So, the Frankfurt School was trending on Twitter because some Australian reactionary turd wrote an article about them that went viral (pic related).
Why is the FS still the favorite boogeyman of the reactionary right? Moreover, why are they tied to the rise of political correctness and identity politics? Aren't Foucault and Butler more to blame in that regard?
Regarding the quote pictured here, I've read virtually all of the FS' work and I've read Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination multiple times (great book). I do not remember any "free speech is bourgeois" talk. In fact, Adorno reaffirmed judicial values such as freedom of speech numerous times. He also hated mainstream music because he thought it accommodated "the dying out of speech as expression."
Is it really too much to expect people to read primary sources before critiquing said sources?
Leo Lowenthal joined a free speech movement while he was living Berkeley. Franz Neumann fought as a lawyer against restrictions on freedom of speech in Weimar.
These people have no idea what they are talking about.
Gabriel Perry
Also if you actually read the Frankfurt School's work it becomes pretty abundantly clear that they all felt impotent and powerless in the face of 20th century capitalism and fascism. There was no grand plan to overthrow either because they did not think it possible. They were fatalists in a way. Instead they just wanted to sit around and intellectualize about it.
‘In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe and perhaps the world, our work is essentially designed to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle." - Max Horkheimer, 1949
Cooper Sullivan
Gee, I wonder what he's trying to say here…
Colton Lee
Changing society through changing cultural mores is literally the fucking opposite of Marxism.
It's like if I proposed 'cultural Nazism' whose central tenets are racial equality, LGBT acceptance, and women's rights. It has fucking nothing to do with Nazi just like how 'Cultural Marxism' has nothing to do with Marxism.
Christopher Miller
Indeed. Would you at least argue that it's Gramscian though? Angela Nagle argues that the alt-right is actually inspired by Gramsci more than anyone else and in that regard are in a way the true """cultural Marxists"""
Hudson Barnes
I actually hope that with all these conspiracy theories surrounding the Frankfurt school people might get interested in reading Adorno and Horkheimer
Cameron Rodriguez
Because they were Jews.
It's recycled Nazi propaganda. They need a subtle way to finger the Jews without being obvious.
Elijah Edwards
It's funny that they think some Marxist intellectual current enabled LGBTBBQ weirdos and radical feminists to ravage the cultural landscape. Perfect way to shift the blame from the failures of Western white people and onto Marx. Pretty much none of this "Cultural Marxism" was practiced in the Soviet Union. Homosexuality was illegal, being a smelly, jobless and potsmoking hippie was illegal and screaming obscenities in front of a cathedral while waving your saggy tits topless would have gotten you thrown in jail for hooliganism.
The reason these things are so pronounced in the West is because the West is declining culturally and morally. Western people are getting fatter and fatter. They want more instant gratification. They are growing ever more narcissistic. Their popular culture is anti-intellectual.
Contrast this with the Soviet Union and the East Bloc countries where health and physical fitness were valued and people looked up to war heroes, engineers, scientists, artists etc. and wanted to emulate their behavior.
Levi Rogers
Because demonizing it ensures that their turdlet followers will never read it and realize how much the alt right is doing them off.
Isaac Price
Frankfurt School philosophers are so boring compared to the far-right boogeyman constructed around them. No college intellectual in American history had ever held that kind of influence or power.
Lincoln Jenkins
Me, a murderer, do you see a knife stabbed into my neck?
The oldest page of Cultural Marxism reads something of what Zizek does today. Oddly enough 5 years later the same wikipedia article was edited by replacing "media, art, theatre, film" to "family, race, gender and western culture"
Wasnt it referred as a conspirracy theory until recently on wikipedia? With a link to Frankfurt school as the actual group that used Marxism on culture, which probably allowed retarded rightwingers to make this connection in the first place.
James Robinson
CM redirects to the frankfurt school page, dunno where he got his screenshots
Hunter Cox
It was never referred as a conspiracy, most of the allegations were filed in the criticism of cultural marxism section. I suspect someone or a group were editing the articles to confirm their biases which caused wiki admins to rewrite the entire article as a conspiracy theory. You can see the archives of the page itself. archive.fo/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism
Mason Martinez
The screenshots are taken from the archive links i posted.
Cameron Russell
Wh-Wh-What do you mean Wikipedia isn't being subverted by the jews this time?!
Nathaniel Powell
I looked up the next archive in line that dates 2009 here. archive.fo/WIPlC
Clearly Paul Gottfried must be on to something right?
Jaxon Roberts
archive.fo/fSzjA Hmmm this Paul guy is very interesting since he is good friends with Pat Buchanan and… wait a minute, Rothbard?
Mason Sullivan
No.
Jaxon Parker
Huh maybe the external links will tell me more about him.
Dominic Jenkins
LewRockwell is interesting, i wonder what that is. Oh…
Ryan Russell
Well VDARE must be the opposite from those links, wait…
Alexander Thompson
Let those anti-semites come out from their caves. They only hurt their movements with this jewish conspiracy bullshit.
Ian Allen
Onto the third external link, wait that's strange. Hey look Paul's name and his friend Pat is there too!
Brody Garcia
he was the one who coined the term alt right
Evan Cook
Last link, nothing seems off here but lets look at the contributers of it. Huh? Richard Spencer? Pat Buchanan again, and William S.Lind That Lind guy sounds very familiar.
Caleb Stewart
The only guy of the Frankfurt school who's approaching their understanding of "Cultural Marxism" is Habermas. The guy really is a piece of shit liberal and has had an extremely negative influence on the development of the EU. Since he outlived all the others it's hardly surprising his reputation spilled over the rest of the Frankfurt school.
Aiden Edwards
Cultural Marxism is a deliberately vague term, everything can be cultural Marxism if you squint your eyes hard enough. Gay rights mass immigration, the decline of traditional forms of life and their replacement by atomised individualism, are thus placed within a single conspiratorial narrative. Large sectors of the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and even the old working class see the liberal managerial state with its emphasis on multiculturalism and representation as a threat and a competitor. Internet media facilitates the spread of conspiratorial narratives and paranoia. Suddenly, everyone else enters your headspace at the same time.
Camden Long
Let's go back here to the first archive link. Wait a minute.
Ayden Barnes
True but he was not jewish and was in the Hitler youth so there's no way you're going to hear about him from the cultural marxism watchers.
I get it now. Libertarians are propping up the term "cultural marxism" as a scapegoat for all the problems the free market has caused. How very fucking convenient of them by weaseling themselves out by shifting the blame onto communists/marxists. Does anyone have that screencap where Reaganomics is behind everything what is wrong today?
Francis also argued that many on the Left misunderstood both the Neocons and Paleocons, as well as the conflict between the two. He said they disregarded the Paleocons' critiques and over-emphasized the influence of Leo Strauss on the Neocons:
This silence about the Paleocons was the result, in part, of the abysmal ignorance of the writers of most such articles but also of the hidden purpose that lurked beneath much of what they wrote. That purpose was not so much to "deconstruct" and "expose" the Neocons as to define them as the real Conservative opposition, the legitimate (though deplorable and vicious) "right" against which the polemics and political struggle of the left should be directed. The reason the left prefers the neocon "right" to a paleo alternative is, quite simply, that the neocons are essentially of the left themselves and, thus, provide a fake opposition against which the rest of the left can shadowbox and thereby perpetuate its own political and cultural hegemony unchallenged by any authentic right.[10]
Further, Francis also complained that the Neocons never fought the left with anything more than elegant reprimand. If they saw serious criticism in return, they issued charges of anti-Semitism. He also said that if "the point is to wipe out Israel's enemies," such as in the Iraq invasion, "the [neocon] Likudniks don't care about American casualties very much."[11]
Claes Ryn places Neoconservatism in a larger historical and philosophical context. In America the Virtuous (2003) he argues that America's traditional civilization, specifically, its constitutionalism and liberty are rapidly eroding and that neoconservatives exemplify and aggravate this development. Their abstract moral principles, summarized as "virtue," constitute a break with older Western values. Though speaking in the name of America and patriotism and even Conservatism, the neoconservatives are replacing attachment to America's older religious, moral, intellectual and cultural traditions with a form of universalism that has roots in leftist thinking. Neo-Jacobin imperialism threatens to produce interminable wars and poses a serious threat to American constitutionalism.
Angel Clark
I can't tell if the first three points are Adorno or Benjamin since Benjamin also wrote about Baudelaire, Kafta, Balzac, etc. and loved German Romanticism.
William Scott
So the karltural marx meme has been orchestrated by ancaps all this time? Those faggots really are worse than fascists.
Joseph Kelly
WHY ARE YOUNG PEOPLE IN COLLEGES SO LEFT?
IT MUST BE "the frankfurt school" IE THE NAME OF A COMMUNIST SCHOOL THAT CORRUPTED ALL OTHER SCHOOLS IN AMERICA.
-mind of the right wing
Josiah Diaz
Basically the paleocons have been hiding in the shadows and the neoliberals propped up the neocons who arent actually very conservative as the real right wing, and the neocons and neolibs went on to destroy the world, so the paleocons and alt right have had their revenge by electing trump.
America has been hijacked by managerial centrists for decades
Wyatt Bell
If you get a chance watch "Encirclement: neoliberalism ensnares democracy", it's a very dense documentary (3+ hours of interviews with leftist intellectuals, including the Chomsky). There's a part that talks about the libertarian/neo-liberal think-tank propaganda network, it's fucking scary.
Cameron Allen
Why are Soviet aesthetics so god tier?
Isaac Davis
Libertarianism is a somewhat obscure ideology but has a fuckton of think tanks, it's kinda scary
Carter Richardson
It was/is pushed by some wealthy groups but I can't remember the names and the torrent on One Big Torrent is dead.
Does anyone know if the current "culture war" was propped up by paleocons too? Because it seems to be working online where you have fence sitters eating up the "both sides are bad, which means centrist ideologies such as libertarianism and fascism are good because they are against both sides"
Blake Mitchell
...
Isaac Thompson
You can tell the moment where his hope for the working class disappears.
Grayson Green
I would also like to see the screencap this guy is mentioning
Benjamin Smith
The thing that enfuriates me about all this is how there can be so much conspiracy theory about the Frankfurt School (and others groups like the Fabian Society, or thinkers like Gramsci and Alinsky who are targets too) but absolutely no effort of those who know these schools and thinkers to fight back.
Search for the Frankfurt School on Youtube. It's virtually nothing but right-wing idiocy with a few popular academic pages in-between, predictably with locked comments sections. There's no visible fucking effort from own team to hold their side of the conversation and explain shit to people.
This is a trend I see all the time. Every time a popular myth about Marxists and Socialists get repeated by the Right - whether it's about Marx, Lenin, the Soviet Union, WW2, Cuba, Venezuela, Frankfurt School, or whatever - it immediatley infiltrates the mainstream while the Left just pretends it's not happening because they think they're too highbrow to debunk this shit.
It's a legacy of the cold war mentality imo, the idea that the enemy's propaganda is so strong that it's pointless to fight them and we can just roll our eyes and mock them occasionally. But we have the internet now, we can organize globally in a second, we can out-compete even the biggest media machines. But we need to have at least some fighting spirit.
Michael Parker
the reactionary right is preoccupied with culture
cultural marxism has the world "cultural" in it
end of explaination
Henry Roberts
With the exception of Spencer, who actually is well read, fashies tend to be illiterate fucks who get all their political information from right wing youtube, webms of hitlers speeches, and bullshit jpg infographs
Isaiah Murphy
The Xexizy video was good but when "they" say that cultural marxism is marxs theories on economics applied to culture, arent they talking about dialectical meterialism? I thought this was the case and i hate idpol
Angel Baker
We simply don't have the outreach to debunk that kind of shit. They're there, hundreds of lefty youtubers debunking lie after lie, none of them with a significant outreach.
Mason Gray
dialectical materialism is the soviet revision of historical materialism what they mean by cultural marxism is critical theory
Daniel Torres
Whenever a person complains about cultural Marxism ignore them because they're likely an idiot.
Jose Miller
what video was this taken from?
Bentley Foster
wow at last someone removed that awful reddit watermark
