So I'm looking at my bookshelf now and I'm thinking you'd probably also find Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han interesting.

Yeah, problem is a lot of my reading on propaganda and communication was before I de-wormed myself of the 'communism bad' , so I don't have too much else to offer other than lib stuff. I think anything modern you can find on Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony would probably be the most useful for you.

Oh, okay, I wasn't sure if you that would work for you or not. Then I would say Inventing Reality and Manufacturing Consent would be the two big ones. I haven't found any specific Gramsci books to recommend, I'm afraid. I bought Volume 1 of the Prison Notebooks and found them to be more like notes to self that lacked a lot of context. A bit much for me. If you find something good please pass it along. If you're willing to move away from strictly ML aspect you may find Dark Money by Jane Mayer interesting in which it explores how the Koch brothers and (other billionaires) shoved their dollars and views into every aspect of USian life, from media to education.

Last two things, on the topic of Community Building, check out work by Mark Lakeman.

Badass democracy - reclaiming the public commons: Mark Lakeman at TEDxSantaCruz - YouTube

How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village - YouTube

Personally I'd be putting it with the philosophy books, hands down. But you're right to ask where it best fits between those two categories.

Herbert Marcuse was generally pretty ant-Soviet and started the trend of scholars deriding the proletariat in America, which I always found to be pretty bad.

Very much so but this goes right to the sorta second wave of then-leaders of Frankfurt School, specifically Horkheimer and Adorno, in the era post Walter Benjamin and Erich Fromm et al. Horkheimer worked very hard to suppress mentions of things like class conflict in what other Frankfurt School theorists would publish in order to efface the materialist underpinning of Marx-inspired analysis and it's no coincidence that the Frankfurt School retreated into really pretty sordid cultural critique imo and there's an argument that Horkheimer could have actually intervened to rescue Walter Benjamin from the fascists but decided to leave him to his fate, although the primary source is an academic work in German so I haven't been able to verify this directly myself.

Tbh that second wave of the Frankfurt School in exile was extremely disdainful of the proletariat and of Marx while they actively courted the bourgeoisie by adopting a pseudo-Marxist revisionist angle.

What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!).

—Lenin, The State and Revolution

And yes, it seems to be in relation to Goerg Lukacs' humanism, not Raya Dunyayevskaya's.

Ah, not so bad then.

I don't know how to think of Deleuze and Guatarri.

Relatable lol.

D&G has gotta be some of the toughest of the Frankfurt School theorists and their magnum opus, Anti-Oedipus (which Capitalism and Schizophrenia is one part of) is a direct response to Lacan so if you want to truly get yourself right across D&G then you really have to start from Lacan.

I've avoided them because they seem to have coming from the psycho-analysis tradtion and isn't that academic tradition basically bunk?

Yeah, it is and yeah, it is. But I think it's important to be cautious about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Freud gets derided a lot, especially from psychology (it turns out the call was coming from inside the house the whole time 😱😱) but a whole lot of that is due to them wanting to position psychology as a much harder science than arguably it is, or ever could be, and so they use Freud as a whipping boy; "Look at how scientific we are, we even denounce the forefather of psychology for being insufficiently scientific!!"

Psychology as a discipline is always frantically trying to adorn itself with anything that confers it with the aura of being scientific when tbh it's just desperate to be something more like biology than it manages to be but also less like sociology which it loathes and which it cannot acknowledge how proximal it is to it.

If you contrast how contemporary psychology relates to Freud vs how it relates to BF Skinner, it says a lot. Skinner made some major contributions to psychology at the time but a lot of his contributions are have been superceded, if not completely disproven by none other than the man, the myth, the self-mummyfying Noam Chomsky just about as soon as Skinner dropped his theory on linguistic development. Sure, Skinner was much more scientific than Freud was but that was as much a product of his time as anything else, and what really gets overlooked is that Freud too made major contributions to psychology in his own time. (There's also a massive discussion about the sociology of scientific knowledge which I'm just going to completely sidestep or otherwise I'm going to write forever and nobody wants that. Also it's bizarre because I wrote a comment somewhere completely different on Hexbear on a subject entirely unrelated and I was channeling the spirit of Harry Collins, a big figure in SSK, just before. How odd.)

Anyway, what I'm driving at is that while Freud was wrong about plenty that doesn't mean that he was wrong about everything or that his conclusions were not valuable. For example, he revolutionised psychology by asserting that the pathology a patient was experiencing could be resolved internally by the patient. Prior to Freud, mental illness was basically considered to be a product of things like "poor moral character" and shit like that, with the solution being that you just beat or torture the patient until they straighten up and fly right, or you just consign them to the asylum forever.

(I'm going to try and rein myself in a bit but there's another tangent I'm about to spiral off on about the earliest reform attempts of the asylum and the role of Richard Paternoster, who was a colourful character by all reports, and how his incarceration in a mental asylum is a perfect example of the stuff Foucault discussed.)

But perhaps surprisingly, you'd think that psychology would have surpassed psychoanalysis and yet comparative analysis between CBT, the gold standard for psychosocial treatment, and psychoanalysis shows roughly equivalent outcomes. So basically you have a pseudoscientific approach to, like, dream analysis and psychosexual development and whatever but there's indications that it's about as effective as the most highly regarded and widely celebrated treatment method in psychology today.

All of this is to say that very faulty reasoning can still arrive at something useful.

And I think that's what the Frankfurt School does - it isn't just an effort to extend or defend psychoanalysis, it's something that gets drawn upon conceptually as an influence. Think like the way that Hegel is to Marx - there are things in Hegel that no materialist would agree with but Marx drew a lot of inspiration from Hegel despite that fact. And although Marx was a Young Hegelian, Marx didn't just go on to try and extend Hegel's philosophy in his writings but instead he took what was useful, applied what he thought was most relevant, and discarded the rest.

Once upon a time, when I was younger, I picked up Leviathan by Hobbes. I'm sure you know the only bit that people ever quote from him - that life, in the state of nature, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short. I was naïve about reading Hobbes at the time and I disregarded what he had to say because the foundation that he developed his political philosophy from was so false that I found it to be objectionable. The thing is though, he wasn't writing as a historian or an anthropologist, he was writing to elaborate on a (then) modern political philosophy. Another more common reason why Hobbes gets dismissed out of hand is because what he argues for, what his Leviathan represents, is essentially totalitarian in nature.

But although I strongly disagree with his conclusions and his muthologising or speculation about humans prior to the advent of "civilisation", there are still important ideas in Leviathan - there are valuable observations and arguments and, equally so, there are observations and arguments he makes that are important to understand in order to refute the foundations of liberalism.

Learn from my mistake. You don't have to agree with an author to read them, and you don't have to agree with the basis of their argument nor even its conclusion to find useful things within it. That was what I was gently encouraging you to take away from my criticisms of McLuhan - his conclusions are crackpot-tier and I'd argue a product of his political and religious convictions but he still made important observations and arguments despite starting from a bad place (imo) and ending up with bizarre fanciful conclusions (imo).

On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses is a really great read. You can look up the chapters as essays individually but I think collectively they shine a bright light on how to navigate ideological reproduction, class struggle and the superstructure in relation to each other. Ideology and ideological state apparatuses the essay in particular you would really like I think