, is actually a decent reading list.

It's fine if you disagree with them, but a lot of your arguments have been based off of the idea that the Franks were grasping at straws, or were claiming all of this stuff happened magically, or were claiming that all of western progress is false or meaningless. That's really not the case at all.

You are a fucking retard. OP was obviously saying that the frankfurt school, regular marxism and liberal capitalist theory are 3 different things. And yes, there are hundreds of divides within marxism itself.

>oppressive society
Is it?

I said I was gonna go, but this is worth responding to.
In the sense that you really don't have very much liberty to do what the ideology promises you to be able to do, certainly. Especially more so if you look at the history of Gov and Corporation suppression of information and perfectly legal gathering (i.e. suppression of Unionization, suicide of Aaron Swartz, NSA, Choamskyist "Manufacturing Consent" etc.) I don't really mean oppression that SJWs claim when they get angry that somebody doesn't want to sell cakes to the gays or when racists get mad that there's a black dude in Star Wars. I'm talking about the actual material ability for somebody to do something; accessibility and ground-level equality as promised by Liberalism and Capitalism. In that sense, the US is a very oppressive regime to most of its citizens.

Well I don't disagree with you, but why people believe that Marxism would be less oppressive?

How can you say that when the only people who actually gave a fuck about Stirner until Veeky Forums memed him were leftists I will never know.
This is what you gotta understand, when we insult americans it's because time and again you people make these sort of basic misunderstandings online and get mad when you get called out on it.

that would depend on which marxism you're talking about and which tendency is making the argument.

Are you fucking illiterate user.

The post says nothing about Stirner not being part of the leftist tradition.

Even if we take whatever arbitrary notion of "modern left" you have, Foucault and Butler are two of the biggest modern readers of Stirner out there.

>How can you say that when the only people who actually gave a fuck about Stirner until Veeky Forums memed him were leftists I will never know.
Those people are not leftists(being snarky,trollish and anti-compassionate isn't very leftist), but edgy-nihilists. Junger and Mishima have probably the best interpretations of Stirner in literature characters ever.

"Marxism" is a philosophy, a way of looking at the world. "Socialism" is the name of the proposed alternative to capitalism.

This is a long post but I hope it clears some things up
Well, we unironically haven't ever seen Communism ever really implemented. As and said it's not as if there's one unified form of Marxism; there are millions of different varieties and flavors. Marxism is a philosophical framework which can be lent to most ideologies, even Fascism (see: Carl Schmitt), as well as fields that have very little do with Captialism itself. You can use a Marxist framework to analyze ancient history and not be a leftist yourself. This is what most misunderstand.
Socialism is a political system that actually predates Marx, but has since been considerably influenced by Marx. Same goes for Anarchism.

The USSR, Maoist China, and Cuba, were all altered forms of Socialism that failed when they tried to implement state-capitalism to build the infrastructure. That's at least one theory.
I know someone's going to reply with the >but it's not Communism meme, but the idiots who respond with that don't really understand what went wrong. For Marx, the idea is that all of conflict in human history has occurred over class struggle, as propelled by notions of private property and scarce resources. Capitalist infrastructure (i.e Industrialization) presented a revolutionary new way in which these resources can be extracted, crafted, and distributed in the fastest & most efficient way that had ever been seen. Marx however found the way in which this system constructed itself to be unsustainable and problematic; he claims that this system is built off of near permanent class structures and life and that work as we had previously known it, now took up new degrading and insidious meaning. (see:Alienation of Labor, Das Kapital)

So him & Engels proposed Communism, a society in which class and private property are eliminated and society and work are democratically organized, and therefore the end of conflict. Capitalism tends to be pretty wasteful (see: Crop burning in the Great Depression), Communism seeks to use these means for the sake of efficiency and equality. /pol/s will claim that this is its big mistake, but often forget that one of the main reasons Capitalism is so often praised is because it claims to bring about the same ends. There are some commie antecedents like the Diggers and even the Paris Commune, that to some look pretty promising, but we've never seen it fully done within a fully industrialized nation. So who knows if it'd actually work, this is merely the claim

I myself am unsure; I consider myself as someone with serious Socialist tendencies, but I also don't deny that the socialist countries (save Allende RIP) have failed pretty miserably. I like some Communist theory, but also don't like violent revolution. I just believe that Capitalism brings a lot of unnecessary and avoidable conflict and suffering. I don't know about his solution, but Marx has a powerful idea of the problem, & for me ranks amongst the smartest men to ever live.

>are both fundamentally nihilistic hedonists

I fucking wish, being a hedonist myself.

Well I personally think that the socialism that was implemented in USSR is the result of these socialist and communist ideas meting human stupidity and maliciousness. I tell you work relations were absolute horrible and without incentive ( and how could there be one if state took away your land/tools and property as well as production, it absolutely ruined rural live and possible increased alcoholism) and industry/farming was horrible and unecological as it is often today in capitalist society. They build garbage fields near lakes for goodness sakes.

And, again, I think that's much more of a result of horribly timed and designed implementation, basically state-sanctioned industrialization under an authoritarian bureaucracy, that further enforced class divisions than dissipated them. The idea of Socialism/Communism, at least the popular ones, is that the citizens become the state itself. I'm not defending the USSR, but thinking that what they did is the same as the literature is a grave, grave mistake.

What is a Genuine Culture?

youtube.com/watch?v=06-XcAiswY4

white male culture

>lol white geNOcide

Are there any Right Wing attempts to draw on methods of the Frankfurt School that are noteworthy? I know there are some on the right who are drawing on the works of Antonio Gramsci lately.

>modern right wing
>noteworthy thinkers

yeah no

All the great thinkers are on the new right now. The leftists are out of gas, it's over for them cause we've had 50 years of their nihilist marxist nonsense and it's all been bad. The greatest thinkers of our time write for counter-currents.com, theoccidentalobserver.net, age-of-treason.com, and others.

this attitude is the reason the right wing is presently gaining steam