/lit/ - Literature

>>22872255
Nothing, fuck commies

>>22872255
French political history was tumultuous pre and post WW2 so I sincerely doubt the Nazi's had much influence on this. The French have also had a tendency to produce high quality thought in a variety of different fields. The various social reforms post WW2 and pre-European union seem to correspond to this fusion, lavish benefits and pay for public sector, expansion of social programs, Keynesian oriented worker and product protection policy, etc. If anything I would say the European Union has had more of globohomo effect on them than anything Marxist that came out of the country.

>>22872283
The best way to "fuck" them is to know them and refute them with your beliefs.
>>22872367
Interestingly the French tradition had been heavily opposed to British and German tradition we can see it in the likes of Bergson. But modern french tradition seems to solely derive from materialist Marxist tradition therefore a lot of race , gender and class opression theories have their origin in France. So how can this specifically occur in France and not its neighbouring countries which are part of the same European tradition ?

>>22872255
who are some names you have in mind? i know of badiou, sartre, deleuze, debord, and althusser, but who else? please not that clown gilles dauve

>>22872255
>marxism
>intellectuall
LOL, fucking hell OP, don't make me spit my coffee everywhere like that, warn us anons or something!

>>22872400
Who are you referencing as the origin point? Race and gender pet issues or pay for votes issues are ubiquitous in the modern west, and that extends to countries outside the EU. It also is something of a point of contention inside Marxist circles as to efficacy and even legitimacy.

>>22872427
pseud

>>22872411
I am thinking of modern philosophers such as Etienne Balibar , Jean-Luc Nancy,Barbara Cassin, Frédéric Worms etc

>>22872255
I've read Marxism was pretty dominant in French intellectual circles between WWII until there was a turn in the 1970s or 1980s or so when it became unfashionable. Also the Soviet Union really wasn't inspiring anybody at that point. There was a CIA article (ha ha) about this called "The Turn of the French Intellectuals."

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP86S00588R000300380001-5.pdf

Before WWII going back to the 19th century, there was a balance of intellectual leftists and rightists, with the right producing de Maistre, Tocqueville and Peguy, who were matched against leftists like Babeuf, Proudhon and Jaures. The right was discredited by WWII and Vichy collaboration, while the left had prestige from resistance to that. "It's true that the Americans liberated us -- but the turning point in the war was Stalingrad. It was the Red Army that gave us hope," said the historian and ex-communist Annie Kriegel. The conservatives held political power after the war but the left had a lot of influence in society and intellectual life. Mitterand became president in 1981 and the communists entered the governing coalition with him, but in 1983 he implemented an austerity turn which discredited his communist allies. Also to reiterate that the Soviet Union was REALLY unpopular.

Marxism was being challenged from left and right. On the left, by New Left renegades called the New Philosophers who were critical of Mitterand and the communists, the USSR, the lingering cult of Stalinism, etc. etc. etc., and there was also a New Right. The New Philosophers included Bernard-Henry Levi and Andre Glucksmann. Then on the right, there was Alain de Benoist and some others.

Godard got to make a weird and semi-entertaining movie about it

>>22872555
Thanks a lot !

>>22872400
>But modern french tradition seems to solely derive from materialist Marxist tradition therefore a lot of race , gender and class opression theories have their origin in France.
It has been popular to blame French theory (weird Marxists, possibly pedos, who hate America) for American wokeness but there's apparently a lot of conceptual and tortuous leaps involved in that argument, and American-style identity politics is apparently treated with some disdain in France and was never well received there. Foucault was also heavily inspired by Nietzsche. I bet you could make a strong case that the contemporary left is more Nietzschean. Also some of the theories like "standpoint theory" which prioritizes subjective feelings came out of the U.S. and isn't the same thing. I'm not an expert on any of this stuff but I know Foucault believed there are different "regimes of truth" which might overlap but he was also wary of identity in general as it can be a way of controlling people, and that people pluck things from Foucault or cite him as an influence but they can be pretty selective and anyways yeah I dunno.

The French political tradition is also very different.

>>22872255
I recommend you read Raymond Aron, who dealt with precisely this question in "The Opiate of the Intellectuals"

>>22872590
ok tranny

>>22872453
Commies are the definition of pseud, they go out of their way to try and prove their theories and never negate their own theories. Commies will look at a bad harvest in ancient history sending peasants into consumer debt to buy food as a problem inherent to market economy without so much as a second thought to how they are buying food if there was a bad harvest, and that really the reason is that they were forced to pay taxes and didn’t have enough left over. Commies absolutely love to point at depressions and financial crises as a problem inherent to market economies and refuse to investigate the involvement of central banking in these matters.

>>22872599
>they go out of their way to try and prove their theories and never negate their own theories.

>>22872603
Yeah that is what pseudoscience is according to karl popper

>>22872598
Well ideas are funny like that. They can bounce around all over the place.

>>22872568
Like I said, I don't know a lot. But on French politics, there's a much stronger emphasis on republicanism in its political traditions than liberalism there I think. In the U.S. for example, the political right is really very liberal in its vertical theory of freedom and its view of the state as the obstacle to freedom. Both liberal and republican traditions exist in the U.S. too, of course, but republicanism as a tradition views freedom as a *status." It's not just an act. People can also be unfree because other citizens have arbitrary power over them even if it's latent or unexpressed. French socialism -- which influenced Karl Marx -- emerged out of this tradition. You might have a "good" boss, but he still has the power to fire you, so the socialists would argue that workers can never be "free" under capitalism. You might have a "good" landlord, but he still has the power to evict you. And here you see communist states calling themselves "unions of soviet republics" or "people's republics."

As far as identity politics goes, the French again are pretty wary of it. I've read the French state really doesn't like to collect demographic data. Everyone in France is supposed to be an equal citizen, and the American habit of sorting everything in racial boxes is weird to them. French secularism is also different than the American version, like with French schools banning traditional Muslim dress.

Foucault meanwhile can sound a lot like an anarchist. One of his most influential works is "Discipline and Punish" which is a history of prisons, and how reforms to make prisons more humane have made the power exercised over people labeled as criminals much more pervasive and systematic (he called it "panoptic"), proceeding largely by surveillance and attempts to re-make not only the behavior of people embroiled in the system, but their very selves. When you think you might be watched, and believe you'll undergo further punishment for misbehavior, then you become the oppressor of yourself, like you have a government agent or prison guard in your head.

>>22872590
Thanks I have done some reading on Foucault and yes he does disagree with the prior hard marxist thinkers. But a lot of people I mentioned here >>22872499
may not be political Marxists but they are stuck in the same Marxists analysis of society but I suspect this is a social science wide phenomenon
>>22872599
They are wedded to their theory unfortunately but there are many voices in the "Marxist" academia who oppose classical Marxist distinctions. Also you can't ignore the practical aspects since they have such a huge corpus of theory on their side any new academic will obviously refer to the same set of theories which continues the chain. I suspect the loss in WW2 made it really hard for any other social analysis to gain steam in academia. But on the bright side their victory has made them weak and nowadays most leftist social scientists are at their positions due to reputation rather than calibre. Its just a waiting game until someone calls out the emperors clothes

>>22872640
>Thanks I have done some reading on Foucault and yes he does disagree with the prior hard marxist thinkers.
He was influenced early on by his teacher Althusser who was a Marxist yeah. But the point of view articulated in Discipline and Punish is definitely not compatible with Marxism. His critique of liberalism ended up also as a devastating critique of communist regimes as culminations of Foucault's nightmare of the carceral surveillance state. Marx's and Marxists' constant claims to be doing science must have have drawn a nasty snicker from him. On the other hand, Foucault would have no time for global technocratic capitalism either. He would probably see them as similar! Look at contemporary China for example. But he was notably reticent about connecting his thought to any definite political program.

>>22872255
Why are French lefties so cucked by Islam?

>>22872710
It's actually quite sensible in a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" kind of way for the city-dwelling upper to upper-middle classes (the main sociological-demographic base of true believer lefties) to ally themselves with the immigrants against the native proles and the rural population.

>>22872710
France is an extremely secular country.They probably have the highest muslim population in the west and yet they apply equal laws for the muslims and whites. Meanwhile US is cucked to death by their minorities , they had to fucking ban pork in prisons. Michelle Obama was frowned upon for not wearing scarf in Saudi. American cuckoldry has no parallel in Europe all /pol/ can gather is a few stale webms and dodgy statistics meanwhile a look at US is sufficient proof of its cuckoldry.

>>22872618
Well sounds like everyone is a pseud.

>>22872733
You literally can’t own guns

>>22872740
Basically yeah but the idea is that you need to acknowledge that something could prove you wrong, rather than looking at everything as roundabout proof that you are right.

It's kind of amusing to see this game of hot potato lefties are playing with the obvious fact that western leftism has massively shit the bed since their cold war zenith.

>it's the french being weird and shallow
>no, you see, it's americans misreading the french
>no, you see, it's actually the fault of the conservatives because contemporary idpol is a reincarnation of throne and altar catholicism
>it's actually the fault of the chuds because they led the native working classes astray with their pied piper song of false consciousness and all we were left with were sexual degenerates, women, jews, and third worlders

>>22872807
The latest iteration is my favourite:
>the bourgeoisie coopted idpol actually

>>22872733
If you can say America practices "freedom of religion" then France practices something more like "freedom from religion" because of the latent coercive power it can hold, implication being to restrict religious expressions in public, prohibiting public officials from wearing religious attire, or at least criticizing it when it's legal. People should be left alone in the ir private lines but defining yourself by your particular ethnic or religious identity group is seen as corrosive. The French state recognizes people as individuals, not as members of groups.

>“It’s not really about religion,” the French writer Marc Weitzmann told me recently. “It’s much deeper than that. Americans are constantly publicizing who they are in every way possible. The French way is to show what you are instead of who you are—through manners. It’s all about conforming to a certain environment.” Weitzmann brought up characters in Honoré de Balzac’s 19th-century novels who arrive in Paris from the provinces, reinvent themselves, and achieve social, political, or literary success. Hakim El Karoui is a Franco-Tunisian writer and consultant who has informally advised Macron; he has advocated for (among other things) the development of French-trained imams who would foster an Islam that is compatible, as he sees it, with French republican values. When we spoke recently, he smiled as he explained the deal on offer: “France is open to anyone, but there’s only one path, and that’s universalism,” he said. “That’s the French paradox. It’s very open and very closed.” In your private life, you can cultivate your culture, your language, your religion; in public, you assimilate.

>>22872599
that sounds like a lot of ancap projection

>>22872255
>intellectual
>marxism
Pick one, do idiots still take this trash seriously? Have you niggers tried getting a job?

>>22872807
Ross Douthat in the NYT tried to reappraise Foucault recently as a figure of the right. Well, sort of. His evidence was the flowering of postmodern theories among Trumpist figures on the right, and a similarity between his critiques of power and administrative control and conservative arguments about lockdowns, quarantines, bodily autonomy regarding vaccines, and other subjects. Douthat believed this is because the cultural left has become more powerful so his theories are less useful, while the right may find them more insightful. That doesn't mean he's on your side, of course, or anyone's side.

>>22872807
How have they shit the bed ? I am not being confrontational I also get a sense of something being amiss but then the same thinkers will throw a barrage of statistics at you like life expectancy , people who are below poverty , moon landing etc and shut the argument. How would you counter this quite visible material progress ?

>French intellectuals

>>22872873
What would prove communism wrong anon

>>22872993
might as well ask to prove capitalism wrong, it's just nonsensical

bump

>>22872590
>this is a perfectly valid answer

No, it's not, you intellect devouring retard.

>>22874429
You will never be an extrajudicial assassin

>>22874436
And communism will never succeed, so it all fits.

>>22874444
>4 fours
Also this image is just so sad

>>22874444
Asian communism is more pragmatic and McDonald's hasn't been very successful in Vietnam because they already had bánh mì, which is faster, cheaper, healthier, and tastes better. Vietnamese also tend to eat out in groups together and share the food which doesn't work so well, and burger is not a dish to share with others. KFC is easier.

Random, but was watching Vietnam military T.V. the other day and they had a concert for women and here's female explosive-ordnance demolition interpretive dancing:
https://youtu.be/u5SDJ3AdwtE?si=wvHQfdEFdLdmGERa&t=522

>>22875052
>Muh different flavour of communism will surely work this time.
How much longer are you gonna cope troon? I have been to Vietnam and I can promise you they have completely abandoned communism same as the chinks, they are autocracy dictatorships. The youth are more into kpop shit than their own state owned tv channels. Also if you actually read into the viet Minh they were mostly nationalists, only a very small minority took the communism thing seriously mostly because they needed the gibs from the soviets to rebuild their country after the war.

>>22872255
>french
>intellectual
Pick one and only one

>>22875125
France gave birth to most modern major ideas about modern society, polity and democracy.

>>22875103
>I have been to Vietnam and I can promise you they have completely abandoned communism
They have a Viet Cong-themed coffee chain. I dunno. It seems like a mixed legacy positive and negative. Communism is like a double-edged sword.

>Also if you actually read into the viet Minh they were mostly nationalists, only a very small minority took the communism thing seriously
It was attractive to intellectuals who are held in higher regard over there. Marx's ideas were pretty complex but it boiled down to extremely simple answers relating to problems about independence, nation-building, famine, employment, modernization, industrialization. The positive side is having a party with a direction that's optimized for extreme war conditions in a place like that, and in the brutal short term, centralized economic control style of Asian communist states with cohesive ruling parties brought more satisfying results than leaving them as an emerging market that's really weak and dependent. On the downside, holding to a dogmatic belief in the infallibility of communist doctrines can cause serious mistakes, or using ideology in such a way that the ruling communist officials are the only ones who benefit.

>>22875180

>>22875172
And those ideas are pretty much bankrupt in our current society.

>>22875186

It's complicated. France is the birthplace of leftist and liberal radicalism. When Marx discovered communism in the 1840s, by fusing his Berliner Left Hegelian thought with French and English utopian socialism and Proudhon's "proletariat" (from What is Property, 1840), Berlin was a sea of centrist statist liberalism with a few "progressivist" streaks in a sea of German social conservatism, with strong cultural and civic (Prussian) traditions of conformity and uniformity. The new king Frederick Wilhelm IV was initially a liberalizer in the spirit of the Prussian reforms and was expected to push Prussia more in a Hegelian direction (Hegel was a big admirer of both the French Revolution and of English civil society, and avidly kept up with English politics), but he did a hard conservative turn. This is really what Marx meant when he said that Germany is "Europe's brain": only a few intellectuals like Hegel and the Left Hegelians can think two or three generations ahead of present developments, but the country itself is two or three generations behind in actual social and cultural development. As a result is is also full of historically retarded atavism like nostalgia for feudalism and parochial society etc.

France on the other hand had an extremely self-conscious revolutionary and liberal tradition due to the Revolution, and by the 1840s it had an extremely lively socialist, communist, and anarchist discourse, especially in Paris. England was somewhere in between, with radicals like Owen and the Chartists and lots of working class openness to alternative social models. I remember reading Corcoran's book Before Marx, and the overview chapter on contemporary socialism in Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism, volume one (the chapter is around pages 180-220 IIRC). Ranciere's Proletarian Nights is another interesting book on the culture of the time, but pretentiously written.

Marx fled Berlin for Belgium and Paris in the mid-1840s and "converted" to what we now call Marxist communism, or at least began his conversion. Then the revolutions of 1848 hit and Marx and Engels spent several years trying to interpret them to themselves and steer them in a socialist revolutionary direction, only to be disillusioned by their failures. This came after Engels' visits to England and writings on the working class, and both Marx and Engels really thought that the dynamism of the social movements in England and France meant that THE revolution was imminent.

>>22875207
Even before 1848, but especially after the failed revolutions and the return to status quo ante liberalism/conservatism in Europe, Marx and Engels were critical of "sloppiness" in contemporary social movements (this is where the Kolakowski chapter is helpful), and saw it as their task to firm things up and make the working class revolution impervious to the utter failures of the Spring of Nations revolutions and especially to the rise of Napoleon III. From 1850 to his death, Marx tried to steer and influence socialism and thus to prepare for Round Two, which both he and Engels (once again) thought was still right around the corner. All of Marx's writings and activities, like the Critique of the Gotha Program, his ambivalent relationship with both the rising German Social-Democratic Party (which was half-bourgeois from Marx's perspective) and French socialism (as in his writings on the Paris Commune), etc., have to be evaluated in this light.

But this also reveals, obviously, that neither French nor German socialism was ever wholly "Marxist." The French had their own traditions, including syndicalism, and the Marxist influence was more absorbed by the French than placed at the center. (I recommend Benoist's book on Edouard Berth, if you read French.) By 1910, French socialism and the more diffuse French "revolutionary tradition" (which leads the French to change their government type back and forth from Republic to Empire every few decades) was more marked by Proudhon's anarchism, lingering "utopian socialism," and syndicalism, including Sorel's radical syndicalism and the nationalist interpretations of it (the Cercle Proudhon), than by Marxism.

The leading French Marxists were never great Marxists intellectually speaking, certainly nothing of the power of a Lenin or Lukacs. There's Jaures, but once again, he was a heterodox Marxist which shows how the existing French traditions described by Corcoran absorbed Marxism rather than the other way around. I personally think Sorel is a brilliant critic of Marx and within the Marxian tradition, but he was just that, a critic of Marxism. He played a major role in the "revisionism controversy," and I believe he is responsible for Gramsci's shift to "idealistic" Marxism which really ceases to be Marxist at its core. He's also both directly and indirectly responsible for Mussolini's Fascism, which can be called a heterodox syndicalism and even a heterodox Marxism to an extent (Mussolini was a leading Marxist intellectual in Italy).

>>22875186
>>22875192
>You will never discuss the oppression of masses with your qt Vietnamese gf at a soulful revolutionary guerrilla inspired cafe :(

>>22875211
In Germany, Marx was more respected and influential, but once again it is not so simple as saying that German socialism was communism. The SPD, ironically, benefited from that characteristic German social conservatism. Bismarck's persecution of the socialists also made them a "society within a society" with extremely high levels of solidarity and self-consciousness. Furthermore, even the people who identified as Marxist were typically fairly bad Marxists: for the first 30 years after its publication, nobody really understood Capital. They didn't have any of the fancy readings of it that people bandy about today, as an "immanent dialectical critique" etc. They just read it as "our own in-house socialist political economy," and thought Marx was a genius but nearly impossible to understand. Kautsky made summaries of Marx that nobody reads anymore today, and people read those, and Engels published Anti-Duhring, which is frankly bourgeois utopian socialism mixed with metaphysical materialism of the sort Marx deliberately avoided, and people read that a lot. Consequently nobody was a very good Marxist. People also liked Duhring just as often as they liked Engels, author of Anti-Duhring, which should tell you something.

By the 1920s-1930s, the SDP has been absorbed by the bourgeois establishment to form a new post-WW1 status quo. Famously, the vast majority of the German left rejected Rosa Luxemburg's attempts to promote hard-line "international communist revolution over all," and chose to side with the German nation, both in WW1 against its external enemies, and in the chaos following the armistice, against its internal enemies (e.g. the Munich revolution). The KDP (Kommunist Partei Deutschlands) split from the SPD in revolt against its bourgeoisification and accomplished nothing. The USSR was looked at as a pariah nation, and the Hungarian "communist revolution" (if that's how you want to regard it) was suppressed by the Romanians.

The French left likewise is not very radical at this point, let alone Marxist, and has basically settled back into being the typical French "left-liberal" progressivism derived from the Revolutionary tradition and from pre-Marxist French socialism/anarchism. In fact some of the most interesting anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist elements of the French interwar period were the "non-conformistes" and Christian personalists and integralists (see Louis Dupeux).

>>22875213
So the question is, what the hell is "cultural Marxism?" If both France and Germany's official native socialist movements tended toward bourgeois reformist equilibrium all along, where does the new Marxist impulse of the 20th century come from? It comes from bourgeois intellectuals, writing (like Marx) in progressive enclaves like Paris and Berlin and largely seeing the surrounding world as having failed to keep up with the "brain" of Europe and its prognostications, which they now identify with Marx, just like Marx identified it with Hegel. But they also knew that Marx's concrete empirical predictions and practical political ideas were failures. WW1, that whole thing where the socialist parties tended toward rapprochement with the liberal establishment rather than self-radicalization (just like in 1848, which is why Marx hated guys like Proudhon and Blanc), proved this, and the success of fascism proved it even more.

Basically, left-wing socialists didn't want to be Marxists, but wanted reformist welfare states that are basically still patriotic and nationalistic and maintain their native traditions; and right-wing socialists (fascists and groups like the aforementioned non-conformistes) wanted reformist welfare states that are basically still patriotic and maintain the native traditions. The one representative of international revolution in Marx's sense was... Stalin. And the USSR's interpretation of Marxism was increasingly heterodox (if brilliant, under Lenin and with aid from the equally brilliant Lukacs -- both of whom were Blanquists who effectively endorsed Robespierrian terror).

You also have a lot of people who have absorbed Marx's ideas intelligently rejected them, and who can articulate their rejection plausibly and compellingly, like the aforementioned Sorel, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim (the founders of sociology, which becomes a bourgeois competitor "discipline" to Marxism), Joseph Schumpeter, Giovanni Gentile, and also Werner Sombart, a one time Marxist whom Engels himself called the one academic socialist to understand Marx's thought, and who later said Marx was superseded by National Socialism. A lot of Italian Fascists were also capable readers of Marxist thought. Concurrent with this you have developments like Gramsci's idealistic, quasi-Blanquist Marxism, Benjamin's barely Marxist quasi-romantic communism. And Lukacs' own Marxism was really a kind of neo-Hegelian millennarianism. In short, figures like Luxemburg who tried to grapple with the revisionist controversy while maintaining a general sense of orthodoxy are in short supply at this point. Even the most bold and vigorous Marxists are heterodox, or tainted by association with the USSR, or they are simply brutally effective realpolitik strongman type guys.

>>22875217
The only way to renew Marxism, assuming one was still convinced of its vitality, was a renewed emphasis on its intellectual and diagnostic side, especially by incorporating the hot new theories then available and spreading like wildfire in bourgeois society, like psychoanalysis and the fast-developing sciences of culture (which, again, are competitor disciplines to Marxism -- the French Annales school for instance, which takes many "structural" and "dialectical" perspectives from Marxism while fundamentally being politically bourgeois). In Germany this takes the shape of the Frankfurt School, which is basically a set of very smart very bourgeois intellectuals who have no actual hope that a revolution is coming. They do a lot of "critiquing" things, especially using those new tools they've incorporated into Marxist theory (see Horkheimer's "Traditional and Critical Theory"). For example they critique Heidegger and the contemporary "jargon of authenticity" (existentialism and Lebensphilosophie) as essentially bourgeois and reactionary, they critique then-rising consumer culture for its stultifying effects on the masses (see Adorno's The Culture Industry), they critique mystagogism like Spengler. You see similar tendencies in Lukacs, who writes on "The Destruction of Reason" and insists that socialist aesthetics must be realist and not escapist, etc.

By the post-war period, Horkheimer and Adorno are very disillusioned about Marxism as a practical program. The liberal states are ascendant and a new technocratic world order is clearly dawning, to be headed by bourgeois civilization. (C. Wright Mills' short essay on the "New Left" is still good.) The USSR is utterly discredited. Adorno basically settles into being a neo-Kantian aesthetic theorist, then see some tits and dies, about a year after being disgraced by Marcuse's utopian socialist belief that the unbearably gay student movements of the 1960s had anything to offer. Marcuse's own theory, in One-Dimensional Man for example, is basically bourgeois liberation theology. Habermas is even worse, and nobody was surprised when he supported biopolitical repressive measures by bourgeois regimes during the COVID crisis. Such is the legacy of the Frankfurt School, although its major philosophical works, especially those of Horkheimer and Adorno, are almost universally brilliant no matter what your political persuasion. Marcuse is worth a read too for sure.

>>22875211
I don’t understand for the life of me why Marxism is not seen as ultimately utopian but Proudhonism and French syndicalism is, as I’d be inclined to believe the reverse. Proudhon absolutely hated utopianism and felt society had to pragmatically “re-adjust” itself every epoch to match or approximate material conditions

>>22875223
In France things are different. Marxist revolution was less on the agenda than it had ever been, in the interwar period. The air was full of jaded anti-USSR "Western Marxists" (the French counterpart to the Frankfurt School), and actual French Marxist intellectuals are mostly retarded and politically irrelevant (Althusser, Badiou) or competent but not politically relevant (Lefebvre), or a mix of the two (Sartre). But the Parisian bourgeois intellectual scene was booming. Like I said, the French cultural sciences (les sciences humaines ou sociales, represented by titans like Mauss and Aron and Braudel and Levi-Strauss) were not only entering their golden age, a position from which they would enrich English and German theory in a few decades, they were also widely read by the French public. The Parisian intellectual scene was incredibly incestuous and pretentious but incredibly dynamic between 1930 and 1975. Everybody went to everybody else's talks, everybody knew the "hot thing" to pretend to understand, etc. So when Kojeve came to town and lectured on Hegel, people listened, and when Jean Wahl imported Jaspers and Heidegger and Levi-Strauss imported Roman Jakobson, people listened, and when Merleau-Ponty taught Husserl, people listened (although only Derrida understood, and then he wasted his understanding by being a lazy retard). Doesn't matter that French intellectuals were sloppy and mediocre interpreters of Heidegger or that Kojeve had a completely idiosyncratic reading of Hegel, what matters is that people were all listening and talking and jerking each other off.

In the first generation of this half-century spanning milieu, the circle around Sartre and Beauvoir was the main event. Sartre was a Marxist of a kind but you can see how it's so watered down at this point that it's basically -- as with the Frankfurt School -- more of a bourgeois intellectual thing than a real political praxis thing. Most of its actual practical effect was encouraging third worldism and anti-colonialism, which had an actual effect on French politics and the fate of the French empire after WW2. The second generation of this milieu, the generation of Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze, was even less Marxist than the first. Like Marcuse, they tended more toward a kind of quasi-phenomenological liberation theology, ultimately similar to Marcuse's, incidentally what people vaguely intend when they say "postmodern philosophy." They also absorbed the influences of the French cultural sciences and did their own version of "critical" theory, "deconstructing" narratives and biases and so forth. Just like Beauvoir was a feminist, Foucault was a gay-ist and so on and so forth.

>>22875226
The foregoing narrative only gets you halfway to an understanding of "Cultural Marxism" however. To understand what the term Cultural Marxism intends, you have to understand how these German and French impulses were blended by American academics starting in the '70s and '80s to create the academic sewer of today. After WW2 Americans became the economic and political leaders of the world. The world was obviously divided into two major power blocs and consequently self-conscious worldviews. Immediate post-war prosperity had a Fordist feel to it for a while, full of optimism and enthusiasm for technocracy, but by the '60s and '70s the aforementioned "New Left" tendency was rising, buoyed by various counter-cultural elements (Beats, Yippies/Hippies, etc.), essentially a regular recurrence of utopian socialism and counter-culture no different from those of the early 20th century of early 19th century for that matter.

The key thing here is that the left- and liberal-leaning baby boomer members of the leisure class capable of going to graduate school consequently had a MIX of economic prosperity (and thus freedom and optimism that things work out and there's room for everybody), world-leadership (and thus confidence and more optimism), and a strong desire for an "anti-evil" worldview in which they are the good guys "liberating" the "oppressed," etc. But they were Americans, and historically Americans have an inferiority or love/hate complex when it comes to Europe. The old Jeffersonian element self-consciously rejects European "sophistication" as enervating, but the American upper classes of the period, being pathetic parvenus and having all the downsides of American lack of sophistication with none of the upsides, thought it would be a great idea to import European sophistication wholesale. And what passed for European sophistication at the time, if you were a leftist, was the New Hotness "critical theory" (Germany) and "cultural studies" (France) stuff, along with all its anti-/post-colonial and New Left baggage. So Americans imported it wholesale and became even bigger fans of these "postmodern" intellectuals than Europeans were themselves -- in fact the French were getting sick of Foucault et al. already in the late 70s and entering into another intellectual fad-cycle typical of Parisians.

So what you know as critical theory and cultural Marxism are really a dopey American parvenu's appropriation of "sophisticated" European leftist theory that isn't actually leftist in any meaningful sense, and that exists solely to give the haut bourgeois leisure class the ability to LARP as sophisticated intellectuals at their exclusive universities. There is literally no being more self-satisfied and self-assured in all of human history than a "leftist" professor who got his PhD in the 70s and spent 40 years thinking he was fighting the good fight by lazily half-teaching anthropology while putting on airs of being a latter day Foucault.

>>22875229
These people's worldview and attendant superhuman self-satisfaction trickled down to the rest of the coastal elite urbanite globohomo leisure class, which leans liberal (see Lasch's Revolt of the Elites), and recapitulated the dynamic by which French/German "postmodern theory" and subaltern liberation theology became the prestige intellectual discourse of American academia, as whole galaxies of academics and failed academics wrote trillions of op-eds and worked as pundits and otherwise shaped the politesse of the American mandarin caste (read: rich west/east coast assholes) for generations.

The final move in this development came around 2000 when the Powell Memorandum-type Beltway vampires who control the dying state apparatus realized that a massive recession was in the offing and began concocting plans to HYPERCHARGE New Left vagueness about actual praxis, by taking already existing and already highly stupid ideas like "intersectionality" and turning them into a new religion. Because this religion already made "the Other" and "the Subaltern" into figures of religious veneration, it was also conveniently simple to tailor the whole thing as a religion for the new post-coastal elite of rich immigrants who are even more crass parvenus than the native American leisure class before them, and even easier to manipulate since they have fled India and Iran to raise families of orthodonists and perpetual graduate students in California, and thus have no contact with any host culture (unlike Americans, who had some residual contact with historic American republicanism and its associated virtue ethics and veneration of hardy autonomy rather than unquestioning worship of losers freaks and victims, which thus had to be carefully excised and destroyed). Anyway, Gorz's book is good on the French left from Sartre onwards.

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>>22875230
Holy based effortpost

>>22872255
Socialism was created just after the french revolutions, by the same bourgeois who created the revolution.

>>22872744
All the atheist liberal revolutions were due to the peasants having guns. And that's since the 1800s. Learn history, and not from CNN.

History went to shit when guns were used. It's a fact. Real men used swords, but with guns the peasants felt they were knights and this removed the boundary between the alpha aristocracy with the beta men.

>>22875207
>This is really what Marx meant when he said that Germany is "Europe's brain": only a few intellectuals like Hegel and the Left Hegelians can think two or three generations ahead of present developments, but the country itself is two or three generations behind in actual social and cultural development.
Yeah that's the usual lie by those deceitful german bitches.
Germans have never been thinkers and they were 100 years late on the secular enlightenment.

>>22875226
>and actual French Marxist intellectuals are mostly retarded and politically irrelevant (Althusser, Badiou) or competent but not politically relevant (Lefebvre), or a mix of the two (Sartre)
Can you elaborate?
I don't hold Althusser and Badiou to be geniuses by any means but I did find useful ideas and concepts in their writings while with Lefebvre I found most of what I read to be rather trite...

>>22875230
nice to see a fellow gorz fan

>>22875211
>great Marxists intellectually speaking, certainly nothing of the power of a Lenin
lol...

>>22875681
Althusser created an ahistorical reading of marxism, trying to elaborate historical materialism in scientific form, against humanism and historicism.
But he wasn't that genius people believe.

>>22872255
They supported Hitler before Hitler invaded france
Just another proof that marxist are braindead retards

>>22875186
>>22875180
As someone sympathetic to or at least interested in Communism such as yourself, you should certainly understand that having a Viet Cong themed coffee chain has nothing to do with not abandoning communism. It's really not that different than teenagers walking around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts. It's just commodification and cheapening, turning a legacy into a product. There is nothing substantively Communist about it. Sounds like Liberalism actually.

>>22876959
Liberalism is undefeatable, commies just can't accept this fact so they resort to coping.

>>22872255
To La Bastille!

To keep it short, in my view, the French Revolution was a proto communism. And to add even more weight to the communist adoption, Marx himself lived in Paris and was I member (hijacker?) of the League of the Just.

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>>22875230
Anon, thank you for the comprehensive and interesting post. Best post in the thread and truly worthy of a literature board, imo.

>>22875207
>but the country itself is two or three generations behind in actual social and cultural development

More often than not what people mean by "social and cultural development" is the degree to which that state approximates the structure and mentality of post-civil war, liberal capitalist England. I find that methodologically quite silly.

>As a result is is also full of historically retarded atavism like nostalgia for feudalism

Uhh...do you even romanticism? Also that's an extremely dishonest reading of the romantic understanding of the middle ages.

>>22872255
Anyone read:

:Power and Resistance:
Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Althusser
by Yoshiyuki Sato:

yet?

the Japanese academics are really into Marxism at the moment, (Why I have no idea maybe some of you know?)

>>22875189
Well, France was also the heart of the absolutist monarchical ideal that came before that, and, in fact, also the feudal knightly ideal that came before that. Discounting France is cringe, and nothing but a meme.
France was also one of the major wellsprings of dissident right, white nationalist ideas (nouvelle droite) in the last century, after ww2.

>>22877181
Indeed, I was just about to comment on how stupid the idea of chronological "progress" is, thank you for doing it in my stead. Truly pathetic that a grown man can fall into such a delirious fairy tale-like comprehension of the world.

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Thank you anon, absolutely fantastic posts. Being a thing I have a general distaste for, I haven't researched the history of leftist movements anywhere near in-depth enough for this sort of understanding, so I really appreciate the sort of filling in the gaps here.
I think most even pretty well-informed people lack knowledge of at least several of the "jumps" and interacting streams of thought you describe. Very worthwhile read.

>>22877231
>the Japanese academics are really into Marxism at the moment, (Why I have no idea maybe some of you know?)
Maybe some of them see it as a way to break away from the neoliberal globohomo system. I don't know.

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Saved your entire post, by the way anon. I hope you know what you're talking about.

>>22876959
At least a che poster or shirt probably means that person has leftist beliefs, I don’t see how a military theme park necessarily implies actual commie beliefs.

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is there a specific book where you got this from? or was it something you came to after a long period of studying and thinking.

>>22872599
Badiou has an iq at least 2 standard deviations higher than anyone on this board.

>>22876840
What about Badiou?

>>22876840
I meant why you would deem him retarded?
I can see the irrelevant part even though I would disagree mildly.

>>22872499
lmao thouse names sound made up

Good thread guys.

>>22876959
>As someone sympathetic to or at least interested in Communism such as yourself, you should certainly understand that having a Viet Cong themed coffee chain has nothing to do with not abandoning communism.
I didn't say otherwise. I just think the whole story is interesting. It's like when you see some images (emphasis on the images) that look really commie in China. And people go: socialism is back! Or they get really indignant as some magazines like The Atlantic do, and they say... ugh, Maoism is back. Or, skeptically, like yourself: socialism is back? Because there's a whole lot of what looks like capitalism going on!

It's like all of these titanic struggles and battles all sent us careening toward the exact same place. Or maybe the development of the contradictions that led up to that were always present in it from the beginning, between the ideals and the need to "catch up" and adopt capitalist methods to do so. But then these images of revolutionary dreams are still there and have soaked into the soil and become chain restaurants. But that also bothers some people who don't like communism, because there's a whole lotta capitalism happening here and communist symbols being used as kitschy brands... and heh it's ironic.... but don't they realize that was all a terrible aberration that destroyed their traditional culture? That's not real culture, that's the Bad Stuff that was supposed to be condemned and dumped forever and forgotten after they got back into capitalism.

But it's still a thing that exists, along with "Red Tourism" and square dancing old women getting their groove on, themselves a strange product of the Cultural Revolution.
https://youtu.be/8rEZ_Drqfqk

Just another feature of the vast landscape of ideas that formed the modern world. Everyone's dreams and desires are blocked in the end by everyone else because it's all contradictory, but it doesn't mean that anyone's contributions to the final result is equal to zero, since it is added into it and therefore included in it.

>>22877947
Badiou is a the average bourgeois

>>22877947
And he still ended up a Maoist. Proof that IQ doesn't mean a damn thing.

>>22879163
Communism is slowly and surely being built in China. Not in France. Not in Russia. Not in Germany.

It took Mao to surpass the USSR. Why Western Marxists care nothing for China I have no idea. But European Marxists can continue to write their books as they will, and China will keep adjusting and being shrewd and protecting themselves from Imperialists at each step.

>>22877976
He isn't that genius of marxism that many marxists in search of an author say

>>22872411
>>22872499
>Marxists
Randomly pick one to Wikipedia
>Frédéric Worms
His father was literally president of Rothschild enterprises in Europe (picrel)
>every single time ?

>>22879300
Google Bakunin's quote about Marx being in cahoots with the Rothschilds, it's pretty funny

>>22872255
Nah, you are just oblivious of France’s history. It is understandable since western countries dont want anything to do with socialism for some odd reason. Socialism is a European and British thing , not Russian nor Chinese.

>>22879270
Why are so many marxists brown 3rd world retards?

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>>22877363
Post more r*ddit cringe, you stinking brown chimp

>>22880189
>omg le based marxist who actually spoke about international banking cartels and jews!
Marxism is utter cancer, worse than liberalism. How much of a soulless fucking bug are you to think it would be better than Western capitalism? Idiot

>>22880189
>"Marx is a Jew and is surrounded by a crowd of little, more or less intelligent, scheming, agile, speculating Jews, just as Jews are everywhere, commercial and banking agents, witers, polticians, correspondents for newspapers of al shades, in short, lterary brokers, lust as they are financial brokers, with one foot in the bank and the other in the socialist movement, and their arses sitting upon the German press. they have grabbed hold of all newspapers, and you can imagine what a nauseating literature is the outcome of it.
>Now this entire lewish world, which constitutes an exploting sect, a people of leeches, a voracious parasite, Marx feels an instinctive inclination and a great respect for the Rothschilds. This may seem strange. What could there be in common between communism and high finance? Ho ho! The communism of Marx seeks a strong state centralization, and where this exists there must inevitably exist a state central bank, and where this exists, there the parasitic Jewish nation, which speculates upon the labor of the people, will always find the means for its existence.
>In reality this would be for the proletariat a barrack regime, under which the workingmen and the working closely and intimately connected with one another, regardless not only of frontiers but of political differences as well- this Jewish world Is today largely at the disposal of Mary or Rothschild. I am sure that, on the one hand, the Rothschilds appreciate the merits of Marx, and that on the other hand, women, converted into a uniform mass, would rise, fall asleep, work and live at the beat of the drum; the privilege of ruling would be in the hands of the skilled and the learned, with a wide scope left for profitable crooked deals carried on by the Jews, who would be attracted by the enormous extension of the international speculations of the national banks."
>- Mikhail Bakunin

Pretty Based

>>22880391
>bakunin
>marxist
/pol/tard revealing his retardation

>>22880401
>omg le based marxist materialist kike!!
Go back to r3ddit
>>22880415
>anyone who criticizes my jewish ideology is a nazi!
Go back to r3ddit or your tranny marxist discord. Marx is for subhumans, literal spiritually inferior bugs.

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>>22880454
Not the brightest tool in the shed are you ?

>>22880734
>brightest tool in the shed
Back in the day i would've said you were trolling, but now it's more probably more likely that you're just some brown mongrel who tries (and fails) to read. Post more epic quips like from the tv shows you watch, faggot.

>>22877257
It might be but I enjoy being “cringe”. I’m probably the oldest person on this board and don’t have to take lip from teenagers.

>>22877257
Im English I don’t have to like French people if I don’t want to.

Alain De Benoist is a meme

>>22880782
you've never even read marx have you

>>22880782
Pol is supposed to be your containment zone. Don’t pollute other boards chud