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No, they didn't come from the Frankfurt school AFAIK, and they're also not bogeymen. They are both components of critical theory though, which as a discipline w

No, they didn't come from the Frankfurt school AFAIK, and they're also not bogeymen. They are both components of critical theory though, which as a discipline was created by the Frankfurt School; obviously there have been sociologists since who have expanded from the initial ideas, but they're critical theorists, not Maoists. The basic attitude of looking for dialectical conflicts and understanding how they affect us is textbook Marx or Hegel. There will, of course, be elements of that in Mao's writing too, because he was a Marxist. It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream and subject to lay analysis, because to properly understand things like 'white supremacy' in a critical context, you need some background in the philosophy and sociology involved. Without that, it just looks like 'all white people are inherently bad', which it isn't. Both liberals and conservatives get this wrong, so what starts out as an interesting academic topic looking at human social systems ends up as a political football.

zozbot234 5y ago
> It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream I sympathize. But the philosophy and sociology behind it all are again not very refined, much less apt to devise good responses that might otherwise mitigate whatever concerns or even 'conflicts' come up in the analysis. The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  > The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to. That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. To take the "white supremacy" thing as an example, one of the key points is that the US transitioned from actual racist policy (slavery, redlining, segregation etc), to race-neutral policy, and race-neutral policy does not undo the damage that racist policy causes to black people's economic and social conditions. That does not translate to "white people bad, black people good" when presented without solutions; it describes a situation that is not essentialised at all to people's ethnicity, but came about as a product of historical dynamics between two racial groups and their economic and political interests (slavery existed for economic gain of plantation-owners, after all). You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership to be able to interpret this stuff correctly, and I don't see that happening in many analyses, including your own. This leads to both the conservative interpretation of "CRT is about white people being inherently bad" and the liberal interpretation of "as a white person, I should feel guilty for the suffering of black people". These are both bad interpretations; the whole problem/solution model lies at the policy level.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. ... You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership Social systems can persist for generations. Your whole argument would lead us to think that, e.g. there's nothing wrong with blaming detrimental aspects of Black culture as the only relevant causal factor behind the continued poverty and social marginalization of minorities in the U.S., but this is often regarded by many as being little different from showing overt hostility to Black people themselves. There's quite simply no shared consensus over what counts as an 'essentialised' vs. a properly nuanced analysis - a narrative focusing on historical dynamics and purported political interests can very much be so coarse and unsupported by evidence as to be quite 'essentialised' in practice. Arguably, this might describe much of what passes for scholarship in the 'critical' tradition, and the unrelenting, thoroughly naïve focus on facile narratives of "liberation from oppression" does not exactly help matters.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Blaming black culture for the continuation of black struggles is incorrect because it reverses the causality. Assuming by "detrimental aspects of Black culture" you mean the usual conservative talking points of gangs, rap, drugs etc - these things are driven by poverty, not the other way around. Eastern Europe is home to many of these afflictions for reasons of poverty as well; same with "chav" culture in the UK - and both of these cultural groups are white. The point of origin of these issues is the ghettoisation of black people by redlining combined with the relative lack of wealth caused by slavery and subsequent discrimination; when you're stuck areas of little economic opportunity, gangs, impulsivity, violence and drug addiction are inevitable regardless of who is the victim. You can't really bootstrap a healthy economy from within a poor one. To prove my point, look at Detroit - when it was a hub of car manufacturing (ie, healthy industry) it was a hub of economic productivity. When all the jobs left it collapsed. It was a majority-black city at both of these points; poverty was the only difference. Thus, the people in this cycle can be said to be oppressed by their circumstances (not, importantly, other people); the systemic approach would be to try to lift these people out of poverty through policy-based interventions in order to liberate them from their dire circumstances. The catchphrase of critical theory is that the aim is "liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". It is both coherent and a useful and pragmatic political approach to helping people get out of oppressive circumstances.

zozbot234 5y ago

> It's annoying that these topics have become mainstream I sympathize. But the philosophy and sociology behind it all are again not very refined, much less apt to devise good responses that might otherwise mitigate whatever concerns or even 'conflicts' come up in the analysis. The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to.

beaconstudios 5y ago
> The whole thing really boils down to "all X are inherently bad" because that's what all 'criticism' shorn of potential solutions boils down to. That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. To take the "white supremacy" thing as an example, one of the key points is that the US transitioned from actual racist policy (slavery, redlining, segregation etc), to race-neutral policy, and race-neutral policy does not undo the damage that racist policy causes to black people's economic and social conditions. That does not translate to "white people bad, black people good" when presented without solutions; it describes a situation that is not essentialised at all to people's ethnicity, but came about as a product of historical dynamics between two racial groups and their economic and political interests (slavery existed for economic gain of plantation-owners, after all). You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership to be able to interpret this stuff correctly, and I don't see that happening in many analyses, including your own. This leads to both the conservative interpretation of "CRT is about white people being inherently bad" and the liberal interpretation of "as a white person, I should feel guilty for the suffering of black people". These are both bad interpretations; the whole problem/solution model lies at the policy level.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  > That's not true, because critical theory is about social systems, not essential properties of human beings. ... You have to be able to separate group conflict from group membership Social systems can persist for generations. Your whole argument would lead us to think that, e.g. there's nothing wrong with blaming detrimental aspects of Black culture as the only relevant causal factor behind the continued poverty and social marginalization of minorities in the U.S., but this is often regarded by many as being little different from showing overt hostility to Black people themselves. There's quite simply no shared consensus over what counts as an 'essentialised' vs. a properly nuanced analysis - a narrative focusing on historical dynamics and purported political interests can very much be so coarse and unsupported by evidence as to be quite 'essentialised' in practice. Arguably, this might describe much of what passes for scholarship in the 'critical' tradition, and the unrelenting, thoroughly naïve focus on facile narratives of "liberation from oppression" does not exactly help matters.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Blaming black culture for the continuation of black struggles is incorrect because it reverses the causality. Assuming by "detrimental aspects of Black culture" you mean the usual conservative talking points of gangs, rap, drugs etc - these things are driven by poverty, not the other way around. Eastern Europe is home to many of these afflictions for reasons of poverty as well; same with "chav" culture in the UK - and both of these cultural groups are white. The point of origin of these issues is the ghettoisation of black people by redlining combined with the relative lack of wealth caused by slavery and subsequent discrimination; when you're stuck areas of little economic opportunity, gangs, impulsivity, violence and drug addiction are inevitable regardless of who is the victim. You can't really bootstrap a healthy economy from within a poor one. To prove my point, look at Detroit - when it was a hub of car manufacturing (ie, healthy industry) it was a hub of economic productivity. When all the jobs left it collapsed. It was a majority-black city at both of these points; poverty was the only difference. Thus, the people in this cycle can be said to be oppressed by their circumstances (not, importantly, other people); the systemic approach would be to try to lift these people out of poverty through policy-based interventions in order to liberate them from their dire circumstances. The catchphrase of critical theory is that the aim is "liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them". It is both coherent and a useful and pragmatic political approach to helping people get out of oppressive circumstances.