/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20278727]

Any books on the Frankfurt School and it's wide range of influence in all areas of modern life?

[Anonymous No.20278732]

> *early life checking intensifies*

[Anonymous No.20278759]

>>20278727
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/10_dogmas_critical_theory.htm

[Anonymous No.20279185]

>>20278727
"The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance" is a good overview

[Anonymous No.20279194]

>>20278727
why don't you just read their books and decide for yourself

[Anonymous No.20279882]

>>20279194
Because when you read a book you enter a process of becoming the book

[Anonymous No.20279888]

>>20279194
Because I don't have any context to what the fuck they are responding to and in what circumstances they wrote their books and what a lot of common concepts mean in their time period. That's why I always start from Secondary literature to get the context and then dive into actual stuff.

[Anonymous No.20279946]

>>20279888
You don't need any context. Walter Benjamin did a fantastic job giving historical and economical background in all his books, he's very lyrical too.

[Anonymous No.20280001]

>>20278727

Of course not. How could you even consider something so inherently anti-Semitic?

[Anonymous No.20280008]

The Perversion of Normality by Kerry Bolton

[Anonymous No.20280024]

>>20278727
>>20279888
The Frankfurt School was a reaction to the creeping suspicion that orthodox Marxist theory appeared to be falsified by history.

Throughout the 19th century and the very early 20th century, it appeared that socialist revolutions were imminent and inevitable. Everywhere the working class seemed to be gaining political power at least and engaging in revolutionary activity at best, and relatively consistently. This all fit in very well with Marxism as exhorted by the man himself.

Following the world wars, socialism and prospects for socialist revolutions seemed comparatively nil. Polities did not undergo
the revolution of the working class but instead developed into authoritarian states. Liberal capitalist democracies seemed more stable than ever (ie due to state intervention of economy). The prognosis was not good for Marxism.

The Frankfurt School, all Marxists, wondered why. They came to the conclusion, like Gramsci before them, that Marx had understated the ways in which ideology could prevent class consciousness from adequately developing. Marx appeared to be wrong when he stated that the contradictions of capitalism alone (strictly in the economic division of labor) contained the seeds of its own undoing (development of class consciousness leading into revolution).

In Marxism "ideology" represents the ruling class' social institutions (laws, morality, culture, the state, religion) which are imposed on the working class to dominate them, as fundamentally juxtaposed to the economic institutions (capitalism), from which the relations of production are constituted.

So the Frankfurt school theorists look at ways that culture, law, religion, morality, etc dominate the working class and prevent it from realizing its own interests.

This is all very rambling and not very well-written. I'd recommend reading Adorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry essay as a stepping point.

[Anonymous No.20280076]

>>20280024
Wow, an actual answer

[Anonymous No.20280087]

German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Julian Young

[Anonymous No.20280100]

>>20280024
Upvote

[Anonymous No.20280117]

>>20280024
>ways that culture, law, religion, morality, etc dominate the working class and prevent it from realizing its own interests.

And this gradually led to the Left becoming a spectrum not particularly focused on economic concerns but rather a general sphere of oppression that is perpetuated by several different factors within a mode of production, yes? So why exactly is it considered a conspiracy theory to say that the Frankfurt School resulted in Marxists trying to infiltrate and subvert culture through their critical analysis when it's literally true? That was the intention of the Frankfurt School and certainly the programme of Gramsci.

[Anonymous No.20280137]

>>20280117
retard

[Anonymous No.20280147]

>>20278727
books dont exist retard. they are an invention of your mind.

[Anonymous No.20280158]

>>20280137
give a real response you fucking fag

[Anonymous No.20280252]

>>20280024
Good post
But I would suggest anons to read Theories of Ideology by Jan Rehmann. He's a contemporary marxist who charts the evolution of ideology theories in the left and ruthlessly criticizes each and every one. Anons should read modern scholars too instead of only reading classics from a century ago.

[Anonymous No.20280282]

>>20280117
>And this gradually led to the Left becoming a spectrum not particularly focused on economic concerns but rather a general sphere of oppression that is perpetuated by several different factors within a mode of production, yes?
The academic left took the Frankfurt School's critical theory and ran with it, but likely for their own purposes. The Frankfurt School's work was bound to be more imprecise than Marx's more "scientific" project because things like law and culture are much more difficult to pin down and analyze than the concrete division of labor and relations of production. This necessitated the more vague power dynamics and oppressor-oppressed typology that the Frankfurt School had to revert to in their studies on what was essentially psychological domination.

In my view the typology was co-opted by feminists and critical race theorists, and then intersectionalists because it provided the most hopeful (and maybe the only tenable) lens through which they could make their vague power dynamic-based cases. Many were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School (Angela Davis studied under Herbert Marcuse), but the connections to Marxism became more and more tenuous as time went on. These people had ideological (in the common sense) motivators separate from Marxism, and most were and are not Marxists.

>So why exactly is it considered a conspiracy theory to say that the Frankfurt School resulted in Marxists trying to infiltrate and subvert culture through their critical analysis when it's literally true?
Today's feminists and intersectionalists and critical race theorists are not Marxists in any common sense of the term. Their ideological motivations seem to me to be pretty clearly Enlightenment Liberalism in its most extreme form regardless of the fact that the tool they use to attack tradition and custom today is Marxist in heritage.

[Anonymous No.20280286]

>>20280024
This is one of the clearest effort posts I’ve ever seen. No one here can explain things easily

[Anonymous No.20280301]

>>20280282
I agree that their basis in Marx is completely tenuous. It's obvious that they only claim Marxism because it provides the most concise epistemic framework that rationalizes their views in a universal way. But I don't think it's right to say that they aren't still Marxists, because really you can't define what Marxists even are. A Marxist is whoever identifies as one, and most leftists and Marxists are now contaminated with intersectionalism and critical theory jargon that neglects the primacy of economics in favor of an oppressor-oppressed dialectic. They pretty much do nothing to challenge the pillars of the liberal society they supposedly wage war against but since they insist on waving hammers and sickles and wrap their statues of Lenin in LGBT flags, I have no reason to say they aren't Marxists. They're just really, really bad ones.

[Anonymous No.20280333]

>>20280117
It's just deflection. I get the same shit if I even use the term "Marxist" irl to describe something, People will act like I'm Joe Mccarthy making mountain out of molehills.

[Anonymous No.20280337]

>>20280333
>>20280117
It's cause they are more influenced by marxist hating pomos than any marxist, you retard.

[Anonymous No.20280384]

>>20280252
>Theories of Ideology by Jan Rehmann
Wow, I just downloaded it on libgen to leaf through and it looks like a super helpful resource. The writing is very clear (unfortunately very rare as you must know). I've been looking for something like this that can provide a good overview, and it looks like it goes far. Thanks anon.

>Anons should read modern scholars too instead of only reading classics from a century ago.
I agree completely, but there is value in the old texts. Especially the accessible ones; Marx is really fun to read. And I feel like the common perception of the Frankfurt School is so tainted that's almost more helpful just to get it from the horse's mouth; anons would probably be surprised at how compelling they'd find something like The Culture Industry. But you're right, it's not pragmatic to read all the old guys today.

[Anonymous No.20280417]

>>20280282
>Today's feminists and intersectionalists and critical race theorists are not Marxists in any common sense of the term. Their ideological motivations seem to me to be pretty clearly Enlightenment Liberalism in its most extreme form regardless of the fact that the tool they use to attack tradition and custom today is Marxist in heritage.
Many of them clearly co-opted Marxist terms. Instead of raising class consciousness, it just became raising women or black consciousness. Or the notion that women need to seize the tools of the oppression used against them (like how Marxists talked about seizing the means of production). You're right though that overtime these concepts become divorced from their origin, such that people using these terms even today often don't realize their deeper intellectual origin.
In some ways though feminism from the get go ran up against an older form of Liberalism, while still drawing from it. The slogan by Betty Friedan, "The personal is political" marked a deviation from the Classical Liberal notion of a strict separation between private and public. Then some black socialist women came onto the scene and got really mad at white feminists for ignoring them, and introduced the concept of intersectionality in the Combahee River Statement.
I think there were also fault lines between the more Marxist types v.s leftists inspired by certain poststructuralist thinkers. The Marxist types still thought primarily in binaries: women v.s men, black v.s white. And they tended to view the goal of political activity to be the victory of their group (ethnic, class, or sexual) against the oppressors. Radical egalitarianism. The politics was still centered around the notion of a common group interest achieving victory, or separation from, the dominant group. Whereas the whole deconstructing binaries thing led to a politics centered around an amorphous notion of inclusivity--where no one really is anything fundamentally, so politics ought to aim at the emancipation of individuals from categories altogether.
That said, I agree they're still all also in some ways drawing from Enlightenment Liberal values emphasizing the primacy of the individual.

[Anonymous No.20280423]

>>20280384
Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism: Deleuze and Foucault is another of his book whose translation will come out this year I'm looking forward to.

>But you're right, it's not pragmatic to read all the old guys today.
It's cool to read old guys from a critical perspective instead of worshipping them but most people just don't tune into the current discourse for some reason. Like I read a book called metamodernism from jason storm(don't be fooled by that meme name) from last year and it helped clarify a lot of things related to what I like/hate about postmodernism and he provides a really interesting alternative to move beyond postmodernism. It's not totally convincing but pretty interesting shit that you won't in old guys books because they were from different era with different discourses.

[Anonymous No.20280430]

>>20280301
I don't even know if many of them would claim that they are Marxists, speaking of the individuals that write the stuff rather than the average academics that collect labels like that to appear to have something to appeal to aside from their own prejudices like you note.

But I wouldn't label the intersectionality crowd Marxist exactly because of your analysis. They do not advocate for or even accept as legitimate revolution (violent or otherwise); they work within the system they profess to despise as hopelessly racist/sexist/transphobic/etc, and if you pin one down it's my bet that he'll state his goal is something as milquetoast as the abolition of economic inequality for or "discrimination towards" his own pet issue, within the system.

[Anonymous No.20280481]

>>20280423
>metamodernism from jason storm
I remember reading his 'The Invention of Religion in Japan'. Top tier shit. A lot of mind blowing takes.

[Anonymous No.20280512]

>>20280417
You're totally right about the intersectionality crowd (maybe in lumping them together I wrongfully lump together Marxists and deconstructionists) forgoing traditionally liberal values. The talk of restrictions on free speech (framed as restrictions of hate speech) and the concept of microaggressions are the most obvious examples to me. Affirmative action and the diversity and inclusion movement are codified realizations of it (or at least are examples of a very tortured and perverted liberalism).

But as far as the Marxist versus poststructuralist distinction that you mention, I've always considered these movements to be liberal in nature, if not in method: the liberation of the individual from the circumstances of his or her birth, and from blind (irrational) tradition and custom. The political project being geared towards the abolition of these traditions and customs. The readiness with which they engage in illiberal methods such as those described above lends credence to your interpretation, but I always just assumed that it was evidence that they really don't have any concrete philosophy or program beyond their own righteous indignation for their cause.

[Anonymous No.20280550]

>>20280384
>>20280423
>It's cool to read old guys from a critical perspective instead of worshipping them but most people just don't tune into the current discourse for some reason.
I agree. Getting into any sort of critical mindset was difficult for me until I started reading the old sociologists in Weber and Durkheim. But it was an immensely rewarding experience.

I feel like there is likely a definite and difficult barrier to entry in the current discourse in understanding where it all comes from, especially with the French pomos.

But also, reading some of that Rehmann book:
>According to his account, after the 1960s the media had become ‘much more contradictory, complex, and controversial’, they were open to social conflict and cultural diversity, with ‘enough novelty and contradiction to splinter the ideological hegemony which was once the fragile accomplishment of the culture industry’. Kellner therefore expects that the culture-industry, ‘reflecting’ the social struggles it is mediating, ‘may deflate or undermine the ideological illusions of their own products and however unwittingly engage in social critique and ideological subversion’.59 This assessment not only fails to take into consideration the extent to which the enormous economic centralisation of the media-industry seriously impedes its capacity or willingness to ‘reflect’ these social contradictions,60 but also shares the illusion that the celebration of differences actually subverts the ideological functioning of cultural apparatuses, instead of (post-)modernising and remodelling them.
I like this already. I'm gonna have to read through this in its entirety (isn't Kellner the standard go-to on postmodernism with Jameson?). Thanks again anon. I'll look into the Jason Storm too, that anon's experience with the Japanese Religion book sounds interesting. I haven't really engaged with much of postmodernism in any acceptable form yet though, to say nothing of metamodernism (this is the first time I'm hearing the term). But I've been drinking too much already.
Goodnight anons.

[Anonymous No.20280576]

>>20280512
Intersectionalists are illiberal only to a certain extent. Their views of emancipation of liberation are completely grounded in liberalism though. LGBT is the best example since it’s literally incomprehensible without a liberal ontology. Sure they promote unity and organization among gay people and transgenders but to even define their gender and sexuality requires a paradigm of individualism. As a “community” the LGBT is completely arbitrary. Intersectionalism is essentially a discreet method of funneling leftists into liberalism.

[Anonymous No.20280617]

>>20280512
>I've always considered these movements to be liberal in nature, if not in method:the liberation of the individual from the circumstances of his or her birth, and from blind (irrational) tradition and custom.
It's a hodge-podge. I think the activists of the 60s and 70s in the U.S blurred the boundary between Marxism and Liberalism in ways that weren't always neat (and the same was true in earlier periods too). For instance, MLK can be understood as a liberal in so far as his aims were oriented towards obtaining legal equality and enfranchisement for Black Americans. Which is to say his understanding was still rooted in liberal social contract theory. Yet he also considered himself "socialistic" about economic issues... In the aftermath of the 60s leftism turned far more identitarian in ways that might've alienated older civil rights activists.
The turn to identity politics could be seen as more liberal in nature with the emphasis being as you point out on the liberation of the individual from tradition. But liberation from tradition to an extent is also something shared by both liberal-progressives and Marxists.
Usually I think of the distinction between the two is that Liberalism emphasizes individualism with the government there more or less as a mediator creating a framework to allow individuals to trade and to ensure their basic natural rights V.S Marxism emphasizing class conflict with the end goal of obtaining total egalitarianism via seizure of state apparatuses. Liberals value neutrality, tolerance, and mutual benefit. Marxists: class conflict and total equality. However, the dichotomy between the two in the 20th century wasn't always neatly separable, as Marxists and liberals interacted and influenced each other's thinking.
The pomo identity politics types today are more a confusing mish mash of intellectual influences. The emphasis on labels, names, language, social discourse comes from the pomo French fags and social sciences/anthropology. The pomo French fags in turn drew on some Marxist ideas but using them freely in ways that weren't always doctrinally Marxist.

[Anonymous No.20280656]

>>20280550
>I haven't really engaged with much of postmodernism in any acceptable form yet though, to say nothing of metamodernism (this is the first time I'm hearing the term).
Tbh you don't really need to.
https://youtu.be/byoQGRRSnN8
He gives enough context/history and explains how people in the past were just talking past each other without saying anything constructive, like for example realism/anti-realism debates where both were just strawmanning each other while agreeing on most shit. He dedicates a whole chapter, I think, to give you a crash course on how postmodern critique is done these days(he has a lot of experience in this considering his past work) while recommending hundreds of relevant books in notes for you to refer to if you want to see in action how pomos deconstruct and destabilise shit. He deconstructs even the narrative of postmodernism. After demonstrating the deconstructive vigilance of pomos, he then begins to list their limits and starts his reconstructive project. He isn't really talking about an actual existing metamodernism movement but constructs an elaborate theory of his own(pretty rare in this day and age) by taking inspiration from wide range of scholars from different disciplines.
It offers a lot of clarity. For example the way he overcomes the false binary of real/social construct.

[Anonymous No.20280984]

surprisingly good discussion supra

[Anonymous No.20280988]

>>20278732
Get lost dickweed.

[Anonymous No.20281046]

>>20280988
triggered af

[Anonymous No.20281058]

>>20280282
>Many were heavily influenced by the Frankfurt School (Angela Davis studied under Herbert Marcuse), but the connections to Marxism became more and more tenuous as time went on. These people had ideological (in the common sense) motivators separate from Marxism, and most were and are not Marxists.
Marcuse thought he was a serious Marxist

[Anonymous No.20281069]

>>20280117
Because they're no longer Marxists at that point, they're just jews and their helpers. Several Jewish "Marxists" became new American conservatives around the same time like Irving Kristof whose son is today an influential zionist.

[Anonymous No.20281085]

>>20281069
Kristol* sorry I'm phoneposting

[Anonymous No.20281134]

>>20280024
>effort posting
Please leave.

[Anonymous No.20281159]

>>20280024
excellent post

>>20280117
critical theory almost entirely dominates the architecture of discussion in the soft sciences but I think you're approaching it the wrong way. The number of journals and publications seeking to publish "a critical analysis" of something or other is absolutely gigantic. The current state of academia in its current incarnation is more about producing research, racking up citations, and gaming university rankings to get more revenue streams than intellectual inquiry.

Therefore, this sort of research is almost entirely self-serving and careerist, and the real audience size of these publications is infinitesimal - basically, academics having a dialogue with a handful of other academics. Their research is very rarely actionable or normative, and has largely been "defanged" from Marxism like the other anon replying to you said.

I will give you an example from my own area of graduate study. Constructivist, postcolonial, feminist, and other critical analyses absolutely inundate the reading list of politics and international relations. This is because there are substantial financial and career incentives in academia to publish these sorts of publications, and the recency of the publications means it is considered more "up to date" and "cutting edge research" than another rehash of Morgenthau, Waltz, Keohane, Wight, etc.

However, no one who meaningfully calls themselves a "constructivist" or "postcolonial theorist" is actively influencing policy circles or defense strategy in politics. It is exclusively the realm of neorealists or liberal internationalists. This also contributes to what I would characterize as resentment amongst academics, leading to them denigrating hegemonic theoretical frameworks (which are hegemonic for a reason - they are accurate) out of selfishness.

[Anonymous No.20281453]

>>20280301
>you can't define what Marxists even are. A Marxist is whoever identifies as one
it amazes me that people can unironically type shit like this

[Anonymous No.20281516]

>>20280024
>Throughout the 19th century and the very early 20th century, it appeared that socialist revolutions were imminent and inevitable. Everywhere the working class seemed to be gaining political power at least and engaging in revolutionary activity at best, and relatively consistently. This all fit in very well with Marxism as exhorted by the man himself.

Is this what marxists actually believe? The working class of the turn of the century never particularly liked revolutionary socialists, socdems were always a lot more popular. The only time unironic revolutionary socialism ever got close to power was when it piggybacked off post-war chaos (hungary) as a blanquist vanguard (by a government that was extremely tolerant towards them, no less), or when the general discontent with the war was so great that anyone who could ride the wave of their frustration would have gotten into power, such as russia. There was never a society where people explicitly craved revolutionary marxism and accepted it of their own volition.

>developed into authoritarian states

just drop the muh authoritarian larp already, the only thing you're mad about is that it wasn't your camp who got to be authoritarian.

>he Frankfurt School, all Marxists, wondered why. They came to the conclusion, like Gramsci before them, that Marx had understated the ways in which ideology could prevent class consciousness from adequately developing.

>In Marxism "ideology" represents the ruling class' social institutions (laws, morality, culture, the state, religion) which are imposed on the working class to dominate them, as fundamentally juxtaposed to the economic institutions (capitalism), from which the relations of production are constituted.

>So the Frankfurt school theorists look at ways that culture, law, religion, morality, etc dominate the working class and prevent it from realizing its own interests.

While Gramsci was true in a general sense about ideology and false consciousness I always find it weird how marxists reconcile their rhetoric of rebellion with the historical fact of post-WW2 marxism being co-opted by the establishment. Like how the fuck do you weave this pathos-laden tale about being the troo rebels which the establishment fears while also being the heads of the post-WW2 brainwashing program in western germany and the USA, getting sinecures everywhere in the western world, never being actively censored and deplatformed even in the fucking 50s, and not wondering why it was that your school had a meteoric rise from being complete nobodies outside marxist circles to getting a massive push by the establishment.

For what it's worth, even Lukács is mostly remembered as an ideological tyrant in the immediate post-WW2 years in hungary, and as the guy who ruined any chance of actual intellectual discourse in the future in hungary through his influence in the school he founded, despite all his LARP.

[Anonymous No.20281570]

>>20281516
kek, someone used my adorno pic

[Anonymous No.20281599]

>>20280024
The only caveat I would add here is that Frankfurters don’t actually have faith in the proletariat, or if they do it’s the mauvais foi of a doomed petit-bourgeois longing for salvation from a revolutionary mass known to be unrealizable. Orwell’s ironic paean to “the proles” in 1984 is a good intertext here imo…the limitations and negativities of Adorno’s dialectics are grounded in longing for restoration of an authentic bourgeois fulsomeness, the salon, the intellectual way of life - and definitively not in a revolutionary abolition of the alienations that life implies.

[Anonymous No.20281787]

>>20278727
Culture of Critique

[Anonymous No.20281879]

>>20280024
Lies. The replies really prove that /lit/ is full of underage leftypol kiddies who don't know the first thing about marxism.

[Anonymous No.20281885]

>>20281599
Holy fucking pseud troon post. This is what modern non STEM academia is.

[Anonymous No.20282197]

>>20281570
It's from Paul Gottfried's "The Strange Death of Marxism" for the record.

[Anonymous No.20282345]

>>20282197
>Paul Gottfried's "The Strange Death of Marxism"
Is this any good. I want to start reading through the Frankfurt school and understand critical theory. If this book is a challenge to it, all the better

[Anonymous No.20282370]

>>20281885
Wtf is your problem, it’s a literature board

[Anonymous No.20282405]

>>20282345
I think so, yeah. He's one of the handful of people with an actual platform who dislikes nu-liberalism, bad faith marxoid shit, and straussians/neocons all the same.

[Anonymous No.20284071]

yes

[Anonymous No.20284105]

>>20281879
Refute him.

[Anonymous No.20284121]

>>20280417
>That said, I agree they're still all also in some ways drawing from Enlightenment Liberal values emphasizing the primacy of the individual.
On the other hand, I might say LGBT is more collectivist in the sense of a tribal or collective identity as opposed to true individualism.

>>20280576
>As a “community” the LGBT is completely arbitrary.
Well, they might all be arbitrary or "socially constructed" at some level. But I think it's basically a politicized one that exists in a "unity of opposites" with right-wing Evangelical Christianity; i.e. both are opposing and depending on each other while existing within a field of tension, so it's also no surprise that we see the development of the LGBT "community" at the same time as the politicization of Evangelical Christians as a distinct constituency.

>>20281516
>There was never a society where people explicitly craved revolutionary marxism and accepted it of their own volition.
Not sure about that one. I think there were a lot of people in some countries who really bought it:

https://youtu.be/0APRjsyrzjY?t=1913

>Like how the fuck do you weave this pathos-laden tale about being the troo rebels which the establishment fears while also being the heads of the post-WW2 brainwashing program in western germany and the USA
Well, I think the obvious answer is that you can't. Unless you're actually in a jungle command post somewhere then I think anyone calling themselves a "troo rebel" is LARPing at some level. But that was still happening in the world in the 60s. But the way I've come to think, is that it might not necessarily be a good thing if the establishment fears you. It might be better if they don't... even if they should, if that makes sense?

More practically, the establishment has constructed a lot of dissent in the language of "terrorism" and then using expanded policing powers to go after people. I think this is one reason why the left has given up armed struggle in most places in the world -- in addition to just being flat-out exhausted after years of engaging in it. I'm thinking of Colombia for example with the FARC which was a Marxist-Leninist rebel group who were actually in the jungle waging an armed struggle with the state. But I've heard down the grapevine that one of the reasons they gave it up is because they realized their existence had become a useful bogeyman for the right-wing government there which, in addition to being involved in the drug trade itself, was receiving a flow of weapons and cash from the U.S. government. To make a long story short, after the rebels demobilized, they've been seeing their members getting assassinated in the middle of the night, and the theory is that the government and off-the-books death squads known as BACRIMs are trying to push them into picking up the gun again so they will continue "playing their part" in this whole ugly game.

[Anonymous No.20284177]

Also to give another example of why it might be better "not to be feared" by the establishment, is the paradox the U.S. establishment has gotten itself into vis-a-vis Russia and China. Trump and some of the people around him are probably right from a strategic perspective to want to cut a deal with Russia so they can focus on China, which is a much bigger threat to U.S. power in the world, but they can't do that. Russia is treated with much more fear.

Why? There are probably several reasons. The tribal political structure perhaps or because parties are more focused on the short-term, superficial balance of power than long-term strategic interests. If Trump tried to cut a deal with the Russians, he'd get blasted for it. Now this whole war in Ukraine is probably much to China's benefit because the U.S. has once again become distracted. And then for a rather long historical period from the 1980s to the mid-2010s, China wasn't considered a threat in the U.S. at all.

This discussion is probably best left to the Fukuyama thread though.

Like, I think the establishment perceives the far right as a threat domestically. And the far right likes to use that as a way of enhancing their dissident credibility. But I suspect they might be a useful "foil" to the establishment as well whether or not people in the establishment actually "fear" them; or even if they really do, subjectively, but that's how ideology works. There could be a legitimate and also *misplaced* fear of the far right. If you don't believe me... in the Russian Empire, the Marxists weren't considered a serious threat compared to the anarchists who never amounted to anything.

[Anonymous No.20284182]

>>20282405
What exactly is straussian? It seems so vague but I never did a deep dive into it

[Anonymous No.20284184]

>>20280117
>So why exactly is it considered a conspiracy theory to say that the Frankfurt School resulted in Marxists trying to infiltrate and subvert culture through their critical analysis when it's literally true?
Subversion is less effective if they caught you red handed.
This is literally asking why people pleads innocent when they are guilty and why they shift the blame on their enemies.

[Anonymous No.20284197]

>>20284177
Or perhaps rather than "legitimate" and misplaced fear, it's a genuine fear that is misplaced, similar to Islamic terrorism. Like, Islamic terrorists can do destructive things, but from a perspective you hear (which might also be correct) on some corners of the U.S. right, the war with Islamic terrorists in the Middle East basically distracted the U.S. for 20 years as China built up its strength which is a much more serious problem for them than some guys in caves.

[Anonymous No.20284199]

>>20278759
fpbp

[Anonymous No.20284203]

>>20284182
Its a form of conservatism

[Anonymous No.20284218]

Not a precise response to OPs question but this deals with themes swirling around it and bears greatly on the discussion above. Del Noce predicted what I believe he called the "sublation of Marxism" by the liberal Left in the 1960s. His core argument was that the concepts of historical materialism and dialectical materialism were contradictory rather than complementary and that the historicist, critical, sociologistic "half" of Marxism (or neo-Marxism by that point) would outlive political Communism. Basically, the assumption was that Marxism itself could not survive the acid bath of historical and material negations that it flung at Capitalist or Traditional societies. Going forward he thought that the affluent societies of the West were, when compared to the Soviet Union, the superior guarantors of an amorphous "liberation", this "liberation" and not Communism being the thing that Leftists wanted most. In this understanding there is plenty of space for "Marxist" sociocultural criticism within Capitalist society itself, because the object of Marxism is no longer Communism, but liberation. One can see that this is fertile ground for the final destruction of Marxism in its conversion into idpol and such.

[Anonymous No.20284276]

>>20284203
But if someone is called a straussian, what does that mean?

[Anonymous No.20284350]

>>20281516
It should also be noted that the societies that could be said to have achieved "the highest level of capitalist development" and were mostly liberal-Protestant without a single centralized Church, like the US and UK, were the places were Communist parties were the weakest, relatively speaking. It had more success in comparatively under-developed countries with a larger peasantry. You could almost say that the farther you get from the institutionalized Church, the farther you get from Communism as a relevant political force.

[Anonymous No.20284423]

>>20284350
That's because Calvinism and Puritanism were stronger left-wing movements than Marxism ever was. No Communist groups could ever survive in the Anglosphere because they'd been retroactively outmoded by Mainline Protestantism. All of the potential Communist radicals in the U.S. were learning the social gospel from Boston and Philadelphia pastors a hundred years before Marx was born

[Anonymous No.20284495]

>>20284423
My thinking was more that Communism arose as a reaction to the pains of industrialization, comparative backwardness, and the failure of contemporary institutional Churches to provide much in the way of consolation to the peasantry at the time like they should have. Many in the intelligentsia in the US and UK WERE admirers of Communism, but it didn't gain enough traction among the average person. My thinking here is that there wasn't enough of a suffering peasantry like one might've seen in the Catholic countries to serve as a base for Communist parties - larger portions of the population owned at least SOME land, and they weren't used to a state organ like the Church enforcing some sort of ideological orthodoxy. Even in the US most of the rank-and-file were immigrants. American Communists were also overly focused on blacks as a revolutionary class.

But this is a fairly half-baked theory anyway.

[Anonymous No.20284898]

>>20284350
It is interesting. I've always wondered how Latin Americans could be so Marxist and Catholic at the same time.

[Anonymous No.20285118]

Just keep in mind that Marcuse is chief instigator of the american type of Critical Theory, as well as being a proto-CIA employee. Adorno and the others aren't your american social liberalism loving pieces of shit.

Basically any german or french theory imported over to the US is deeply contaminated with american neuroticism.

[Anonymous No.20285228]

>>20284177
the american bureaucrats now that china is dangerous, precisely tanks to trump
it is the socialists like piece of shit obama and clinton and all the bureaucrats before those who propelled china to what it is now

however, the brain poop of the current US bureacrats is that india and small countries around it will be enough of a commercial power to be the new US manufactures and to buy all the US public debt

this is why the US merchants and bureaucrats put hire massively Poos and put them at top positions of megacorps infatuated with virtue signaling.

[Anonymous No.20285240]

the american bureaucrats know that china is dangerous, precisely tanks to trump
it is the socialists like piece of shit obama and clinton and all the bureaucrats before those who propelled china to what it is now

however, the brain poop of the current US bureaucrats is that india and small countries around it will be enough of a commercial power to be the new US manufactures and to buy all the US public debt

this is why the US merchants and bureaucrats hire massively Poos and put them at top positions of megacorps infatuated with virtue signaling.

[Anonymous No.20285251]

>>20280024
Not all heroes wear capes. Updooted!

[Anonymous No.20286161]

>>20280076
Only partially correct though

[Anonymous No.20287831]

>>20284276
Straussians are pretty weird. They are the disciples of Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss thought that many of the great philosophers understood and clandestinely propogated arguments in their work that they knew to be untenable or unacceptable in the regime they wrote them in. The result being that the superficial meaning of the text is not the real interpretation; the real interpretation can only be arrived at by an extremely close reading. Irony and hyperbole are rife in these texts, though it may not appear that way.

As I understand it the common theme among his interpretation is deeply illiberal. He seems to have been very elitist. But his writing is very difficult to get a handle on too.

Today most straussians use that to take neoconservatism and run with it.

[Anonymous No.20287843]

>>20287831
That’s what I gathered from Wikipedia. I figured most people read books that way with the era in the back of their mind. So it would be like if I read The Prince today, as if it was written today?

[Anonymous No.20287854]

I wonder what the Frankfurt school would think if they saw the shit they caused today. I think a lot of left wing writers would be disgusted by the new left

[Anonymous No.20287895]

>>20284276
In a Straussian's eyes, it means they try to solve the problems of modernity and postmodern nihilism/relativism by returning to the classical traditions and radically reevaluating the perennial significance of the problems devised by the ancients. The goal is to revive the classical form of political philosophy which is inherently pragmatic, focused on wisdom rather than technical/theoretical knowledge of how to run politics, ecumenical, and pedagogical (it trains statesmen to be wise and pragmatic in the image of philosophers).

When most non-Straussians say it, they either mean what Shadia Drury means in her anti-Straussian books, that they are all evil neocons who think American democracy should be spread abroad by military force and imperialism

When people who actually know what they're talking about say Straussian, what they mean is that the Straussian claim about going back to the classical sources is mostly a fraud, and what Strauss actually wanted was to reject modern European philosophies which had tended toward fascism (he was a student of Heidegger) in the 20th century, by asserting an "ecumenical" form of philosophy that actually amounts to the maintenance of stagnant liberal democracies at all costs (what Strauss called "open societies" as opposed to "closed" societies, i.e. those with concerns about their internal spiritual health) - except for Israel, where Strauss made an exception to his rule for the entire rest of humanity and declared that Israel should be a closed society par excellence, essentially a fascist nation. Funny how that works.

Also, the whole thing about classical wisdom and so forth is really just Strauss reading a highly anachronistic, radical atheism into every single ancient and medieval source, most notably Plato (the mystic). The Straussian story of the entire history of philosophy is that all smart people become radical atheists who realize the mob is stupid and needs to be thought controlled, so they encode their esoteric knowledge of the atheist truth in "exoteric" forms that can pass by the censors. Every philosopher ever was secretly an atheist, and the whole history of philosophy is really just the process of atheism becoming dominant and liberal open societies where faith is irrelevant and just an optional thing for the dumb masses. Except for Israel which is a closed society and should focus on being ethno-religiously Jewish. Not joking.

Their readings of classical philosophy are worthless. They are a parasitic cult that invades academic departments and kicks out all other Straussians. They overwhelmingly favor recruiting fellow Jews. Some of Strauss' ideas are interesting and he has had an impact so he's worth reading but nobody takes him seriously in any of the fields he touched on. Nobody thinks Plato was a secret atheist, or Maimonides. His infamous interpretations of Machiavelli literally use numerology, which nobody takes seriously.

[Anonymous No.20287902]

>>20287895

He did his best work in the 20s-40s but his American students can't read or understand German so they can't study that, so they focus on the weird numerology shit.

https://carnegieendowment.org/2006/02/06/i-am-not-straussian-at-least-i-don-t-think-i-am-pub-17984
>But that's not the reason I never became a Straussian. It was because my father explained to me, as well as to Bloom, of course, that Bloom did not understand Plato. This may seem a bit outrageous to many people today, given Bloom's reputation. But I still think my father was right, and at the time I had no doubt that he was right. My father was and is a great arguer, and as a boy I was inclined to believe that he was right about practically everything. So to me, the Kagan-Bloom debates always looked like a complete wipe-out.

>As best I can recall, their biggest point of contention was whether Plato was just kidding in The Republic. Bloom said he was just kidding. I later learned that this idea--that the greatest thinkers in history never mean what they say and are always kidding--is a core principle of Straussianism. My friend, the late Al Bernstein, also taught history at Cornell. He used to tell the story about how one day some students of his, coming directly from one of Bloom's classes, reported that Bloom insisted Plato did not mean what he said in The Republic. To which Bernstein replied: "Ah, Professor Bloom wants you to think that's what he believes. What he really believes is that Plato did mean what he said."

>Anyway, my father said Plato was not kidding. The argument would go back and forth for hours, and in my memory it always ended with Bloom saying, "We'll have to look at the text," which was a great way of ending the discussion because there was no ancient Greek text of The Republic available in the Statler's lunch room. So, as I saw it, and as my father saw it, that was sort of a surrender.

[Anonymous No.20287916]

>>20287902
Also one of the reasons the Straussians are effective at masking their shallowness and their true intentions is because the "go back to the classics! The modern world has lost its way and wandered into relativism! Classical wisdom!" came at just the right time to be identified with this kind of thinking, so people who value this idea and don't necessarily like the real Straussian ideas have often travelled with them. Also, he was big with postwar Catholics because he claimed he was trying to rehabilitate natural law doctrines. But I have had Straussians laughingly tell me that this was a ploy to swindle the Catholics into allying with him because he wasn't at all interested in Catholic natural law doctrine, only in classical natural law doctrines. Nevertheless there is a subschool of Catholic Straussians who are basically not Straussians in the real sense.

One other thing is that his "Read Plato with a fine tooth comb, analyze every diacritic mark numerologically!" meme is catchy and flashy for certain people and naturally makes intellectually curious people ask whether there is something to it. The answer is no. At least not as the Straussians carry it out. They are bad at what they do.

Paul Gottfried's book on them is the best starting point. Short too.

[Anonymous No.20287928]

>>20287895
>They are a parasitic cult that invades academic departments and kicks out all other Straussians.
Screwed this up. Meant they kick out everybody else and bring in more Straussians.

[Anonymous No.20287933]

[Anonymous No.20288031]

>>20281159
this superficial sort of critique critique is part of the culture industry, liberal academics are competing to take part in the same system of electoral politics militarized propaganda, the NGO industrial complex, psychiatric power, that's why 'woke' ideology amounts mostly to a new form of paternalism, rationalized domination based on supposedly primordial racial or gender qualities. basically authoritarian technocracy legitimated through identity politics.criteria of 'equity' are capitalist ones of financiarization, if you talk about institutionalized oppression and internalized prejudices you can silence concerns about the legitimacy of institutions and their interventions in the life of the individual.the genealogy comes from cold war psychiatry and paternalist ideology rather than marx or foucault or adorno. Telling that these whole apparatuses would be invested in things like the expansion of the sex industry or the biopolitics surveillance psychiatric regime.

the Case of IR is interesting, were do these incentives come from? because one is seeing a shifts from the political theory of morgenthau's time, in essential agreement with marxism or world systems theory, acknowledging liberal democracy and the rules based liberal order is grounded on imperial power and the domination of the core over the perifery, to the increasingly fine tuned therapeutic management of subjectivity under a high imperial system. its not a question of political economy or imperialism but one of subconscious prejudices and biases, orientalisms and various isms,

[Anonymous No.20288065]

>>20288031
liberalism works best without the bourgeoisie autonomous subject, the model of erving goffman's total institution, identity politics are not incompatible with technocracy because they divide the population into patients and staff.

[Anonymous No.20288593]

>>20288065
>identity politics are not incompatible with technocracy

lol come on, this is completely wrong. care to explain 21st century america then? you don't think the state is overtly pushing a progressive and identitarian agenda?

[Anonymous No.20288598]

>>20280024
Upvooted!

[Anonymous No.20288626]

Marxism is a form of secular messiahism. When the messiah doesn't come, revolution, they re-invent the story into something because they want the underlining conclusion, communism, to really be true when it isn't. Much of Marxism is form of Manichaeism - Talmudic Manichaeism. Its a religion, not a science, and leaders of communist states are their deities until they die or are replaced.

[Anonymous No.20288669]

>>20284495
>My thinking was more that Communism arose as a reaction to the pains of industrialization, comparative backwardness, and the failure of contemporary institutional Churches to provide much in the way of consolation to the peasantry ... But this is a fairly half-baked theory anyway.
That's not really a crazy theory and I think it's similar to what JFK thought. He still saw communism as an opportunistic conspiracy in poor countries, but I think he had a liberal (and rather Catholic-seeming) view that it was in large part a reaction to technological shock. It's for this reason that I think he developed a foreign policy concept based around supporting non-communist / non-aligned left-nationalist leaders to help them hold out, and not fighting communists where they had majority support reasoning that you can't defeat a whole population anyways, but this ran into opposition from within the hardliner camp in the U.S.

>larger portions of the population owned at least SOME land
Yeah and much larger acreage per farmer. If you look at the average American farmer in the 1930s, they worked around 640 acres (on average) while the average Chinese peasant worked... 4 acres. So you can see why the land question and land reform was of central importance to the revolution there. Vietnam too.

>Even in the US most of the rank-and-file were immigrants. American Communists were also overly focused on blacks as a revolutionary class.
Historically, American communism has been attractive to blacks and immigrants relative to other groups. Just speaking from personal experience in college, the only undergraduate class I took that discussed communism at all in a positive way was an African-American history class because of the role of communists in that ranging from W.E.B Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Robert F. Williams, the Black Panther Party (who were Marxist-Leninists) and so on.

This has been recuperated somewhat so you'll see images of black American communists in music videos like Angela Davis putting her fist up, but the rest of the content revolves around generic themes of empowerment or something and the people who might use her image are not themselves communists in many cases:

https://youtu.be/8CFrCk6_0rM?t=76

[Anonymous No.20288712]

>>20288626
>Much of Marxism is form of Manichaeism - Talmudic Manichaeism.
I think Marxism is more Promethean and, after all, Prometheus was Marx's favorite Greek god. Prometheus brought down fire (civilization, culture, etc.) from the heavens to give to man.

So, for Marx (or this is my reading), people create God but they project / alienate their virtues and creative powers onto their creation which then keeps them submissive (or really, to other men who monopolize the explanation of divine powers). So men come to believe that God created them than the other way around. So, in capitalism, Capital becomes like God and the workers must make sacrifices to it when in fact people have become enslaved to other men who own the machines.

But as long as there are class struggles in the economic substructure (like in a workplace) in capitalism, that materialistic class struggle about means of production and allocation of resources will be projected into the political superstructure as an idea or a political movement, or a revolution (socialism or communism). Even if you don’t talk about the "fight club," the "fight club" is still there. So, socialists and communists are actually created by capitalism. Capitalism's own internal contradictions created capitalists' own biggest enemy. Therefore, you will also see pro-capitalist political superstructure (government, media, law, morality, religion and etc.) projected by the economic substructure's winners.

So even if capitalists are like God/eternity, socialists/communists will be born to be the supermen to kill God/go beyond eternity to accomplish wonders. That is the fate of socialism and communism.

https://youtu.be/wtroGFcY3fo

[Anonymous No.20288716]

>>20288065
>>20288031
this is not very clear anon.
How do identity politics legitimate authoritarian technocracy? Prioritizing equity?
How are criteria of equity the same of financialization? Promoting democratization of meritocracy?
If we have a therapeutic management of the individual (as a means of control?), how is it under a high imperial system? Economic (and hence "social" or cultural) imperialism?
And how does identity politics divide the population into patients and staff? Via its weaponization?

[Anonymous No.20288787]

>>20288712
Nah, Marxism is thoroughly Manichaen. Communism is the great reset - it doesn't give anything to man. It gives everything to the state. Communists believe they can usher in a utopia, without contradictions, if they just limited the accumulation of goods and services by everyone. The goal of Marxism, ultimately communism, is to turn everyone into a pauper and make the state one big poor house that everyone is dependent on - to become mindless, programmable cattle. According to the Communists, the gentiles, the goyim, must serve god's chosen ones because the Talmud tells the Jews, the gentiles, the goy, are inferior to god's chosen ones - the Jews. Its a struggle against the evil, cursed goys who god put here to test the Jews, to prepare them for their final solution to the Jewish problem of not having a nation ( a home), and the righteous Jews who have a god given right, according to them, to rule over the gentiles as cattle. Jews are kicked out of every country they live in because of their subversive mercantile character to make money above all else, and that forces them to be a parasitic class of sellers and usury. Merchants, in order to maximize their profitability, their earnings, they need stability. Jews believe if they just abolish class, the family, nations, culture, religion, war - all the things that ruin their ability to safely earn a buck off peoples' existence, they can usher in a utopia for Jews where they will no longer have to be a socially repugnant group of travelers, and they finally have a home to thrive.

Their Talmudic Manichaeism dictates that this day shall come when they control all sectors of commerce through state ownership, and that the final reassurance of this victory requires ideological monotheism (Judaism) through world revolution. Jews use their propaganda, their useful idiots to convince gentiles to do the work for them while they hide in the shadows, creating plausible deniability for their schemes. It works very well because slowly Jews have taken over cultural institutions to make it much harder for people to fight back because their ideas are seen as the status quo. The only way to fight this is to call out the Jew, the name, and deny him or her the chance hide their mischief, their schemes behind lemmings and gaslighting. Jews are Archons essentially. They serve an evil, demurgic purpose. They don't care how many people are killed in the pursuit the goals because they feel it bring them closer to ushering in their utopia here and now. To them, what doesn't kill them simply makes them stronger for their final assault on civilization. The Great Reset, the Great Replacement - Jews change their forms, but communism, world domination, is always their goal.

[Anonymous No.20288822]

>>20287933
This and the bell shaped curve refute Marxism and all of its variants. Marxists are just people who are paid to do mis-direction from genetics and the over-sized Jewish influence on society.

[Anonymous No.20289744]

>>20287895
>Except for Israel which is a closed society and should focus on being ethno-religiously Jewish. Not joking.
lel

[Anonymous No.20289755]

>>20287895
>>20287902
>>20287916
thank you for these effort posts

[Anonymous No.20289807]

>>20288822
>>20288787
>>20288626
aaaaand the /pol/tards arrived. Good thread while it lasted.

[Anonymous No.20290568]

>>20289807
it was shit from the third post onward lol