Marcuse is best known as part of the Frankfurt School of "critical theory", which was known for its usage of both Marxist and Freudian analysis in analyzing problems of society. Marcuse understood himself as a Marxist, but he was apparently not formally affiliated with any party after leaving the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) after the suppression of the 1919 militant workers movement by an SPD government.
But besides Freud and Marx, Marcuse had other major intellectual influences, Hegel (1770-1831) being a major one. Marcuse's enthusiasm for Hegelian thinking, described in some detail in his 1939 book Reason and Revolution itself marked him as departing from orthodox Soviet-line Marxism, which de-emphasized the significance of Hegel's influence on Marx and Engels. Marcuse studied directly with the Christian philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), whose outspoken support of the NSDAP (Nazi Party) during the Third Reich remains a serious blot on his reputation, although he left the NSDAP and rejected their approach as early as 1937. Heidegger is considered a founder of the phenomenology school of thought, which was very influential on existentialism, with which is associated. Less well known is the influence on Marcuse of the Christian mystical philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), also a founder of phenomenology.
In his 1967 lecture, "The End of Utopia", the title refers to the organizing idea of the speech, that the use of utopia historically had been more a way to criticize existing conditions than to argue the immediate possibility of achieving the utopian state. But he argues that the productive powers of the modern economy have achieved the state that makes the achievement of what had previous been considered a utopian ideal, the end of "alienated" labor a real possibility. The economic potential, organized under a mostly-undefined brand of socialism, would provide adequately for the basic needs of the population of the economically advanced countries while allowing for a reduction in hours of labor and of waste. As he puts it, "All the material and intellectual forces which could be put to work for the realization of a free society are at hand." (Shapiro/Weber translation)
Marcuse was very aware of relative degrees of freedom, and clearly understood the differences between capitalist democracy (aka, "bourgeois democracy") and various forms of dictatorship. And most students in Berlin, surrounded by East Germany, also had a good idea of the distinction. But Marcuse also drew heavily on Freud's idea, described particularly in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that the increasing development of civilization was bringing with it an intensification of feelings of guilt, and with it unhappiness and an increased tendency toward human violence and destructiveness. Even in the "affluent society", there were things to be genuinely unhappy about.
As Marcuse described his concept of the end of Utopia to the students in Berlin (Shapiro/Weber translation):
The abolition of poverty and misery is possible in the sense I have described, as are the abolition of alienated labor and the abolition of what I have called "surplus repression." Even in bourgeois economics there is scarcely a serious scientist or investigator who would deny that the abolition of hunger and of misery is possible with the productive forces that already exist technically and that what is happening today must be attributed to the global politics of a repressive society. But although we are in agreement on this we are still not sufficiently clear about the implication of this technical possibility for the abolition of poverty, of misery, and of labor. The implication is that these historical possibilities must be conceived in forms that signify a break rather than a continuity with previous history, its negation rather than its positive continuation, difference rather than progress. They signify the liberation of a dimension of human existence this side of the material basis, the transformation of needs. [my emphasis]Read superficially, Marcuse's concept of people developing new needs could be read as the aspiration to create what Che Guevara in those days called the "new man". We would probably call it "the new person" today. Although I'm sure there are those who would suggest that a dramatic transformation of men would be sufficient. Guevara was hardly the first to suggest such a concept. Nor was he the first to be disappointed in the prospects of achieveing it.
But Marcuse wasn't just adopting a superficial slogan. Here again he was relying on psychoanlytic concepts that had shown how social requirements are transformed into personal needs in the process of growth and socialization via the mechanisms of the ego and superego. He doesn't seem to have been operating on a belief that the id, the portion of the mental software that psychoanalysis understands as being the source of the basic biological drives, would be transformed into a tamer homo sapien. But when it came to the effects of marketing and advertising to create ever-growing consumer needs that produced a great deal of products that had little or nothing to do with basic needs or requirements for a happy life, creating a huge amount of waste and requiring both unnecessary labor and "surplus repression" to maintain it, he did believe that such socially generated needs could be altered. If this sounds a bit like hippie thinking of 1967, or reflective of the ideas of environmental activists, it is. In the question period, he named some of the characteristics that he hoped to see reduced by such a change: "brutality, cruelty, false heroism, false virility, competetion at any price."
If Marcuse's idea of new touch of "new needs" sounds a bit like Lamarckian evolution, another part of his theory of social transformation that he articulates in this lecture rests on the Marxian economic theory of surplus value, whose empirical basis is scarcely clear. Without going into ten paragraphs of background explanation, Marx's concept of surplus value held that profit and capital are both produced by Labor, and are the excess of the total value they produce over what the capitalist pays the workers in wages. In this concept, only human labor can produce surplus value (capital and profits). Yet the competitive pressures of the capitalist economy compels the capitalists to automate more and more over time, so that a greater and greater proportion of what is produced comes from machines and the proportion of human labor becomes smaller and smaller. The further automation proceeds, the greater the squeeze on profits becomes since only human labor can produce surplus value. Therefore, a capitalist organization of the economy and society inevitably restrains the economy from achieving its full potential for automation because too much automation would destroy profits and fail to produce capital for investment.
For the full potential of the automation of "socially necessary labor" to be achieved, the capitalist system would have to be replaced with a socialist system not bound by the capitalist imperative of private property. Even though the inherent functioning of capitalism creates enormous pressures toward such a state, it can't be realized without the public wanting such a state to happen. Which makes the development of those new needs imperative, because, says Marcuse, in order for the "technical possibilities" of the economy "to be able to fulfill their liberating function, they must be sustained and directed by liberating and gratifying needs."
On the one hand, this is a radical analysis of capitalist societies. And yet this chain of reasoning highlights the restrained nature of Marcuse's analysis of the practical possibilities of bringing about such a revolutionary, liberating change. Because his analysis provided no immediate and clear hopes for such a change to happen in the near term. And his audience in 1967 was looking for such hopes.
It's noteworthy in this lecture that Marcuse talks about the possibilities of "the convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play". It could certainly be argued that much of what we know as the high-tech and digital revolutions in the ensuring decades - though Marcuse would not likely have called them "revolutions" - actually proceeded along those lines.
Perhaps surprisingly given Marcuse general reputation, his advice to the students was restrained, cautioning them against false hopes and careless overoptimism. While he thought the student movement of that time was an important force in focusing opposition to oppressive aspects of the current order, but they were far from galvanizing large segements of the population into pressing for such fundamental changes. He warned his listeners, "What I have called the total mobilization of the established society against its own potentialities is today as strong and as effective as ever."
Marcuse in this presentation and in others on that visit to Berlin talked about an idea for which he was well known, the idea that movements among the marginalized had a powerful potential to transform capitalist societies like those of the US and Western Europe. He had in mind phenomena like the civil rights movement in the US, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist movements like the Vietnamese fighting against the US, intellectuals and students, hippies and beatniks. But, unlike his reputation, he didn't picture these movements as the basis for putting a near-term revolution into motion. He saw in those groups that were in some way marginalized expressions of what he famously called the Great Refusal, a willingness to criticize and reject elements of what the complacent majority in the "affluent society" accepted passively or even embraced. He saw those groups as agents that were changing the consciousness of others as well as their own. But in his own statements and arguments, he was restrained in the potential he gave to them.
He concluded the question period in a way that is revealing about his outlook in more ways than one (Shapiro/Weber translation):
I had not ventured to say so, but after you yourself have said it, and you seem to know something about it, I can now say that I believe in fact, although I have not mentioned it here, that at least in some of the liberation struggles in the third world and even in some of the methods of development of the third world this new theory of man is putting itself in evidence. I would not have mentioned [Franz] Fanon and Guevara as much as a small item that I read in a report about North Vietnam and that had a tremendous effect on me, since I am an absolutely incurable and sentimental romantic. It was a very detailed report, which showed, among other things, that in the parks in Hanoi the benches are made only big enough for two and only two people to sit on, so that another person would not even have the technical possibility of disturbing. [my emphasis]Continued in Part 3
Tags: critical theory, herbert marcuse
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