[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.