Workers and social change
Cohan and Serby are looking at Marcuse's work in the context of socialist theory and in view of the history of left politics. Left politics of pretty much all stripes in the 20th century in the advanced capitalist countries at the center of the world economy were built around the organization and activism of the working class and organized labor. That was true of the Communist and Social Democratic parties and also the New Deal and Great Society programs that largely built the social-welfare state institutions in the US. The Populist movement of the late 19th century was also built on a similar social basis. Prior to the Second World War, such movements in the US could also draw on substantial support from small farmers. But agriculture in the US has been so corporatized that the number of small farmers are now a tiny portion of the population. Wage workers in all phases of agricultural production, though, are very significant.
However, even though "working class" today does not look exactly like the factory or textile workers of 1850 or 1935, control of economic and political power in capitalist countries today is still dominanted by a small group of the wealthy, the "One Percent" that Occupy Wall Street successfully labelled as such a decade ago. And most people still work for wages or salaries. And a class in between, these days sometimes called the "professional-managerial class," which we could call a "middle class" if that term hadn't become one that applies to nearly everybody.
In other words, capitalist economies are still capitalist economies. David Hume would scarcely recognize the 2021 version, but his theory of comparative advantage in international trade still applies in some ways today. Things have come a long way from the pin factories that Adma Smith wrote about. But actual economists as well as business boosters still pay attention to his theories. (Some of the latter group would be shocked if they actually plowed through Smith's The Wealth of Nations and discovered how much of it focuses on the need to deal with the social disruptions capitalism causes.)
And of course Karl Marx himself was looking at a very different world in so many ways as what we know today. But the recurring "crises" of capitalism that he described still happen, although they have gone through various name changes like "depression", "recession", and "business cycles". The National Bureau of Economic Research provides dates for those in the US, which most economists and business journalism take as authoritative, starting from 1854 and going up the official recession of February-April 2020.
Cohan and Serby discuss Marcuse's reception in the context of the New Left of the 1960s and early 1970s. Part of his reputation was that he focused on "outsiders" like racial minorities or young people looking for "alternative" life styles, while dismissing the traditional working class as pacified, satisfied, and not particularly useful for progressive, left social change.
Cohan and Serby chronicle that reaction to Marcuse's work in the 1960s. And they argue against that interpretation and assert that Marcuse took a "critical and materialist" view that was largely basic on the view of Marxism taken by the critical theories of the Frankfurt School that I discussed in Part 1:
In the final analysis, however, Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory. The student movement, the hippie counterculture, the radical intelligentsia — these were catalyst groups with a “preparatory function.” Their task was not revolution, but “radical enlightenment”; lacking a mass character, they could at best move the broader population from false to oppositional consciousness. Their signal achievement was having called into question “the prevailing structure of needs” and freed “imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason.” Marcuse applauded the New Left [of the 1960s and 1970s] but cautiously warned his readers not to overrate its significance. [my emphasis]They quote statements of Marcuse's like, "“the contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger” (1965). But, somewhat surprisingly, they also argue that the widespread reaction in the 1960s which they criticize nevertheless had something to it. For instance, they write, "By 1967, [Marcuse] had come to view the counterculture as representing 'a total rupture' with the ideology of advanced capitalism, a force heralding 'a total trans-valuation of values, a new anthropology' and the development of needs that the existing political and economic system could not satisfy."
But Marcuse had enough personal experience with left politics and the reality of fascism to have argued that a proliferation of hippie communes was going to do away with exploitation of workers, imperialism, and militarism. He did look at the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the student uprisings and protests, and, in particular, the women's movement, as both challenging the existing order and foreshadowing the possibilities of a liberated society.
If anything, one could argue that despite his utopian critique of capitalist society, Marcuse was downright pessimistic about seeing it transcended any time soon. He concluded his book Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) with, "the next revolution will be the concern of generations, and 'the final crisis of capitalism' may take all but a century." That "all but a century" phrase, of course, is a synonym for "not likely to happen in the lifetime of any adult now living". On the other hand, he was writing that five decades ago. So if his timeline holds, the 20-year-olds of 2021 could be looking at a radicxally transformed world in their 70s! And hopefully transformed for the better.
I would add that a point that's too often overlooked, including in contemporary discussions of "class" politics versus "identity" politics is that "identity" politics coexist with class politics. Women's rights has very much to do with equal pay and equal treatment of women workers; in the US, two of the most important unionized groups of workers are nurses and teachers, both groups having a disproportional number of women workers. The same kind of overlap is also present among African-Americans and Latinos. That doesn't mean that issues of discrimination can be reduced to a subset of class politics, or that "identity" issues don't cross class lines.
Marcuse's indictment of the "one-dimensional" society
Cohan and Serby express approval for the critical view of capitalist society Marcuse took in One-Dimensional Man and especially for his emphasis of the following three points:
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Irrationality and Destructiveness: here Marcuse's emphasis on the dangers of the nuclear arms race was key, "the shadow that hangs over all of Marcuse’s
critique, from the first sentence on."
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Manipulation and Unfreedom: this refers to the various kinds of controls characteristic for what John Kenneth Galbraith later called "the culture of contentment."
- Continuing poverty and exploitation: This included the real and serious persistance of poverty in the wealthiest capitalist societies as well as in the less developed world.
Cohan and Serby call the second "soul" of One-Dimenstional Man a "moralistic and defeatist" one. Here their criticisms seems less focused. They give Marcuse credit for the "normative" aspect of his book, for analytic insight into mobilizing working class politics, and for his insights into "how partial victory can paralyze oppositional forces." But that is pretty vague commentary.
They go on to argue:
Yet Marcuse also articulated a form of defeatism that has plagued the Left of the advanced capitalist world. Marcuse’s liberatory and socialist message was largely abandoned and repressed with the defeats of the New Left, but his doubts as to the possibility of majoritarian left politics became the common sense of the New Left and the elite liberalism that would follow.One could certainly cherry-pick passages from Marcuse's work to argue for his having promoted a defeatist attitude. But as they also explain, he was eager to find hopeful signs in the present for the possibilities of a liberatory, majoritarian movement based on the working class. He was not known for lecturing activists to lower their expectations.
Marcuse was a philosopher and political theorist, not a politician. His work was analytical and aspirational, but not oriented to building a political party or organizing protest movements, although he did lend his support to such efforts.
And Marcuse inspired "elite liberalism"? Let's just say I find this less than obvious.
They also make the following argument, which seems to run in the opposite direction of their criticism of his supposedly promoting "defeatism":
Critics of the strain of gloomy mid-century social theory Marcuse exemplifies often point to how wildly inaccurate the portrait of a fundamentally static world turned out to be. High growth rates, proportional wage growth, high unionization, and more were hardly permanent. But Marcuse was certainly not alone in failing to accurately predict how far we could fall backward. Some variation on the theory of state capitalism was widely held at the time. Everyone missed the possibility of a strong revanchist turn to a seemingly permanently discredited laissez-faire liberalism. [my emphasis]So, he was too defeatist but also not pessimistic enough about the emergence of what we now call the neoliberal era? That strikes me as more simple inconsistency than a dialectical contraction. It doesn't make obvious sense, in other words.
Did Marcuse, whose outlook was so heavily defined by the catastrophe of National Socialism, really fail to see that there was the potential for conditions to get a lot worse? He opens Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) this way:
The Western world has reached a new stage of development: now, the defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. In its extreme manifestations, it practices the horrors of the Nazi regime. Wholesale massacres in Indochina, Indonesia, the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, and the Sudan are unleashed against everything which is called "communist" or which is in revolt against governments subservient to the imperialist countries. Cruel persecution prevails in the Latin American countries under fascist and military dictatorships. Torture has become a normal instrument of "interrogation" around the world. The agony of religious wars revives at the height of Western civilization, and a constant flow of arms from the rich countries to the poor helps to perpetuate the oppression of national and social liberation. Where the resistance of the poor has succumbed, students lead the fight against the soldateska and the police; by the hundreds, students are slaughtered, gassed, bombed, kept in jail. Three hundred of them chased and shot down on the streets of Mexico City opened the festival of the Olympics. In the United States, students are still in the forefront of radical protest: the killings at Jackson State and Kent State testify to their historical role. Black militants pay with their lives: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, George Jackson. The new composition of the Supreme Court institutionalizes the progress of reaction. And the murder of the Kennedys shows that even Liberals are not safe if they appear as too liberal ...They also write, "the weakness of [Marcuse's] vision of social change in the idea of the “Great Refusal” is related to Marcuse’s dismissive criticism of the parliamentary participation of the Italian and French communist parties (PCI and PCF) and silence on the civil rights movement."
I would guess that Marcuse's famous student Angela Davis would be surprised to hear that Marcuse was silent on the civil rights movement. She had this to say in 2018 (Angela Davis on Protest, 1968, and Her Old Teacher, Herbert Marcuse Literary Hub 04/03/2019):
In 1968, I was one of Herbert Marcuse’s graduate students at UC San Diego, and we all benefited both from his deep knowledge of European philosophical traditions and from the fearless way he manifested his solidarity with movements challenging military aggression, academic repression, and pervasive racism. Marcuse counseled us always to acknowledge the important differences between the realms of philosophy and political activism, as well as the complex relation between theory and radical social transformation. ...Since the civil rights movement was the single most important of the "outsider" movements of the 1960s in the US to which Marcuse looking to promote a wider liberation movement, I don't know how Cohan and Serby got there. It's true that Marcuse criticizes the PCI and PCF in the places they footnote. But in a place they also cite in One-Dimensional Man, he wrote:
While Marcuse did not always agree with particular tactics of radical movements of that era, he was very clear about the extent to which calls for black liberation, peace, gender justice, and for the restructuring of education represented important emancipatory tendencies of the era and, indeed, helped to push theory in progressive directions. ...
Fifty years later, as we confront the persisting globalities of slavery and colonialism, along with evolving structures of racial capitalism, Herbert Marcuse’s ideas continue to reveal important lessons. [my emphasis]
[U]nderneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not. Their opposition hits the system from without and is therefore not deflected by the system; it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game. When they get together and go out into the streets, without arms, without protection, in order to ask for the most primitive civil rights, they know that they face dogs, stones, and bombs, jail, concentration camps, even death. Their force is behind every political demonstration for the victims of law and order. The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period. [my emphasis]How that could be read as "silence on the civil rights movement," I really don't understand. The long quote above from Counterrevolution and Revolt also seems to indicate he was paying attention to the civil rights movement.
The original Marx-Engels view of the social development that would lead to a working-class revolution producing a socialist organization of society and government did assumede a fundamental contraction between the needs and interests of the working class and the capitalist class. But they conceived of this as a fundamental conflict based on the dynamics of capitalist society that did tend to a concentration of wealth and income among the wealthiest.
But they did not understand the complete pauperization and immiseration of the working class, although there has been an enormous amount of both during Marx's life and since. But based particularly on the most advanced capitalism of the 19th century, that of Great Britain, they understand capitalism as developing in a way that produced a working-class majority that were subject to the economic and political dominance of the capitalist class. In the interest of defending their own security and collective as well as individual rights, the working class would be pushed to establish their own democratic control over the economy as well as the government.
My purpose here is not to try to summarize many decades of debate and development and economic evolution and how that has manifested in splits, arguments, divisions, and competing approaches to strategy in the history of socialist movements and organized labor. The point is that the "working class" today does not look exactly like factory or textile workers of 1850. But control of economic and political in capitalist countries today is dominanted by a small group of the wealthy, the "One Percent" that Occupy Wall Street successfully labelled as such a decade ago. Silvio Ricardo Gomes Carneiro, Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times New Political Science 38:4 (2016)
Ronald Aronson, Marcuse Today Boston Review 11/17/2014 Mike Watson, In Defense of Herbert Marcuse Jacobin 02/27/2021
Eric Alterman turns part of his Altercation column over to Chad Alan Goldberg for a piece called Authoritarians Amok: Explaining Trumpism, with some help from Chad Goldberg and Herbert Marcuse The American Prospect 09/24/2021, with the extra title, "The Establishment and Its Trumpist Discontents" for the Goldberg piece.
Goldberg emphasizes the continuing relevance of the study by Theodor Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (1950), which was part of the Studies on Prejudice reports commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and directed by Max Horkheimer, head of the Institute for Social Research, aka, the Frankfurt School, in the 1940s. Goldberg also discusses Marcuse's psycholanalytic theories of social authority, which Marcuse explained at length in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955).
It is important to recall here that the authoritarian personality’s adherence to conventional values is determined exclusively by “external social pressure.” But “if permitted to do so by outside authority,” the authoritarian person “may be induced very easily to uncontrolled release of his instinctual tendencies, especially those of destructiveness.”Silvio Ricardo Gomes Carneiro, Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times New Political Science 38:4 (2016)
One of the issues Cohan and Serby discus is Marcuse's relationship to Marxism, more specifically the classic Marxism of the Second International.
It really covers a wide range of issues in a focused and informed way, including Marcuse's own work, the general understanding of the 1960s student movements in the US particularly, and focuses seriously on the theme of how classical working-class left politics as conceived by most Marxist and socialist theory seems to have been neutralized in a way that was suprising in the terms of that theory.
phenolemology and existentialism
The original Marx-Engels view of the social development that would lead to a working-class revolution producing a socialist organization of society and government did assumede a fundamental contraction between the needs and interests of the working class and the capitalist class. But they conceived of this as a fundamental conflict based on the dynamics of capitalist society that did tend to a concentration of wealth and income among the wealthiest.
But they did not understand the complete pauperization and immiseration of the working class, although there has been an enormous amount of both during Marx's life and since. But based particularly on the most advanced capitalism of the 19th century, that of Great Britain, they understand capitalism as developing in a way that produced a working-class majority that were subject to the economic and political dominance of the capitalist class. In the interest of defending their own security and collective as well as individual rights, the working class would be pushed to establish their own democratic control over the economy as well as the government.
My purpose here is not to try to summarize many decades of debate and development and economic evolution and how that has manifested in splits, arguments, divisions, and competing approaches to strategy in the history of socialist movements and organized labor. The point is that the "working class" today does not look exactly like factory or textile workers of 1850. But control of economic and political in capitalist countries today is dominanted by a small group of the wealthy, the "One Percent" that Occupy Wall Street successfully labelled as such a decade ago.
"Für Marcuse waren mit der Niederlage des Nationalsozialismus die totalitären Tendenzen in der Welt nicht verschwunden." ("For Marcuse, the totalitarian tendencies in the world had not disappeared with National Socialism.") Susanne Kailitz Von den Worten zu den Waffen? Frankfurter Schule, Studentenbewegung, RAF und die Gewaltfrage 2007.
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