The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1272: Continental Philosophy and Its Origins - Pt. 16 - The Frankfurt School Pt 1 - w/ Thomas777

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

65 MinutesPG-13Thomas777 is a revisionist historian and a fiction writer.Thomas continues a series on the subject of Continental Philosophy, which focuses on history, culture, and society. In this episode Thomas begins a talk about the Frankfurt School.Thomas' SubstackRadio Free Chicago - T777 and J BurdenThomas777 MerchandiseThomas' Buy Me a CoffeeThomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 1"Thomas' Book "Steelstorm Pt. 2"Thomas on TwitterThomas' CashApp - $7homas777Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump Dunebeg. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Cush Farage. If you want to get the show early and ad-free, head on over to the piquinez Show.com. There you can choose from where you wish to support me. Now listen very carefully. I've had some people ask me about this, even though I think on the last ad I stated it pretty clearly. If you want an RSS feed, you're going to have to subscribe through substack or through Patreon. You can also subscribe on my website, which is right there, Gumroad, and what's the other one? Subscribe Star. And if you do that, you will get access to the audio file. So head on over to the Picanuenozo Show.com. You'll see all the ways that you can support me there. And I just want to

thank everyone. It's because of you that I can put out the amount of material that I do. I can do what I'm doing with Dr. Johnson on 200 years together and everything else. The things that Thomas and I are doing together on continental philosophy. It's all because of you. And yeah, I mean, I'll never be able to thank you enough. So thank you. The Pekignanos Show.com. Everything's there. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekina Show. Thomas is back. How are you doing today, Thomas? I'm doing well. How are you?

Doing good. Doing good. We're going to continue in the series. Tell us what we're going to talk about today. I was going to talk about the post-Marx's paradigm because that's important. And I don't think people have a proper conceptual picture. That's not condescending or pedantic. In America, unlike in Europe, people don't. really conceptualized political theory as informing praxis in direct capacities.

Part of that is because of the anglosphere conceptual bias against theoretical constructs that don't fall within what passes for scientific models. You know, that's obviously why analytic philosophy is paramount. You know, when people talk about continental philosophy, they're talking about, about it contra analytic philosophy which is basically formal logic it's formal logic it's theoretical mathematics and and things like that there's philosophical questions that arise in neuroscience and things and consciousness studies but that's sort of its own thing but if you want to understand what sort of succeeded um Marxist dialectics and discourse and what really animated the revolutionary cadres that were able to

insinuate themselves into American political and cultural life. You've got to understand what succeeded Marxism. I part ways with Padua Buchanan qualifiedly. In 2002, Paafi He can't wrote this book called Death of the West, which was actually a really balzy book. It's pretty good. It's a pretty good capsule summary of the subject matter. And he cited a lot of very politically incorrect stuff, including American dissident voices, the William Pierce's radio show.

It's very interesting flipping through the citations and end notes in that book. And I think that book, that's before there was nearly as much freely available data online. And I think that book allowed a lot of people to properly educate themselves in a meaningful curriculum. But where I part ways of them, and I realized part of this was he did it for reasons of brevity. He consistently referred to the Frankfurt School. as cultural Marxism. He coined that term, which is really interesting

because it's become mainstream conservative nomenclature. I don't think it's accurate, though. People like Grimes, Gnardin, Adorno, and Marcosa, Marcosa succeeded people like

Gaior Lukach and the aforementioned And, but I mean, he was a disciple of Luke Gatch. But these guys weren't, they weren't Marxist who, who added some sort of extrinsic body of work to Marxist theory. I think that they split entirely with that tradition. I mean, if you look at people, and I'll get into what I mean by this, But if you look at the guns of people who are pushing for mass immigration, multiculturalism, you know, gay social identity and LGBTQ stuff, these aren't a bunch of Marxists and they're not a bunch of labor rights. And they're not a bunch of people like Jackson Hinkle who really are the post-Marxist left.

They draw up on people like Emmanuel Wallerstein. you know but they they they've got um it's not um it's not a bunch of it's not a bunch of marxists or post-Marxists who promote this stuff you know i generally agree with i generally agree with paul godfrey stalinism was really its own thing and most of the late cold war was uh these kinds of the Frankfurt school radical types and these Trotskyists who found a home with them, you know, dialectically and physically at odds with Stalinists, who they viewed as this kind of fascist referee tendency that was as psychologically scarring to the person as, as capitalist society was. And this isn't just academic, this is important. Because if you don't understand this, you don't really understand the government you live under, among other things.

You know, so it's, it's tiresome to hear people invoke this, these lazy malapropisms, you know, as if Hillary Clinton's a Marxist, or that the Democrats or some actual party or some political tendency or some cadre of Marxism. or some cadre of Marxists that's asinine. You know, and one of the problems, I mean, I don't really care what conservatives do, because they've got nothing to do with me, but it is a problem when you have a majority of the body politic

that otherwise would be shifting in their conceptual focus such that it would deprive the regime of legitimacy except for the fact that they're totally illiterate. you know and the um i made a point before the the dissident right traditionally and you know in the 20th century the fascist right and the people that succeeded them that traditionally are positive of intellectuals but the center right they're they are conceptual illiterate it's not that's not just something liberal say and that's uh that's a problem because of this has to sabotage discourse even if if one has no interest in corralling them into some sort of hypothetical cadre or something.

But, you know, the roots of Frankfurt School, too, really are at the, in the opening salvo, is a World War I. One of the reasons, a lot of the original Marxist vanguardists, when, you know, including Lenin himself, when uh august 1914 um when the when hostilities kicked off at first they thought okay this this is the catalyzing event you know all the social democrats and the reichstag they're finally going to stand with us and there's going to be this broad front that overthrows the monarchies and realizes a socialist revolution but instead what happened was to a man the social democrats and the Reichstag signed off on the Kaiser's war credits and you know got 100% behind mobilization you know

it was a huge this almost killed the movement that's how much of a that's how injurious it was the credibility of of the communists, you know, because suddenly all these social Democrats who'd been, at least superficially abiding Marxian claims about the historical process, they suddenly threw their lot in with this patriotic caucus and were just as taken with war fever as either can serve as were and the Catholic centrist were. You know, this antagonism that supposedly was going to fulfill the dialectical mission of history was totally absent.

And interestingly, I mean, this is why after the war, after war two, you know, it wasn't the KPD that rural East Germany. It was the Socialist Unity Party. And that effect. effectively banned the Social Democrats and that was not accidental. They weren't ever going to let this happen again. Ready for huge savings?

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You know, that's always what put the Bolsheviks at odds with what had been a plurality within the early cadre. They were totally opposed to, you know, a mass party because this is what they were afraid of happening. You know, and that was always a, that was always a conceptual obstacle that the, that Marces Lennonist couldn't overcome because they were, they really were proven wrong. You know, it was almost. It was almost like some of these millenarian, you know,

Christian cults, offshoots in the 19th century, that we're trying to put a date at which, you know, Armageddon was coming, and then that time would come and pass, and these people would be ridiculed. You know, there really is a political theology of an apocalyptic character to Marxist Leninism. you know and further you know people the the guys who ultimately came into the constant to the Frankfurt school they were watching this from the sidelines you know as young

revolutionaries and then when the Bolshek revolution did happen you know there were these vanguardist crews attempted in Budapest in Munich Berlin the Bavarian Soviet got crushed by the Free Corps, Rosa Luxembourg and Carl Liebnacht, you know, they were beaten and then shot to death by the Free Corps in the middle of Berlin. You know, that's why Rosa Luxembourg, despite the fact that she was very much a schismatic in some ways within the Bolshevik movement. that became this big martyr to the Reds. You know, in Bella Coon, after a few months, his regime was so brutal and, you know,

he was so hated that it collapsed on itself. You know, and what in all cases, what failed to materialize was the proletariat didn't rise up. And in the Russian case, you know, Russia was an unusual case because on the one hand, you know, the Soviet Union obviously became the world vanguard of the revolution. But Russia was this odd country and sociologically it wasn't like Europe and there wasn't a real proletariat. So people could point to that, sympathetic elements could point to that and say, well, there wasn't the historically developed

class structure to facilitate, you know, a revolutionary situation as predicted, but in Berlin there was. And that didn't happen, you know. And then kind of the final nail in the sort of traditional claims within Marxist-leven's dialectic. in the first years of the Revolution Enterprise was when Trotsky assaulted Poland. You know, this was very much sort of a redox of the Jacobins aiming to take the revolution across the continent. And when Trotsky met Marshall Potsolski,

yeah, Pulsudski at the Vistula, they got thrown back. you know and cut the pieces and um you know this is this is with a Polish junta that reigned for decades and ultimately spoiled for war with the German Reich you know in 1939 this is where they got their mandate from because they threw back the Reds you know and um so the historical role assigned the proletariat wasn't emergent And this was the source of, this was the original source of the schism within the

revolutionary movement. I don't say the communist movement because again, I think the Frankfurt School at this point really abandoned Marxist Leninism, almost entirely. You know, and there were further schisms in 53, 56, and then in 68, you know, in the most pronounced way. And the Sino-Soviet split had a different proximate cause, but it was related to the historical situation, and much of a buffoon as Mao was, he also saw the writing on the wall, and that Stalinism was losing legitimacy as an animating catalyst,

the third world and the third world at that point was what mattered because that's where the cold war was going hot on every continent but um you know um this this is the origin of frankfors school which is the origin of the schismatic tenancy within the revolutionary ideological culture which in turn later facilitated the schismatic tenancy within the Cold War, which ultimately was the victorious tenancy, and which now informs the ideological schema that defines the ruling ideology of globalism. The only place is where that ideology is not dominant is within resistance

coded societies. So this is an academic. This is a very real thing. The two key figures of the Frankfurt School and Buchanan did get this right was Georg Luch, and Antonio Gramsie. Gramsie was sort of the token goy

within the Frankfurt school and he Gramsie and Adorno are often credited as being political revolutionary political geniuses on the order of Mussolini or Lenin and I basically agree with that

Lukach was more of a was more of an intellectual sort of a sort of a Zawahiri if that makes sense to somebody like Gramsies, bin Laden for those that understand the example. You know, Lukach wrote he was an agent of the common term and he wrote history and class consciousness, which was fairly orthodox in some respects, but it made clear that the revolutionary destruction of society, the superstructure that supposedly is wholly derivative from productive forces,

and capitalist imperturbism, narratives, Lukach suggested this was paramount, at least in terms of praxis, because a worldwide overturning of values, it can't take place without, you know, the denial, the direct assault on normative modes of thought and behavior. It's not something that just abides once conditions become materially suitable for, you know, to facilitate revolutionary cognizance. And look at me the point, too, that advanced capitalism isn't making things worse for workers. You know, and this is actually a summer Sombard point, too.

You know, the injury to the injurious aspects of, of capitalism and the opinion of Lukach and the entire cadre that came to the Frankfurt School their notion was that capitalism is psychologically scarring to the person and that it's arbitrary and authoritarian strictures and what it requires of the person is fundamentally anti-human I made no mistake people like Lukach were humanists they were they just were humanists and they very debate based way. They view the human being as essentially nothing more than an animal and the most base aspects of that human animal being what is paramount, you know, essentially placing

passion over reason and viewing will as male-level. That's why there's this singular emphasis on sex. That's not accidental. Ready for huge savings, we'll mark your calendars from November to 30th because the Lidl Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items, all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value.

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Kosh Farragge. And it's not merely pragmatic owing to a... improperly... ...waited variables or something. You know... And according to Lukach, what he... he said that within Christian society... He said what's identified as demonic.

He said these are basically aspects that are arbitrarily vilified. You know, aspects of the human... being and the core of the human psyche that are arbitrarily vilified owing to the needs of the capitalist system or to reinforce social prejudices for various pragmatic reasons that play individuals and groupings against one another within the body politic and he himself described these things as you know he said you've got to you've got to advocate for demonic things um in the service of cultural terrorism these are his words this is an hyperbole that fascists came up with or that i came up with their happy cannon devise and that's very telling and a major element of this

and mind you this preceded kinsie by decades this preceded kinsie by decades this preceded you know, these these strange characters who emerged in 1960s media by decades. It, you know, preceded obviously

the regime that, the social engineering regime that was implemented in the Bundes Republic as the day of defeat by decades. Lukach said, you've got to, you, as part of this cultural terrorism, there needs to be a radical sex education program insinuated into public schooling. You've got to instruct children that sex is basically

like going to the bathroom and it shouldn't have any relationship to emotional bonding that, you know, anything related to familial morality and social codes is outdated and oppressive that monogamy is artificial, that religion is irrelevant, and it only exists to deprive people of pleasures that as a human being you have some intrinsic right to pursue. You know, he said that it was essential to encourage women to get abortions and to rebel against sexual amores, you know, commanding modesty. it becomes very obvious too that this was something very different than what Lenin envisioned

because, and this is not me saying positive things about Leninism or suggesting that he was a man of high moral character, but Lenin viewed these kinds of things as a boring and as decadent aspects of you know a capitalist

society and things that, you know, the lump in proletariat was prone to that were so deleterious they were basically you know uh disadvantageous to curating a revolutionary environment you know and the people like lucoch in some cases consciously but in some cases just because this was intrinsic to the world of social existence they were mired in which was you know fundamentally judeic there's just this axiomatic antipathy to to what they view as Christian civilization, and they can't be denied.

And, you know, this sort of moral leveling down of the human being, that it's obvious, Lukash, and the only person I know who makes this point directly is E. Michael Jones, Lukash very much owed to Marquis de Saad. If you were to college in America,

even if fairly concerned, of college, at least his way it was 30 years ago. They'll treat Desaude de Sade as a sort of as a sort of eccentric literary figure who wrote pornography because he was perverted. And those

things are true. But he was a political thinker, and that's what he viewed himself as. He openly said that. You know, I'm doing what I'm doing to tear down you know, middle class morality. and

Lukach it's obvious if you read particularly as essays that succeeded history and class cautionist it's obvious that's who and what he's drawing upon and

that's really what underlies everything from this kind of recasting of free speech as being access to pornography and this idea of feminism going from being this sort of Victorian

this kind of thing Victorian rich ladies were into to try and get women to learn to read and go vote to being this thing that worships abortion and you know suggests that promiscuity is somehow this great thing that

liberates people from these these paternalistic moors this all who comes back to Lukach who is drawing upon Desaad you know and among other things too

I mean that this was very sick anyway obviously but you know Desaad was literally a pimp you know and he had contempt for women if you read his stuff

and I have read it you know it's it's pretty gross and pretty tawdry but there's very much a pimp's sensibility

throughout every pimp at the one hand is overconversating for the fact he's worried he himself is an F-A-G-G-O-T I don't this might be I end up on YouTube so I don't want to say things that'll get us Merked

but also there's this kind of there's this kind of jailbird and in in in in fag coded like hatred of the feminine that's like shot through this stuff so that's one of the ways you can tell that and i'm not talking about young women or misled by this kind of thing because they don't know any better and they haven't educated themselves yet but these you can tell these people like glorious stynum who like advocate this kind of garbage I mean, first of all, within Judaism, it's a massively patriarchal culture where women basically have no say.

But also, what she's doing is she's basically promoting the ideology of the Pimp and pretending that this is somehow liberating. It's really, it's really self-refuting, according to its own stated postulate's irrationales. Catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design. They move you, even before you drive. The new Cooper plugin hybrid range. For Mentor, Leon, and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2,000 euro.

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the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle New Bridge Warehouse House sale 28 to 30 November. Lidl, more to value. And now, this is over the hamster, is leargoal to doer Gila and not yet Gereina in Aondon

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in many respects, these people like Lukach and, like Gramsie and, like Adorno, they were basically bringing, by advocating a humanist revolutionary tenancy, And again, this is very much a deteriorated and morally and spiritually corrupt humanism, but that, but it was a humanist tendency. By abiding that anthropological aspect of The there you know within their historical schema, it did represent a return to a conventional Higalianism as opposed to that of Lenin and Marx and

self and that was and is one of its enduring strengths I say that qualifiably within the bounded rationality of political philosophy and the kind of linear tradition of it from really the 14th 15th century know Hobbes and um Machiavelli through Heidegger it does situate more seamlessly within that schema than Marx does Marks seems like a profound breach with precedent despite the fact that yes Marx was a Hegelian especially in his younger days and even when he matured as a thinker and even within his magnum opus

which was Das Kapital the Hegelian stamp is inescapable I mean I make the point that Hegel is the Marx, what Hobbes was to Carl Schmidt and if you

approach it with a certain understanding there doesn't seem to be that rigid sort of breach with precedent and discourse. But nevertheless, it's not just superficial. The kind of conventionally coded Higalianism of the Frankfurt School. And the course of the Frankfurt School, you know, like I said,

I stipulated that Lukach, his early writings very much were within the paradigm dialectically and conceptually in Marxism. I think that owes the fact that everything was encompassed by that conceptual horizon. I've discussed in a very different context how a lot of these people, after the day of defeat, a lot of these national socialist revolutionary types, including like Horstomal, he was very much allied with the DDR and with the Stalinist element that ruled the DDR and even as he and the Roth Army fraction

were exporting these revolutionary sensibilities to the nascent political cultures in the Arab world they were still very much coloring any sensibilities they had they were in within a

Marxian veneer and that wasn't even fully conscious, I don't think. You can't escape the zeitgeist

if you're engaged in political warfare you know otherwise um you're not engaged in any such thing but also simply the parameters of what's possible within political life isn't there's not limitless permutations of how that can be expressed or implemented or even conceptualized it's it's always tethered due the zeit guys than the dominant political forms. That's somewhat hard for people to, I think, truly realize today.

I mean, the president is no different, but there's such a homogenous, maybe homogenous there's such a monoculture in political life. I mean, even within the axis of resistance, there's not radically different ways that states are organized. I made the point before, the Russian Federation, for example, their political values are totally different than America's. They're on a very hostile footing with America, but it's not like their government structurally is arranged differently. It's not like there's some political bureau and, you know, that decides everything. There's not a party state.

There's not some apparatus where the prices and wages are fixed according to some calculus that abolish. that abolishes the price mechanism deliberately, being spontaneously ordered, there's only one form of government. So essentially, anybody who's talking about politics in a critical capacity is coming up with permutations of resistance to what exists everywhere.

That can have one or two effects on the zeitgeist. That can mean that everybody basically is only having one conversation which sort of happened in the years before World War I in Europe, or it can mean that there's all manner of conceptual models for alternative structures within that dominant paradigm. And that's what's happening today. But part of that's because there's a free mobility of capital across national frontiers

it's easier to access money than ever before that this may come to an end with our lifetime but as of right now there's unprecedented levels of production and availability of evaluated products people have a lot of options you don't need to decide how you're going to proceed politically

based on the fact that I'm fixed in this location otherwise there won't be drinkable water or they're, you know, I won't be able to access things I need. That's not on the table in the developed world. And increasingly, even in the third world, you can get what you need if you have money. So that changes things too.

But this is important. It's not merely academic. But, you know, Luke Och himself, So, I mean, when the Fraghert School was formally established in Weimar era, even then it had an ambivalent relationship with communist power and with, to Stalin himself, and to these, you know, communist parties that were within the official structure of the common turn and in Moscow's orbit. But Lukach, he fled to the Soviet Union after 93, like a lot of revolutionaries did, particularly Jewish revolutionaries along to the national socialist descendancy. And when he was there, I mean, he was immediately swept up, you know, by the security services

and basically it was basically demanded of him that he explained himself. so he frantically was defending his rejection of dialectical materialism and trying to explain the reasons why he'd adopted these heterodox and arguably schismatic and arguably counter-revolutionary positions in Germany and in Hungary and in Weimar he was convincing enough that not only did you know, the NKVD, not having him shot, but, you know, he, and he, nor was he imprisoned, but he was never really accepted. And in, after the day of defeat, he went back to Hungary, thinking that, and as David Irving makes the point, Communist Hungary was very, it was the one Stalinist regime, especially after 953, that was still,

heavily Jewish. You know, so Lukach obviously thought that there'd be a home for him there. But any chance of that was smashed because you know, the writing was on the wall.

And he even went as far as to openly endorse the Soviet suppression of the 1950s uprising. I mean, how, whether I was him trying to save his own skin or Curry favor that he lost

with Moscow or if he actually believed it, I mean, who knows, but that even that couldn't dispel this idea that he was not, that there was nothing but a quote, social humanist and a fifth columnist.

You know, and that if there was any vestigeal sympathy for the Orthodox Marxist's camp, and I don't think there was, within the front of the school, I think this was, I think it ended after the 56 uprising. Airgrid,

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you know, I don't, and again, this isn't just me being pedantic or being hung up on nomenclature or phraseology. We can't talk about the left being Marxist after November 9, 1989, anywhere in the world. You know, the left United States had really been doctrinally Marxist for decades, you know, and the common cause they'd find with these, what they call these liberationist movements like the Sandinistas was more of a pragmatic decision, only to, like I suggested a minute ago, questions as zeit guys. but in doctrinal terms you know it's worth noting and Paul Gaffrey makes this point a lot and that's one of the reasons I mean he's a he's a great scholar

and he's had a huge impact on my own thinking and research and things but he makes the point especially in his book the strange death of Marxism which is all about this schismatic tendency that we're discussing to serious communist to orthodox Marxist

Lenin is what was and we talked about this when we covered Marx a few weeks back what was bad about fascism it wasn't that it was opposed to immigration or that it was racist or that it you know it didn't

it didn't view women as as being valuable or or that it didn't think that that they didn't think that gay people were We're valuable people who deserve dignity. Fascists to orthodox Marxist as Leninists,

they're engaged in a struggle against the working class, and they join with beleaguered capitalists to stave off the advance of history in the form of a socialist revolution. They're class enemies who are trying to frustrate the historical process, either for reasons of, you know, self-interest or because they're diluted by attachments to arcane sociological forms. But that's the issue with them.

And that's why, despite what people claim, and they don't understand the reason why this kind of language was invoked in the DDR and the Soviet Union. When the Soviets these Germans invoked anti-fascism, they weren't talking about Antifa. They weren't talking about LGBTQ. They weren't saying Germans are evil because they're racist. They were saying that capitalism

in crisis and fascism are the same thing and trying to frustrate the advance of history is a fascist tenancy because all this stuff is meaningless anyway. There is no actual religion.

Social authority as is precedented. late modernity is a bourgeois conceit these things are secondary aspects of the arrangement of economic forces according to productive modalities that's it there's not some deep moral implication here you know Bolshevik anti-fascism was a totally different thing than the ideology itself of anti-fascist The latter is 100% based on this humanist moralism, which the communists rejected outright. And even the European left today, even these people who are very radical, even within the contemporary monarchy, even within the contemporary monotonous, culture, you know, dictated by America and what have you. People like the left party in the Buddhist Republic who claim some lineage with the original

KPD, they don't abide communist ideas or advocate them. You know, they're economic neoliberals. They, their base is what remains of the middle class or the kinds of people who, you know, work in in academe and and in the the public sector which serves a government which is totally capitalist adjacent you know they the priorities that they that they that they assert you know in in these european parliaments and legislatures and the kind of stuff they try and force the center of the center left coalition partners into it's stuff like you know it's stuff like you know it's Stuff like passing hate speech codes.

It's stuff that's punitive towards the white Christian majority. You know, it's stuff like criminalizing, you know, quote, Holocaust denial. It's things that the communists had absolutely no interest in and would have viewed as counterproductive. And probably even viewed as counter-revolutionary and some kind of enemy-coded. tendency. So what I'm getting at is even to the degree that we can suggest that there's such a plausible continuity between the current culture of the left, the post-communist culture of the left, and 20th century Marxism, that apparent continuity, if it's anything,

it owes to zeitgeist. In the same way that the Revolutionary Right in the Weimar era, people like the NSDAAP called themselves socialists. Because everybody was a socialist after 1929.

There were no non-socialist. James Burnham's made that point. You know, and you're always a product of the zeitgeist. You know, like that's another that's another matter of illiteracy of the official opposition

in America and people who are adjacent that the sort of media culture is declaring that everything that's identified as socialist is somehow left-wing or liberal. It doesn't make any sense. You know, it's an odds of reality. You know, and

And so I, you know, like I said, I realize I'm probably in my, I'm not that I care, but I'm probably watching the minority on this take, but it's, it's because it's informed by the historical record, and it's informed by the dialectical process. And I mean, even if you don't accept the Hegelian paradigm, there is this sort of discurs, this ongoing, discursive phenomenon that takes on different, you know, conceptual forms over time, owing to historical occurrences. I mean, some of this stuff is probably a self-fulfilling prophecy within, owing to the conceptual and intellectual prejudices, the people, you know, so engaged in this, process. But even if you reject that, it's something independent of human

derivation and kind of the intellectual culture that forever attends the political occurrences and the business of government, that doesn't make it somehow not real. And, you know, regardless, it informs and very much brands

to invoke a contemporary signifier the way these things are expressed and interpreted you know the since that there was a neo-Marxist tendency that came out of the Frankfurt school

I'd say it was Herbert Markusa I'm probably going to have to dive and we'll dive into Adorno and Gramsie Marcuse in the next episode but just briefly with the time we got left I want to briefly discuss Mercuse and who and what he was. You know, Marcusa's big, what used to be part of the philosophical and sociological and sociological curriculum in American universities was civilization and discontents by Marcusa.

Marcusa identified, he literally identified, as a Freudian Marxist. strange this might seem and one of the reasons why I was talking a burden about this on one of our episodes the other week Freudian concepts were disinuated into the American culture in all kinds of ways

and that very much owed to Marcusa and others but even preceding their sort of a sentency within pop acadine after the day of defeat in 45 there's this idea that Freud was bringing some sort of scientific rigor to psychology which is absurd because i mean you know the Freudianism is

nonsense it's some guy just making assertions without any meaningful methodology but that's the way was perceived and the ardently secular and rationalist not rationalist cultural the culture of the especially the first half of the 20th century you know you talked about it viewed everything relating to human affairs in very reductionist terms, you know, biologically and materially. So this idea that, well, you know, the human being is basically, and you know, what the human being is, is the human mind and the mind is just the brain. The human being is basically a pastiche of these pre-rational drives. And first among them is sexuality.

but of course to live in a civilized culture you can't just be acting out on sexual impulses all the time so these things are sublimated and if they're not sublimated correctly or if there's too pronounced of a willful mechanism curated into the person in the form of the super ego all these pathologies will emerge and people behave and disfinding functional ways and institutions will become autocratic and no longer serve the needs of human beings. And people just accepted this. Like, oh, that's true. You know, the great man, rabbi, sorcerer Freud says so. Well, Marcusea took that. And to understand the depth of the rot, even early Christopher Lash, I'm not saying Lash with some incredible man, but he was a serious guy. late in his career he died

he was only about 50 years old which is really young when it's young to just drop dead you know what um but he in his earlier stuff it's which is very critical the then dominant culture of the 70s even that

was shot through with just Freudian nonsense as a supposedly scientific method of of explicating human behavior individually in that skill. But Marcoza's notion was, look, capitalist society, the reason why it's so injurious is because it's psychologically scarring to the person, not because of alienation

from one's labor, although that's part of it, but the needs of capitalist production modalities and the ordering mechanisms that facilitate those things, they require suppression of Eros to the point of people developing this profound sense of shame, such that they can't achieve this orgiastic catharsis in any meaningful way. And even if they do accidentally, they feel as if they're engaged in something criminal or grossly immoral. And this guilt mechanism in turn generates its own pathologies, which generally translates into violence. This idea that violence, all violence, of a private and public nature, not just violence

against females or something, the idea is that all violence is essentially something, supplemented arrows. That's a Marcuse idea. That's where it came from. And that's basically the rationale of the 68er, what they called free love, which is essentially institutionalized promiscuity. It's deliberately divorced from love. That's why I object to it to these weirdo,

subversives as well as a bunch of like normies or basically just sheep who can talk when their big kink was the fiction of gay marriage they were going around talking about it you can't like regulate love it's like okay so

eros is love does that mean like a guy who has sex with his kids is like loving them I I mean I that's disgusting but it's disgusting to say that you know people running like animals is love.

But also just categorically, there's not some concept called love. You know, like, eros isn't the same as, you know, love between a parent and a child, or between comrades, or between two women, obviously. But, you know, this isn't just trivia for people who like studying political theory. Marcusa, I would say, other than Lukach, on the theoretical side, he's probably the most important post-Marxist thinker in the American situation. Gramsie is the Lenin of the post-Marxist left. I'd say Marcosa is probably the Marx.

That makes any sense. But, yeah, looks like we're about done. But I hope that this was informative, because I think it's particularly important, and especially if you identify as a partisan in the present day, as I do, and it'd be clear for people monitoring this, and I know they are, that does not suggest anyone should break the law because they shouldn't. But it's important to know who and what your adversaries are. Well, this is what your adversaries are. They're not Marxists and they're not liberals. So they're not the Democrat Party, which doesn't actually exist, to be clear. And if you think it does, you're stupid.

We mentioned Paul Gottfried in this, and I always find it ironic that his Ph.D. advisor was Marcuse. Yeah. Well, and interestingly, he wrote his master's thesis was on Strasser, and Strasserism. and it's really good. You can find it, it might not be so easy anymore. You'd probably find an archive, but I've got it somewhere on one of my,

I don't know if it's because technology hates me or if because I overload them with too much long-form stuff, but all the laptops I get eventually just like blow up and shit the bed. And like one of the ones I have around here that so shit itself, I've got the Gottfried Strausser,

uh, master's thief. And, um, yeah, and it's really, it's really thoughtful. And particularly in the mid-60s,

that wasn't just esoteric, but that, that would have been viewed as, uh, somewhat unseemly. But, um, it's, it's very,

it's very praising of the black front and of, uh, and of, and of stressor. Um, but yeah, no, it,

uh, that's one of the reasons why Godfrey is, uh, I mean, he, he knew Marcusa personally, and he doesn't harp on that point in the strange death of Marxism, but he does mention the intro, you know, as somebody who knew the man,

I can, yeah, feel like I have some insight into this, beyond that, which one can glean, you know, just from studying the historical record. Yeah, it would have been interesting to hear the dialogue that they were having, considering Gottfried's PhD was on, thesis was on Catholic Romanticism in Munich, 1826. to 1834. Yeah.

That's fascinating. I think, yeah, like I said, Godfried reminds me of Kissinger. I mean, I mean, that, like, I know a lot of people don't like Henry Kissinger. I'm not one of those people who villainizes them, obviously. But he, I think his PhD thesis is on Metternich. Yeah, no, it's a very,

Gaffreed he's very fascinating guy. I'm glad he's uh the burden was in touch with him the other day and that's great because uh godfried's you know he's getting up there in years and i'm glad he's still active and and mentally well with stuff so um you contacted me today said you had a new way that people could support your work what was what was that oh yeah it's buying me a coffee if you'd like include that in this show notes um i i i patreon is janky and um um It was Patreon being weird about syncing with my substack and other stuff. And I just, I just prefer buy me a coffee.

And it seems to be, it seems to be expedited. So yeah, yeah, if you want to, if you want to support the brand and what I'm doing, you can buy me a coffee. All right, I'll link to that, link to substack, link to everything. including Radio Free Chicago, which is doing really good work there. Yeah, no, it's great. People seem to, I mean, thanks for the endorsement. People seem to really like it.

And I think a current event's program is important because I get kind of so lost in theoretical space and stuff. And doing, I'm blessed because, like, Burden is our dear friend. And he's a great kind of creator. but he's also he's got good insights into, you know, things in the news cycle. I think I can read

the proverbial tea leaves and with some macro level stuff, particularly like power political stuff, but there's things I miss because I'm like an old guy and I'm at base like a bookworm and stuff. You know, like burden helps keep me grounded

and things. So, yeah, I feel very lucky to have him on deck. All right. Thank you, Thomas. Until part two of the Frankfurt School. Yeah, thank you, man.