Why do so many Marxists despise the Frankfurt School? I rather enjoyed the Dialectic of Enlightenment and what I could understand of Negative Dialectics. Benjamin and Marcuse are also fun to read. I see why comrades would accuse them of being armchairs but their critiques seem right on the money.
Why do so many Marxists despise the Frankfurt School...
Isaac Long
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Nathan Sullivan
useless
Elijah Parker
I don't despise them, and I'd assume that only LARPers who think it's edgy to dismiss all theory as pointless would. What most anons don't like is that they shifted the focus from Political Economy to cultural critique, and it opened the flood gates for Idealism to enter into the Marxist Tradition and created much of the ground work for later idpol like Queer Theory and Post-Colonial Theory (although technically Gramsci is the true progenator of all this). Anyway, I like the Frankfurt School, and Gramsci too, but half the people who read and cite them today aren't even Marxists, most of them are idpol Liberals, and the alt-right themselves are basically just reactionaries who finally wised up and started reading Gramsci, Adorno, and Benjamin.
Jonathan Brown
Marcuse is underrated af tbh
Jacob Allen
WTF? All of these authors were strongly anti-fascist.
Ian Lee
I think you mean Lacan and Foucault.
Lucas Adams
The Frankfort School Of Witchcraft And Wizardry? The training camp for young leftists to be taught how to destroy western civilization with Marxism from Lord Soros himself? I'm red-pilled as fuck. I watch Sargon Of Akkad's videos, you can't blue-pill me you regressive shill!
Joseph Richardson
You suck at this parody thingy, lurk more faget.
Gavin Perez
Adorno and Benjamin were semi-traditionalist. Benjamin loved Judaism and Carl Schmitt ffs.
Jayden Nelson
so Holla Forums is right when they say cultural marxism?
Levi Brown
Chill, bro. Not all of us do Holla Forums comedy for a living…
Mason Peterson
Nah, they're way off on that one mainly because of their loose definition on what Marxism is. They basically throw it at anyone to the left of Augustus Pinochet.
Oliver Mitchell
The closest thing to the cultural marxism would be an analysis of society through marxist lens, as in:
What Holla Forumslacks "define" as cultural marxism is tranny toilets drama, which has hardly any link with class struggle or marxism in general
Luis Peterson
Pretty much. Holla Forums would love Adorno if they had the ability to comprehend him.
Grayson Scott
I think their view is that "cultural marxism" is derived from marxist thinking, applying it to culture instead of economics. And weren't all the Frankfurt school people self described marxists? So I think there's a lot of truth to it, except it being a huge jew conspiracy, but that they wanted to create change by changing a nation's culture.
Gabriel Campbell
They were VERY unorthodox Marxists.
Ryan Baker
What makes that particularly funny is that is exactly what "traditionalists" and every other stripe of idealist is doing. Like said, they would love the shit out of Frankfurter philosophy if they were to ever read any.
Sebastian Ross
doesn't mean that you can't flip their political opinions around and use the same theory to build your own politics
I mean, the alt-right is basically very Gramscian. They don't necessarily (most of them) even really know who he was, but they have very similar ideas about cultural hegemony, how intellectuals strengthen it, and so on. They just diagnose a different kind of hegemony.
Their weapon is the same, as well: they try to create their own culture and change what is "common sense" to people. Their enemy is the cultural hegemony.
Christopher Miller
I've only read Marcuse, and Adorno, but I can't take any psycho-analytic "intellectual" seriously; nor can I take anyone whose analysis of society are so blatantly ahistorical, and one-sided like them.
Matthew Sanchez
I don't.
Gavin Harris
"Cultural Marxism" as Holla Forums means it is an elaborate antisemitic conspiracy where Marxists, who are secretly Zionist Bankers, took over academia. What actually happened is that a bunch of Marxists turned to cultural critique and then a bunch of Liberals, who already think all politics are culture, and reject Dialectical Materialism, ran with their ideas and just discarded all the parts that were still Marxist.
Jason Brown
I know Adorno critiqued culture from a traditional view, but I've heard others at the Frankfurt School critiqued it as more from a SJW view. Is that at all true?
Wyatt Ward
Yes, but their Dialectical analyses of Culture is beyond reproach, from there you just flip it into a reactionary critique of "Modernity" as opposed to Capitalism, and voila, you've got White Nationalists reading Theory.
Jason Foster
Depends on what you mean by "SJW".
Benjamin critiqued culture from the POV of Jewish theology. Marcuse is probably closer to SJW territory but even he was critical of hippies.
Ethan Moore
I mean Marcuse was almost a Maoist, and I think he put a lot of stock in the "free love" movement, although that made a lot more sense at the time considering how sexually repressed the West really was before the 60's. I wouldn't necessarily say Adorno was as culturally conservative as you're implying, in fact I'd say he wasn't at all in his own way, he didn't reject things like Jazz because he felt it was anti-traditional, he just thought repetitive, rhythmic, and danceable music was Bourgeoise because it didn't promote thought the way he felt serial music and other forms of avant-garde music did. Horkheimer on the other hand was very conservative, he even fully supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam. None of them were "SJW"s, nothing like that existed then, they were all Marxists.
Tyler Howard
The reason it's easy for both Leftists and reactionaries to read their work is because at the end of the day both sides aren't too fond of the Enlightenment, albeit for diametrically opposite reasons, but either way Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment is about as thorough a refutation of Enlightenment philosophy as you can get.
William Davis
Wait, Marxists didn't like the Enlightenment? Why? I'll check out that book.
Henry Barnes
Certainly not universally, but the Enlightenment is ground zero for Capitalism and the Bourgeoise, thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith, all the Classical Economists. That said, Marx himself could easily be viewed as a thinker in the Enlightenment tradition, especially because of his Hegelianism, as well as his genuine believe in Progress, but the Enlightenment is a hotly contested subject on the Left, most are critical of it, a few defend it, and a few outright reject it.
Benjamin Bennett
Enlightment thinking is the foundation of liberalism.
Fascists don't like it because they deem it too materialist and souless, some Marxists see it as obsolete because it's too idealist.
Dylan Turner
dumbest thing I've read all day tbh.
Caleb Cox
Like I said, not universally, but most are at least critical of Bourgeoise Modernity and it's origins in the Enlightenment.
Connor Ramirez
I've only read Marcuse, and Adorno, but I can't take any psycho-analytic "intellectual" seriously; nor can I take anyone whose analysis of society are so blatantly ahistorical, and one-sided like them.>>1642749
'no', bourgeois ideology is only a part of enlightenment thought, mainly the entire premise around technological rationality, and human-centredness that the Frankfurters were critiquing.
Ian Nguyen
Disgusting.
wdhmbt?
You just repeted my point but with far more autism. Are you shitposting or have you been drinking?
Camden Hughes
Because they were shit.
Literally never wrote anything of importance
"Everything I don't like is fascist"
Literally based 90% of his thought on jew-voodoo aka mystical bullshit
Based 90% of his thought on Marx's theory of alienation which Marx later rejected
"Communism is one big orgy guize!!"
Liam Morgan
Anthony Cooper
fpbp
i mean they're interesting and all, but really, useless all told
Justin Morales
...
Justin Edwards
Yeah most of the Frankfurt School-ites became neocons.
Jayden Lee
That never fails to amaze me. The atheist materialists who actively seek the destruction of capital are somehow religious financiers. Up is down, and black is white.
Chase Long
People aren't manifestos and dictionary definitions, they're made of flesh and blood, not paper and ink.
Jonathan Fisher
...
Kevin Butler
Yeah, and Engels was an industrialist. Occasionally people act against their own class interests. How is that supposed to make an atheist ideology dedicated to the destruction of capital into a zionist banking conspiracy? It takes a spectacular level of cognative dissonance to even conceive of such nonsense.
Kevin Wilson
So… Are you trying to argue that Marx was in bed with the Rothschilds? Because that's the impression one gets from your post m8