Frankfurt School Quotes

Political correctness is a war on noticing.

It was not surprising that after the war Dostoevsky was linked to Kierkegaard as a prophet of social resignation.

Ruthlessly, in despite of itself, the Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.

We no longer live in a world where nations and nationalism are of key significance, but in a globalised market where we are, ostensibly, free to choose – but, if the Frankfurt School’s diagnosis is right, free only to choose what is always the same, free only to choose what spiritually diminishes us, keeps us obligingly submissive to an oppressive system.

The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality, reducing everyone’s concrete life to a universe of speculation.

The Revolution won't happen with guns, rather it will happen incrementally, year by year, generation by generation. We will gradually infiltrate their educational institutions and their political offices, transforming them slowly into Marxist entities as we move towards universal egalitarianism.

To the horror of those who can genuinely claim to have suffered from its effects, alienation has proved a highly profitable commodity in the cultural marketplace. Modernist art with its dissonances and torments, to take one example, has become the staple diet of an increasingly voracious army of culture consumers who know good investments when they see them. The avant-garde, if indeed the term can still be used, has become an honored ornament of our cultural life, less to be feared than feted. The philosophy of existentialism, to cite another case, which scarcely a generation ago seemed like a breath of fresh air, has now degenerated into a set of easily manipulated clichés and sadly hollow gestures. This decline occurred, it should be noted, not because analytic philosophers exposed the meaninglessness of its categories, but rather as a result of our culture’s uncanny ability to absorb and defuse even its most uncompromising opponents.

Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?

Amusement always means putting things out of mind, forgetting suffering, even when it is on display. At its root is powerlessness.

Cultural Marxism was what other people called political correctness, according to Brown, but it was really cultural Marxism, and had come to the United States from Germany, after World War II, in the cunning skulls of a clutch of youngish professors from Frankfurt. The Frankfurt School, as they’d called themselves, had wasted no time in plunging their intellectual ovipositors repeatedly into the unsuspecting body of old-school American academia.

If one Googles “critical theory,” the first thing that pops up is a boxed definition that states: “crit-i-cal the-o-ry, noun, a philosophical approach to culture, and especially to literature, that seeks to confront the social, historical, and ideological forces and structures that produce and constrain it. The term is applied particularly to the work of the Frankfurt School.”630 That is precisely correct. Note the words “culture” and “Frankfurt School.” Modern critical theory has grown out of that early Freudian-Marxism of the Frankfurt School.

The Frankfurt School’s studies combined Marxist analysis with Freudian psychoanalysis to form the basis of what became known as “Critical Theory” – the destructive criticism of Western culture, including Christianity, capitalism, authority, the family, patriarchy, morality, tradition, sexual restraint, loyalty, patriotism, nationalism, ethno-centrism and conservatism. Critical Theory repeats over and over a mantra of alleged Western evils: racism, sexism, colonialism, nationalism, homophobia, fascism, xenophobia, imperialism and, of course, religious bigotry (only applied to Christianity).

At Berkeley the Free Speech Movement arose simultaneously with the hippie world of drugs. At first it was politically neither left nor right, but rather a call for the freedom to express any political views on Sproul Plaza. Then soon the Free Speech Movement became the Dirty Speech Movement, in which freedom was seen as shouting four-letter words into a mike. Soon after, it became the platform for the political New Left which followed the teaching of Herbert Marcuse (1898–). Marcuse was a German professor of philosophy related to the neo-Marxist teaching of the “Frankfurt School,” along with Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), Max Horkheimer (1895–) and Jürgen Habermas (1929–).

John Dewey. ‘The serious threat to our democracy is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefield is also

Michael Delaney used to be fat. Not puppy-padding fat—bursting-frankfurts-in-a-boiling-pot fat. He remembered gym class and swimming lessons. All of the thin guys who could be divided into one of two groups: those who looked but did not comment and those who looked and commented, with enthusiasm... Fat kids are like alcoholics; they always have excuses.

Nuestra misión actual es, antes bien, asegurar que en el futuro no vuelva a perderse la capacidad para la teoría y para la acción que nace de esta [...] Debemos luchar para que la humanidad no quede desmoralizada para siempre por los terribles acontecimientos del presente, para que la fe en un futuro feliz de la sociedad, en un futuro de paz y digno del hombre, no desaparezca de la tierra.

The world is an estranged and untrue world so long as man does not destroy its dead objectivity and recognize himself and his own life 'behind' the fixed form of things and laws. When he finally wins this self-consciousness, he is on his way not only to the truth of himself, but also of his world. And with the recognition goes the doing. He will try to put this truth into action, and make the world what it essentially is, namely, the fulfillment of man's self-consciousness.

Today, as in the past, we ought to remind ourselves that the true natural law is not a mere congeries of appetites, and that it is not from the vagrant musings of the hour's judges that the natural law derives its high authority. . . . The Catholic tradition of natural law, to borrow a phrase from Sir Ernest Barker, holds that "law--in the sense of last resort--is somehow above lawmaking." This understanding, in effect, still prevails among many Americans, not all of them Catholics. They agree with Justice Frankfurter that natural law is "what sensible and right-minded men do every day." Yet often the public's apprehension of the teachings of natural law is much decayed, in part because of the total secularization of instruction in public schools. . . . Human nature is not vulpine nature, leonine nature, or serpentine nature. Natural law is bound up with the concept of the dignity of man, and with the experience of humankind ever since the beginning of social community.

On September 11, it was government that failed. Law enforcement agencies didn't detect the plot. The FBI had reports that said young men on the terrorist watch list were going from flight school to flight school, trying to find an instructor who would teach them how to fly a commercial jet. But the FBI never acted on it. The INS let the hijackers in. Three of them had expired visas. Months after the attack, the government issued visas to two dead hijackers. The solution to such government incompetence is to give the government more power? Congress could have done what Amsterdam, Belfast, Brussels, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Rome did: set tough standards and let private companies compete to meet them. Many of those cities switched to private companies because they realized government-run security wasn't working very well. Private-sector competition keeps the screeners alert because the airport can fire them. No one can fire the government; that's a reason government agencies gradually deteriorate. There's no competition.

To illustrate this claim, Benjamin relates a fable about a father who taught his sons the merits of hard work by fooling them into thinking that there was buried treasure in the vineyard by the house. The turning of soil in the vain search for gold results in the discovery of a real treasure: a wonderful crop of fruit. With the war came the severing of ‘the red thread of experience’ which had connected previous generations, as Benjamin puts it in ‘Sketched into Mobile Dust’. The ‘fragile human body’ that emerged from the trenches was mute, unable to narrate the ‘forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions’ that had engulfed it. Communicability was unsettled. It was as if the good and bountiful soil of the fable had become the sticky and destructive mud of the trenches, which would bear no fruit but only moulder as a graveyard. ‘Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?’ Benjamin asks.

If “bullshit,” as opposed to “bull,” is a distinctively modern linguistic innovation, that could have something to do with other distinctively modern things, like advertising, public relations, political propaganda, and schools of education. “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry Frankfurt, a distinguished moral philosopher who is professor emeritus at Princeton, says. The ubiquity of bullshit, he notes, is something that we have come to take for granted. Most of us are pretty confident of our ability to detect it, so we may not regard it as being all that harmful. We tend to take a more benign view of someone caught bullshitting than of someone caught lying. (“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through,” a father counsels his son in an Eric Ambler novel.) All of this worries Frankfurt. We cannot really know the effect that bullshit has on us, he thinks, until we have a clearer understanding of what it is. That is why we need a theory of bullshit. Frankfurt’s own effort along these lines was contained in a paper that he presented more than three decades ago at a faculty seminar at Yale. Later, that paper appeared in a journal and then in a collection of Frankfurt’s writings; all the while, photocopies of it passed from fan to fan. In 2005, it was published as On Bullshit, a tiny book of sixty-seven spaciously printed pages that went on to become an improbable breakout success, spending half a year on the New York Times bestseller list.

cursing, the delicate use of profanities, and some good basic slang to help you navigate the world of spoken German. So when a drunk harasses you in a Frankfurt bar, you’ll know just how to tell him to “get lost” or “fuck off” (whichever you prefer); when a woman speaks to you of her Muschi, you’ll know that she is either talking about her cat or a part of her own anatomy (you be the judge); and when the hitchhiker you picked up on the autobahn yells, Vorsicht! Bullen!, you’ll know he is not warning you of cattle crossing the road but of the police.

He spent the autumn of 1929 commuting back and forth between Berlin and Frankfurt. He met up with Adorno and his wife, Gretel Karplus, and Max Horkheimer and Lacis several times in a vacation home at the spa resort of Königstein. There Benjamin read to the group from the current sketches for the Arcades Project. Those weekends devoted to discussion in Königstein are now seen as the actual founding events of the so-called Frankfurt School, which would dominate German intellectual life for fifty years after the war.

To hate destructiveness one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life.

Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).

Drug counterculture was precisely the weapon that the Frankfurt School and their fellow-travellers employed, over the next 50 years, to create a cultural paradigm shift away from the so-called ‘authoritarian’ matrix of man in the living image of God, and the superiority of the republican form of nation-state over all other forms of political organization.

Anaconda. Beaver Buster. Corn Dog.” “Not now, Bobby.” “Dipstick. Earthworm. Frankfurter.” “Put a lid on it.” “Gherkin. Hose. Iron Rod. Joystick.” “I said that’s enough,” Steve ordered. “And to think,” Victoria said, “when I was in school, we only memorized the Gettysburg Address.” “Don’t look at me,” Steve said. “I didn’t teach him that stuff.” “Kosher Pickle,” Bobby said. “You taught me that one.” “That’s

Klossowski’s writings therefore invite us to move beyond the impasse of certain intellectual positions inherited from the 1960s: on the one hand, arguments that society is all-determining as a set of institutional and disci- plinary constraints (Frankfurt School, structuralism), and on the other hand, arguments for the perpetual vitality and agency of the subject which continually subverts and undermines these restrictions (post-structural- ism, Deleuze and Guattari). Rather than collapsing these positions, Klossowski requires us to take on board a more complex network of libidi- nal drives that require perpetual restaging and renegotiation. This tension between structure and agency, particular and universal, spontaneous and scripted, voyeur and voyant, is key to the aesthetic effect and social import of the best examples of delegated performance.

Rudi Dutschke summed up his strategy in 1967 with the famous phrase, “the long march through the institutions,” which Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School described as “working against the established institutions while working within them” and building “counterinstitutions.

From the streets of France to the heart of American evangelical Christianity, the past three hundred years have seen many changes in the nature of redistributive social justice. Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagined a centralized power capable of achieving egalitarian equality. Karl Marx wanted to accomplish this dream through the redistribution of resources from the haves to the have-nots. Walter Rauschenbusch Christianized socialism under the banner of “social justice.” Antonio Gramsci believed it was the cultural hegemony, and not simply the haves, which was actually responsible for oppressing the have-nots. György Lukács saw capitalism as an oppressive mindset and not just an economic system. The Frankfurt School developed critical theory to analyze oppression in cultural institutions. French postmodernists, like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault deconstructed language and knowledge as social constructs and power dynamics. Kimbery Williams Crenshaw developed intersectionality, which attempts to construct a new hierarchy based on a matrix of socially constructed victim categories. Achieving social justice has gone from the redistribution of income to the redistribution of privilege, from the liberation of the lower classes to the liberation of culturally constructed identities, from lamenting victimhood to promoting victimhood, and from changing society through politics to changing politics through society. No social organization remains unaffected. Gramsci’s “long march through the institutions” is almost complete. The final stage is to capture the last stand for Western Civilization and conscious of the country—the American evangelical church.

The multi-faceted defense of a certain notion of benign mimesis both in Critical Theory and the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has also attracted attention, as have certain affinities with Lacan's critique of ego psychology.

Shortly before my departure in January 1969, I happened to be at a party in New York, where I was introduced to Mark Rudd, the fiery leader of the Columbia student uprising who was soon to embark on the desperate, self-destructive adventure that was called the Weather Underground.

The true history of mankind will be, in the strict sense, the history of free individuals, so that the interest of the whole will be woven into the individual existence of each.

Mallory says that the comradely sisters then proceeded with a sustained discussion on how to advance these goals. “It was clear they desired nothing less than the utter deconstruction of Western society,” she said. How would they do this? They would do so via the method laid out by the cultural Marxists, by the Frankfurt School, by the spirit of Antonio Gramsci and the “long march through the institutions” of the culture, from media to education. They would “invade every American institution. Every one must be permeated with ‘The Revolution.

As noted, this cultural Marxism began to emerge not on May 5, 1818, with Marx’s birth, but over a hundred years later with the birth of what came to be known as the Frankfurt School. As shown, these 1920s and 1930s German Marxists were Freudian-Marxists for whom orthodox/classical Marxism was too limited. They and their disciples, especially in America and the wider West in the 1960s, lusted for revolutionary changes in sexuality and in culture. The universities would be their factory floor. They would rally students, the academy, the arts, the media, film—the forces of cultural change.

The heirs of Gramsci, like the ideological progeny of Marx and Lenin and the Frankfurt School, insisted on the need to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.” By the twenty-first century, even biological sex was no longer considered a settled issue.

Exploring the thoughts (too generous of a word, really) of these ideological madmen (and madwomen) is a somber sojourn into a world of stupidity, an exercise in self-immolation. It is a waste—fruitless, useless, depressing, damaging. The amount of time and energy needed to adequately understand and then explain and convey these idiotic ideas is plainly not worth the human investment and spiritual grief. The practitioners of the ideas in this chapter and the one that follows—especially the perverse men of the Frankfurt School—were intellectually and spiritually vapid. Their notions were inane, yes, but they were also dark. Indeed, it would not be so bad if their ideas were just dumb. Their ideological nostrums were toxic, sometimes literally deadly, and poisonous to the soul. At

Here, too, are some freaks who did harm in their own way. They have names not like Mao and Che and Fidel and the other usual suspects who the world already knows too well, but names like Crowley, Duranty, Hay, Reich, Benjamin, Alinsky, Millett, the Frankfurt School—more elusive targets off the radar, and who the world should know more about, at the least because they serve as subtle (or not so subtle) markers and cautionary tales of the consequences of these ideas.

One could take this connection further and draw a parallel between Satanism and the so-called “critical theory” pioneered by the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School sought to dispel a traditional/Christian understanding of society and instead desired to set society free from the constraints of historical Western culture. As Max Horkheimer noted, the goal of critical theory is “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”628 These “circumstances” are the traditional Western institutions and moral norms that have held together the Judeo-Christian world for millennia. For culture-focused Marxists, these institutions had to be dismantled. Literally speaking, to hell with them.

These men developed a kind of Freudian-Marxism, or “Freudo-Marxism,” integrating the extraordinarily bad but influential twentieth-century ideas of Sigmund Freud with the extraordinarily bad but influential nineteenth-century teachings of Karl Marx. This was no match made in heaven. The noxious Marx had conjured up the most toxic ideas of the nineteenth century, whereas the neurotic Freud had cooked up the most infantile ideas of the twentieth century. Swirling the insipid ideas of those two ideological-psychological basket cases into a single malevolent witch’s brew was bound to uncork a barrel of mischief. The Frankfurt School was the laboratory and the distillery for their concoction, and the children of the 1960s would be their twitching guinea pigs and guzzling alcoholics. The flower-children, the hippies, the Yippies, the Woodstock generation, the Haight-Asbury LSD dancers, the sex-lib kids would all drink deep from the magic chalice, intoxicated by lofty dreams (more like hallucinations and bad acid-trips) of fundamental transformation of the culture, country, and world. And a generation or two still later, they would become the nutty professors who mixed the Kool-Aid for the millennials who would merrily redefine everything from marriage to sexuality to gender, wittingly or not serving the Frankenstein monster of cultural Marxism by doing so.

To be sure, the Frankfurt School of the 1930s was certainly not issuing joint statements calling for, say, same-sex marriage—such would have been considered pure madness in any day before our own. Nonetheless, this cabal’s comprehensive push for untethered, unhinged sexual openness with no cultural boundaries or religious restrictions cracked the door for almost anything down the road. When God and tradition and ancient norms are said to no longer exist, anything and everything is permissible.

There were many key figures from the Frankfurt School: Georg Lukacs, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Franz Neumann, the Soviet spy Richard Sorge, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and others. The school began in 1923 as the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. It is also sometimes called Goethe University, fittingly and frighteningly enough. Karl Marx would have been proud. The Frankfurt School in the 1930s would pick up and relocate to the United States, as its members (most if not all of them Jews) fled Hitler’s atrocious Final Solution.584

Critical theory grew out of the Marxism of the 1800s. Karl Marx taught that all of history has been one long economic class struggle between oppressed and oppressor groups, and that the only way for the oppressed to be liberated was for them to engage in violent revolution toward socialism. In the 1930s, intellectuals of the Frankfurt School in Germany broadened Marx's analysis to apply not only to economics but also to culture and mass media. In the decades that followed, this basic framework was extended to other areas: race, gender, sexuality, physical ability, and a host of other identity markers. Like the working class in Marx's analysis, people of color, women, and those in the LGBTQ community were identified as victims of social structures that empowered their oppressors and kept them marginalized.

After the Marxist revolution failed to topple capitalism in the early twentieth century, many Marxists went back to the drawing board, modifying and adapting Marx’s ideas. Perhaps the most famous was a group associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which applied Marxism to a radical interdisciplinary social theory. The group included Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Georg Lukács, and Walter Benjamin and came to be known as the Frankfurt School. These men developed Critical Theory as an expansion of Conflict Theory and applied it more broadly, including other social sciences and philosophy. Their main goal was to address structural issues causing inequity. They worked from the assumption that current social reality was broken, and they needed to identify the people and institutions that could make changes and provide practical goals for social transformation.

The Frankfurt School theory towards the family is summarised by Jay Martin in a semi-official history of the institution: ‘Even a partial breakdown of parental authority in the family might tend to increase the readiness of a coming generation to accept social change’.

The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36

RULING CLASS. For Marxists the ruling class is the economically dominant class, and the economically dominant class is the class that owns and controls the means of production. With economic power comes political power, and Karl Marx saw the ruling class as controlling the state. Furthermore, the ruling class is intellectually dominant, which Marx expressed as, “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas.” The notion of a ruling class can obscure or oversimplify complexities of class rule. For example, as Marx himself notes in discussing various actual historical examples, the ruling class may be split into different sections, or may be difficult to determine, and the Soviet Union raised the question of whether or not its leadership constituted a new ruling class not defined in terms of its property ownership. The state itself may develop its own autonomy and interests separate from those of the dominant economic class, a complicating factor explored by Nico Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. The issue of the ruling class’s ideas being the ruling ideas is a further issue of debate within Marxism, with Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, and the Frankfurt School’s focus on ideology raising the question of the extent to which ideology is instrumental in maintaining class rule.

PROLETARIAT. This is the term used by Karl Marx to refer to the working class, and it is defined as the class within capitalism that does not own the means of production, the class that owns nothing other than its labor power. The proletariat is locked in struggle with the bourgeoisie which owns and controls the means of production, and by extension controls the state. Gradually developing in size, organization, and class consciousness the proletariat, Marx believes, will bring about revolutionary change, overthrowing capitalism and instituting communism after a transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat. With the advent of communism and the abolition of private property the proletariat along with all other classes will disappear. There are a number of significant problems with Marx’s notion of the proletariat. First, Marx nowhere develops a theory of class and fails to offer more than a terse definition of the proletariat. This means that it is very difficult to determine exactly who falls into the category of proletarian. For example, managers, professionals, intellectuals and housewives/husbands are all propertyless, but it is not clear if they should be included in the proletariat since they do not create value and in the case of managers and professionals in particular they may earn vastly more than and see themselves very differently from a more typical member of the proletariat such as a factory worker. Also, there is the problem of the lack of a revolutionary consciousness emerging in the proletariat, which has led to some Marxists, such as Vladimir Ilich Lenin, arguing for a vanguard party to import revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat, and others, for example the members of the Frankfurt School, taking a more pessimistic view of the possibility of the proletariat being an agent of revolution at all.

As Lenin put it, "Through the schools we will transform the old world... the final victory will belong to the schools... the final sketch plan of the socialist society will belong to the schools." So the Frankfurt School targeted and took control of the teachers' colleges in order to control what was being taught to children. ...young teachers are forced to go through possibly the most rigorous courses of indoctrination available in any universities.

The Frankfurt School masterminds for indoctrination into collectivist mindsets. Those men’s understanding of human psychology was infallible: Ideas that the general public sees and hears on a repetitive basis will eventually achieve agreement with the ideas put forth or impair the individual judgment necessary to refute them.

by choosing Nietzsche and Freud as their models, the members of the Frankfurt School also unwittingly put the images and language of degeneration theory squarely in the middle of their critical Marxist program. All the ills of modern society that had been blamed on physiological degeneration—social decay, crime, insanity, suicide, neurosis, alcoholism, degradation of the arts, atavistic mass democratic politics, even anti-Semitism—were now the fault of capitalism and, by extension, the modern West.

The Frankfurt School was profoundly mistaken in thinking that the Enlightenment—or, better, its scientific rationality—should be interpreted as triumphant or in isolation from the theory and practice of its rivals. Enlightenment thinking has always been on the defensive. That remains the case.

Die Aufklärung aber erkannte im platonischen und aristotelischen Erbteil der Metaphysik die alten Mächte wieder und verfolgte den Wahrheitsanspruch der Universalien als Superstition. In der Autorität der allgemeinen Begriffe meint sie noch die Furcht vor den Dämonen zu erblicken, durch deren Abbilder die Menschen im magischen Ritual die Natur zu beeinflussen suchten. Von nun an soll die Materie endlich ohne Illusion waltender oder innewohnender Kräfte, verborgeneer Eigenschaften beherrscht werden. Was dem Maß von Berechenbarkeit und Nützlichkeit sich nicht fügen will, gilt der Aufklärung für verdächtig. Darf sie sich einmal ungestört von auswendiger Unterdrückung entfalten, so ist kein Halten mehr. Ihren eigenen Ideen von Menschenrecht ergeht es dabei nicht anders als den älteren Universalien. An jedem geistigen Widerstand, den sie findet, vermehrt sich bloß ihre Stärke. Das rührt daher, daß Aufklärung auch in den Mythen noch sich selbst wiedererkennt. Auf welche Mythen der Widerstand sich immer berufen mag, schon dadurch, dass sie in solchem Gegensatz zu Argumenten werden, bekennen sie sich zum Prinzip der zersetzenden Rationalität, das sie der Aufklärung vorwerfen. Aufklärung ist totalitär.

neoliberalism and neoconservatism worked together to undermine the public sphere and democracy, producing a governed citizen who looks to find solutions in products, not political processes. As Brown claims, the choosing subject and the governed subject are far from opposites ... Frankfurt school intellectuals and, before them, Plato theorized the open compatibility between individual choice and political domination, and depicted democratic subjects who are available to political tyranny or authoritarianism precisely because they are absorbed in a province of choice and need-satisfaction that they mistake for freedom.

The Frankfurt School proclaimed that Western civilization had been built around a deliberate degenerative strategy: that of crushing man’s vital instincts through the rational control of nature, oneself, and others. The modern West’s chief characteristic was its essential lifelessness. As Marcuse later put it, Nietzsche’s “total affirmation of the life instinct” represented a “reality principle fundamentally antagonistic to that of Western civilization.”4 Liberation on the Frankfurt School’s terms, therefore, meant giving up a view of life that stressed man’s ability to use logic and reason to arrive at truth and his need to accommodate himself to a reasonable and natural social order in order to be happy and free. Instead, human beings had to look to a deeper and more “negative” consciousness, in short, a Nietzschean consciousness. The Frankfurt School created a new cultural hero, the “critical” writer/teacher/intellectual. A direct descendant of the Romantic artist, he would use his typewriter or classroom to attack and expose the contradictions and evils of modern Western civilization. “Under the conditions of late capitalism,” Horkheimer wrote in 1936, “truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men”—meaning himself and his friends. Later on, those same “admirable” critics would act as carriers of a new cultural pessimism, stemming this time from the political Left rather than the Right.

Like the rest of the Frankfurt School, Marcuse saw no hope for revolution from the working class. Instead, he looked to the marginalized groups who are excluded from consumer society and hence immune to its blandishments, a “substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable.”64 Marx himself had scornfully called this moblike group the Lumpenproletariat , a tool of demogogic reaction; now they became Marcuse’s last hope. In his Essay on Liberation (1969), Marcuse summoned forth an alliance of “the young, the intelligentsia,” blacks, welfare recipients, Third World revolutionaries, and New Left students, who would “break the historical continuum of injustice, cruelty, and silence.” “The armed class struggle is waged outside” the mainstream of Western society, in the streets and ghettos, the rice paddies of Asia, and the mountains of Latin America.65 “The Cuban revolution and the Viet Cong have demonstrated it can be done,” Marcuse wrote in 1968. “There is a morality, a humanity, a will, and a faith which can resist and deter the gigantic technical and economic force of capitalist expansion” and what he called “the affluent monster.

Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally unpopular with other writers. He was much despised by the academic writers of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc.) as a ‘vulgar Marxist’. Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker.

كيف يمكننا إطلاقا أن نقول أمرا عن الشيء من دون أن نكون مطلعين بشكل كاف على نوع الحقيقة التي تخصه؟ يمكن حالا أن نرد على ذالك بسؤال: كيف يمكننا أن نعرف أمرا ما عن الحقيقة الحقة حول الشيء إذا لم نعرف الشيء ذاته، حتى نحسم في شأن الحقيقة التي يمكن و يجب أن تخصه؟

Tops Tips About Acupuncture That Anyone Can Follow Do you have aches and pains that do not seem to respond to traditional medicines? If you do, you may want to give acupuncture a try. This form of medicine has been around for thousands of years, and has becoming quite popular among Western medicine. If you want to find out more about it, read the following article. Some people find acupuncture treatments are quite effective for migraine headaches. One very positive aspect of this type of alternative treatment is the lack of any side effects. Even though very fine needles are inserted into the flesh at specific points, most people do not feel any pain at all from the procedure. In most places around the United States, a license is required to practice acupuncture. Before going to a new office, ask to see the acupuncturists credentials. It is important to ask how experienced they are and where they went to school. Any place that can not provide this information should be visited with caution. Ask your acupuncturist about the style they use. Acupuncture is a very complex discipline and there are several methods acupuncturists can use to relieve pain or stress. Make sure the methods your acupuncturist uses are painless. If you are new to acupuncture, ask if you can get a very simple treatment to get used to the sensatin. Understand that acupuncture focus on the entire well being of you as a person. In Western culture, it's often the norm to concentrate on symptoms, what's ailing you immediately. That's not true of acupuncture. It looks at the big picture and tries to help your entire body. It's a major difference in thought. Herbs Talk to a doctor about anything you are taking if you plan on having acupuncture treatments. If you are currently taking medication, herbs, or supplements, you need to speak to your doctor about what you can continue to take. They may have to make changes to what you're taking before or in between your acupuncture treatments. Ask your acupuncturist if there are certain herbs you should consume in between sessions. Remember, this is a holistic practice. There are many different things to it compared to Western medicine. Herbs are a big part of it. They can help relax your body and remove any sort of pain left over from your session. Herbal treatments could be suggested to you by your acupuncturist before treatment. As beneficial as certain herbs are, if you are on certain medications, you may develop side effects. You should check with your doctor for possible issues before adding herbs to your treatment. Are you currently taking any medications, vitamins, or herbs? If so, get in touch with your doctor and ask him whether or not you can continue to take these things before and during your acupuncture sessions. You would hate for your acupuncture sessions to be less effective because you did not know you weren't supposed to take any of these things. Acupuncture can give you relief from pain that no other methods can provide. Just take your time to learn more about it so you will be comfortable with the idea. Talk to people who have gone through treatments. The more find out about acupuncture by visiting rosholistic.com

British businessman Cecil Rhodes, “who founded the Round Table groups, a precursor of the Council on Foreign Relations and its offshoot, The Trilateral Commission.” Members of the Frankfurt School sought to develop a theory of society based on Marxism. They, along with the Tavistock Institute, were instrumental in aligning America and the EU with their Marxist vision of state control and management of the economy. These organizations have worked to create new forms of state-run capitalism—a euphemism for socialism, which became wildly popular among youth during the presidential campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist. Marxism, socialism, communism, and progressivism are designed to destroy the individuality of men and women created in God’s image. The goal is to create a hive mind where everyone thinks the same. In Marxism and its variants, the infinite, personal, living God of the universe is replaced by the state or the “collective.” This permits totalitarianism under a godless state. The Frankfurt School, whose representatives later occupied key positions in important American universities like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, understood the importance of controlling the media in producing “massification.” Ultimately, ideas like massification, collectivism, conformity, and the New Age movement were designed by a secretive occult elite to control the masses. All these concepts contradict God’s plan for humanity.

However, what Ben-Ghiat is not telling you is that the theory about “the Authoritarian Personality” originates with the Frankfurt School, and she omits the most important historical fact about this theory—the agenda behind it. As we noted in the previous chapter, the psychological theories and research that came out of the Frankfurt School were designed to ignite a Marxist cultural revolution to take down America by destroying Christianity, traditional marriage and the nuclear family, biblical moral values, and patriotism. The Frankfurt School launched their Marxist cultural revolution through venues like political correctness, education, media, arts, literature, sex, religion, and psychology. These Marxist professors partnered with Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, who developed the theory of psychoanalysis. Together, they created the still-popular theory that the repression of sexual urges of any kind, especially through Christian or biblical teachings and a strong father-centered family structure, creates severe psychological problems that give rise to phenomena such as “the Authoritarian Personality.” One of the primary tenets of Marxism and communism is to destroy the concept of the individual and replace it with groupthink where people find their identities by being part of the team, group, or collective. Individuality is considered a product of capitalism and Christianity. In the ideal Marxist society, the individual disappears, the collective emerges, and the state replaces God. A strong individual leader who has enough self-confidence to be fearless and doesn’t need the approval of the collective is a direct threat to Marxism. This is because the Authoritarian Leader possesses the power, along with the people who follow him, to stop or overthrow a Marxist revolution. The primary motive for the creation of the Authoritarian Leader theory is to use it as a

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and

He was also a more astute politician than even his admirers realized. During his rise to power, he constructed his own base as an independent candidate not beholden to the oil interests in Southern California. For party loyalty, he substituted personal connections to the state’s two most important (and quite conservative) publishers—Joe Knowland in Oakland, and Harry Chandler in Los Angeles. At the very least, these friendships helped neutralize papers that might otherwise have rejected his increasingly liberal agenda. He was a distinguished governor of California. The state was growing by as many as ten thousand new residents a week, and the pressures on the state’s schools, roads, and its water resources were enormous. Facing that challenge had made him tough-minded and pragmatic about government, its limits, and how best it could benefit ordinary people. He was both an optimist and an activist: If he did not exactly bring an ideology to the Court, then he brought the faith of someone who had seen personally what government could and should do to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people. That the great figures on the bench had so much more judicial experience—Black with sixteen years of service on the Court, Frankfurter and Douglas with fourteen each, and Jackson with twelve—did not daunt him. As he saw it, they knew more about the law, but he knew more about the consequences of the law and its effect on ordinary citizens. His law clerk, Earl Pollock, said years later that there were three things that mattered to Earl Warren: The first was the concept of equality; the second was education; and the third was the right of young people to a decent life. He had spent a lifetime refining his view of the role of government, and he came to the Court ready to implement it.

Frankfurt School Critical Theory is generally understood as a body of social thought both emerging from and responding to Marxism, and the work of critical theorists is recognized as having made significant contributions to the study of [culture] … Emphasizing issues of consciousness and culture, the critical theorists have … stressed the role of human agency in affecting revolutionary social change. … Theory with practical intent seeks not only to understand the world but also to transform it.

In the afterword of the Signet Classics edition of 1984, Erich Fromm, who was associated with the Frankfurt School, articulated the primary question posed in dystopian literature as “Can human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget that he is human?” What makes Orwell’s work so powerful and relevant is that he articulates how human nature can be changed by corrupting systems and language. If a government or invading British army demands ownership of the truth, then it no longer matters if the truth is actually true or false.