The Frankfurt School

Ace points to this:

…the Frankfurt School’s attempt to create a path to Marxism that could work in prosperous America. Because agitation among the (relatively well-paid) working classes wasn’t working. What did they come up with? Political correctness, and creating a new style of cultural/social warfare.

What is the Frankfurt School?

Via Wikipedia:

The Frankfurt School (German: Frankfurter Schule) refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The school initially consisted of dissident Marxists who believed that some of Marx’s followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx’s ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist parties. Meanwhile, many of these theorists experienced that traditional Marxist theory could not adequately explain the turbulent and unexpected development of capitalist societies in the twentieth century. Critical of both capitalism and Soviet socialism, their writings pointed to the possibility of an alternative path to social development.

Although sometimes only loosely affiliated, Frankfurt School theorists spoke with a common paradigm in mind, thus sharing the same assumptions and being preoccupied with similar questions. In order to fill in the perceived omissions of traditional Marxism, they sought to draw answers from other schools of thought, hence using the insights of antipositivist sociology, psychoanalysis, existential philosophy, and other disciplines. The school’s main figures sought to learn from and synthesize the works of such varied thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Weber and Lukács.

Following Marx, they were concerned by the conditions which allowed for social change and the establishment of rational institutions. Their emphasis on the “critical” component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, materialism and determinism by returning to Kant’s critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel’s philosophy, with its emphasis on dialectic and contradiction as inherent properties of reality.

Since the 1960s, Frankfurt School critical theory has increasingly been guided by Jürgen Habermas’ work on communicative reason, linguistic intersubjectivity and what Habermas calls “the philosophical discourse of modernity”. More recently, critical theorists such as Nikolas Kompridis have voiced opposition to Habermas, claiming that he has undermined the aspirations for social change which originally gave purpose to critical theory’s various projects—for example the problem of what reason should mean, the analysis and enlargement of “conditions of possibility” for social emancipation, and the critique of modern capitalism.

Black3Actual has been writing about control of the language here.

Watch the videos. Scary. Spread this around. Tell your friends and neighbors.

About these ads

One thought on “The Frankfurt School

  1. I think the only way to turn this around is to beat them at their own game using their rules. We can win. Although, admittedly, I do cheat in strip poker:)
    Oh, but, then again, we’re dealing with cheats; thus I am justified…….What’s that I hear? Two wrongs don’t make a right? Screw that! Two Rights better turn a Left real quick-like.
    I mean, there’s more than clothes at stake here….

Talk Amongst Yourselves:

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s