/lit/ — In 1967 Theodor Adorno gave a lecture on right-wing extremis

Adorno was a stupid plant who got stuck on neokantianism and forgot to read anything and everything after them.

>>25335368 (OP)
reading through this now. thanks for posting.

no thoughts yet, but this seemed interesting:
>At the same time, however – and this touches on the antagonistic character of the new nationalism, or right-wing extremism – there is something fictitious about it if one looks at the grouping of the world of today into these few oversized blocs, where the individual nations and states really play only a secondary part. ... The individual nation’s freedom of movement is heavily restricted by its integration into the large power blocs. One should not, however, draw the primitive conclusion from this that, because it is now obsolete, nationalism no longer plays a significant role; on the contrary, it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance. The witch trials, after all, took place not at the height of Thomism but during the Counter-Reformation, and something similar is probably the case with, if I may term it thus, the ‘pathic’ nationalism of today.

>>25335400
>>25335368 (OP)
None of that came to pass. Philosophers are such jokes.

>>25335400
This is so unimaginably stupid.

>>25335400
>One should not, however, draw the primitive conclusion from this that, because it is now obsolete, nationalism no longer plays a significant role; on the contrary, it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance.
This is an interesting perspective to consider now because right wing extremist terrorist networks on places like telegram have never been more radical in their ethnosupremacist and antifeminist ideology while also being comprised of mixed race teenagers born in the 2000's who have only experienced a nominally post-national and post-feminist world. "Demonic" is a good choice of words here because as these ideas have been condensed into symbols they have literally started to identify themselves with Satan.

>>25335435
it's called hyperbole, retardbro

I read some pages and to me what's interesting is that he says something about how power, or I guess he says capital but that's pretty much synonymous, gets centralized in society over time as a result of capitalism, and that this means strata of society that once had status lose it. I have for a long time been thinking about the concentration of power over time as a result of the progress of technology, and I think concentration of power is an inevitable consequence of the progress of technology. But it's a fucking word salad, just like his book Dialectic of Enlightenment. Kind of gave up on reading this lecture but maybe I'll keep trying.

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>>25335368 (OP)
>right wing extremism
>in 1967

>everyone who doesn't follow my ideology is an extremist

>>25335400
>there is something fictitious about it if one looks at the grouping of the world of today into these few oversized blocs, where the individual nations and states really play only a secondary part. ... The individual nation’s freedom of movement is heavily restricted by its integration into the large power blocs
Play a part into what? The greater order of the world? Right-wing people don't concern themselves with such a distant prospect (proven wrong countless time by the way, e.g. Vietnam, Egypt, Ukraine) but with immediate threat to their perceived national identity, i.e. immigration, multiculturalism, and so on. It's such a retarded take.

>>25335368 (OP)
>adorno
>clusterfuck
redundant

bump

>>25335524
>Right-wing people don't concern themselves with such a distant prospect
>but with immediate threat to their perceived national identity

If rightoids had any brains they would see that these are co-dependent realities. But then they wouldn't be rightoids, would they?

>>25335368 (OP)
Adorno: a bit vague, but that’s to be expected since it’s a transcript. He died before witnessing the Left being co-opted by capitalist advertising propaganda.

The guy who comments afterward: has no justification for being so biased and his addition is pointless since he merely summarizes the text to point out how "relevant" it's today.

>>25335419
same way outdated tech becomes icons and decor, makes perfect sense that the nietzchean herd has not been abolished and to recognize that if we do not cultivate and educate it, give it the Marxian will to overcome itself and its circumstances, it will be the means of the oligarchs destroying democracy.

spot on, really.

>>25335368 (OP)
>Now, of course, there has been official legislation to make these things taboo. But even the taboo about mentioning the Jews becomes a means of anti-Semitic incitement, with a wink and a nudge: ‘We’re not allowed to say it, but we understand each other. We all know what we mean.’ And, in this technique of allusion, the mere mention of a Jewish name is already sufficient to create certain effects.

Test

>>25336625
>it's
should be "it is", don't know why

>>25336625
>but that’s to be expected since it’s a transcript.
why?

>the Left being co-opted by capitalist advertising propaganda.
what?

>>25335524
No he is ABSOLUTELY correct. There isn't a single right wing party in europe that is for European Union. They see it as a threat to their countries autonomy and it is one of the primary fears of these groups that EU becomes simply a conglomerate of federated states with no autonomy.
t. Europoor

>>25336688
>Why
Because at a conference you have less time to elaborate on each point
>What
Adorno argues that the right wing uses propaganda because it lacks internal coherence, and he identifies certain causes within the economic system; today the same thing happens with the left as well, but of course he couldn’t have known that

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>It is the very substance of the matter, just as it was with the Nazis. When the means increasingly become substitutes for aims, one can almost say that, in these extreme right-wing movements, propaganda actually constitutes the substance of politics.
The parallels to Trumps americca today are so clear here that it made me chuckle a bit.

Also reading this I noticed a weak parallel in Adorno's thoughts on the power of concepts/ideologies. In facism you get the rising "demonic character" when "the objective situation has deprived them of substance". With the bugbear of communism, the concept of communism becomes this all encompassing evil in the minds of its ideological opponents (here McCarthyism is an obvious example) precisely because there is no real communist party anywhere in sight. The lack of concreteness brings this intensification in thought.
>>25335447
>But it's a fucking word salad
I can read this perfectly fine and so can the other people in this thread
>just like his book Dialectic of Enlightenment
Not "his"; it was cooperative work by Horkheimer and Adorno. It is a hard book but all of its thesis are clearly expoundable. I like this kind of elitism through writing, it filters the low iqs while raising the level of the readers that are willing to find out. This creates better discussions. Also, that book has one of the most interesting critiques of facism as rising of the self-repressed brutality induced by the civilizational domination of nature.

>>25336736
>self-repressed brutality induced by the civilizational domination of nature.
What?

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>>25336736

>>25336741
Humans become civilized partly through the oppression of nature by what Adorno calls "identity thinking" which reduces the thing in itself to the concept. This reduction is only partial and humans are always doomed to have destructive impulses which go disavowed in society. Facism steps in here by promising the pleasure of the fulfillment of these destructive urges but only by extermination of what is considered the "other" (Jews in the Nazi case). The other is precisely that which is repressed by identity-thinking so the whole thing is a projection. I wont spoonfeed you beyond this point. Read Dialectic of Enlightenment and if you don't understand it listen a podcast or read a book or whatever

It has a lot of good insights into right-wing thought and behaviour, though I find Adorno's lack of intellectual humility a little annoying, his dogmatisms, his insistence on the pathological nature of all rightism, his belief in psychoanalysis

>>25336762
>It has a lot of good insights into right-wing thought and behaviour
Such as?

>>25336762
Yeah so far I have seen no actual arguments, it's all psychologizing. One big long drawn out convoluted glorified circumstantial ad hominem. It's like "you only believe in God because you had a cruel father" on steroids.

when i finished my degree without ever having been assigned any cultural marxists i thought damn my alma mater must blow it's just a satellite campus of a big state uni but then when i actually read some of them i was like no this shit sucks ass they were right not to.

>>25336778
Did you go into this expecting a big debooonking? It literally says in the first paragraph the first page
>I will not attempt to present a theory of right-wing extremism with any claim to comprehensiveness but, rather, I will highlight with some informal observations a few things of which you may not all be aware. It is thus not my intention to invalidate other theoretical interpretations, simply to add a little to what is generally thought and known about these matters.

If all you understood was "psychologizing" and "ad hominem" then I sincerely doubt your reading abilities. I can start spelling his observations to you if you ask nicely

>>25336788
Something touched a nerve. Why are you personally invested in this and clearly upset? This is not how you conduct a discussion.

when stuff doesn't get translated until like 60 years years later it's prob cuz it wasn't that good but somebody decided to pick up the cash on the floor i guess.

This is the audio of the lecture in German and the book in German. Maybe someone bilingual in German and English spots mistranslations or strange translations and can comment on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtRsFPI8E5U
https://annas-archive.gl/md5/737a2c537e07843d323dfa902f2dc975

Great works of intellectual history tend to come from the old guard passing judgment on the present, like a Burckhardt or a Henry Adams, or the vanguard of the future, such as Nietzsche or William James dealing with the contradictions of the present head on. Not from people with huge chips on their shoulders who are too gripped by intellectual hysteria against their subject to really have anything worthwhile to say that could apply to realities external to those realities which their own ideological frameworks have locked them in.

>>25336692
Not exactly, I think chuds are in fact FOR an european union of sorts, just not THE European Union, which they cannot and will not ever be able to conceive of as having their best interests in mind.

>>25336625
>He died before witnessing the Left being co-opted by capitalist advertising propaganda
The victors gave him and his butt buddies a bunch of university sinecures. That never would have happened if the new world order genuinely thought of him or his friends or their ideology as potential threats to their interests either then or in the future.

>>25336791
I don't think there is any way of critiquing your post without you accusing me of "being upset" or "personally invested." It is, of course, difficult to hear that one's ability to read and critique is so poor that it can hardly be described as such.

>>25336825
You're just being silly. "Without claim to comprehensiveness" doesn't really imply that you will not be addressing arguments and instead only look at motives, circumstances, psychology etc. It's just saying the scope will not be great and thorough, whatever that means is open for interpretation. "Informal observations", pretty much the same thing, very vague what that means, could be anything. "Invalidate other theoretical interpretations" is also very vague and open to be interpreted in any number of ways, nothing in that in itself is implying that "other theoretical interpretations" means arguments given by the "right-wing extremists" in question, it could also be points brought up by other critics of "right-wing extremism". Likewise with "simply to add a little", nothing says what this little might be. I think you're putting way more into the text in your greentext than what can be known for certain about it.

https://youtu.be/U3Jm8zF7bJ8?&t=2857

>>25336853
Yes, I agree with everything you said here! What you are dancing around is the fact that you clearly said that there aren't arguments and that "it's all psychologizing" when there clearly are arguments in the form of how the right-wing ideology works at a general and particular level. I'm saying that your critique amounts to nothing and either you are incapable or unwilling to see them.

>>25336883
So far I have only seen "arguments" which are about motive, psychologizing etc, which is basically ad hominem, ie not actual arguments. He's not addressing the ideas held by the right-wing extremists and refuting them, he's making an analysis of why they are behaving a certain way, why they hold certain beliefs, not whether or not those beliefs are true. So that's like being in a debate atheist vs Christian, and the atheist isn't talking about whether God exists, but instead about what nutritional deficiency could possibly have caused the Christian to hallucinate and engage in such irrational behavior as speaking to an invisible person etc.

>>25336750
I never realised Muttley was green. I always thought he was grey. Anyhow, both sides have adopted propaganda out of 'necessity'. This is the Baudrillardian/McCluhan universe now of the mediaverse, the soulless propagation of content without form (the forms being so hyper productive that they seamlessly entwine, the content manufactured after the gramme). Even the classist critique is swallowed up by an avalanche of identio-info hysteria. The body is left out of it. All hail the Gramme

>>25336901
Marxism's "laws" failing to work as they "should have" not once, or twice, but thrice (WW1, WW2, the Cold War) brought the attention of marxists far more to the superstructure than to the base. The question went from "how should we prepare for the world after the collapse of capitalism" to "why did history fail to take its correct course, why did false consciousness prove to be so powerful". Hence the psychologizing tone of marxist analysis.

Being a marxist necessarily entails that you think everyone would have realized the truth of marxism had they were given the opportunity, there is no room for the existence of irrenconcilable conflicts of interests in marxism like there is in chuddy thought.

>>25336915
>there is no room for the existence of irrenconcilable conflicts of interests in marxism
Really? I thought that was pretty central to the whole philosophy, including the idea of dialectic.

>>25336611
False dichotomy

>>25336901
>He's not addressing the ideas held by the right-wing extremists and refuting them
Because he did not set out to do that. Your position is absurd because it denies that you can ever write about the rise and sustenance of ideologies through the social and economic lenses and instead always have to take the propositions and show their falsity. If one is setting out to analyze "Aspects of the new Marxist-Leninist Extremism" it would be absolutely retarded to then start yelling about the author not debunking the ideology. You are incorrect that they aren't arguments. They sure as hell are but not in the framework that you are assuming.

I'm still wondering if you read this because the first page of analyzing the prevailing nature of facism in burgeois classes through their economic concerns should've tipped you off...

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>>25335368 (OP)
>I think this reference to anticipating terror touches on something very central that, as far as I can see, is given far too little attention in the usual views about right-wing extremism, namely the very complex and difficult relationship with the feeling of social catastrophe that prevails here. One might speak of a distortion of Marx’s theory of collapse that takes place in this very crippled and false consciousness. On the one hand, on the rational side of things, they ask, ‘What will happen if there is a big crisis?’ – and that is where these movements are attractive. On the other hand, they also have something in common with the type of manipulated astrology one finds today, which I consider an extremely important and typical socio-psychological symptom, because, in a sense, they want the catastrophe, they feed off apocalyptic fantasies of the kind that, as it happens, could also be found among the Nazi leadership, as documents show.

>If I had to speak psychoanalytically, I would say that, of the forces mobilized here, the appeal to the unconscious desire for disaster, for catastrophe, is by no means the least significant in these movements. But I would add – and I am speaking especially to those of you who are rightly sceptical about any merely psychological interpretation of social and political phenomena – that this behaviour is by no means purely psychologically motivated; it also has an objective basis. Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative but, like Richard Wagner’s Wotan, to say, ‘Do you know what Wotan wants? The end.’ This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise – though not the demise of their own group, as far as possible, the demise of all.
Trvth

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>So these are people who are simultaneously cold, without relationships, strictly technological in their mindset – but also insane in a certain sense, as Himmler was to a prototypical degree. And this strange unity of a delusional system and technological perfection, this seems to be on the rise and once again playing a decisive part in these movements.
lmao, yeah

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>The only thing – I will jump to this now, because I think it is one of the most crucial aspects of how to resist this movement – the only thing that really strikes me as effective is to warn the potential followers of right-wing extremism about its own consequences, to convey to them that this politics will inevitably lead its own followers to their doom too, and that this doom was part of it from the outset, just as Hitler started saying, at an early stage, ‘Then I’d rather put a bullet in my head’, and then repeated the claim at every opportunity. So if one is serious about opposing these things, one must refer to the central interests of those who are targeted by the propaganda. This applies especially to young people, whom one must warn about every kind of drill, about the restriction of their privacy and their lifestyle. And one must warn them about the cult of a so-called order that does not answer to reason, especially the concept of discipline, which is presented as an end in itself, without anyone asking ‘Discipline for what?’ And obviously the fetishization of everything military expressed in such lovely phrases as ‘soldierly man’ [der soldatische Mensch] belongs in this context.
Self-destructive drive yeah, you do see people who were in the alt-right chill a bit when they realize something like this I think, but the heavy military aspect he's talking about would've probably made more sense in Germany in the context of the time.

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>A further difference one must keep in mind is that of political intertwinement. Today, Germany is not a political subject in anything like the way it was in the Weimar period. There is even a risk that precisely this movement might remove Germany from world politics, from the tendency of world politics as such, and completely provincialize it. On the one hand, this places far greater real-world restrictions on such a politics, unless other and far more powerful countries also experience a triumph of right-wing extremism. On the other hand, that very fact stirs up anger. And this anger is likely to be vented especially in what one calls the ‘cultural sector’. I would therefore argue – to say nothing about the direct interests that a cultured person has in these matters – that, from the political perspective too, the symptoms of reactionary culture and forced provincialization must be observed with particular vigilance, because this – simply because these movements have no room for manoeuvre in foreign policy terms – is the area in which they can rage most and will surely try and try even more to rage.
Bingo. Also see the emerging split between new pan-European rightists and what they negatively call right-wing petty nationalists.

>>25337119
fag

>>25337323
The latter is just called tribalism

>Something that belongs in the same context is the ‘salami method’, as some term it with a flippant German expression – that is, cutting off a piece from a complex, then another and then another. So, for example, using the pseudo-scientific pedantry peculiar to these movements, they cast doubt on the number of murdered Jews. And first they say, ‘Well, it wasn’t six million, only five and a half’, and from that point it soon becomes dubious whether any were murdered at all, and finally things are presented as if it had actually been the other way around. So I think that one should view these matters with particular vigilance.
It is very funny to read Adorno saying this in '67 when I remember that one fake historian playing exactly the game described here on Joe Rogan

>>25337473
Can you please stop samefagging your terrible thread? If you want to shill this worldview figure out a way to make us give a shit about it first. None of this fits with my understanding of the world and you've given me no reason to think my understanding is flawed in a way that Adorno's ideas could correct. Fucking hell.

>>25337473
The Canadians just invented an ethnic genocide against Indian schoolchildren out of thin air a few years ago, a bunch of hate crimes were committed against churches as a result, and there were multiple calls to make questioning it illegal with direct comparisons to holocaust laws as justifications. All this, without a single body in an alleged mass grave site having been found. And all because it gives shitlibs a few more whiffs of that sweet righteous indignation in the heat of the moment.

An approach of total agnosticism to shitlib history that you have not directly researched via primary sources is perfectly healthy, especially if it's history they use to justify the present exercise of power.

>>25337473
In other words,
>If a small amount of criticism and scrutiny is permitted, it could tear down our assertions. Therefore, we must be vigilant against any criticism whatsoever -- if it comes from the wrong people.
Adorno was never, and I repeat never, not a duplicitous sophist.

i was just listening to a book and when it talked about postmodernism and how that destroyed all grand narratives it had a good point when it said there is in fact one narrative left and that is anti-racism and diversity.

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Adorno confirmed weak mind.

>>25337517
"Postmodernism destroyed grand narratives" is a narrative and it is rather grand.

>>25337521
yeah the truth is it did not. the grand narratives just look different now.