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Friends,
As you might know if you listen to the show, I’ve had a continuous but shaky relationship with Marxism.
When I really discovered it, I was in college (surprise!) where plenty of people discover it. It didn’t come through a professor or a course, it was just sort of in the air. A strange collection of thinkers kept wandering into the discussion: the Frankfurt School.
The Frankfurt School, if you don’t know is the group of philosophers – most notably Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer (although other adjacent philosophers like Walter Benjamin come into the orbit as well) – who in the first half of the 20th century entered into wide-ranging discussions and projects that combined Marxism with cultural studies to popularize what we now call critical theory.
I was fascinated by them, their inspiring, bizarre, often cryptic strivings to treat the world with a sort of poetic thinking. For them, nothing was not worthy of examination. Everything deserved to be evaluated in relation to to the conditions and the psyche of labor.
These thinkers weren’t universally loved by Marxists of course. Many Marxists as well socialists I knew disliked theory all together. They were instead intent of revolution without thought. seemed much worse to me.
At the same time, it felt some of that anti-culture tension appeared the work of the Frankfurt School philosophers themselves, as if everything that was not based in political economy was subjected to a ruthless slant by which it would roll away, downhill. Into a pit of disregard and disdain.
Over time, I listened to a lot of new voices. many inspired by Marx and the Frankfurt School. Contemporaries, peers, and teachers, all inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School. Heather Berg, Srećko Horvat, my pals from Chapo Trap House, and more… I got so much out of our interactions, and felt a subsequent loosening up of a certain view of Marxism and the Frankfurt School.
Of course there is plenty that doesn’t connect squarely with my spiritual life. In fact, many people who share some of the same spiritual beliefs as me are terrified of Marxism, they view it as the great enemy. To make matters worse, In the years since that debate, a continuing drumbeat – that the marxists are radicals coming to destroy the world and enslave the mind to a certain form of political economy – has gotten louder and louder. So loud, in fact, that not much can be heard above the beat of that drum.
Everything is lumped in or removed from connection to Marxism, depending on which side you take.
Marxists are radicals who hate everything you love, or the only hope.
It’s tricky stuff. Some true, some false, most exaggerated, so I asked intellectual historian, A.J.A. WOODS , author of the excellent and very readable The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the Weston to the show to discuss all this.
In their book, A.J.A. traces the great movement of blaming everything good and bad – from trans liberation to sexual abuse, from religious plurality to totalizing Satanism, from fighting state violence to supporting gulags – on something called cultural Marxism.
If it sounds incoherent, that’s because coherence is not really the point. The illusion of coherence is. And the illusion is created by noise and density.
I loved talking with A.J.A., and I hope this conversation inspires you to rethink or revisit the Frankfurt School and Marxist intellectuals.
CH
Conner Habib 
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