Frankfurt school

maybe because he was an apologist for stalin, a dire uptopian , and never really attempted to ground his critique any form of concrete analysis?

That's not to say he too wasn't an interesting character, with some interesting things to say, but no better or worse than marcuse who we could easily dismiss if we wanted too as a hypocrite for his involement with the US government propaganda machine & state agency that went on to become the CIA?

I can see the apologist for Stalinism but I think your point about "utopianism" is not so much missing the mark as overshooting it by 8 miles and blowing up a red cross ambulance.

As for grounding it in concrete analysis. Well I'd say his 1500 page book that constantly refers to the culture of it's day, noting the prevalence of sub cultures, fashion, advertising, music and dance is pretty concrete.

Blochs very point was the need to understand "ideology" not just in political texts or in the media but rather in things like shop display, day dreams, sports and clothes, and not to merely dismiss them as "mystifications" but to eek out the "utopian" surplus that can ground a critique. This to me seems the embodiment of "concreteness", and also doesn't revert back to the bullshit binary of "appearance" and "essence".

Well the whole of Marcuse's "One dimensional man" is the thesis that mass culture is producing a docile integrated subject, I'd say that's a very one dimensional analysis.

Platonism was being used in a very broad sense in the previous posts not merely the forms of Platonism, but rather the notion of an ability to find an absolute truth, to have a god's eye view, to perceive the "forms" independent of subjectivity, essentially the objectivism of "Platoism", or "the view from nowhere".

I'd also see phenomenology as essentially "empiricist", and I have no problem with "empiricism" in it's wider notion of that which we experiance.

You didn't like Eros and Civilization?

I just started The Principle of Hope.

The Frankfurt School are right in everything they've ever said. I mean, just look at revol, isn't he an example of a one-dimensional man right there?

Its nice to know that Marcuse is still flying around the campus these days, actually, when I read it for the first time it felt like some kind of door had opened and I could see things a little clearer. But what do I know?
Marcuse was a genius, still is, if he's alive, although sadly not above the critisicm of shoplifters...

Shop lifting is a more penetrating critique than Marcuse ever put forward.

anything the frankfurt school has to offer one can find in the works of reich, lukacs, korsch, and the situationists(and with much less of the academic objectivist bullshit )...as to whether the events of may 68 threw the frankfurt specialists into the dustbin of history, correctamundo!

i hear that!

Point 1: Wrong. I can say that pretty easily as Lukacs stopped well short (although some are fond of some of his post-1927 work, it is not uncompromised by his "self-criticism" before the Great Father.) Korsch slid into nonsense by the mid 1930's. The SI made use of the Frankfurters, but except for Debord, never attempted anything as systematic, and Debord's is more of a salvo, where the Frankfurters attempted a sustained barrage.

Point 2: Being wrong in 1968 does not preclude having been right in 1940. Although the Frankfurters (those still alive) had mostly abandoned Marxism by the mid-1940's (Bloch and Grossman being notable exceptions), their early work is still very valuable and influenced not merely the SI, but their own ooponents in 1968 (Hans Jurgen-Krahl, Johannes Agnoli), who influenced people like the Open Marxism folks and many of the liveliest theoretical people in our generation. In fact, Hans Jurgen-Krahl had his own analysis of Adorno's betrayal that was based on Adorno's own work.

Chris

In an 'Essay on Liberation', Marcuse argued that the working class' role as the agent of historical transformation were 'temporarily suspended' (not that they aren't agents of historical transformation - indeed, he always argued that, in the penultimate moment it must be the working class who fulfill the promises of historical materialism) due to the fact that they are so thoroughly integrated psychologically into the techno-structure of advanced capitalism. He never argued that students, the urban intelligentsia, artists, exploited minorities and those exploited in the 'third world' replaced the working class as agents of social transformation, but rather that they would need to effectively 'carry the torch' until such a time as the working class could break from their psychological repression and assume their role as harbingers of revolution.

The role of the students etc that he envisaged was to undermine the psychic structure of consumer capitalism and liberate the potentialities of the working class so that they could again assume their position as agents of historical transformation!

Heidegger could be a tad pretentious with his use of language at times...The Question Concerning Technology seems a tad overcomplicated for the point he was trying to get across, same with Being And Time. I prefer Sartre's Being And Nothingness and an even easier philosopher to understand is Camus. Both Sartre and Camus were socialists of different sorts. Sartre more of a Marxist and Camus had anarchist leanings. If you want to know what being and nothingness has to offer socialism I'd read Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Dialectical_Reason

I'd probably summarize the point of trying to meld existentialism with socialism as being we are the ones in control of our future. A sort of anti determinist outlook that is meant to put a fire under our asses, to put us into action rather than sitting around waiting for revolution. I think Sartre, late in life, said he regretted writing Being And Nothingness and wanted to be remembered for writing Critique of Dialectical Reason....I think, if I remember correctly, it was because he came to see that we're NOT free in any situation and tried to change that point of view in Critique.

Marcuse also said 1968 org 1969 in an interview, that his theory was mainly focussed on countries like the USA, Germany and Britain but not on france or Italy ... in a certain way, the theory of the "new mass vanguard" by Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan and other leading figures of the "pabloite" Fourth International (pretty much focussed on France and other societies on the continent) was similar: struggles by students, marginal layers of the class, marginalized groups in societies and political groups at the fringes of the workers movement may lead to "explosions" like 1968 in France

As this is a thread about the Frankfurt School and Heidegger's esoteric language has been introduced, I would suggest anybody interested in these two strands should check out Adorno's critique of Heidegger's language in his book The Jargon of Authenticity. It is also worth checking out one of Marcuse's books Heideggerean Marxism, especially the new edition where Marcuse writes a new chapter explicating his later critique of Heidegger (though I have to say, I enjoyed the parts of Being and Time I could decipher.

As for the Essay on Liberation, i have to say man, it is really dated romanticism. The main thesis of One Dimensional Man (the closure of political discourse), still has pertinence in my opinion, but a lot of Marcuse's stuff is of a different era and some parts of the left would do good to evaluate it more thoroughly.