More on Matt Taibbi's strange take on Herbert Marcuse (2 of 2)

While we're on the subject - see Part 1 here - here is another commentary on Marcuse by Douglas Lain in light of Taibbi's flawed commentary, Is Matt Taibbi A One Dimensional Critic? Zero Books 02/27/2021.

The democratic socialist magazine Jacobin has also weighed in on the controversy with Mike Watson's In Defense of Herbert Marcuse 02/27/2021.

I'd have to say that one of Lain's criticisms of Marcuse is mistaken, when he says that Marcuse "had turned away from Marx and revolution both." I suppose in the most technical sense, that's true, i.e., he didn't regard Karl Marx as having written the last word on everything to do with capitalism, much less post-capitalism (Marx actually wrote very little about what a socialist society would look like). And Marcuse didn't agree with most of the specific prescriptions for revolution being promulgated after the Second World War (and most of them didn't agree with each other, either).

But Marcuse did understand himself as working in the Marxist tradition. He was criticized by others on the left during the 1960s and 1970s for underestimating the continued relevance of the working class as the key agent of change from capitalism to socialism and instead viewed students and militant ethnic/racial minorities as taking their place.

There's no question that Marcuse's focus was not on the internal politics of organized labor. But he always insisted on the accuracy of the basic longterm process identified by Marx, in which the working class was the fundamental agent of change with a historical mission of pushing for a revolutionary change of the social and economic system of capitalism into socialism. He saw this as a result of fundamental nature of the social contradictions that persisted in capitalist society.

These days, the Democratic Party is not going to be writing anything like that in their official party program. (Which nobody but the party officials drafting it reads anyway.)  And Hillary Clinton's supporters in 2016 professed to be horrified that Bernie Sanders talked about a "revolution" in the form of establishing European-style national health insurance (which for decades had been part of the Democratic Party's official program until the Clintonites changed it in 1992) and a massive increase in citizens' active participation in democratic politics. People get their heads cut off in revolutions, Hillary supporters gasped. Chris Matthews was still talking that way in 2020. (Peter Wade, Chris Matthews’ Wild Rant Connects a Bernie Sanders Win With Public Executions Rolling Stone 02/08/2020)

As far as I'm aware, neither Marcuse nor Bernie Sanders ever advocated reviving the guillotine or mass shootings of ditsy centrist journalists. But Marcuse was explicit about his revolutionary expectations in books like An Essay on Liberation (1969), which Taibbi has explicitly mentioned in his criticisms of Marcuse, and Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972). Marcuse identified with and directly encouraged the civil rights, antiwar, and student protests associated with "1968" more than other members of the first generation Frankfurt School thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Jürgen Habermas of the "second generation," who at age 91 90 now is still commonly called Germany's most important public intellectual, got into a frustrating controversy with militant German protesters for once using the phrase "red fascism" to describe some protesters' tactics he didn't like.

Mike Watson's Jacobin's piece makes this point: "the legacy of the 1960s counterculture movement makes it unlikely that a white septuagenarian German academic will ever again have such a prominent position at the helm of a multiracial movement for race, gender, and sexual liberation." (Bernie Sanders would like a word on this! But, admittedly, he's not German or an academic.)

Ironically, in light of the discussion around Taibbi's criticism, Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" essay drew rhetorical fire from liberals in the 1960s for what they took to be its advocacy of violence. Marcuse was not a pacifist, and he does write there about the power as well as the limits of Ghandian nonviolence in that essay. And he recognizes violence as sometimes being a necessary evil for people facing intolerable oppression. "In terms of ethics, both forms of violence [that of the oppressor and that of the oppressed] are inhuman and evil - but since when is history made in accordance with ethical standards?"

But despite how some liberals reacted to it, there is nothing in "Repressive Tolerance" that could reasonably be construed as incitement to violence, certainly not as much as the average Republican politician's routine statements on the Second Amendment. It's surprising that none of the Taibbi/Marcuse discussion I've seen so far takes account of this aspect of Marcuse's work that was especially controversial in the mainstream at the tinme.

It's worth noting that in 1977, Marcuse publicly criticized the tactics of kidnapping, bombing, and assassination then being practiced by far-left groups like the German Red Army Faktion (RAF), though without mentioning the RAF specifically. (Mord darf keine Waffe der Politik sein Die Zeit 39:1977; my translation from the German):

There may be situations where the elimination of protagonists of repression really changes the system – at least in its political manifestations – and liberalizes oppression (for example, the successful assassination of [Franco’s presumed heir apparent] Carrero Blanco in Spain [in 1973]; perhaps the killing of Hitler [attempted in July 1944]). But in both cases the system was already in the phase of disintegration, a situation that certainly does not exist in the [West German] Federal Republic.

But he also articulated what was also the classic Marxist criticism of individual "terrorism" as a political tactic:

Is terrorism in the [West German] Federal Republic a legitimate continuation of the student movement by other means, adapted to the intensified repression? I too have to answer this question negatively. Rather, terrorism is a break with this movement. The APO [extra-parliamentary opposition], with all its reservations about its class base, was a mass movement on an international scale and with an international strategy: it represents a turning point in the development of class struggles in late capitalism: namely, the proclamation of the struggle for "concrete utopia", for socialism as a qualitatively different, and yet real possibility. The movement did not shy away from open confrontation, but in its vast majority it rejected conspiratorial terror. This is not their inheritance: it remains stuck with the old society, which it wants to overthrow. It works with their weapons, which do not serve their purpose. At the same time, it divides the left once again at a time when all opposition forces are required to be regrouped.

Precisely because the left rejects this terrorism, it does not need to chime in with the bourgeois [establishment] ostracizing of the radical opposition. It expresses its autonomous judgment in the name of the struggle for socialism. In that name, she says "No - we don't want that." The terrorists are compromising this fight, which is also their own. Their methods are not those of liberation – not even that of survival in a society mobilized for the oppression of the left. [my emphasis]

Those 1977 comments by Marcuse (he died in 1979) give a picture of his political stance quite different than what one might take from Lain’s discussion in the embedded video above.

Regardless of the position one takes on national health insurance or guillotines, if it's worth the time to do articles and podcasts on Herbert Marcuse, it worth the effort to at least try to get what he was actually saying right. I agree with Mike Watson on this point, "Marcuse is a figure who should be read, debated, and respected for his contributions, not subject to lazy condemnation."