The Frankfurt School
AntiMulticulture
The Frankfurt School
The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of
German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in
Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of
Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in
the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W.
Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm produced some of the
first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass
culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The
Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical
cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and
political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception
and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).
Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School
experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film,
popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture
(Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found themselves in
exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment
controlled by big corporations. Two of its key theorists Max Horkheimer and
T.W. Adorno developed an account of the "culture industry" to call attention
to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist
relations of production (1972). This situation was most marked in the United
States that had little state support of film or television industries, and
where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive
feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.
During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a
critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural and communications
studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of
social and ideological effects of. They coined the term "culture industry"
to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and
the commercial imperatives that drove the system. The critical theorists
analyzed all mass-mediated cultural artifacts within the context of
industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries
exhibited the same features as other products of mass production:
commodification, standardization, and massification. The culture industries
had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of
the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its
way of life.
Adorno's analyses of popular music, television, and other
phenomena ranging from astrology columns to fascist speeches (1991, 1994),
Lowenthal's studies of popular literature and magazines (1961), Herzog's
studies of radio soap operas (1941), and the perspectives and critiques of
mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's famous study of the
culture industries (1972 and Adorno 1991) provide many examples of the
Frankfurt school approach. Moreover, in their theories of the culture
industries and critiques of mass culture, they were among the first social
theorists its importance in the reproduction of contemporary societies. In
their view, mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure
activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political
reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary
societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social
effects.
Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the
cultural industries in a political context as a form of the integration of
the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school theorists
were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass
culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which
were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario.
They also analyzed the ways that the culture industries and consumer society
were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new
strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and
models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social
critique and goals for political struggle. This project required rethinking
Marxian theory and produced many important contributions -- as well as some
problematical positions.
The Frankfurt school focused intently on technology and
culture, indicating how technology was becoming both a major force of
production and formative mode of social organization and control. In a 1941
article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," Herbert Marcuse
argued that technology in the contemporary era constitutes an entire "mode
of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a
manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for
control and domination" (414). In the realm of culture, technology produced
mass culture that habituated individuals to conform to the dominant patterns
of thought and behavior, and thus provided powerful instruments of social
control and domination.
Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt school
experienced first hand the ways that the Nazis used the instruments of mass
culture to produce submission to fascist culture and society. While in exile
in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe
that American "popular culture" was also highly ideological and worked to
promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by giant
corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the
strictures of mass production, churning out mass-produced products that
generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold the
values, life-styles, and institutions of "the American way of life."
The work of the Frankfurt School provided what Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one
of the originators of modern communications studies, called a critical
approach, which he distinguished from the "administrative research." The
positions of Adorno, Lowenthal, and other members of the inner circle of the
Institute for Social Research were contested by Walter Benjamin, an
idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute. Benjamin,
writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new
technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969), Benjamin
noted how new mass media were supplanting older forms of culture whereby the
mass reproduction of photography, film, recordings, and publications
replaced the emphasis on the originality and "aura" of the work of art in an
earlier era. Freed from the mystification of high culture, Benjamin believed
that media culture could cultivate more critical individuals able to judge
and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate
athletic activities. In addition, processing the rush of images of cinema
created, Benjamin believed, subjectivities better able to parry and
comprehend the flux and turbulence of experience in industrialized,
urbanized societies.
Himself a collaborator of the prolific German artist
Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin worked with Brecht on films, created radio plays,
and attempted to utilize the media as organs of social progress. In the
essay "The Artist as Producer" (1999 [1934]), Benjamin argued that
progressive cultural creators should "refunction" the apparatus of cultural
production, turning theater and film, for instance, into a forum of
political enlightenment and discussion rather than a medium of "culinary"
audience pleasure. Both Brecht and Benjamin wrote radio plays and were
interested in film as an instrument of progressive social change. In an
essay on radio theory, Brecht anticipated the Internet in his call for
reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way transmission to a
more interactive form of two-way, or multiple, communication (in Silberman
2000: 41ff.)-- a form first realized in CB radio and then
electronically-mediated computer communication.
Moreover, Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural
and media politics concerned with the creation of alternative oppositional
cultures. Yet he recognized that media such as film could have conservative
effects. While he thought it was progressive that mass-produced works were
losing their "aura," their magical force, and were opening cultural
artifacts for more critical and political discussion, he recognized that
film could create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of
celebrity and techniques like the close-up that fetishized certain stars or
images via the technology of the cinema. Benjamin was thus one of the first
radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and technology of
media culture in appraising its complex nature and effects. Moreover, he
developed a unique approach to cultural history that is one of his most
enduring legacies, constituting a micrological history of Paris in the 18th
century, an uncompleted project that contains a wealth of material for study
and reflection (see Benjamin 2000 and the study in Buck-Morss 1989).
Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno answered Benjamin's
optimism in a highly influential analysis of the culture industry published
in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, which first appeared in 1948 and
was translated into English in 1972. They argued that the system of cultural
production dominated by film, radio broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines,
was controlled by advertising and commercial imperatives, and served to
create subservience to the system of consumer capitalism. While later
critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist,
it provides an important corrective to more populist approaches to media
culture that downplay the way the media industries exert power over
audiences and help produce thought and behavior that conforms to the
existing society.
The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical
perspectives on the transition from traditional culture and modernism in the
arts to a mass-produced media and consumer society. In his path-breaking
book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas
further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of the culture
industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture
industry, Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late 18th and 19th
century was distinguished by the rise of a public sphere that stood between
civil society and the state and which mediated between public and private
interests. For the first time in history, individuals and groups could shape
public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and interests while
influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it possible
to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful
interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.
Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated
in the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolution to a
media-dominated public sphere in the current stage of what he calls "welfare
state capitalism and mass democracy." This historical transformation is
grounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the culture industry, in
which giant corporations have taken over the public sphere and transformed
it from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative consumption and
passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from rational
consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the
manufactured opinion of polls or media experts. For Habermas, the
interconnection between the sphere of public debate and individual
participation has thus been fractured and transmuted into that of a realm of
political manipulation and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest and
absorb passively entertainment and information. "Citizens" thus become
spectators of media presentations and discourse which arbitrate public
discussion and reduce its audiences to objects of news, information, and
public affairs. In Habermas's words: "Inasmuch as the mass media today strip
away the literary husks from the kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and
utilize them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a
culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed" (1989: 171).
Habermas's critics, however, contend that he idealizes the
earlier bourgeois public sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational
discussion and debate when in fact many social groups and most women were
excluded. Critics also contend that Habermas neglects various oppositional
working class, plebeian, and women's public spheres developed alongside of
the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests excluded in
this forum (see the studies in Calhoun 1992). Yet Habermas is right that in
the period of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which
for the first time in history ordinary citizens could participate in
political discussion and debate, organize, and struggle against unjust
authority. Habermas's account also points to the increasingly important role
of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that corporate
interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote
their own interests.
The culture industry thesis described both the production of massified
cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the
Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as
well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry produced
cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the
dictates and the behaviors of the existing society. And yet, as Walter
Benjamin pointed out (1969), the culture industry also produces rational and
critical consumers able to dissect and discriminate among cultural texts and
performances, much as sports fans learn to analyze and criticize sports
events.
In retrospect, one can see the Frankfurt school work as
articulation of a theory of the stage of state and monopoly capitalism that
became dominant during the 1930s. This was an era of large organizations,
theorized earlier by Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding as "organized
capitalism" (1980 [1910]), in which the state and giant corporations managed
the economy and in which individuals submitted to state and corporate
control. This period is often described as "Fordism" to designate the system
of mass production and the homogenizing regime of capital which wanted to
produce mass desires, tastes, and behavior. It was thus an era of mass
production and consumption characterized by uniformity and homogeneity of
needs, thought, and behavior producing a mass society and what the Frankfurt
school described as "the end of the individual." No longer was individual
thought and action the motor of social and cultural progress; instead giant
organizations and institutions overpowered individuals. The era corresponds
to the staid, conformist, and conservative world of corporate capitalism
that was dominant in the 1950s with its organization men and women, its mass
consumption, and its mass culture.
During this period, mass culture and communication were
instrumental in generating the modes of thought and behavior appropriate to
a highly organized and massified social order. Thus, the Frankfurt school
theory of the culture industry articulates a major historical shift to an
era in which mass consumption and culture was indispensable to producing a
consumer society based on homogeneous needs and desires for mass-produced
products and a mass society based on social organization and homogeneity. It
is culturally the era of highly controlled network radio and television,
insipid top forty pop music, glossy Hollywood films, national magazines, and
other mass-produced cultural artifacts
Of course, media culture was never as massified and
homogeneous as in the Frankfurt school model and one could argue that the
model was flawed even during its time of origin and influence and that other
models were preferable, such as those of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried
Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, and others of the Weimar generation and, later,
British cultural studies. Yet the original Frankfurt school model of the
culture industry did articulate the important social roles of media culture
during a specific regime of capital and provided a model, still of use, of a
highly commercial and technologically advanced culture that serves the needs
of dominant corporate interests, plays a major role in ideological
reproduction, and in enculturating individuals into the dominant system of
needs, thought, and behavior.
Douglas Kellner
References and Further Readings
Adorno, T.W. (1991) The Culture Industry. London: Routledge.
__________ (1994) The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on the Irrational
in Culture. London: Routledge.
Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations. New York: Shocken.
_______________ (1999) "The Artist as Producer," in Walter Benjamin,
Collected Writings, Volume II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
_______________ (2000) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Calhoun, Craig (1992), ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The
MIT Press.
Habermas, Jurgen (1989a) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Hertog, Herta (1941), "On Borrowed Experience. An Analysis of Listening to
Daytime Sketches," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, No. 1:
65-95.
Hilferding, Rudolf (1981 [1910]) Finance Capital. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Horkheimer, Max and T.W. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York:
Herder and Herder.
Kellner, Douglas (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity. Cambridge
and Baltimore: Polity and John Hopkins University Press.
______________ (1995) Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity, and
Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York:
Routledge.
____________ (2000) "Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical
Intervention," in Perspectives on Habermas, edited by Lewis Hahn. Open Court
Press.
Lazarsfeld, Paul (1941) "Administrative and Critical Comunications
Research," Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, No. 1: 2-16.
Lowenthal, Leo (1961) Literature, Popular Culture and Society. Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Marcuse, Herbert (1941) Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX,
No. 1: 414-439.
Silberman, Marc (2000) Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio. London: Metheun.
Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994), The Frankfurt School. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
See also British cultural studies; Hollywood film; popular music;
television; political economy;
Douglas Kellner
Graduate School of Education
Moore Hall Mailbox 951521
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA 90095
kel...@ucla.edu
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html
Fax: 310 206-6293
Phone: 310 825-0977
--
JimB
Union Against Multiculturalism
http://www.geocities.com/UAM01
tooly
Pat Buchannon's book, 'Death of the West'.
I'll summarize some of the concepts as I understand them [though your post
was certainly more detailed, but more intellectually abstract, so shooting
from the hip here to bring some of it down to earth, so be tolerant]
.
First, these German social marxists saw that communism was not working in
the USSR and founded the Frankfurt School to specify needed 're-evaluation'
of Communist Manifesto, why it didn't work, what to do, new approaches.
The revolution was originally supposed to sweep all of europe...whereupon
the worker, it was thought, would 'identify' their plight across borders and
nationalities as the plight of, well, the worker versus their supposed
oppressors, the bourgeoisie and the owners of capital. But it only took
place in places like Russia. In countries where the 'culture' existed under
stronger fundamental health, the workers identified themselves along
'nationality' and 'heritage' before being the underprivileged proletariat.
The old manifesto called for violent overthrow for change. Frankfurt School
came up with this new notion of a bloodless grand 'March' through the very
institutions, whereupon, revolution would come about slowly, over decades as
'influence'...whereupon a citizenry would simply wake up some day to a new
socialist reality, where a coup had taken place, silently, almost
imperceptibly.
A new term to coin this MARCH has been the idea of Cultural Marxism.
But how to break down a fundamentally strong cultural resistance that
existed in the west? Two main components it was surmised would have to be
slowly dismantled along with giving rise to the new socialist mindset as it
marched on. Those two components would be to dishonor Heritage and to
discredit Christianity. Christianity was seen as like a "castle keep" that
held these cultural bonds under irrational mystification that worked to
preclude the necessary 'rational' mindset that would be needed for people to
embrace socialism. The castle keep would have to scaled, conquered, and
then torn down.
How the Frankfurt school has actually disseminated it's ideas is unclear [to
me]. Buchannon, in his book, connects names and dots pretty clearly
though...and traces a lot of todays' crazy inane left wing radicalism to
these people. Has our culture become the victim of communist conspiracy in
some way?
"AntiMulticulture" <som...@somewhere.com> wrote in message
news:8qY7b.1917$vQ1.1...@nnrp1.ozemail.com.au...
Mark K
"tooly" <rd...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:uEZ7b.2395$d82....@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> Good post, but to decipher some of this in the
> best treatment I've read, get Pat Buchannon's
> book, 'Death of the West'.
> First, these German social marxists saw that
> communism was not working in
> the USSR and founded the Frankfurt School
> to specify needed 're-evaluation'
> of Communist Manifesto, why it didn't work,
> what to do, new approaches.
In recent weeks, Jews have been appearing on
these newsgroups denouncing liberals, socialists
and communists and pretend to be blind deaf-mutes
when confronted with their deep involvement
in liberalism, socialism and communism.
The new Jewish school is the American East Coast
Neoconservative school who are pushing
"US Global Leadership" and "UN irrelevance"
for the good of the tribe.
Jon R
"AntiMulticulture" <som...@somewhere.com> wrote:
>http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm
>
>The Frankfurt School
>
> The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of
>German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes
It is deceptive to refer to the founders of the Frankfurt School as
"German-
American. Virtually all of them were Jews. Prof Kevin MacDonald
covers the Frankfurt School extensively in his book The Culture of
Critique.
------------------------
Book review of:
Kevin MacDonald,
The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement
in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements,
Prager, 1998, $65.00, 379 pp.
Reviewed by Stanley Hornbeck
In The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald advances a carefully
researched but extremely controversial thesis: that certain 20th
century intellectual movements - largely established and led by Jews
- have changed European societies in fundamental ways and destroyed
the confidence of Western man. He claims that these movements were
designed, consciously or unconsciously, to advance Jewish interests
even though they were presented to non-Jews as universalistic and
even utopian. He concludes that the increasing dominance of these
ideas has had profound political and social consequences that
benefited Jews but caused great harm to gentile societies. This
analysis, which he makes with considerable force, is an unusual
indictment of a people generally thought to be more sinned against
than sinning.
The Culture of Critique is the final title in Prof. MacDonald's
massive, three-volume study of Jews and their role in history. The
two previous volumes are A People That Shall Dwell Alone and
Separation and its Discontents, published by Praeger in 1994 and
1998. The series is written from a sociobiological perspective that
views Judaism as a unique survival strategy that helps Jews compete
with other ethnic groups. Prof. MacDonald, who is a psychologist at
the University of California at Long Beach, explains this
perspective in the first volume, which describes Jews as having a
very powerful sense of uniqueness that has kept them socially and
genetically separate from other peoples. The second volume traces
the history of Jewish-gentile relations, and finds the causes of
anti-Semitism primarily in the almost invariable commercial and
intellectual dominance of gentile societies by Jews and in their
refusal to assimilate. The Culture of Critique brings his analysis
into the present century, with an account of the Jewish role in the
radical critique of traditional culture.
The intellectual movements Prof. MacDonald discusses in this volume
are Marxism, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school of
sociology, and Boasian anthropology. Perhaps most relevant from a
racial perspective, he also traces the role of Jews in promoting
multi-culturalism and Third World immigration. Throughout his
analysis Prof. MacDonald reiterates his view that Jews have promoted
these movements as Jews and in the interests of Jews, though they
have often tried to give the impression that they had no distinctive
interests of their own. Therefore Prof. MacDonald's most profound
charge against Jews is not ethnocentrism but dishonesty - that while
claiming to be working for the good of mankind they have often
worked for their own good and to the detriment of others. While
attempting to promote the brotherhood of man by dissolving the
ethnic identification of gentiles, Jews have maintained precisely
the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in
others.
Celebrating Diversity
Prof. MacDonald claims that one of the most consistent ways in which
Jews have advanced their interests has been to promote pluralism and
diversity - but only for others. Ever since the 19th century, they
have led movements that tried to discredit the traditional
foundations of gentile society: patriotism, racial loyalty, the
Christian basis for morality, social homogeniety, and sexual
restraint. At the same time, within their own communities,and with
regard to the state of Israel, they have often supported the very
institutions they attack in gentile society.
Why is this in the interests of Jews? Because the parochial group
loyalty characteristic of Jews attracts far less attention in a
society that does not have a cohesive racial and cultural core. The
Jewish determination not to assimilate fully, which accounts for
their survival as a people for thousands for years - even without a
country - has invariably attracted unpleasant and even murderous
scrutiny in nations with well -defined national identities. In Prof.
MacDonald's view it is therefore in the interest of Jews to dilute
and weaken the identity of any people among whom they live. Jewish
identity can flower in safety only when gentile identity is weak.
<snip>
Full review found at http://www.carolontheweb.com/links/critique.html
---------------------------
MacDonald, Kevin, "The Culture of Critique," 2002 (The original
edition in 1998 was published by Praeger Publishers, an imprint of
Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.).
The 2002 edition has an added long preface, full of information, that
can also be found online at
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/Preface.htm
Mark K
"Jon R" <jo...@private.mail> wrote in message
news:XZQR6XGB378...@Gilgamesh-frog.org...
> > http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm
> >The Frankfurt School
> >The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of
> >German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes
> It is deceptive to refer to the founders of the Frankfurt School as
> "German-American. Virtually all of them were Jews. Prof Kevin MacDonald
> covers the Frankfurt School extensively in his book The Culture of
Critique.
The climate of fear that pervades the West is obvious from the fact
that the word "Jew" these days has become as revered as the word
"G-d" and may be taken in vain - but only at the risk of being labeled
a chronic "anti-Semite" or a "bigot" or a Nazi.
But you may use the words: Christian, Muslim, Arab, raghead, Pallie,
and so on to your hearts content without ever risking being labeled:
anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, etc.
And this reticence to mention the word "Jew" exists, despite the fact
that Jews are the most powerful single group in the Western world today.
The Western world is so petrified by the "anti-Semitism" and "holocaust"
incantations that jack-booted SS or skulking KGB terror-police are quite
unnecessary to keep them well-behaved.
Polybius
> "AntiMulticulture" <som...@somewhere.com> wrote:
>
>
>>http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/fs.htm
>>
>>The Frankfurt School
>>
>> The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of
>>German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes
>
>
> It is deceptive to refer to the founders of the Frankfurt School as
> "German-
> American. Virtually all of them were Jews.
Yep. That's true.
Another interesting group of mis-identified "Austrians" and "Germans" is
the so-called "Austrian School" of economics and finance. In reality
just another group of devious jews headed by a jew named Ludwig von Mises.
This Austrian school group started leaving Austria and Germany years
prior to Hitler, when they realized that the game was up; their role in
the post WWI hyper inflation and various financial scandals in Germany &
Austria made America look like good pickin's for 'em, and, Americans are
suckers for foreign professor con men with accents. :o))))) Notice how
far it got Henry Kissinger.:o))))))))))
Much of today's jew neo-con school of "thought", not trying to make a
pun, is based on these two schools of "thought"...the Frankfurt and the
Austrian Schools.
Sometimes truth is strnger than fiction...:o)))))))))
Tiny Human Ferret
In the States, it's generally considered undeniable that this general
mindset of the "slow march through the institutions" was widely adopted by
Academia, with an influence considered most profound in the "social
sciences", specifically sociology especially with respect to concentrations
on perceived "underclasses". But in no place was the influence greater than
on the teaching of Teaching. The US Educational establishment is considered
the sole surviving hotbed of Marxism in the US. It's from this venue that we
get the original concept of "political correctness" and for many of the
hottest years of the Cold War, marxist sympathizers were probably targeted
by flattering agents-of-influence. From this we got an entire generation
crippled by the so-called "New Math" -- so-called becase it wasn't Math,
much less new -- and a variety of other disruptions of the formerly
effective US public schools. Interestingly, despite the near destruction of
the American public-school educational system, the parochial schools and
religious schools continue to turn out top-quality students who are truly
prepared for the genuine excellence of the majority of the States' "small
colleges" and private universities.
The truly odd thing is that only one thing could make possible the central
tenet of the Frankfurt School's vision -- efficient, rapid, responsive and
predictive Central Planning and Disbursement -- and that thing was invented
in and deployed by the US' major academic creation, the NSF/ARPA... and that
was the InterNet.
True Communism of the economy under a genuine People's Republic is possible
only with a modern level of technology. As much as we have been raised to
despise communism, mostly because of the tyrannies inherent in the failed
premature instantiations, there may be something of value in the idea of
using a combination of InterNet speed-of-communications and a rationalized
market-based trading and commerce sector, towards a goal of making sure that
too much capital never concentrates in the hands of too few people and thus
denying any capital at all from being acquired by the majority of the people.
Just food for thought, and a very interesting post from you, Tooly. Now
please stop top-posting.
Top-posting causes Crabs, it's a Scientific Fact.
BOEDICIA
>From: "AntiMulticulture" som...@somewhere.com
>Date: 9/11/03 3:45 AM Pacific Daylight Time
>Message-id: <8qY7b.1917$vQ1.1...@nnrp1.ozemail.com.au>
> The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of
>German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in
>Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of
>Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt,
>Germany in
>the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W.
>Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm
I thought you said they were Germans.
Iconoclast
Or perhaps an MK ULTRA mind control experiment where all the Baby Boomers
who took acid in the '60s and '70s came to believe that John Lennon was
right in his anthem for the Woodstock Generation, i.e., "Imagine." .