[infowarrior1]

So guys I saw in one of threads about this:

Quote:

Cultural Marxism is a pejorative term with links to the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory and alleges an organized and concerted effort on the part of Marxists to subvert the traditional Christian values and cultural norms of western society.[1] Historian William S. Lind and other American commentators, such as Patrick Buchanan, have further claimed that "Cultural Marxism" is a dominant strain of thought within the American left, intended to promote "the capture of [Western culture]".[2] According to proponents of the term, multiculturalism is an outgrowth of Western Marxism[citation needed] Cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society are actually historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy[citation needed]. Cultural Marxists use Marxist-inspired methods in their practice, such as historical research with a focus on the identification of economic interest cui bono, and the study of the mutually conditioning relationships between parts of a social order[citation needed]. Such Marxist approaches may be utilized in attempts to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticize what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological[citation needed].''As a political term

According to German political scientist Thomas Grumke, the new American extreme right undertook a reinterpretation of the enemy image in the 1990s because the classical Red Scare ceased working. Part of this strategy is the introduction of fighting terms such as “Cultural Marxism”, which is used by American conservatives to describe an alleged conspiratorial attempt of “the Left” to destroy the cultural and moral values of the United States through systematic attacks on the American Way of Life[citation needed]. According to the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory, Cultural Marxism supposedly began in the culture war of the 1930s when a small group of Jewish philosophers fled from the German Reich to the United States. These representatives of the Frankfurt School allegedly started teaching at Columbia University, where they are said to have developed a form of Marxism that did not focus on the economic system, but on cultural issues. This group is said to have had the goal of talking white Americans out of their ethnic pride in their European heritage, as well as portraying Christian family values as reactionary and antiquated. Consequently, this group also supposedly praised the sexual revolution. According to Grumke, American military theorist and political commentator William Sturgiss Lind fabricated connections to several other ideological and political groups who allegedly had ties to Cultural Marxism, including feminists, homosexuals, multiculturalists, migrants, and environmentalists, all of whom had been labeled by Lind as supposedly being hostile “cultural warriors” controlled and directed by the Marxist philosophers of the Frankfurt School.[3]

The term is popular with many modern social conservatives, such as historian William S. Lind and mass shooter Anders Breivik, who both associate it with a set of principles that they claim are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and the Christian religion [4] and multiculturalism, which are identified with cultural Marxism, are argued to have their true origin in a Marxian movement to undermine or abnegate those traditional values.[5] Google is unable to track the terms search history before 2007 as it doesn't have extended use online before that year.[6]

Can any of you guys inform me about what is going on with this?

[iknowexactly]

I can't because I don't understand exactly what is meant by Cultural Marxism.

My guess would be it is the belief that all cultures, like all people in Marxism, are considered to me equally valuable?

If it does, I would think CM is bad. I believe backwards places like Pakistan where, for instance, polio vaccine workers are murdered-- are inferior and stupid.

I'd way rather be in 3rd world Christian Philippines than Pakistan.

But to me, all these vague catch-all terms-- CM, liberalism, conservatism, are about as objective as words like "God.".

They don't give us any concrete issues to discuss, for example, marijuana legalization, death penalty, etc-- they are at least SOMEWHAT linked to observable reality. We can theoretically reach a compromise on objective issues.

Jingoistic terms like Cultural Marxism or fascism seems too vague to accomplish that, and instead just lead to endless, vague, wasteful abstract bickering.

They mean totally different things to different people.

[Rutting Elephant]

I think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory. Regarding Adorno, as far as I can tell he was a cultural elitist disgusted by, for example, pop music. And it seems a stretch to blame the recent spike in LGBTQ propaganda on some immigrant professors from the thirties.
"Postmodernism" served as a fine target for a long time, and it was easy to trace.
Shouting "Commies!" strikes me as a step backwards in discourse.

[infowarrior1]

I base the theory of cultural marxism based on the words of the soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov:

And Bill whittle:

[The Reactionary Tree]

Cultural Marxism is not a conspiracy theory. They fucking teach it in schools. They call it critical theory. It's also known as Political Correctness. Social justice warriors = cultural Marxism. It's anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-Christian, anti-traditionalist, anti-western civilization. It's literally every post we make fun of here on this forum i.e. feminism.

It's literally all this crap that all white people are racist and should feel guilty for slavery, it's white privilege non-sense, it's all men are rapists, etc. It's not a conspiracy if it's happening every day.

Literally the mere fact that we have to hide our identities to talk about men's issues on an internet forum like RVF is fucking cultural Marxism. The reason people like Roosh and Forney are the most hated people on the internet is cultural Marxism.

It's disappointing to hear guys on this forum say they don't know what it is or call it a conspiracy theory.

[Deluge]

(12-13-2014 12:08 AM)Rutting Elephant Wrote:  

I think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory. Regarding Adorno, as far as I can tell he was a cultural elitist disgusted by, for example, pop music. And it seems a stretch to blame the recent spike in LGBTQ propaganda on some immigrant professors from the thirties.
"Postmodernism" served as a fine target for a long time, and it was easy to trace.
Shouting "Commies!" strikes me as a step backwards in discourse.

Critical Theorists have been mythologized by conspiracy theorists into an international Jewish conspiracy bogeyman and into something far more influential then they really were. In reality they were just a group of German intellectuals who wrote a bunch of books from the 30's to the 50's that critiqued modern society and mass culture, their work barely touched upon multiculturalism (I'm not aware of any on it at all actually, it didn't really exist back in that era) or race, and only a small amount covered sexual liberation and feminism (i.e Eros and Civilization). Their focus was on critiquing social repression, control and domination through mass culture, fascism and Western/Soviet bureaucracy.



The link to the New Left and feminism etc. came in the following decades as an outgrowth on their attacks on social repression. If you want to critique the New Left though it's much worthwhile to go after the major Second-wave feminist writers and Foucault who had far far bigger part to play in creating the New Left, but Critical Theorists gets paranoid types riled up because they were mostly Jewish and their institute had neo-Marxist origins, even though the vast majority of them have never read any of their works. A lot of the stuff that gets linked to them (i.e post above) isn't actually in their writings, most of that crap only popped up long after the members of the Frankfurt School had died, Marcuse being an exception.

[Sp5]

(12-13-2014 01:57 AM)Deluge Wrote:  

(12-13-2014 12:08 AM)Rutting Elephant Wrote:  

I think it's fair to call it a conspiracy theory. Regarding Adorno, as far as I can tell he was a cultural elitist disgusted by, for example, pop music. And it seems a stretch to blame the recent spike in LGBTQ propaganda on some immigrant professors from the thirties.
"Postmodernism" served as a fine target for a long time, and it was easy to trace.
Shouting "Commies!" strikes me as a step backwards in discourse.

Critical Theorists have been mythologized by conspiracy theorists into an international Jewish conspiracy bogeyman and into something far more influential then they really were. In reality they were just a group of German intellectuals who wrote a bunch of books from the 30's to the 50's that critiqued modern society and mass culture, their work barely touched upon multiculturalism (I'm not aware of any on it at all actually, it didn't really exist back in that era) or race, and only a small amount covered sexual liberation and feminism (i.e Eros and Civilization). Their focus was on critiquing social repression, control and domination through mass culture, fascism and Western/Soviet bureaucracy.



The link to the New Left and feminism etc. came in the following decades as an outgrowth on their attacks on social repression. If you want to critique the New Left though it's much worthwhile to go after the major Second-wave feminist writers and Foucault who had far far bigger part to play in creating the New Left, but Critical Theorists gets paranoid types riled up because they were mostly Jewish and their institute had neo-Marxist origins, even though the vast majority of them have never read any of their works. A lot of the stuff that gets linked to them (i.e post above) isn't actually in their writings, most of that crap only popped up long after the members of the Frankfurt School had died, Marcuse being an exception.

And Marcuse worked for the US Government - the OSS and the State Department, for ten years!! During that time, the CIA funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom and various conferences promoting modern art, modern music, especially jazz, as a counterweight to the Soviet Union's repression and puritanical and "realist" art during the Stalin era.

So the operations Bezmenov described in the video had a mirror image from the USA directed at the USSR - possibly with Marcuse as the designer!

Foucault's critiques are spot-on with regard to a lot of things in the world: the therapeutic state (the nanny state) and the modern state modeled on the "panopticon" prison where everyone is watched all of the time.

Not that these guys weren't wrong a lot of the time, but to blow them up as some huge conspiracy makes no sense.

Market forces explain feminism more than Marcuse. Women buy a lot more shit, so the market was reengineered to give them more independence and their own source of income. This fueled consumption growth, profits, and the GDP.

[berserk]

(12-13-2014 01:57 AM)Deluge Wrote:  

but Critical Theorists gets paranoid types riled up because they were mostly Jewish and their institute had neo-Marxist origins

We've had the jewish thread.

Why do people have this idea of jewish involvement in subversive movements?

Because literally every single person mentioned on that Wiki page about Cultural Marxism are jewish.

Almost every single leader (again Wiki) in the post WW1 German socialist coup were jewish.

A vast majority of Bolsheviks and early Sovjet leaders were jews.

Almost every influential second wave feminist were jewish, a staggering overrepresenation, Dworkin, Steinem, et al.

Facts are facts. Even to this day, every time there is some hit piece SJW article in mainstream media the last name is jewish most of the time.

I don't believe it is a jewish conspiracy, but I do believe it is a representation of a influential subset of jewish culture which mixes superiority beliefs with paranoia and victim mentality. The result is a deep mistrust of everything that represents traditional European culture.

[perverted sage]

Wikipedia becomes INGSOC

[Deluge]

Beside the point but the Frankfurt School wasn't all Jewish, Habermas even grew up in a Nazi household. Ashkenazi Jews have always been very overrepresented in high IQ positions and since the Frankfurt School was a. based in Frankfurt and b. all about critiquing social repression, it's unsurprising most of it's associated intellectuals were (secular) ethnic Jews.

The central thesis of the “Cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory is that Critical Theorists had set out to destroy Western culture. Now you could make that charge about Habermas and his championing of sexual liberation in “Eros and Civilization” (although his work as a propaganda officer for U.S intelligence agencies flies in the face of the anti-West conspiracy narrative), but on the whole that’s just not what they were about.

(12-13-2014 01:47 AM)The Reactionary Tree Wrote:  

It's also known as Political Correctness. Social justice warriors = cultural Marxism. It's anti-white, anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-Christian, anti-traditionalist, anti-western civilization. It's literally every post we make fun of here on this forum i.e. feminism.

It's literally all this crap that all white people are racist and should feel guilty for slavery, it's white privilege non-sense, it's all men are rapists, etc. It's not a conspiracy if it's happening every day.

This is a good definition of what feminism is about, not the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School was about critiquing social control, and how governments in both the West, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany deployed it (remember it originated in the 1930's). The Frankfurt School latched on to how the cultural and media elites sitting at the top of the "culture industry" use their influence to mould the desires of ordinary people to serve their own interests, i.e generating false needs to buy things they don't need with money they don't have to impress people they don't like etc. which lines the elites pockets, and which keeps people too plugged into this system to ever be capable of rebelling to change it. As you can guess the Frankfurt School was a major influence on "Fight Club."

You can also probably tell this has undertones critical of (although not anti) capitalism, and hence is where the pejorative "Cultural Marxism" actually comes from. Fast-forward to the 1960's and Herbert Marcuse who was very heavily influenced by the Second-wave feminists of the time extended Critical Theorists preoccupation with social control to the sexual realm, i.e critiquing patriarchy and tradition as repressing people's individual liberty, but this was one member out of many, writing decades after the school was at it's peak. Even then, his influence on feminism wasn't of great importance. Eros and Civilization gets passed over in Gender/Women's studies for works which are actually considered to be part of the feminist movement as opposed to something coming from the Frankfurt School, girls coming out with these degrees don't even know who Marcuse is.

The conspiracy theory that FS sought to destroy Western civilization came from Lyndon LaRouche, who has some crazy theories about international Jewish cabals running the world in a secret alliance with the British royal family (I kid you not). From LaRouche’s perspective this conspiracy is a great way to link together Communists and Jews with feminists/New-Leftists into one overarching grand conspiracy, especially because most people who’ll eat his shit up are either too stupid or too lazy to actually go and read what the Frankfurt School actually wrote.

[Sonsowey]

In all honestly Cultural Marxism seems to be a catch-all, loosely-defined phrase that people use to describe anything they do not like which has hints of leftism to it.

Is it meant to be Critical Theory? If so Critical Theory is already put there. Is it meant to signify Critical Theory + something else?

I always took it as the equivalent of just calling leftists pinkos or commies, just a sorta insult. If there were some sort of academic body of work on the topic I would be surprised.

[dog]

Deluge: Where are you getting your information from? I find any narrative from that time period with such little ambiguity to be deeply suspect, especially one that casts the Frankfurt school as well-intentioned victims with only the best interests of the world at heart (they were fighting Nazis and Stalin!). I've heard that one too many times.

The facts are:
1) They were in Frankfurt
2) They came here
3) They immediately took over academia
4) Their ideology has dominated academia for the last 50 years
5) Their ideology has dominated politics for at least the last 30
6) Their ideology has government-enforced teeth

For a group that is supposedly "against social control" that sounds a lot like social control to me. That sort of cognitive dissonance should be setting off alarm bells in your head.

All this hand-waving about how it's just a coincidence and there is no conspiracy doesn't matter. I don't care whether it spread in dark rooms full of be-yarmulke'd figures looking to destroy the goyim or if a bunch of clueless baby-boomers latched onto it as a way to justify their mindless rebellion. It's an evil, anti-human, anti-reality ideology and it needs to be stopped.

BTW - It's funny how Wikipedia, an institution run by people who revert spelling and punctuation corrections for not following proper procedure, was a-okay with making such a drastic change to an article. The fact that these are often the same type of no-life losers who make 100 spastic tweets a day in favor of typical SJW pap should clue you in on why. There may not be a conspiracy, per se, but who needs a conspiracy when you dominate the institution to begin with?

[Sherman]

The reason it is so hard to pin down the concept of "Cultural Marxism" is because the term is describing an evolving system with inputs from multiple sources over time. For example, the Frankfurt school may have had a part in developing criticism of the West, but they didn't care about feminism. Some of the original proponents wouldn't recognize Cultural Marxism as it exists today because it keeps getting more extreme and more nasty. But they still played a part in its formation. An interesting read is "Revolution from Above" and the "The Psychotic Left" written by Kerry Bolton. Another spin on it is "Understanding the Times" by David Nobel.

What I would like to know is where are the Cultural Marxists getting all their money and power? They couldn't do what they are doing without the blessing of the establishment. If the elites didn't approve they would just shut them down. They are in the government, media, and control the universities. The Cultural Marxists are now the establishment.

[Deluge]

(12-13-2014 11:42 AM)dog Wrote:  

Deluge: Where are you getting your information from? I find any narrative from that time period with such little ambiguity to be deeply suspect, especially one that casts the Frankfurt school as well-intentioned victims with only the best interests of the world at heart (they were fighting Nazis and Stalin!). I've heard that one too many times.

The facts are:
1) They were in Frankfurt
2) They came here
3) They immediately took over academia
4) Their ideology has dominated academia for the last 50 years
5) Their ideology has dominated politics for at least the last 30
6) Their ideology has government-enforced teeth

For a group that is supposedly "against social control" that sounds a lot like social control to me. That sort of cognitive dissonance should be setting off alarm bells in your head.

All this hand-waving about how it's just a coincidence and there is no conspiracy doesn't matter. I don't care whether it spread in dark rooms full of be-yarmulke'd figures looking to destroy the goyim or if a bunch of clueless baby-boomers latched onto it as a way to justify their mindless rebellion. It's an evil, anti-human, anti-reality ideology and it needs to be stopped.

BTW - It's funny how Wikipedia, an institution run by people who revert spelling and punctuation corrections for not following proper procedure, was a-okay with making such a drastic change to an article. The fact that these are often the same type of no-life losers who make 100 spastic tweets a day in favor of typical SJW pap should clue you in on why. There may not be a conspiracy, per se, but who needs a conspiracy when you dominate the institution to begin with?

To be frank, you don't know what you're talking about.

Points 3-6 are completely false. Academia is leftist for sure but if you think the Frankfurt School's ideology were the dominant field back then let alone now then it's pretty clear that you don't know what the Frankfurt Schools beliefs actually were.

These guys started in the 30's peaked in the 40's. I can tell you've never actually read their work because you're confusing them with feminism, i.e the feminists second wave in the 60's and their dominance since around the early 90's with their third wave. They are both left wing schools of thought yes but they have completely different focuses which I've already explained. Don't take my word for it, there are dozens of books by Frankfurt School members out there for you to read for yourself, "Dialectic of Enlightenment" being the most logical starting point (although there's much better uses of your time than reading Critical Theory to be honest). The point is until you actually know what the people you're talking about were advocating whatever you have to say about them is worthless. I'm not advocating what the Frankfurt School actually espoused by any means but what you're doing is akin to running around saying Bang is a rape guide based off what an SJW wrote about it.

(12-13-2014 12:01 PM)Sherman Wrote:  

The reason it is so hard to pin down the concept of "Cultural Marxism" is because the term is describing an evolving system with inputs from multiple sources over time. For example, the Frankfurt school may have had a part in developing criticism of the West, but they didn't care about feminism. Some of the original proponents wouldn't recognize Cultural Marxism as it exists today because it keeps getting more extreme and more nasty. But they still played a part in its formation.

I think this is a good way of putting it, with some caveats. The Frankfurt School didn't critique Western Civilization per se but did critique "advanced industrial societies", communism, fascism and capitalism and the commonalities between them. Also I wouldn't say progressivism today is a direct descendant of the Frankfurt School, rather 60's feminists (and the New Left generally) were influenced by CT's critiques and absorbed some of that into their own ideology centered around Identity politics (feminism + race) and political correctness.

Edit: I meant Marcuse and "Eros and Civilization", not Habermas.

[dog]

(12-13-2014 12:03 PM)Deluge Wrote:  

[snip]

The point is until you actually know what the people you're talking about were advocating whatever you have to say about them is worthless. I'm not advocating what the Frankfurt School actually espoused by any means but what you're doing is akin to running around Bang is a rape guide based off what an SJW wrote about it.

Okay, point taken. I'll do my research.

[scorpion]

Deluge, what are you trying to say, exactly? That "Cultural Marxism" is an inaccurate term? That the Frankfurt School is being mischaracterized? That there was never any intentional conspiracy?

In my opinion, none of that really matters. I agree with dog entirely when he said above:

Quote:

All this hand-waving about how it's just a coincidence and there is no conspiracy doesn't matter. I don't care whether it spread in dark rooms full of be-yarmulke'd figures looking to destroy the goyim or if a bunch of clueless baby-boomers latched onto it as a way to justify their mindless rebellion. It's an evil, anti-human, anti-reality ideology and it needs to be stopped.

At this point, tt doesn't matter where it came from or what the intentions of the people who spread it were. The damage has already been done. We simply must recognize how toxic and harmful this ideology is, and do our best to root it out. Doing so entails some degree of tracing it back to its origins, of course, but there's nothing to be gained by obsessing about whether this was some kind of secret Jewish conspiracy or whatever. Regardless of its origins, "Cultural Marxism" has become a useful catch-all term for identifying and labeling ideologies that are subversive of traditional Western values. Sitting around talking about how it isn't technically true that the Frankfurt School didn't dominate academia in the middle of the 20th century, or didn't criticize Western society but "advanced industrial society" is being pedantic.

[Samseau]

(12-13-2014 12:03 PM)Deluge Wrote:  

(12-13-2014 11:42 AM)dog Wrote:  

Deluge: Where are you getting your information from? I find any narrative from that time period with such little ambiguity to be deeply suspect, especially one that casts the Frankfurt school as well-intentioned victims with only the best interests of the world at heart (they were fighting Nazis and Stalin!). I've heard that one too many times.

The facts are:
1) They were in Frankfurt
2) They came here
3) They immediately took over academia
4) Their ideology has dominated academia for the last 50 years
5) Their ideology has dominated politics for at least the last 30
6) Their ideology has government-enforced teeth

For a group that is supposedly "against social control" that sounds a lot like social control to me. That sort of cognitive dissonance should be setting off alarm bells in your head.

All this hand-waving about how it's just a coincidence and there is no conspiracy doesn't matter. I don't care whether it spread in dark rooms full of be-yarmulke'd figures looking to destroy the goyim or if a bunch of clueless baby-boomers latched onto it as a way to justify their mindless rebellion. It's an evil, anti-human, anti-reality ideology and it needs to be stopped.

BTW - It's funny how Wikipedia, an institution run by people who revert spelling and punctuation corrections for not following proper procedure, was a-okay with making such a drastic change to an article. The fact that these are often the same type of no-life losers who make 100 spastic tweets a day in favor of typical SJW pap should clue you in on why. There may not be a conspiracy, per se, but who needs a conspiracy when you dominate the institution to begin with?

To be frank, you don't know what you're talking about.

Points 3-6 are completely false. Academia is leftist for sure but if you think the Frankfurt School's ideology were the dominant field back then let alone now then it's pretty clear that you don't know what the Frankfurt Schools beliefs actually were.

These guys started in the 30's peaked in the 40's. I can tell you've never actually read their work because you're confusing them with feminism, i.e the feminists second wave in the 60's and their dominance since around the early 90's with their third wave. They are both left wing schools of thought yes but they have completely different focuses which I've already explained. Don't take my word for it, there are dozens of books by Frankfurt School members out there for you to read for yourself, "Dialectic of Enlightenment" being the most logical starting point (although there's much better uses of your time than reading Critical Theory to be honest). The point is until you actually know what the people you're talking about were advocating whatever you have to say about them is worthless. I'm not advocating what the Frankfurt School actually espoused by any means but what you're doing is akin to running around saying Bang is a rape guide based off what an SJW wrote about it.

(12-13-2014 12:01 PM)Sherman Wrote:  

The reason it is so hard to pin down the concept of "Cultural Marxism" is because the term is describing an evolving system with inputs from multiple sources over time. For example, the Frankfurt school may have had a part in developing criticism of the West, but they didn't care about feminism. Some of the original proponents wouldn't recognize Cultural Marxism as it exists today because it keeps getting more extreme and more nasty. But they still played a part in its formation.

I think this is a good way of putting it, with some caveats. The Frankfurt School didn't critique Western Civilization per se but did critique "advanced industrial societies", communism, fascism and capitalism and the commonalities between them. Also I wouldn't say progressivism today is a direct descendant of the Frankfurt School, rather 60's feminists (and the New Left generally) were influenced by CT's critiques and absorbed some of that into their own ideology centered around Identity politics (feminism + race) and political correctness.

Edit: I meant Marcuse and "Eros and Civilization", not Habermas.

I've read Critical Theory and Feminism was easily tied hand in hand with the Frankfort School. Although they may have developed independently of each other to claim they aren't natural allies is disingenuous.

Feminists used Critical Theory to advance their critiques of how white men enforced the patriarchy, while race theorists became "critical race theorists." All bedfellows.

As for Cultural Marxists not owning academia, you are mistaken. Pretty much all feminist, frankfort school critiques are simply taken from granted at every philosophy department across the entire western world. You can't even question some of these tenants without losing your job at these places.

[Deluge]

(12-13-2014 12:01 PM)Sherman Wrote:  

What I would like to know is where are the Cultural Marxists getting all their money and power? They couldn't do what they are doing without the blessing of the establishment. If the elites didn't approve they would just shut them down. They are in the government, media, and control the universities. The Cultural Marxists are now the establishment.

(12-13-2014 08:29 AM)Sp5 Wrote:  

Market forces explain feminism more than Marcuse. Women buy a lot more shit, so the market was reengineered to give them more independence and their own source of income. This fueled consumption growth, profits, and the GDP.

I think the Frankfurt School's own beliefs explain this quite well. I disagree with them on most things but their concept of the "culture industry" resonates with me. Adorno (or even Marcuse himself) would tell you that all the money is on their side because catering to progressive demands is in the economic interests of the elites. Getting women into the workforce and unskilled immigration drives down the price of labour. Women's lib significantly increases consumer demand. In fact the vast majority of spending decisions today are made by women. Since they profit from feminism, they can use their control over mass culture and mass media to jam that down people's throats through movies, TV and music. They would also argue that using identity politics to pit groups against each other prevents/distracts them from trying to challenge the elites. Have you ever noticed that the economic elites have very liberal social views even though they vote for centre-Right parties?

(12-13-2014 12:39 PM)scorpion Wrote:  

Deluge, what are you trying to say, exactly? That "Cultural Marxism" is an inaccurate term? That the Frankfurt School is being mischaracterized? That there was never any intentional conspiracy?

Cultural Marxism is an accurate term for feminism/progressivism, and I think feminists probably did have an explicit agenda to attack Western values at least from the 60's. But yes the Frankfurt School has been completely mischaracterized, if you were familiar enough with their work you'd be scratching your head wondering why they keep coming up so often in anti-feminist discussions. Like I said there are many other intellectuals out there with far more relevance to contemporary Leftism and even better fodder for conspiracy theories (Gloria Steinem was on the CIA payroll for instance).

(12-13-2014 12:46 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

I've read Critical Theory and Feminism was easily tied hand in hand with the Frankfort School. Although they may have developed independently of each other to claim they aren't natural allies is disingenuous.

Feminists used Critical Theory to advance their critiques of how white men enforced the patriarchy, while race theorists became "critical race theorists." All bedfellows.

As for Cultural Marxists not owning academia, you are mistaken. Pretty much all feminist, frankfort school critiques are simply taken from granted at every philosophy department across the entire western world. You can't even question some of these tenants without losing your job at these places.

1. Of course they were natural allies, after all they both spent plenty of time criticizing capitalist society and the mass media.

2. Agree

3. Definitely you can't question feminism today in academia, but you can definitely disagree with the Frankfurt School at least in Politics and Sociology departments. I think you're getting the two movements too intertwined in your head. Is it really thought crime to say you didn't care much for "One-Dimensional Man" or communicative rationality? I've heard a senior Politics professor tell a class he cares little for the Frankfurt School, and he's a typical Ivory Tower lefty. Most of what the Frankfurt School wrote about has little to do with what Leftists today care about.

[Samseau]

(12-13-2014 12:49 PM)Deluge Wrote:  

3. Definitely you can't question feminism today in academia, but you can definitely disagree with the Frankfurt School at least in Politics and Sociology departments. I think you're getting the two movements too intertwined in your head. Is it really thought crime to say you didn't care much for "One-Dimensional Man" or communicative rationality? I've heard a senior Politics professor tell a class he cares little for the Frankfurt School, and he's a typical Ivory Tower lefty. Most of what the Frankfurt School wrote about has little to do with what Leftists today care about.

It doesn't matter what they say, they've internalized it. It's like the bleeding heart liberals who claim they aren't Christian, yet support giving aid to the poor non-stop. Who cares what they say, watch what they do.

[Deluge]

(12-13-2014 01:01 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

(12-13-2014 12:49 PM)Deluge Wrote:  

3. Definitely you can't question feminism today in academia, but you can definitely disagree with the Frankfurt School at least in Politics and Sociology departments. I think you're getting the two movements too intertwined in your head. Is it really thought crime to say you didn't care much for "One-Dimensional Man" or communicative rationality? I've heard a senior Politics professor tell a class he cares little for the Frankfurt School, and he's a typical Ivory Tower lefty. Most of what the Frankfurt School wrote about has little to do with what Leftists today care about.

It doesn't matter what they say, they've internalized it. It's like the bleeding heart liberals who claim they aren't Christian, yet support giving aid to the poor non-stop. Who cares what they say, watch what they do.

You just said you can't criticize the Frankfurt School in academia today, now you're admitting they can? Again I think you've intertwined the movements too much, the overlap between the Frankfurt School and feminism is definitely there but it's not significant enough to make them a protected class. If all of their work was like "Eros and Civilization" that would be the case, but the rest of it is too outdated for progressives for them to care about.

Edit:
I make a big deal about this because I don't understand why people focus so much on this group in relation to feminism. If you were to craft a list of the 10 most influential intellectuals on today's feminist/progressive thought, Marcuse might show towards the bottom of the list and that's it. I think because of the influence of the LaRouche junk you guys have given the Frankfurt School way too much credit for advancing progressive thought, and much more credit than progressives themselves do.

[placer]

Here's a fairly recent decent version of the article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.html?titl...=631539138

Here is the original version:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.html?titl...d=56281103

And the version from five years ago:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.html?titl...=307540329

And how it looks now that the SJWs have mangled it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.html?titl...=637595273

Edit Just in case the SJWs manage to destroy this article's history, here's how it looked on October 29th:

Wikipedia Wrote:

Cultural Marxism refers to a school or offshoot of Marxism that conceives of culture as central to the legitimation of oppression, in addition to the economic factors that Karl Marx emphasized.[1] An outgrowth of Western Marxism (especially from Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School) and finding popularity in the 1960s as cultural studies, cultural Marxism argues that what appear as traditional cultural phenomena intrinsic to Western society, for instance the drive for individual acquisition associated with capitalism, nationalism, the nuclear family, gender roles, race and other forms of cultural identity;[1] are historically recent developments that help to justify and maintain hierarchy. Cultural Marxists use Marxist methods (historical research, the identification of economic interest, the study of the mutually conditioning relations between parts of a social order) to try to understand the complexity of power in contemporary society and to make it possible to criticise what, cultural Marxists propose, appears natural but is in fact ideological.

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Contents

    1 Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory
        1.1 Frankfurt School and critical theory
        1.2 Birmingham School and cultural studies
        1.3 Use by current Conservatives
    2 See also
    3 References
    4 Further reading

===Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory===

We are, in Marx's terms, "an ensemble of social relations" and we live our lives at the core of the intersection of a number of unequal social relations based on hierarchically interrelated structures which, together, define the historical specificity of the capitalist modes of production and reproduction and underlay their observable manifestations. — Martha E. Gimenez, Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy [2]

According to UCLA professor and critical theorist Douglas Kellner, "Many 20th century Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and influences on audiences and social life."[3][4] Scholars have employed various types of Marxist social criticism to analyze cultural artifacts.

==Frankfurt School and critical theory==

The Frankfurt School is the name usually used to refer to a group of scholars who have been associated at one point or another over several decades with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, including Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Wolfgang Fritz Haug and Jürgen Habermas. In the 1930s the Institute for Social Research was forced out of Germany by the rise of the Nazi Party. In 1933, the Institute left Germany for Geneva. It then moved to New York City in 1934, where it became affiliated with Columbia University. Its journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung was accordingly renamed Studies in Philosophy and Social Science. It was at that moment that much of its important work began to emerge, having gained a favorable reception within American and English academia.

Among the key works of the Frankfurt School which applied Marxist categories to the study of culture were Adorno's "On Popular Music," which was written with George Simpson and published in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences in 1941. Adorno was worried by signs of conformity in contemporary mass society and also at the conversion of individual artistic expression into the mass production of standardised commodities. He argued that popular music was, by design and promotion, "wholly antagonistic to the ideal of individuality in a free, liberal society",[5] Adorno and Horkheimer's "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", originally a chapter in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which argued that culture reinforced "the absolute power of capitalism",[6] and "Culture Industry Reconsidered", a 1963 radio lecture by Adorno.[7]

After 1945 a number of these surviving Marxists returned to both West and East Germany. Adorno and Horkheimer returned to Frankfurt in 1953 and reestablished the Institute. In West Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a revived interest in Marxism produced a new generation of Marxists engaged with analyzing matters such as the cultural transformations taking place under Fordist capitalism, the impact of new types of popular music and art on traditional cultures, and maintaining the political integrity of discourse in the public sphere.[8] This renewed interest was exemplified by the journal Das Argument. The tradition of thought associated with the Frankfurt School is Critical Theory.

==Birmingham School and cultural studies==

The work of the Frankfurt School and of Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was particularly influential in the 1960s, and had a major impact on the development of cultural studies, especially in Britain. As Douglas Kellner writes:

Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham School.[3]

==Use by current Conservatives==

See how the SJW invasion was already starting

In current politics, the term has also been associated by Conservatives with a set of values that, it is claimed, are in simple contradiction with traditional values of Western society and Christian religion.[9] Undermining these is believed to be the true purpose of Political correctness and Multiculturalism, which are then identified with Cultural Marxism.

===References===

1. Merquior, J.G. (1986). Western Marxism, University of California Press/Paladin Books, ISBN 0586084541

2. Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy, by Martha E. Gimenez, Published (2001) in Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 23-33.

3. Douglas Kellner, "Cultural Marxism and Cultural Studies,"http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/culturalmarxism.pdf, circa 2004.

4. Douglas Kellner, "Herbert Marcuse," Illuminations, University of Texas, http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm.

5. "On popular music". Originally published in: Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York: Institute of Social Research, 1941, IX, 17-48. See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).

6. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer "Enlightment as mass deception" Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 1979, 120-167 (originally published as: Dialektik der Aufklärung. Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). On-line the University of Groningen website and Marxist Internet Archive. See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).

7. Lecture in the International Radio University Program over the Hessian Broadcasting System which was published in German in 1967, English translation in New German Critique, 6, Fall 1975, 12-19 (translated by Anson G. Rabinbach). See Gordon Welty "Theodor Adorno and the Culture Industry" (1984).

8. e.g. Jürgen Habermas (1962 trans 1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society, Polity, Cambridge.

9. William S. Lind (2008), Who stole our culture?

===Further reading===

* Marcuse, Herbert (1955). Eros and civilization; a philosophical inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press.
* Wolff, Robert Paul; Marcuse, Herbert (1964). A critique of pure tolerance. Boston: Beacon Press.
* Leiss, William (1974). "Critical Theory and Its Future". Political Theory 2 (3): 330–349. doi:10.1177/009059177400200306.
* Eidelberg, Paul (1969). "The Temptation of Herbert Marcuse". Review of Politics 31 (4): 442–458. doi:10.1017/S0034670500011785.
* Eidelberg, Paul (1970). "Intellectual and Moral Anarchy in American Society". Review of Politics 32 (1): 32–50. doi:10.1017/S0034670500012560.
* Stokes, Jr., William S. (1980). "Emancipation: The Politics of West German Education". Review of Politics 42 (2): 191–215. doi:10.1017/S0034670500031442.
* Davies, Ioan (1991). "British Cultural Marxism". International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4 (3): 323–344. doi:10.1007/BF01386507.
* Dworkin, Dennis (1997). Cultural Marxism in Post War Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-1914-4.
* Gottfried, Paul (2005). The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press. ISBN 0-8262-1597-1.
* Luca Corchia, (2010). La logica dei processi culturali. Jürgen Habermas tra filosofia e sociologia, Genova, Edizioni ECIG. ISBN 978-88-7544-195-1.

[Soberane]

[Soberane]

(12-13-2014 12:05 AM)iknowexactly Wrote:  

I can't because I don't understand exactly what is meant by Cultural Marxism.

My guess would be it is the belief that all cultures, like all people in Marxism, are considered to me equally valuable?

If it does, I would think CM is bad. I believe backwards places like Pakistan where, for instance, polio vaccine workers are murdered-- are inferior and stupid.

I'd way rather be in 3rd world Christian Philippines than Pakistan.

But to me, all these vague catch-all terms-- CM, liberalism, conservatism, are about as objective as words like "God.".

They don't give us any concrete issues to discuss, for example, marijuana legalization, death penalty, etc-- they are at least SOMEWHAT linked to observable reality. We can theoretically reach a compromise on objective issues.

Jingoistic terms like Cultural Marxism or fascism seems too vague to accomplish that, and instead just lead to endless, vague, wasteful abstract bickering.

They mean totally different things to different people.

Latin America is poor compared to USA, they have a drug problem, not oil in the same scale as many middle Easter countries, but they are way more peaceful than Pakistan or Gaza, not country in Latin America is bombing some other country next to it, Latin American being more conservative than USA, you still do not have a huge cultural crash like Scandinavian and Muslim in Europe, Americans do not have to deal with South Americans women wearing Burkas, Latinos men creating Sharia law zones where you can't drink or sell any alcohol.

You don't know of anyone who look for refuge in a middle Easter country.

[Jevioso]

It's really not that complicated if you know your history of philosophy in the United States.

Progressivism actually originates from the philosophy of pragmatism as created by John Dewey and William James. John Dewey was the big influence in education, and helped popularize the ideas of a creating a balance between socialism and capitalism through education. William James pretty much popularized psychology in the United States, as well as defending the subjectivity of truth. Both of these ideas and concepts were inherited from various ideas originating from German philosophy, which had been the dominant nation in terms of philosophy throughout the 19th century in Europe. These served as the founders and the thinkers of what we would call the Old Left.

Cultural Marxism developed after WW2 as well as the widespread influence of Freud's cynical ideas of human nature. (People don't know that in the early 20th century, the science that paid the most and was most in demand by corporations and governments was psychology either for advertising or propaganda purposes). Also the widespread occurrence of shell shock popularized psychoanalysis, which led to a lot of government funding into research in mental health after WW2. The spread of Freudian ideas, mixed with cynicism of human nature especially in Academia, led to the embrace of Cultural Marxism. The philosophy was basically a combination of Marx's criticism of Capitalism, and Freud's proclamation that society needed to repress the animal nature of populations, or they would destroy civilization. Academics began to theorize ways in which the government could prevent the destruction of civilization by brainwashing citizens.

The Frankfurt school associated this change in Academia to capitalism, and basically used Freud to criticize Freud. Unlike, the Old Left, the people who provided the foundation of the New Left, theorized that the only way capitalism was able to survive was because it had been repressing people's natural inclination towards socialism, this was also the reason why socialism/communism failed in the Soviet Union. They decided that the goal would be to use psychology and education like the old left to build a more socialist/communist country, but also to deconstruct/criticize the things in Western Culture that they felt were responsibile for the survival of capitalism. The Vietnam war, and people's desire not to fight in it, was was brought the end of the Old Left and the rise of the New Left, and that's how Cultural Marxism came to the US.

[lskdfjldsf]

Man's inner longing for identity and purpose will always be stronger than the attempts of others to stifle it. I see this among many of my friends, mostly white Europeans, who are now 26-27 and coming to the conclusion that without a connection to their heritage (both ancestral and in terms of belief systems) and without a central moral framework, there's really not much to life to be happy about.

It's only when men search for this deeper meaning to their existence that Cultural Marxism begins to be chipped away.