Frankfurt school and Reforming the International Red Aid

[Aslan]

1.) What is your opinions of the Frankfurt school of? I'm not familiar with philosophy enough to understand their whole shtick. However I'd like to hear your guy's opinions on the school.

2.)I've been thinking about this for a while. Marxism doesn't have a proper organizational body to coordinate its ideology and spread the word to people around the world, Could a true pan-leftist 5th international be formed out of various leftist ideologies? But it shouldn't be just revolution, I also have been thinking about the re-formation of a international red aid, the humanitarian branch of the international.

Are there already organizational bodies like this in existence? Is organizing ourselves just makes us a big target for Fascist/Capitalist enemies to extirpate? Is joining the left even possible?

[ComradeAllende]

1.) Not much to think about. Mostly a bunch of anti-Stalinist academics from interwar Germany who serve as a "bridge" between the old Marxists and the postmodernist left. They were primarily interested in analyzing the "superstructure" of bourgeois society (as opposed to the base) and included noted philosophers such as Althusser and Habermas.

2.) Well, the best time to establish a Fifth International would have been right after he Great Recession; the Occupy movement could have served as a great starting point, although the anarchists probably wouldn't appreciate it unless it served as some sort of "United Front."

Technically speaking you cannot join "the left", mainly because there hasn't been a broad organization of left-wing thinkers and activists since the social movements of the 1960s.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Althusser was not part of, or associated with, the Frankfurt school; it's a good thing he's dead or the claim alone would have caused him to go into a mysterious state of diminished responsibility and strangle you.

Why would you want to unite with most of "the left"? We don't agree on our goals, our methods, even our starting point, so how can we work together? How could I, as a Trotskyist, work together with Shachtmanists on one side and Stalinists on the other? It couldn't work.

[Counterculturalist]

This section of the MIA is a good introduction to and overview of the Frankfurt School, with plenty of excerpts from their works: https://www.marxists.org/subject/frankfurt-school/

Adorno, Marcuse, and Benjamin are all worth reading. If they don't strike you as particularly interesting I wouldn't go much further than those three.

[DOOM]

1.) Not much to think about. Mostly a bunch of anti-Stalinist academics from interwar Germany who serve as a "bridge" between the old Marxists and the postmodernist left. They were primarily interested in analyzing the "superstructure" of bourgeois society (as opposed to the base) and included noted philosophers such as Althusser and Habermas.

Dafuck? Adorno and Horkheimer alone made some amazing contributions to critical theory which are all worth to look into, for example the culture industry, the dialectic of reason & Enlightenment, their critique of positivism etc.
And I'd say that the "postmodernist" left was more influenced by french poststructuralists than by the Frankfurt School.

[Hit The North]

The Frankfurt School: too much Hegel, too much Kant, too much Freud, and too much pessimism.

Not enough Marx, not enough Lenin, not enough action, and too little in the way of proletarian steel.

Entertaining. But too bourgeois-intellectual.

A retreat into the relative safety of the air-conditioned academy.


Dafuck? Adorno and Horkheimer alone made some amazing contributions to critical theory which are all worth to look into, for example the culture industry, the dialectic of reason & Enlightenment, their critique of positivism etc.
And I'd say that the "postmodernist" left was more influenced by french poststructuralists than by the Frankfurt School.

Their analysis of the culture industry is only sound if you believe that all popular culture is moronic and all workers are idiots. Not only were these German boffins too posh to understand the working class, they were snobs into the bargain.

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[DOOM]

Their analysis of the culture industry is only sound if you believe that all popular culture is moronic and all workers are idiots. Not only were these German boffins too posh to understand the working class, they were snobs into the bargain.

...
I don't believe that all workers are idiots, nor did A&H. I believe that ideology is a powerful force and that culture and art by being part of the capitalist totality are mediated through capital.
The argument that they were too snobby and too posh is really boring and it doesn't really matter, as their contribution would still be extremely important, even if they were too "bourgeois" (whatever this means, is this some sort of r-r-radical lingo?).
So it's really just hypocritical anti-intellectualism combined with some weird glorification of the working class on your side. Leftism in a nutshell.


Not enough Marx, not enough Lenin, not enough action, and too little in the way of proletarian steel.


German boffins too posh to understand the working class
Euphoric

[Hit The North]

I don't believe that all workers are idiots, nor did A&H. I believe that ideology is a powerful force and that culture and art by being part of the capitalist totality are mediated through capital.
The argument that they were too snobby and too posh is really boring and it doesn't really matter, as their contribution would still be extremely important, even if they were too "bourgeois" (whatever this means, is this some sort of r-r-radical lingo?).
So it's really just hypocritical anti-intellectualism combined with some weird glorification of the working class on your side. Leftism in a nutshell.
c

If maintaining that the working class is the revolutionary agent is a "weird glorification" then it is one I share with Marx and Lenin, but not one I share with A&H, unfortunately.

And the term "bourgeois" isn't a "sort of r-r-radical lingo" (whatever that's suppose to mean),it speaks to the fact that these writers were highly educated members of the European bourgeois-intelligentsia, repelled by their own class but completely divorced from the working class. Displaced by fascism and war, the alienation they ascribe to the workers was really a reflection of their own alienation.

Of course culture in a capitalist society is mediated by capital, the problem is that how A&H conceptualise it there is no room for resistance, except via a return to "authentic" classical bourgeois culture.

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[suneo]

I would agree if the working class is maintained to be a revolutionary agent. The working class is very understanding of their work and have a variety of experience. They also are used to working hard in different situations