Marcuse; Frankfurt School

[Stephen Colbert]

Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pzfy2izu44&feature=player_embedded#!

He seems to be a very smart and well spoken man. I enjoyed these youtube videos.

Thoughts on his alternative views/Neo-marxian perspectives?

[Buffalo Souljah]

Marcuse is certainly interesting, and I think worth taking seriously. We've had some discussions on him, as well as the Frankfurt School in general in both the Theory and Philosophy forums, which I will find links to later today.

[Fietsketting]

I enjoyed his work, have some on my bookshelves as well.

An Essay on Liberation was qreat imo.


Marcuse, Herbert. An Essay on Liberation
Pp x, 91. Boston: Beacon Press,1969. Published in 1969 in the midst of the ferment of popular uprisings and movements across the globe, An Essay on Liberation written by the late Herbert Marcuse, a member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and a mentor of contemporary political activists and critical theorists such as Angela Davis and Douglas Kellner, explores a number of crucial terrains -- material, cultural, political -- and poses a number of engaging questions that require the attention of those currently attempting to rebuild Left movements and critical analysis.
In the introduction to his essay, Marcuse warns against the bureaucratic and repressive state formations of the Soviet socialist experiment and posits a provocative query, in the masculinist language of the day, which remains a pressing challenge to those on the Left. Marcuse submits, "The question is no longer: how can the individual satisfy his own needs withoug hurting others, but rather: how can he satisfy his needs without hurting himself, without reproducing, through his aspirations and satisfactions, his dependence on an exploitative apparatus which, in satisfying his needs, perpetuates his servitude?" (4). What is at the root of Marcuse's statement is the recognition that a market economic system reliant upon the cycle of production and consumption (i.e. supply and demand) in order to operate, necessitates the creation, socialization, and reproduction of the psychological basis for continuous consumption. Thus contemporary market identities are highly shaped by the forces of consumption, backed by media-advertising, educational, and social institutions that cooperate to create avid consumers that drive the profit-driven, capitalist, market economy. Such a statement invites interrogation beyond traditional Left emphasis on political economy, into the the convoluted arenas of aesthetics, desire, culture, and psychology.
Marcuse does not merely reveal new terrains of struggle and inquiry without himself entering into the fray. In the next chapter, entitled "A Biological Foundation for Socialism?", Marcuse further elaborates on his earlier remarks.

The so-called consumer economy and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinaly and agressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling, and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people... has become a "biological" need... The second nature of man thus militates against any change that would disrupt and perhaps even abolish this dependence of man on a market ever more densely filled with merchandise -- abolish his existence as a consumer consuming himself in buying and selling. The needs generated by this system are thus eminently stabilizing, conservative needs: the counterrevolution anchored in the instinctual structure (11). Corporate capitalism, in Marcuse's argument, creates the needs within human beings by which the purchase and use (consumption) of technology and commodities becomes a necessary component of human "actualization." He argues that the frustration and aggression arising from life in capitalist civilization -- with its overt and subtle forms of exploitation, oppression, and regimentation -- finds its outlet through the consumption of commodities. Values such as self-determination are re-defined in terms of the perceived control and autonomous use of commodities as well as the freedoms within constraints that become naturalized as part of the capitalist social order. Marcuse thus radically calls into question the validity of happiness in capitalist civilization, arguing for objective criteria beyond socially constructed subjective emotion. The pervasiveness of consumer identities and its conservative and counterrevolutionary consequences becomes one of the impediments for the revolutionizing of the working class. Radical working class consciousness becomes effectively obstructed as long as the consumption-based needs and identities of human beings remain intact and psycho-biologically connected to the maintenance of the capitalist status quo. Liberation, therefore, entails the subversion of the psychological and socialized attachment to commodity consumption, and the re-envisioning and redefinition of new values and needs emancipated from the standardized pleasure, status, and symbols which reproduce the contemporary capitalist political-economic system.

[Red Commissar]

I haven't heard of him before. Does he fall into the same group of leftists that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s?

[x359594]

...Does he fall into the same group of leftists that came to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s?

More or less. He was a refugee from Hitler who immigrated to the US and ultimately secured a teaching position at the University of California, San Diego. Marcuse was singled out for attacks by then Governor Ronald Reagan and the arch-reactionary Superintendent of Public Education Max Rafferty as evidence of Marxist subversion and communist infiltration of California's college campuses.

I too very much liked his An Essay on Liberation as well as Counter-revolution and Revolt. But the books that made his name in the US are One Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization, the latter work drawing on Freud to buttress Marx's critique of capitalist society.

[Buffalo Souljah]

Check out these:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-rabid-anti-t132248/index.html
http://www.revleft.com/vb/extent-revision-acceptable-t134086/index.html

and also this thread:
http://www.revleft.com/vb/marcuse-t132925/index.html

[S.Artesian]

Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pzfy2izu44&feature=player_embedded#!

He seems to be a very smart and well spoken man. I enjoyed these youtube videos.

Thoughts on his alternative views/Neo-marxian perspectives?


Yes, he was. I met him and corresponded with him for awhile. IMO, his best book is Reason and Revolution in which he explores Hegel's dialectic, and Marx's "extraction" of the rational kernel, the rise of social theory.

Now that's kind of damning the man with praise as that book was written in 1941, and he wrote for many years after that. Eros and Civilization is good, but I thought One Dimensional Man was just awful, actually reinforcing what it thought it was criticizing-- the notion that capitalism was able to conquer its own limitations.

In that regard, the book reminded me of nothing so much as the books we get during the peak of a wave of capitalist prosperity, about how "this time is different, this time we've conquered the business cycle, this time there won't be any recession," all of which are our best indicators that prosperity is about to end, and this time is no different than any other time, except it might be worse.

Anyway, he was very bright, very animated, great to argue with-- but his Marxism was more, or less, than just not very good. It wasn't Marxism.

[Thirsty Crow]

Y
Anyway, he was very bright, very animated, great to argue with-- but his Marxism was more, or less, than just not very good. It wasn't Marxism.
Can you explain?
Does it have something to do that Marcuse was a mamber of a generation which completely cut off from the class struggle?

[S.Artesian]

Can you explain?
Does it have something to do that Marcuse was a mamber of a generation which completely cut off from the class struggle?

Been a long time since I've read Marcuse-- at least 20 years, and over 40 for One Dimensional Man, which I think is an awful book, but I think I can explain.

It's not at all, IMO that Marcus was completely cut off from class struggle, certainly his generation was not. Marcuse was born in 1898, puts him at 21 years old during the revolutionary struggle of 1919, and he participated in that struggle, and also I believe in 1921 and 1923 struggles.

I think he was convinced, after WW2, that capitalism had conquered scarcity and had so made the commodity both the vehicle, and the object, of deep psychological needs, of libido and aggression, that individuals and whole classes could not distinguish their needs from those needs supplied by, determined by, and satisfied by this "sexual" fetishism of commodities.

Consequently, all "hope" in Marcuse's scheme for resistance to capital was to be found in the margins, among the outsiders. And as theoreticians are inclined to do, he interpreted all such resistance and revolt as being the revolt of "outsiders" and thus confirming his theory. So the black struggle in the US was the struggle of "outsiders" who couldn't gain admission to the system. And the struggle of the Vietnamese was that of outsiders.

Of course, neither the African-American struggle, nor that of the Vietnamese was in any way shape of form outside the framework of capitalist reproduction. The struggle of African-Americans was triggered by massive changes in the relations of agricultural production in the South, and the movement of African-Americans into the cities, into factory employment which made Jim Crow obsolete, and a burden.

Nevertheless, for Marcuse, capitalism had conquered, more or less, its limitations in that it could abolish scarcity and that class that historically opposed capital, had now introjected the needs of capital into itself and expressed them as its own needs.

That, to say the least is not, Marxism. And it isn't even a good analysis of what went on in capitalism in the post 1945 period. Capitalism certainly does maintain scarcity, precisely as it overproduces itself as capital. What Marcuse thought was a permanent condition was a post world war stabilization and restoration of rates of profit built on the bones of millions who were turned into ash. By 1970, profit rates peaked and began their decline and Marcuse's analysis was shown to be the real "one-dimensional" man in the game.

[bricolage]

I don't think Marcuse was an isolated example of this, it was a consistent trend along a lot of theorists of the time ranging from the Frankfurt School to the Situationists to Bookchin to Foucault and so on. Reading Bookchin for example he talks of how struggles has shifted from demands for survival to demands for life which at the very least is a Eurocentric perspective, beyond that it doesn't even really fit lots of Europe and was probably shattered by the return of naked class struggle in the late 1960s onwards. This assumption that capitalism has evolved past scarcity lead to a re-conceptualisation of struggle whereby the working class was no longer the key agent of social change. With this in mind and the working class largely perceived as 'reactionary' (sexist, racist,etc) the focus, largely cemented by the New Left, shifted to students, minorities and so forth.
I think there is also another factor to take into consideration here that most of the work having been written prior to May 68, Hot Autumn, Winter of Discontent (I use European examples as these were European theorists) were written in an intense period of defeat whereby the only discourse of class struggle was the bankrupt one being propogated by the various Stalinist inclinations. With this in mind I can see why many would move away from such a societal theorisation.