Critical Theory

[B0bbyBuds]

I'm quite new to critical theory and learning so much. It gives me the language to articulate my beliefs as I'm terrible at describing my ideas and thoughts.

 

Wondering if anyone else is interested in critical theory? Have any recommendations. 

 

Just found Henry Giroux a couple of days ago. The way he talks and language he uses is great. His lecture where is the outrage is good.

[Harry Worth]

Looks interesting.

critical-theory

Unfortunately Im too shallow to discuss the finer points - joking aside, whats he say ?

 

 

[Onetoke]

I must admit I spend far too much time on it. Like anything that gets you going. I've been reading critical essays an OU book on C20 poetry since Xmas. Also spent getting on to be 25-30hours catch up on Terrance McKenna, the twenty year gap since he was active gives a useful hindsight and listening over you get to filter out the shpiels from the ideology, if that's what it is. What I like is the sense of community, the psychedelic community of the late 90's, and how the bottom line ends up being the felt experience of the present moment, what empowers the individual in caught in the momentum of culture. I wish I'd paid more attention back then but then there wasn't an internet to speak of and all I'd read was a hand me down copy of Trialougues at the edge of the West. 

[Fry]

Critical Theory..... AKA Common Sense. (Disclaimer: apprently not so common).

[willowisp]

I disagree. Critical theory is NOT the same as critical thinking. Critical Theory, Frankfurt School etc is what spawned extreme social justice activism, militant gender politics etc and other useless and dividing ideas. Critical thinking is what I would turn on Critical Theory to expose it.

[Guest Thor420]

On 14/02/2018 at 5:57 PM, B0bbyBuds said:

I'm quite new to critical theory and learning so much. It gives me the language to articulate my beliefs as I'm terrible at describing my ideas and thoughts.

 

Wondering if anyone else is interested in critical theory? Have any recommendations. 

 

Just found Henry Giroux a couple of days ago. The way he talks and language he uses is great. His lecture where is the outrage is good.

 

I take it you are a Marxist or another radical persuasion of "the left". So I thought you might find hearing about the Frankfurt School from a radical right perspective different, although it is funny hearing both Jonathon Bowden (Fascist) and Richard Spencer (Absolutist) defend the Frankfurt school from the dumb conservative perspective and deconstruct them from a revolutionary right wing perspective. Not that I agree with their views on the subject myself. However reading the same old stuff on the subject from other sympathetic post left sources gets boring after awhile:

 

 

Edited April 1, 2019 by Thor420

[Victor Kruger]

On 03/06/2018 at 11:40 AM, willowisp said:

 Critical theory is NOT the same as critical thinking. Critical Theory, Frankfurt School etc is what spawned extreme social justice activism, militant gender politics etc and other useless and dividing ideas. Critical thinking is what I would turn on Critical Theory to expose it.

 

Absolutely 100% this. 

[Victor Kruger]

 

Worth 5 mins and anyone with kids in uni or yourselves should recognise the tricks used as explained here. 

[Cursed]

 '

Cultural Marxism': a uniting theory for rightwingers who love to play the victim

 

The culture war that so defines current debates between the left and right sides of politics has its history in the barmy theory of ‘cultural Marxism’

 

 

What do the Australian’s columnist Nick Cater, video game hate group #Gamergate, Norwegian mass shooter Anders Breivikand random blokes on YouTube have in common? Apart from anything else, they have all invoked the spectre of “cultural Marxism” to account for things they disapprove of – things like Islamic immigrant communities, feminism and, er, opposition leader Bill Shorten.

What are they talking about? The tale varies in the telling, but the theory of cultural Marxism is integral to the fantasy life of the contemporary right. It depends on a crazy-mirror history, which glancingly reflects things that really happened, only to distort them in the most bizarre ways.

It begins in the 1910s and 1920s. When the socialist revolution failed to materialise beyond the Soviet Union, Marxist thinkers like Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukacs tried to explain why. Their answer was that culture and religion blunted the proletariat’s desire to revolt, and the solution was that Marxists should carry out a “long march through the institutions” – universities and schools, government bureaucracies and the media – so that cultural values could be progressively changed from above.

 

 

Adapting this, later thinkers of the Frankfurt School decided that the key to destroying capitalism was to mix up Marx with a bit of Freud, since workers were not only economically oppressed, but made orderly by sexual repression and other social conventions. The problem was not only capitalism as an economic system, but the family, gender hierarchies, normal sexuality – in short, the whole suite of traditional western values.

The conspiracy theorists claim that these “cultural Marxists” began to use insidious forms of psychological manipulation to upend the west. Then, when Nazism forced the (mostly Jewish) members of the Frankfurt School to move to America, they had, the story goes, a chance to undermine the culture and values that had sustained the world’s most powerful capitalist nation.

The vogue for the ideas of theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno in the 1960s counterculture culminated with their acolytes’ occupation of the commanding heights of the most important cultural institutions, from universities to Hollywood studios. There, the conspiracy says, they promoted and even enforced ideas which were intended to destroy traditional Christian values and overthrow free enterprise: feminism, multiculturalism, gay rights and atheism. And this, apparently, is where political correctness came from. I promise you: this is what they really think.

 

The whole story is transparently barmy. If humanities faculties are really geared to brainwashing students into accepting the postulates of far-left ideology, the composition of western parliaments and presidencies and the roaring success of corporate capitalism suggests they’re doing an astoundingly bad job. Anyone who takes a cool look at the last three decades of politics will think it bizarre that anyone could interpret what’s happened as the triumph of an all-powerful left.

The theory of cultural Marxism is also blatantly antisemitic, drawing on the idea of Jews as a fifth column bringing down western civilisation from within (see also cultural bolshevism), a racist trope that has a longer history than Marxism. Like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the theory was fabricated to order, for a special purpose: the institution and perpetuation of culture war. We can even nominate an author for this lunacy: William S Lind, a polymath of the American hard right, who sought to put rightwing activism on a new footing as the cold war drew to a close.

 

In the late 1980s, Lind wrote a couple of monographs arguing that there was an emerging mainstream political consensus on free-market economics (due in part to the “disarray” of the traditional social-democratic left), but that many Americans across the political spectrum were dismayed by the decline in traditional values, the family and middle-class life. If conflict with the left could be shifted to the ground of culture, there was a chance of binding the right and even claiming some socially conservative voters who had traditionally voted for the Democrats.

When the Berlin Wall fell, it was time for Lind’s strategy of “cultural conservatism” to become a central strategy for US Republicans: it identified a new kind of social enemy for the right to mobilise against. The changing parameters of economic debate and the beginning of American decline demanded that conservatives embrace a politics “centred more, not less, on cultural issues” – the family, education, crime and morality. The fairytale of cultural Marxism provided a post-communist adversary located specifically in the cultural realm – academics, Hollywood, journalists, civil rights activists and feminists. It has been a mainstay of conservative activism and rhetoric ever since.

 

While Lind has recently become a more marginal figure, his story of cultural Marxism has proved durable and useful across the spectrum of right-wing thought because it offers so much. 

It allows those smarting from a loss of privilege to be offered the shroud of victimhood, by pointing to a shadowy, omnipresent, quasi-foreign elite who are attempting to destroy all that is good in the world. It offers an explanation for the decline of families, small towns, patriarchal authority, and unchallenged white power: a vast, century-long left wing conspiracy. And it distracts from the most important factor in these changes: capitalism, which demands mobility, whose crises have eroded living standards, and which thus, among other things, undermines the viability of conventional family structures and the traditional lifestyles that conservatives approve of.

The story of cultural Marxism is also flexible and can be tailored to fit with the obsessions of a range of right-wing actors. As such, it’s one example of an idea from the extremes which has been mobilised by more mainstream figures and has dragged politics as a whole a little further right.

Anders Breivik killed young social democrats because he believed that their party was involved in a cultural Marxist plot to undermine traditional European values by means of mass immigration from the Islamic world. Prominent voices in the #Gamergate movement have invoked it to warn of what is really motivating the feminist and queer critics of game aesthetics and culture – a desire to purge the culture of “proper” masculine values. It can even chime with Cater’s dreary, pedestrian moaning about how a “graduate class” seeks to remodel authentic, “egalitarian” Australian culture.

The idea of a cultural Marxist conspiracy has also endured because, in the absence of a genuine clash of ideas about the way the economy should be run, it provides an animating idea for the political contest. For Cater to claim that Bill Shorten is a Marxist of any kind is laughable precisely because to the extent that the opposition leader is explicitly offering anything, it’s plainly just a slightly more cushioned version of the same underlying economic orthodoxy embraced by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. Until that changes, the right will always be able to offer their story of victimhood and conspiracy with some hope of success.

[Comrade Stoker]

21 hours ago, Victor Kruger said:

 

Worth 5 mins and anyone with kids in uni or yourselves should recognise the tricks used as explained here. 

That's a massive load of shit. This come as no surprise, given your previous record of posting utter shit.

Just picking out two comments from the video, one on Capitalism, and one on Venezuela

 

Capitalism: Its not a Capitalist system, its an illusion. Its not a free market, because chosen industry sectors are favoured and given public money. The IMF produced a lengthy and detailed report, demonstrating that the profits of the American Banks can be directly attributed to the public purse. The fact that some people have been lifted out of poverty, does not mean the system is the best system.

 

Venezuela: Chavez made some bad mistakes, no doubt, though, its worth looking at how the Venezuelan people felt under Chavez, it was better for many, he helped a lot of people. He fucked things up by not keeping oil reserves, and giving away cheap oil to the likes of Haiti and even certain parts of the US. When he ran out of money (When the oil price softened), he had to turn to the International money market, and we know who runs this, right?. The US orchestrated a military coup to overthrow Chavez, they wanted him out, they used every asset they could to pull him apart. Comments on that video, like "Middle class people are queuing up for toilet roll" is deliberately removing many many facts, and it simply paints the picture that Chavez fucked it all up, this is not the full story, and you know it. Its much more complicated than this, and if a debate is to be had, its not helpful to post horse shit soundbites like that.

Stop with your bullshit.

Edited May 15, 2019 by Comrade Stoker

[mikeydoughnut]

didnt realise this was on old thread. Someone else can poke a stick in’t cage. 

Edited February 11, 2020 by mikeydoughnut
Old post. Irrelevant

[mac_47]

Yeah, sometimes I think I'm intelligent but I've read a few texts around critical theory and a lot of it is over my head. I remember Orwells essay about obfuscatory language and clarity when reading some of that stuff.

[botanics]

 

[Crow River]

Re-heating this thread as I thought folk may be interested in critical theorists and cannabis?

 

Starting with the Frankfurt School: Walter Benjamin experimented with drugs, especially hashish. 'On Hashish' collects scattered writings on the topic:

 

https://anarch.cc/uploads/walter-benjamin/on-hashish.pdf

 

A good article from the New Yorker here giving a wealth of context to those writings:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/08/21/the-philosopher-stoned

 

 

[Crow River]

Next up, a gardener's or botanist's perspective from Michael Pollan, a journalist rather than a theorist, but proper journalism...

 

Quote

[The author] presents case studies mirroring four types of human desires that are reflected in the way that we selectively grow, breed, and genetically engineer plants. Each of the book's four parts discusses a different plant and a corresponding human desire for which it historically has been cultivated: the apple for sweetness; the tulip for beauty; cannabis for intoxication; and the potato for control.

The stories presented are a blend of plant science and natural history, ranging from the true story of Johnny Appleseed, to Pollan's first-hand research with sophisticated cannabis hybrids in Amsterdam, to the paradigm-shifting possibilities of genetically engineered potatoes.

(source: Wiki)

 

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Botany_of_Desire/7RjzwAEACAAJ?hl=en&kptab=overview

 

You can also find the ebook in various formats at Library Genesis, it doesn't seem to be available commercially any more, though there is an audiobook you can buy.