Marxism and the Frankfurt School

This subject deserves its own separate thread.

youtube.com/watch?v=qcEPLVySRZ0

What is Cultural Marxism?

MARXISM AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

Marxism is a philosophy of life and political idea that emerged in the mid-19th century. The most important authors of texts which spread ideas and philosophy of Marxism are Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx (after whom the idea bears the name). Fundamentals of Marxist doctrine were outlined in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the most influential joint work of Marx and Engels, published in 1848.

Marx and Engels in the Manifesto directly speak about the final Marxist aim, but very indirectly show that things have to be destroyed in order to come to the final goal.

The first of these 4 things is religion. In the Manifesto it has been said that religion is the opium of the people and as such should not be present.

The second thing is national identity. "The workers have no fatherland" is one of the most frequently repeated Marxist quotations, which came from the Manifesto itself.

The third thing is the traditional family based on patriarchal arrangement, the organic mind and a healthy lifestyle. Such a family is declared bourgeois and should die out, according to the words of Marx himself.

Last of the things that Marxists seek to destroy is private property.

All 4 things were declared as the enemy of the working class. It is told how the worker's personal wealth is at risk by the "bourgeois greed" of his family, how religion is "the opium of the submissive and obedient," how national identity is an "insult" to his comrades accross the world and how his private property is an "insult" to, from him, poorer workers. From everything stated above is clearly seen the very foundation of the Marxist doctrine, which has both in theory and in practice always been individualistic, because it has always dealt with personal gain of the individual and accused organic thought as his biggest obstacle. Hence from that it can be concluded that the liberal-democratic thought with Marxism does not differentiate according to its ultimate goal - the fall of non-Jews into Jewish slavery, with total devastation of morality, culture, family, national identity, religion and private property. Therefore, it does not represent to it any contradiction. Marxists have their diabolical operation in Europe expanded during the second half of the nineteenth century. They founded numerous associations that dealt with the spread of decadent art and celebration of immorality through the press and literature. They long awaited that their pernicious doctrine fully spreads among the masses, and the first big opportunity was offered to them after more than half a century of Marx and Engels' works.

German Social Democrats (disguised Marxists) on that 4th of August 1914 they stood in the Reichstag and, all of them to a man, with enthusiasm voted for the Kaiser's war credits, while the troops of the Reich after the Schlieffen Plan intruded into France from Belgian territory. Marxists were flooded with enthusiasm and joy. The long-awaited war between European powers should show all the power of Marxist principles. "Workers have no fatherland," they chanted. They will not indulge in bloodshed with fellow workers from neighboring countries, no. Their class comrades around the world will be united after the old Marx's "Workers of the world unite!". Followed by dissatisfaction and a series of rebellions against the bourgeoisie.

Oh, how painfully they were denied! When the war bells rang, the same worker for whom Marx said there was no fatherland found himself among his nation, and not in the class. And not only him, but also one that belonged to the upper class from him, as did the one who was a member of the lower class. All entered together in the battle, as one nation is inextricably linked with blood.

With the huge financial resources and large financial support from the side of Jewish bankers, satanic agents have succeeded in creating the first Soviet state in Russia. Lifted by their initial success, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Erenberg, Zhdanov, Kalinin, Radek, Piatakov and others wanted to realize as soon as possible the idea of ​​world revolution. In late 1918 and early 1919 Marxist strikes were attempted in Budapest, Munich and Berlin, while the Red Army was sent to the west, in a military campaign on the Polish territory.

However, German monarchists and war veterans quickly shot down the Bavarian Soviet Republic and choked a similar uprising in Berlin, while liquidating Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Eugene Levine, the leaders of the uprisings in Berlin or Munich. The regime of Bela Kun in Hungary lasted barely a few months. Marshal Pilsudski took a decisive victory over the Red Army at the Vistula. Marxist demonic plans were falling into the water one after the other, like a house of cards. European workers did not all of a sudden, overnight, receive the ideas of Marxism, as Marx had imagined. How could the Jews have been so badly mistaken? Where did it all go wrong?

Two of Marx's followers offered an explanation. The first was a Jew from Hungary, György Lukács. "As the only solution I have seen revolutionary destruction of society. Till changing the values ​​at the global level, can not occur without canceling the old values ​​and creating new, which make the revolutionaries," stated Lukac. As Commissioner for Culture of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lukac his "demonic" ideas, as he himself called them, carried out in practice through "cultural terrorism".

As part of the "cultural terrorism", he introduced a program of workers' sex education in schools across Hungary. Young people learned about free love, sexual intercourse, the archaic nature of middle-class family rules, monogamy obsolescence and irrelevance of religion, which deprives man of all pleasures. And women were evoked to a rebellion against the sexual morality of those times. Lukac's goal in spreading debauchery of women and young people, was the destruction of the family and the organic thought, that core of Christianity and European culture.

Another disciple was Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist party member. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Mussolini government in 1926. He died in 1937, but still these 11 years was enough for him to write his vision of the plan for the execution of the Marxist revolution.

Rather than seize power and impose a cultural revolution as rulers, from above, Marxists must first change the culture, and then the power will fall into their laps like a ripe fruit. However, for changing the culture will require a "long march through the institutions" - art, film, theaters, schools, colleges, music, seminaries, newspapers, magazines, radio. One by one, step by step, it is necessary to seize them and to politicize them into an agency of the revolution. Only then the people might gladly accept the revolution.

Gramsci insisted that his Jewish like-minded comrades form popular fronts with Jewish intellectuals who shared their disregard for Christianity, European culture and moral values. So that in that way they would be be able to form the opinion of young people. Unfortunately, Gramsci's ideas on how to implement the Marxist revolution in Europe, proved to be correct, a major role in the destruction of moral values ​​were precisely those fronts, better known under the name as the Frankfurt School.

The "Frankfurt School" of Marxism was initiated and championed most visibly, both in Europe and the States by a German sociologist, Max Horkheimer, himself a Jew, and one of the more left-leaning thinkers, later championed here in the US by Herbert Marcuse and other German-speaking Jewish refugees who'd fled Europe during the 30's:-)

As to the link between Judaism and "Communism" aka Marxism, one ought to bear closely in mind that Marx himself was a convert to Lutheranism and a Jew in name only!

As to what his upbringing brought to bear on his subsequent theories is anyone's guess:-)

Needless to say, he'd doubtless be more highly amused than angry or even irritated to learn that anti-Semites associate being Jewish with being MarxistLOL

While it is true that, with the notable exception of Herr Engels himself, Karl Kautsky, August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, and Ernst Thaelmann, a majority of Marxist and Marxist sympathizers were Jewish, they didn't consider their Judaism to be much of anything other than a mere accident of birth!!

The family name, "Marx" is also NOT Jewish in itself, witness the well-known Weimar statesman Wilhlem Marx,

Basically none. He rarely worked alone anyway, and his historical analysis has of course been much analysed by the greatest minds in philosophy and political science. His daughter Eleanor (very personally close to the late great Annie Besant - who visited Poland on one of the first scheduled flights, there are original photos of her arriving) deserves a lot more attention for her ideas and philosophy.


A great force for good in the world.

..holes aplenty thought that there are:-)

I'm also suspicious of the doctrinaire.

The Frankfurt School began its operation in 1923, when Lukac and members of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) Karl Greenberg, Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock founded at the Frankfurt University the Institute of Marxism, in the tradition of Marx and Engels Institute in Moscow. After a few weeks, they opted for a more subtle title: The Institute for Social Research.

The director of the Frankfurt School in 1930 became Max Horkheimer, an admirer of Marquis de Sade. From that moment, under his supervision, the Frankfurt School began to translate Marxism into cultural terms. Discarded were the old Marxist instructions for fighting and created were the new ones. Old Marxists had a false enemy - capitalism, while European culture, their true enemy, they kept hidden. New Marxists had realized that hiding will not achieve anything and declared European culture as their open enemy. For old Marxists, the path to power was through a bloody revolution, for the new ones the way for the acquisition of power was less violent and demanded decades of patient effort. "Victory will come only after in the soul of the Western man disappear Christian beliefs. And that will happen only after the allies and agents of the revolution take over and cash in the institutions of culture and education. Seize the cultural institutions of the West, its "forts and dikes" and the state "the outer moat" will fall without a fight."

Around that year 1930, music critic Theodor Adorno, psychologist Erich Fromm and sociologist Wilhelm Reich, joined the Frankfurt School. However, in 1933, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany. Thus, the Frankfurt School had to pack their bags and find refuge in the United States of America. Among the Marxists, went also the graduate student Herbert Marcuse. The Institute was renewed at the Columbia University in New York, so the Frankfurt School continued its demonic operation on the other side of the Atlantic.

One of the most important new weapons of the cultural conflict which the Frankfurt School had invented, was also critical theory. One of the scholars of critical theory, defined it as "essentially destructive criticism of all major elements of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, hierarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, heritage, ethnocentrism, conventions and conservatism. "

Using critical theory cultural Marxists constantly repeated the accusation that the European nations are guilty of genocidal crimes against all civilizations and cultures with which they came into contact. According to critical theory, European societies are the largest shelters in history of racism, sexism, nativism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, fascism and national socialism. According to critical theory the crimes of Europeans derive from their character, how it was shaped by Christianity.

Critical theory eventually leads to "cultural pessimism", a sense of not belonging and alienation, hopelessness, despair, when the people, although advanced and free, begin to observe their society and country as oppressors, evil and unworthy of love and loyalty. New Marxists believed that cultural pessimism is a necessary precondition for revolutionary change. Under the influence of critical theory, numerous members of the generation of the sixties had convinced themselves that they live in unbearable hell. In the book, The Greening of America, Charles Reich spoke of "a total atmosphere of violence" accross American high schools: "The exam or test represents a form of violence. Mandatory physical education classes, for someone who was ashamed or afraid, is a form of violence. The requirement that the student must have a pass to be walking down the hall, represents violence. Required attendance in the classroom, mandatory learning in a facility designated for learning, represent violence ".

This is all cut and pasted. Hard to see the point of it really, since people can read analyses of political science and sociology anywhere.

Pol-Pot, Stalin, Mao, Castro and many others goodies two shoes. How many million of people have they murdered 100? 1000? Oppressing billions. You commies are dangerous evil.

If you are interest in the topic of communism Bolsheviks and its roots check out Winston Churchill essay 'zionism vs Bolsheviks: struggle for the soul of the Jewish people

Hitler though had murdered even those Jews for example who willingly curried favor in order to save their own necks:-) There were notable exceptions such as his cook, chauffeur, and even fellow soldiers on the front who happened to have been fully Jewish, yet performed acts of bravery, in one case, saving the future Fuehrer's life from a mustard gas attack. Then there were the half- quarter Jews who technically didn't fit into the Racial Laws or whose Ahnentafel (family pedigree) was for whatever reason overlooked!

Pol Pot was vicious, yet randomly so. Neither type, he or Hitler, surely is much better, right? However, the goal-directedness of the Nazis to some extent overshadows the worst misdeeds of the fervent Communists, if only in that Hitler's ideology was solely in order to punish with extermination as brutally as possible, class distinctions notwithstanding.

Mao for instance hated all landed gentry and aristocratic overlords, having uncounted millions put to death. One wonders though in hindsight whether, had they been willing to relinquish their wealth in order to survive, they would have been put to death anyway.

A moot question, to which we likely will never learn the answer. Communists and Faschist dictatots therefore are not comparable in terms of their wanton disregard for human life.

In all fairness the one 'socialist' country I wouldn't mind living in is gaddafis Libya - free healthcare, pennies for gas, free housing (yes housing was considered a human right), 50k from the government upon marraige, and much more. Aside from gaddafis Libya I can't think of any great successes of socialism, communism, etc. Maybe modern day china but that's basically a weird mix of capitalism with state controlled businesses and institutions and somewhat authoritarian

The reasons why he was overthrown are complex and include backstabbing by Sarkozy (gaddafi have him millions for his reelection), wanting to create the dinar as an alternate currency like the euro but more for africa, m.e. and especially the oil producers, and massacring a bunch of salafists in prison when they staged a riot.

Indeed. Far left regimes kill when things are going wrong. Far right regimes kill when everything is going exactly to plan.

No, commie regimes kill as per definition until they have a total control on very asked of life of their populace, then they kill somewhat less.


If you are talking about fascist those are left too, differed spectrum. Nazism borrowed from Marxism a lot.

Hmmm, not certain I quite get your last point, jon. Hitler for example intended to put to death ideally ALL Jews within the German dragnet of Nazi control, from Britain right on up through the farthest reaches of the Baltic, if possible, some eleven million in total. How was "everything going exactly to plan"?? In fact, everything had not been going exactly to plan at all, as the Jews during the '20's wielded considerable influence in the media, arts, finance, scientific research, medicine, literature, even in politics (remember Prof. Hugo Preuss who drafted the Weimar Constitution, not to mention Hugo Haase, Kurt Eisner, and Walther Rathenau etc.), far too great an influence for Hitler's taste.

Hitler wanted to purge the country, perhaps the entire world, of the Jews and so only when things "went wrong", so to speak, did they start going right for the Nazis:-)

Actually Hitler wanted to first report all the jews to Madagascar but that proved too cosrly

Hitler wanted to purge the world from capitalism embodied by Jews as its main beneficiaries.
Straight from Marx.

We haven't had a proper one yet. One day we will.

youtube.com/watch?v=_se8c-wN35M

ah you would do it right would you? You're a bad person jon with ego to big for your shoe number.

Totalitarian utopia is a totalitarian utopia. How many billion of people would you have die until you get it? No, you wouldn't do it better nor any other person.

The evolution of society, the progress of humanity and the inexorable march of time certainly will.

There you go again. Remember, all humans are equal, and you can't turn the clock back to a world where the "survival of the fittest" means that you would certainly have not survived.

One of the many reason that the basic premise of Das Kapital is still as fresh as the day it was written and so far His theses on the march of history remain accurate.

LOL!

Obviously you never played or watched sports (well, perhaps you do avidly watch all male sports but not for the same reason the main public does). Nor could you have even been in a position of responsibility and having to interview several people to fill a single important vacancy or assign a critical time-sensitive task to someone. You wouldn't be able to do it unless you were an absolute hypocrite when it comes to the egalitarian platitudes you are dispensing on here.

And since you have frequently boasted of having a very long and diverse "portfolio career" (i.e., loads of job hopping due to a lack in skills and competencies in order to lock down anything permanent) then let the forum know how you always sought out the person or persons you managed to bump out of the running so that in the name of equality you could share your pay cheque with them. Or did you smugly believe their dole money would be enough to compensate for things so you could move on with a clear conscience?

Lets look at real life when it comes to your belief that all humans are equal and answer each of the following:

1. Which gender has the highest rates of homelessness? A) Males; B) Females; C) The rates are always exactly the same because all humans equal; D) There is no homelessness because all humans are equal

2. Which gender always gets lower prison sentences (fines and incarceration) for committing the same types of crime? A) Females; B) Males; C) The sentences are always exactly the same because all humans are equal, D) There is no crime because all humans are equal

3. Which gender pays less in taxes during a working career due to taking loads and loads of time off but then lives longer and thus draws more in pension and medical benefits funded by payroll taxes? A) Females; B) Males; C) The tax burden is always exactly the same because all humans are equal; D) I don't know because I could never hold a job down in Britain and wasn't qualified or legally allowed to work in Poland so instead I now work in despotic Islamic countries where I get paid under the table in cash and keep it all stuffed in a foreign bank and away from the taxman back in Europe so I now just sit back and relax and troll on PF all day about the virtue of equality

Correct Answers:

1. A
2. A
3. A & D


Survival of the fittest meant reproductive success according to Darwinian theory.

You must be against abortion then and a woman's right to have one. After all if all humans are equal then both men and women are equal and have equal rights. It takes both a man and a woman to conceive a child and so the man would have equal rights regarding consent to terminating a pregnancy. Right? All humans are equal?

Three words for you all two faced leftists out there:

Sports, Bieggers are playing. A distraction, and no basis on which to form an overarching philosophy of humanity. That's very clumsy thinking, discredited and stale long before Ayn Rand claimed her welfare cheques.


That's actually the opposite of the truth. Something that therefore reflects your post succicinctly.


That actually means nothing, rather like the rest of your rant. Those of us who work, as you will one day learn when you are old enough to get a job, pay our taxes and social insurance in part to ensure equity and a social safety net. A developed culture is not the dog-eat-dog Darwinesque world that you pretend to relish however in fact fear.

All humans are equal. This is the basis of civilised society. Some may have very deep-seated psychological issues, as your insolent and childish Cartmanesque rants prove, however any developed society, including Poland, is based on the concept that all humans are equal, with equal rights and equal responsibilities.

The books Escape from Freedom (author Erich Fromm), Mass Psychology of Fascism and the Sexual Revolution (Wilhelm Reich) maintain critical theory. But the most influential book of the Frankfurt School ever published is The Authoritarian Personality (Theodor Adorno). In it the economic determinism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is replaced by cultural determinism. If the family is profoundly Christian, with the authoritarian head of the family as a father, you can expect that the children will become racists and fascists. When he "discovered" that fascism occurs in the patriarchal and healthy families, Adorno has now "identified" its natural habitat, traditional culture: "It is a well known hypothesis that susceptibility to fascism is a phenomenon that is most characteristic for the middle class, that it is "in culture" and that, therefore, those who most conform to that culture, will have the most prejudice." Adorno and the Frankfurt School cold-bloodedly claimed that individuals who grow up in healthy families are potential Fascists and National Socialists. In the mid sixties of the 20th century, those who opposed the revolution in universities, were proclaimed to be fascists. Since that time, the most effective weapon in the hands of Jewish occupiers was precisely the proclamation of a rival as a hater or mentally ill person. "If you want to challenge something that someone is doing. . . call him a mental person." Evaluating Studies on the prejudices of the Frankfurt School, of which the most famous was Adorno's The Authoritarian Personality, Christopher Lasch wrote: "The aim and the plan of the Study about prejudice dictated the conclusion that prejudice, rooted in the structure of the" authoritarian personality ", can be eradicated only if the American people are subjected to collective psychotherapy - if they are treated as if they were in a sanatorium for lunatics. "

Horkheimer, Adorno and other cultural Marxists realized that the road to cultural hegemony leads through psychological conditioning, rather than a philosophical discussion. To American children it could be made conditional that in schools, social and moral beliefs of their parents and families they reject as racist, sexist and homophobic, and to accept the new morality, Marxist. The schools openly said that it is less important that children learn facts or skills, but to leave school equipped to demonstrate "correct attitude".

However, the importance of schools (although still significant) in brainwashing young minds, soon overcame the new media: television, computers, movies and series. William Lind once wrote: "The entertainment industry. . . fully appropriated the ideology of cultural Marxism and kept repeating it, not only in teaching, but also in parables; strong women that beat up weak men, children who are wiser than their parents, corrupt priests who are cheated by the mocking homeless, blacks from the upper class who oppose the violence of whites from the lower class, firm homosexuals who lead normal lives. It's all made up, a reversal of reality !, but the entertainment media make it to appear realistic, even more than the world around us. "

During the fifties, the Frankfurt School lacked the personality that would spread ideas buried in the prose of Horkheimer and Adorno. There appeared the already mentioned Herbert Marcuse, who gave the answer to Horkheimer 's question: "Who will play the role of the proletariat in the future cultural revolution?" Marcuse had his candidates: the radical youth, feminists, black militants, homosexuals, the alienated, the socially incompetent, revolutionaries of the third world and all the other angry voices of the persecuted victims of Europe. That would be, according to Marcuse, the new proletariat to overthrow Western culture.

Marcuse believed that sex and drugs, among others, represent powerful weapons. Marcuse has recommended a general acceptance of the principles of pleasure. "Lets reject the cultural order in full and we will be able to create a world of "polimforne perversion''. When millions of children of the "baby-boom" started flooding schools and colleges, his time had come. Marcuse's books have become one of the best selling. He became one of the cult figures. During the student riots in Paris, in 1968, the rebels carried banners reading "Marx, Mao, Marcuse."

In the book One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse advocated educational dictatorship. In repressive tolerance, he sought a new "liberating tolerance", which carries "intolerance of movements on the Right and tolerance for movements on the Left."

Marxist theory and some of the socio-cultural interpretation of it does actually cover some of the oddities, bile and extreme behaviour evidenced in post #24. Marxian thought is flexible - there's a good interpretation of the American school shootings, Dylan Roof etc, which gives a good perspective on why someone so young, still a teenager might have a hatred of the altruism at the heart of humanity and a staggering contempt for women.

The Lacanian approach (influenced by Marxian thought, however arguably based on much earlier ideas) to human psychology particularly addresses such self-loathing, and is of course in so many ways more Freudian than Freud himself in that respect.

As I've always asserted; we are all equal as human beings, endowed by the same Creator with the same rights and privileges, however NOT as people!

@Ironside,
If you're arguing that Marx would've been in favor of a Jewish genocide because the latter represented capitalism, such a statement is nearly as cockeyed as it is offensive. Are you in some way attempting to justify Hitler's genocide?

Check out the concept of equity - often confused with equality and very close as a concept but with key distinctions - Marx covered this when He wrote his magnum opus as well as the manifesto. Basically we all have different things to contribute to the world and different needs to be fulfilled. A person who is 7' 5" in height has different living, clothing and possibly housing needs to someone who's 5' 2". Similarly, someone who's got an IQ of 130 and someone who's got an IQ of 50 have different things to contribute to society.

Come on jon do you really believe ALL humans are equal? I dont quite see how a starving infant from Sierra Leone and the British royal couples daughter are equal. Aside from both being human, they certainly were born with a very different life ahead of them. Same with say Kim Jon un and a random north Korean - no matter what Kim was going to be wealthy and powerful while the other nk is subservient to him.

If everyone were created equal all nations would have the same level of development and there wouldn't be a migrant crisis.

If blacks were equal to whites then why does affirmative action and why did apartheid exist?

This world is survival of the fittest whether you realize it or not. Someone can be born dirt poor like say gaddafi or idi amin and rise to the highest office in their country. Meanwhile people born on the same day became postal workers, carpenters, doctors, beggars, whatever which are different from each other and different still from being a dictator or President. Yes perhaps a person who is lazy and refuses to work for a living will not be left to starve to death like he would say during medieval. That person will be provided with government aid. However take that aid away and were back to survival of the fittest. Perhaps in Angola he would starve as the government doesnt have the funds to provide him with food

People are all human beings - everyone wipes their own butt in that sense yes everyone is equal as we are the same species. However in terms of fate/destiny, position in the world, etc no we are not equal far from it.

Communism tries to make all people equal because they inherintely are not and even that falls short because you'll always have a political class with access to capital and foreign goods and the working poor masses. If based on economics alone no we are not all equal let alone in health, physique, anatomy, destiny, and most importantly worldview as everyone has their own unique worldview

That's actually a very valid and interesting point, much discussed over the last dozen decades by scholars and interpreters of the man Himself and entirely Marxist in scope. As humans, of course we are all equal. Some have historically and socially derived privilege, some don't, some have more abilities, some have less. That doesn't impact on either equality or equity. As the world's greatest economist Karl Marx said, "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need".


A historical lottery and set of cultural and social conditions that are fast disappearing.


You've understood the point of Marxism. To remove those circumstances that hold some back and allow others to steal the surplus value of their labour.