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Great article by Gabriel Rockhill: The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism

The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism - The Philosophical Salon

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cia-the-frankfurt-schools-anti-communism/

Foundations of the Global Theory Industry Frankfurt School critical theory has been—along with French theory—one of the hottest commodities of the global theory industry. Together, they serve as the common ... Read More

The CIA & the Frankfurt School’s Anti-Communism - The Philosophical Salon

Rockhill dives into the history and philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to explain why the two towering figures of the Frankfurt School ultimately played the role of radical recuperators.

3 comments

ANITINSTITUTIONALISM

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Something about this rubs me the wrong way. I don't know enough about their references to say anything, but the strain of "The Frankfurt School and French Philosophers are CIA plants and are a pure diversion" is kinda short sighted. Yeah they're western navel gazing academics and carry that baggage, but they do as a cannon provide useful lenses through which to analyze neoliberal capitalism. Adorno's schtick as I recall was being against positivism - i.e. hyper-rationalist thinking that ditches any kind of broader sense of the metaphysical social subject. Like hyperfocusing on the "materialism" in "dialectical materialism", missing the forrest for the trees in reading Marx.

AcidSmiley

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Same here. I wonder what else can be found on a site that starts out by fedjacketing and accusing Adorno of "cultural Marxism", a common fascist dogwhistle.

Oh look, the featured article about Roe vs Wade casually slips in TERF shit like this:

Unable to define the word “woman,” the liberals have been working on a new lexicon which strips girls and women of their dignity and their personhood. Their identities are now reduced to their body parts and biological functions. They are now “bleeders” or “birthing bodies.” The new language qualifying girls and women as body parts as opposed to whole human beings in their own right, has created the perfect opportunity for conservatives to seize Roe v Wade; if she’s a body part, she’s not a person and her uterus can be turned into state legislated chattel.

I guess trans men, who can also become pregnant and may need abortions, either don't count or have to be subsumed under the TERFy "womynandgurls" umbrella. The cherry on top is that the author also publishes in the settler-colonialist, pro-Trump Jerusalem Post.

And then there's an article from a self-described "lockdown critic " about how you can be against lockdowns and still take in Ukrainian refugees, where she says about the Canadian chud truckers that "the convoy represented something deeper to me—a revolt against two years of government overreach—and I supported the right to express that".

So, i've now looked at three articles and every one of them uses an academic veneer to slip common rightwing discourse into seemingly leftist positions.

Extremely sus source.

Hewaoijsdb

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Did you just skim the first paragraph and thought you understood the article? How is it 'fedjacketing' to point out Adorno's and Horkheimer's well-documented collaboration with CIA fronts? And how does pointing out different articles written by different authors prove anything? The Philosophical Salon is published by the LA Review of Books and publishes from different viewpoints. There's no secret intention behind every article posted from that source.