He previously accused me of ad homonym for suggesting JFK Jr was a “pseudoscientific grifter”, and then saying his blanket opposition to lockdowns was indicative of a liberal tendency. I am very tempted to point out that now he is the ad homonym user, but I realize that I can annoy him more simply by continuing to not respond. I’m also tempted to send the Chinese “Copium” react image, but that seems not to be worth it.
Damn I liked the Dialectics of Enlightenment, I’m crying and shaking right now
To my defense this was their most controversial piece, specifically because liberals didn’t like the fact that fascism was described as contained within capitalism and that Hollywood is more “totalitarian” than explicit propaganda
I remember reading some critical theorist piece or another I agreed with and enjoyed regarding social phenomena, alienation and the like, but this history condemns reading them to require a kiloton of salt to take their words with.
long tirade, don't want to clog up comments
One of my comrades in uni was forced to digest tons of this stuff starting with Weber and onward to Adorno et al. and it shocked me when he started equivocating the USSR and U.S. in terms of peoples’ alienation from labor utilizing radical-sounding rhetoric. Went onto social issues, then economic ones, then structural ones, but eventually he broke free.
Their professor had this person read DuBois as well. In the multiple page preface of the collection, there was a single, small paragraph dedicated to his association to the Communist Party and his admiration of the socialist cause. It makes an excuse for this, even - claiming that DuBois may have thought differently were he alive today and had witnessed the failures of communism - a white “critical theorist” wrote this preface, putting words in the mouth of a dead black revolutionary.
These are the true dangers of the CCF, critical theory, and other Frankfurt Schoolian sects of champagne socialists. They warp potentially revolutionary minds in search of further education into a deep-seated anticommunism akin yet different to liberalism, an ostensibly anti-establishment ideological foundation that can remain comfortable in understanding that their imperialist nation is still the best, unlike those totalitarian not-real-socialist states.
Adorno making the explicit claim that despair was a revolutionary’s best friend (completely dismissing Lenin’s appeal to revolutionary optimism and restraint from misanthropy) is more than enough for me to consider his branch of philosophy worthy of a wide berth, let alone the strange gravitational pull of Heidegger in this realm of academic “Marxism”, Heidegger having been a literal Nazi, and the rest of it.
also note for anyone who may not yet know of “critical theory”: I am not discussing “critical race theory” as I am nowhere near educated enough to even begin to talk about that. When it comes to race as all other matters, I am a Marxist-Leninist.