Palantir Goes to the Frankfurt School

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Marx was an anti-semite. Why is he still taken seriously when "right-wing"[0] thinkers can be dismissed for "ties" to anti-semitism?

Hint: The answer is in Marcuse. His theory of "repressive tolerance" holds that freedom of expression can only be afforded to the left. Right-wing (and perhaps insufficiently left-wing) voices and opinions must be quashed if we are to bring about a fair society

(And, incidentally, with that pesky Constitution -- or UDHR, or other foundational document establishing freedom of expression as a universal right -- getting in the way, the best way to silence your critics is to discredit them.)

This is not a conspiracy theory because the supposed conspirators were very clear and public about what they intended to do.

[0] At this point, you may as well just say "counter-revolutionaries" or "wreckers" for all the meaning "right-wing" (or "alt-right") has in 2020. It's not an indictment of specific opinions, it's a way to shut down political opponents by associating them with a shadowy network of neo-Nazis. Itself a kind of conspiratorial thinking, but oh right, I forgot, conspiracy theories are exclusively a right-wing phenomenon. Because see above about Marcuse.

>Hint: The answer is in Marcuse. His theory of "repressive tolerance" holds that freedom of expression can only be afforded to the left. Right-wing (and perhaps insufficiently left-wing) voices and opinions must be quashed if we are to bring about a fair society

I cite Repressive Tolerance a lot, and it's best to read it as a directly political rather than theoretical text. I also find some of his reasoning quite convincing. Nevertheless, although Marcuse and Popper were academic enemies of sorts, the concept gets a look-in through Popper's paradox of tolerance. Marcuse goes into quite some detail surrounding the justifications and function (at least in his time) of the "free speech principle". Marcuse's argument for censorship is based entirely around his assumption that there is limited or little capacity for rational discourse in the public sphere. The title, as with the other two entries in the book, refers to the idea that tolerance itself contains an element of repression - not that we should be repressively tolerant.

Marcuse was also writing in the context of the state (and the establishment around it) having no hope of adopting truly emancipatory goals. This is somewhat under question today, at least more than it was in the 60s. Besides this, there are quite a few good philosophical arguments for the regulation of speech or even against a free speech principle as a whole. I'd be happy to share them (some are linked in some recent comments of mine here.) - I think Marcuse was right on the money in terms of his diagnosis. His prescription is debatable.

Finally, what is attributed to Marcuse and the Frankfurt School as a whole tends not to be based around the one essay which he wrote for a book on concepts of tolerance, but rather something much more abstract and dark: that the School existed to destroy Western civilization through progressive ideology. This is not only a shaky charge, but it has little to do with Marcuse. The right-wing attacks on the School today from the pundits mentioned earlier in this thread actually focus much more on Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, and even non-School thinkers like Gramsci.

And the claims that Marx was an anti-semite are almost comically overblown; there's plenty of scholarly work on this topic from both within and outside Marxism.

> Marx was an anti-semite. Why is he still taken seriously when "right-wing"[0] thinkers can be dismissed for "ties" to anti-semitism?

Perhaps I am uninformed, how could Marx be an anti-semite? He was ethnically Jewish.

> Just that the people who spread the views beyond just the "anti-Semites and white nationalists" seem to be both themselves.

Another thing: if the far left bullies moderates and center-rightists into saying the sky is green, so that the only people left with the guts to claim that the sky is blue are neo-Nazis and KKK members (who have nothing to lose by doing so anyway), does that make the sky any less blue? Does it justify a ban on claiming that the sky is blue? Does it justify dismissal of anyone who believes that the sky is blue as part of a sinister right-wing conspiracy?

This isn't just theoretical. Hollywood has produced a string of lazily written, but "woke" themed movies, allowing the directors and producers some form of plausible deniability. They can merely claim that negative opinions of their films are "linked" to racists and misogynists, and any bad word of mouth about the movie can thus be shut down. They can also expect only positive press coverage from then on out.

Less trivially, recently a couple of psychologists published a study that suggested there was no evidence of a racial disparity on fatal police shootings -- the race of neither the officer nor the civilian mattered in a statistically significant way to the probability of getting killed. They were forced to retract their study after it became "linked" to conservative commentators and BLM activists started calling for their heads. Assuming the study's methodology and results were sound, why should they be forced to retract it? Isn't scholarship about finding the truth no matter whose feathers it ruffles? I suppose when it ruffled the Church's feathers that was okay, but when it ruffles the Party Commissar's feathers, that's an entirely different kettle of fish?

Oh right. Foucault. There's no such thing as truth. The only thing the findings of any scientific inquiry can meaningfully accomplish is to bolster and reinforce this or that power structure. It's almost as if science itself is being undermined... but as Claudia "I can totally cite you convincing reasons why opinions that deviate too strongly from my own should be censored" Werner assures me below, the idea that Marxist philosophers are out to destroy Western civilization and all its boons is just a vague sinister conspiracy theory from the fevered imaginings of the far, far right...