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

Wow, an actual answer

German Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Julian Young

Upvote

>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.

retard

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

give a real response you fucking fag

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.

>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.

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

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.

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.

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

>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 user.

>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.

>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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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 user. I'll look into the Jason Storm too, that user'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.

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.

>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.

>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.
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.

surprisingly good discussion supra

Get lost dickweed.

triggered af

>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

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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.

Kristol* sorry I'm phoneposting

>effort posting
Please leave.

excellent post

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 user 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.

>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

>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.

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kek, someone used my adorno pic

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.

Culture of Critique

Lies. The replies really prove that Yea Forums is full of underage leftypol kiddies who don't know the first thing about marxism.

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

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

>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

Wtf is your problem, it’s a literature board

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.

yes

Refute him.

>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.

>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.

>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:

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.

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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.

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

>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.

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.

fpbp

Its a form of conservatism

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.

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