Herbert Marcuse and the world of his One-Dimensional Man (Part 1 of 3)

I wanted to call attention to some articles about Herbert Marcuse, and one in particular: a new article by Jeremy Cohan and Benjamin Serby in Jacobin's theoretical journal Catalyst, "The Two Souls of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man" (5:2:2021) which as the title indicates deals with Herbert Marcuse's best-known book, One-Dimensional Man (1964). And they focus on what his view implied about the role of the working class and the labor movement in progressive politics.

The authors have just done an interview with Jen Pan and Paul Prescod, The Actual Legacy of the Frankfurt School & Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man Jacobin 10/06/2021.

The Frankfurt School and the "critical theory" associated with it has been an important stream of philosophy and social theory since the 1930s. In a weird twist, a cartoonish version of the Frankfurt School has been incorporated into the far-right narratives of "cultural Marxism" and now "critical race theory." It's a cartoonish version, but a dishonest, malicious, and anti-Semitic.

But to provide the background I wanted for the Cohan-Serby piece including the Franfkfurt School context, I decided to split this commentary into three parts. 

Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, and their theory of social transformation

One of the issues Cohan and Serby discuss is Marcuse's relationship to Marxism, more specifically the classic Marxism of the Second International. The context is to what extent working-class people can be motivated to participate more actively in a left-progressive political agenda. Since the early 19th century, mobilizing the working class to press a left program to benefit themselves in opposition to the politics of conservative capitalists has been a central issue in politics in the West and now in the whole world. Obviously, the context varies greatly by location and time.

The book One-Dimensional Man addressed the American and European situation in the 1950s and 1960s which seemed to be marked by a kind of political stagnation in which important alternative answers to major problems like militarism and the nuclear arms race were being ignored and even suppressed by existing institutions through means direct and indirect. It fits broadly with other books of the period like John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958) and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), both of which challenged the self-satisfied and superficially optimistic "American Century" attitudes which prevailed during the early years of the Cold War.

Marcuse was part of the Frankfurt School of "critical theory" associated with the Institute for Social Research, the first generation of which also included Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Henryk Grossmann, Otto Kirchheimer, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Neumann, Frederick Pollock, and Karl Wittfogel. In the 1960s and 1970s, they were known in America particularly for combining ideas from Marx and Freud into a broad social-psychological view. A project sponsored by the American Jewish Committee called Studies in Prejudice contributed heavily to that reputation in the US, particular one of the books that emerged from it, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). That work is receiving renewed attention in recent years.

The thought-world of the Frankfurt School between the two World Wars generally fell somewhere between the views of the Communist parties of the Third International and the more reformist approach of the Social Democratic parties of the Second International. (The latter still has a shadow existence as the Socialist International.) After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the socialist movement split between supporters of those two camps.

There's an interesting analogy between the position of the Frankfurt School and that known as "Austromarxism," the interwar stance of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers Party (SDAP) idenfied with leaders like Friedrich Adler and Otto Bauer. There was a small Communist Party in Austria, but there was no major Communist split-off from the SDAP after 1917. In 1921-23, a group of socialist parties including the SDAP formed the International Working Union of Socialist Parties (Vienna Union) to promote a strategy between those of the Second and Third Internationals. The Communists mocked it memorably as the Two and a Half International. In 1923, the Vienna Union was folded into the Second International.

1923 was also the year the Instiute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) was founded with Carl Grünberg as its head until 1930, when Max Horkheimer took over that position. The Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, which Grünberg edited from 1911-1930 (and is better known now as the Grünberg Archive), became the main journal of the Institute during the 1920s.

So, what was Marcuse's particular version of Marxist-socialist theory of society and politics? Cohan and Serby assert that his understanding of capitalist society and the process of it transitioning to a socialist society was broadly in line with that of the pre-First World War Second International.

They are basically right about that. I would even go a bit further than they do and say that Marcuse operated from an traditional Marxist or even "Marxist-Leninist" framework in his broader perspective, although so far as I'm aware he never used the latter term for himself and was critical of official Soviet ideology.

But what I mean is that Marcuse proceeded from the assumption that capitalist society possessed basic contradictions within itself, particularly the contradiction between the capitalist class and the working class, which would ultimately lead to a political revolution. That would enable to the working class to establish a socialist society based on centralized state ownership of the basic elements of the economy, "the means of production," as Marx called them.

In his famous/notorious essay "Repressive Tolerance" (1965 with a 1969 postscript), Marcuse also indicated that something like a "dictatorship of the proletariat" (though he didn't use that term) would be necessary, in which an elite vanguard group would seize power supported by a popular revolt. I mention this because it was very much a part of the thought-world in which Marcuse matured and which he applied in his philosophical work as part of the original Frankfurt School group associated with the Institute for Social Research.

But in 2021, that requires a bit of temporal translation.

The socialist movement and the working class

Without trying to rehash a century and a half of left polemics, the classic Marxist theory of the pre-First World War period understood capitalism as a class dictatorship of the capitalist class, not simply in terms of government but in terms of their social and economic power. The German Social Democratic Party, the largest and most influential in the Second International up until the First World War, envisioned taking power as the party representing the working class [proletariat] which they understood as being a majority of the people. Once in power, they would use state power to establish society on a socialist basis. This would represent the class "dictatorship" of the working class, which as a democratically legitimated power would dismantle the social and economic dictatorship of the capitalist class.

The Social Democrats expected and hoped to take power through some combination of electoral action, militant protest, and labor union power. In a era in which the French Revolution and the European Revolutions of 1848 loomed large in people's understanding of what it took to establish a democratic government, the advocates of socialism were no more ready to renounce violence as a necessary element of the transition than George Washington and the American Founders were in the 18th century.

But the Social Democrats expected that any violence in the transition was most likely to come in the form of violent resistance on the part of the capitalist class in opposition to a legitimate democratic government, which the workers' government - a democratic government of the majority - would use its legitimate state power to resist and suppress.

If this sounds like elaborate hair-splitting, it may be helpful to think of the January 6 storming of the US Capitol in Washington earlier this year. As we are learning in more detail as time goes by and the prosecutions proceed, we know that Trump and his circle were actively planning a coup. It's actually called a self-coup when a sitting government is resisting the results of a legitimate democratic vote for a change of government, which was the case with the Trump coup attempt. The Capitol police and, eventually, National Guard forces suppressed the violent revolt taking place on January 6.

The supporters of the coup, of course, are saying this was persecution of good Amurcan patriots by the evil "gubment" and the Deep State. So describing it as an instance of a democratic government using "dictatorial" means to suppress a revolt sounds a bit like a validation of that narrative.

But that is what a lot like what the the parties of the Second International in the 19th century understood by the "dictatorship of the proletariat," i.e., a democratically elected, legitimate government using (legitimate) force to suppress a reactionary attempt to seize the government by illegitimate means.

The Soviet version of the dictatorship of the proletariat first established in 1917 - in a country in which the working class was a distinct minority - was part of what divided the socialist movement between Social Democrats (2nd International) and Communists (3rd International). Karl Kautsky, one of the most important Marxist theorists of the Second International, wrote a polemic against the Soviet version, Terrorism and Communism (1919). "Terrorism" in that context was understood more as state repression than partisan-warfare style acts of sabotage and assassination. The concept harked back to the Terror, aka, Reign of Terror, of 1793-4 during the French Revolution. (What we know as partisan or guerrilla warfare in Europe also dates back to the Napoleonic Wars, although arguably a version of it was used in the American Revolution.)

The parties of the Second International eventually abandoned the phrase. But the notion of a democratic government led by the Social Democrats needing to be prepared to use legitimate force to defend itself against a violent counter-revolution didn't go away. Nor did the idea of socialists prior to taking power needing a option to defend themselves by force disappear among the Second International parties in the interwar period. In Germany and Austria, the Communists, the Socialists and the parties of the right had their own self-defense groups.

Marcuse and post-First World War Germany

Cohen and Serby note, "Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers’ council during the [1918 German] revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht." At the end of the war, military units began revolting and built workers' councils ("soviets" in Russian) as political action groups. The Kaiser fled Germany and the Social Democrats (SPD) took power. Friedrich Ebert, a moderate Social Democrat who had supported the war, declared the SPD government. (His level of zeal for social transformation was indicated by his reported comment at the time, "I hate the revolution like sin.”) But virtually simultaneously, Karl Liebknecht, a left SPD leader who had opposed the war, declared a workers' republic under his leadership.

In reality, Erich Ludendorff, the general who was de facto head of the German government at the end of the war, had a very conscious plan to pass the government to the SPD because he knew the war was lost and wanted to set up the SPD to take the blame for it. Ludendorff was setting up the Big Lie that Germany only lost because traitors at home undercut the military. An outbreak of protests among workers that became known as the Spartacist Revolt prompted a crackdown, described as follows by the stodgy-but-reliable Britannica Online:

The German army ... had recovered its nerve and was determined to prevent a further move to the left. In December [1918] the army had begun secretly to train volunteer units drawn from the sea of soldiers returning from the front. These so-called Freikorps (“Free Corps”) units formed dozens of small right-wing armies that during the next years roamed the country, looking for revolutionary activity to suppress. The Spartacist revolt, which was confined largely to Berlin, was put down within a week by some 3,000 Freikorps members. When Liebknecht and [Rosa] Luxemburg were captured on January 15 [1919], they were both shot at the initiative of Freikorps officers. Although sporadic revolutionary activity continued elsewhere in Germany during the following months, its failure in Berlin clearly marked its doom. The proclamation on April 4, 1919, of a Räterepublik [Soviet Republic] in Bavaria revived radical fortunes only briefly; Freikorps units put down the radical Bavarian republic by the end of the month.

The Social Democrat immediately in charge of crushing the Sparticist protest was Gustav Noske. Ebert's SPD government's use of the Freicorps in this situation became a source of lasting resentment and was a major reason the SPD and the Communists (KPD) were unable to form an effective united front against the far right during the Weimar Republic. Ludendorff, who later became a Nazi, had done his nasty work well.

The far right attempted a coup in 1920 against the new Weimar government headed by the SPD known as the Kapp Putsch. It was put down mainly by a general strike of German workers.

In the case of the Sparticist revolt and the violent suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic that immediately followed, the Social Democratic-run government resorted to literally "dictatorial" measures to suppress a movement it feared would overturn its government. The workers themselves had more to do with defeating the Kapp Putsch, but the government was defending itself also in that case against a rightwing coup. The Kapp Putsch came closer to looking like the reactionary revolt against a Socialist government that the prewar SPD had envisioned. But these did all represent the SPD government acting as a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the way the prewar Second International had understood the concept. Although even by 1919, they weren't calling it that.

The Austrian SDAP stuck with something like the traditional Second International concept. Anton Pelinka explains in Die Gescheiterte Republik: Kultur und Politik in Österreich 1918-1938 (2017):

One wing [of the SDAP] was perceived as "left", whose representative was Max Adler. Adler was also the main person responsible for the fact that in the rhetoric of the party and the formulations of the "Linz Program" of 1926, concepts that seemed to emphasize a close relationship to Marxism-Leninism took a prominent place - such as the "dictatorship of the proletariat" put on the table as a defensive instrument. [my emphasis; my translation]

Pelinka goes on to say, "Despite its ambivalence [toward the Austrian government of the 1920s], despite its tendency to distance itself from the real existing republic, Austrian Social Democracy was the only party to try to give the republic an affective basis."

Norbert Leser describes the concept of the Linz Program on the subject this way (Der Sturz des Adlers: 120 Jahre österreichische Sozaldemokratie, 2008):

While the Social Democracy [the SDAP] was self-confident enough to be convinced of its victory, it was also Marxist enough to fear that, as Marx had prophesied, even in the event of an election victory, the ruling classes would not voluntarily abandon the field of their positions and property rights but would resist. In trying to predict the opponent's behavior, two seemingly logical possibilities were envisaged: one would be to use force to prevent a party that won elections and possibly had an absolute majority from taking power legally; the second path, considered possible and feared, could be such that a capitalist class defeated in the elections would not only by sabotage make it more difficult for the socialist government to govern, but would make it impossible. In these two cases, there would be no other way out than the establishment of a "dictatorship" and the entry into a "civil war". As unwise as it was to paint hypothetical situations on the wall, so irresistible was the temptation to instill courage and confidence in one's own followers for an emergency and to put the capitalist class on notice. Basically, the pattern of behavior that the [Second] International had already practiced before the First World War was repeated: to speak of an emergency in the silent hope that it would never occur. [my emphasis; my translation]

The notion that "in the event of an election victory, the ruling classes would not voluntarily abandon the field of their positions and property rights, but would resist," sounds something like the American January 6 of this year and the Trump coup plan behind it. Even though the Democratic Party - despite the hysterical accusations of the Republican Party and other hardline rightists - was far away from wanting to wipe out the capitalist economic system!

I should note that Norbert Leser (1933-2014) was considered a part of the more conservative wing of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (now SPÖ, the current initials for the party). But he described that aspect of the history of the SPÖ's history well.

The Austrian Social Democrats never faced the situation in which they took governmental power and faced a reactionary revolt. But in 1934, they faced something like the reverse. The leader of the conservative Christian Social Party, Engelbert Dollfuss, in 1933 established a Mussolini-style dictatorship, which was officially called the Standestaat and is often described as a "clerical-fascist" regime. In 1934, his regime carried out a crackdown to suppress the SDAP by force in a relative brief period that was nevertheless serious enough to go down in history as a civil war. One the SDAP lost.

In 1936, the democratic government of the Spanish Republic faced a reactionary revolt led by Francisco Franco that resulted in a much longer and dealier civil war. But the Spanish Republic in that situation faced the kind of emergency against which the SDAP held "the silent hope that it would never occur."

As distant and different as that period may seem, it was the historical framework in which Herbert Marcuse and others in the original Frankfurt School tradition formed their political and social outlooks. And since most of that first generation were Jewish intellectuals as well as leftists who had to leave Germany during the Third Reich. Understanding the reality of fascism, how to prevent it and how to overcome it, was defining for their political outlooks.

The experience of National Socialism (Nazism) and the longterm chronic threat they thought it represented was central to the Frankfurt School thinkers' view of the world. "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; my translation)

And for them, authoritarian tendencies were deeply rooted in capitalist societies. Max Horkheimer famously observed, "If you don't want to talk about capitalism then you had better keep quiet about fascism."

In Part 2, I look more specifically at the Cohan-Serby article.

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."

More on Matt Taibbi's strange take on Herbert Marcuse (1 of 2)

There's another entry in the Taibbi-Marcuse discussion I mentioned in an earlier post. This piece by Benjamin Studebaker on his own website is called Misreadings of Marcuse and the Confused Cancel Culture Debate 02/17/2021.

Katie Halper invited Studebaker and Taibbi onto her YouTube show to talk about Marcuse. (Marcuse Debate w/ Matt Taibbi... 01/26/2021) Studebaker clearly understands the constellation of problems Marcuse was addressing in his "Repressive Tolerance" essay in particular much better than Taibbi does.

I hope the visibility this discussion has had in left-leaning media will encourage some people to actually read more of Marcuse. His books don't make easy reading. But he has a very informed and nuanced view of capitalism, fascism, and authoritarianism.

Studebaker thinks as I do that it's pretty superficial for Taibbi to try to portray Marcuse as a predecessor of an establishment-liberal, elitist "cancel culture." And given that Marcuse is one of the best-known figures of the Frankfurt School of thinkers which is portrayed in the current far-right theory of "Cultural Marxism" - very influential among the hardcore radical right in American and Europe - as an evil Jewish conspiracy to create multiculturalism/"political correctness"/"cancel culture", I would really like to hear how Taibbi would distinguish his own claim that Marcuse created "cancel culture" from that of the poisonous Cultural Marxism theory.

Dave Neiwert explained that concoction several years ago in How the 'cultural Marxism' hoax began, and why it's spreading into the mainstream Daily Kos 01/23/2019. As he puts it there:

It’s become a common reference in recent years as conservatives have increasingly attacked multiculturalism in the public square. From Fox News to Breitbart to pop philosophers such as Jordan Peterson, “cultural Marxism” is increasingly identified as the source of everything wrong with modern liberal democracies.

The problem with these claims, however, is that they are fundamentally groundless. The only place that “cultural Marxism” actually exists is within a very narrow and relatively minor faction of academia, and in the fertile imaginations of the right-wing ideologues who see it as the wellspring of a nefarious conspiracy to undermine and eventually destroy Western civilization.

The whole concept is essentially a kind of hoax, a conspiracy theory concocted by radical white nationalists in the 1990s to explain the spread of multiculturalism, and nurtured by a combination of neo-Nazis and nativists over the ensuing years, as it gradually spread to mainstream conservatism through the activism of a handful of key players. It is also deeply anti-Semitic at its root, offering essentially an updated version of the classic “Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion” conspiracy theory, postulating a scenario in which a cabal of elite Jews conspires in secret to inflict all the ills of modernity onto society for their own benefit. [my emphasis]

It's a whackjob conspiracy theory. But it has long since spread well beyond the horned-hat-shaman crowd. Does Taibbi really not know that his column on Marcuse echoed a favorite theory among today's radical right? Since he clearly doesn't seem to understand what he read from Herbert Marcuse, maybe he doesn't know. But he should really bring himself up to speed on it.

I don't know exactly how to characterize the brand of politics that people like Taibbi and Halper currently represent. Taibbi sounds to me like he's trying to articulate a kind of socialist left narrative that also tries to incorporate some of the right's brand of anti-elitist rhetoric into his viewpoint.

Part of what we hear in the video is a criticism of what has lately been called the "woke" liberal viewpoint, which they associate with the anti-Bernie, Clinton-ish argument that not only does the left not recognize the importance of identity issues around race and gender, but that arguments that even stress the importance of economic redistributionist issues alongside those concerns is itself bad, or reactionary, or un-woke.

To me, this is a strange turn in the longterm cycle of American politics, In the 1960s, the impetus for Great Society programs like Medicare and Medicaid and urban renewal was part of a Democratic viewpoint that in significant part identified itself rhetorically and often practically with racial justice concerns. In the 1970s with the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment, a prominent concerns for women's rights also became identified with economic-redistributionist issues in mainstream politics.

The left tended to criticize the general liberal approach as being inadequate to the structural problems producing racial discrimination and economic inequality. (And they were right about that, BTW.) The left in addition took a very critical stance toward US military interventions and the promotion of coups in countries like Chile and Argentina in the 1970s. By today's standards, many liberal Democrats were also strikingly critical of many of the same issues, though they were allergic to calling their position "anti-imperialist." Because Russia and China claimed to be anti-imperialist, or whatever.

By 1992, when Clinton was elected President and the Soviet Union had fallen apart, those mainstream constellations had changed. Republicans and Democrats had largely embraced neoliberal economic approaches, and military adventures had come to look a lot more benign to many liberals. There's some irony in the fact that in 1992, Clinton's centrist messaging tended to downplay the racial justice and equal-rights aspect and emphasize something that sounded more like old-fashioned Keynesian economic stimulus policies than what the Republicans had on offer. Clinton's Administration actually wound up being more defined by more-or-less conservative/neoliberal austerity thinking and a messaging that celebrated diversity - even though his actual policies stressed more draconian prison sentencing, the drug war, and "welfare reform" that actually had seriously bad effects on African-Americans, especially.

We even saw a later echo of the 1992-tpye messaging in Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, in which she tried to contrast her emphasis on economic issues and national health care to the diversity issues with which Obama was so associated. But now we're emerging (I hope!) from a stretch in which concern for good wages is mocked by establishment Democrats as excusing racism, sexism, and xenophobia by blaming them superficially on "economic anxiety".

Taibbi seems to be articulating a view aimed at stressing a leftie, even democratic-socialist economic criticism together with a rejection of superficial "woke" rhetoric, a rejection that may also involve some disdain for the real social problems with which "wokeness" is concerned. And he mixes this with an antiwar attitude that in my mind borders more on an actual conservative isolationism than on a well-worked-out, left-leaning peace policy.

(Continued in Part 2)

Matt Taibbi rants against Herbert Marcuse

I'm not sure what Matt Taibbi's current schtick is. But this column about Herbert Marcuse (Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual Substack 02/16/2021) reads to me - I've seen only the non-subscriber portion - like a backdoor version of the far-right "Cultural Marxism" nonsense, the conspiracy theory spawned by William Lind that "political correctness" (now known as "cancel culture") was created by a group of German Marxist Jews.

Herbert Marcuse is responsible for the 1619 Project? This is beyond silly.

Here is the real world, Marcuse (1898–1979) actually was an important philosopher, part of the "first generation" of the Frankfurt School that is the villain of Lind's "Cultural Marxism" fairy tale. Marcuse became a media "icon" representing the New Left in the 1960s. But his political and philosophical influence, like that of other Frankfurt School figure like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, came mostly through conventional academic channels. He was not a leader of a political group. And except for the occasional op-ed, he mostly stuck to fairly technical academic framing even in his public speeches.

The Frankfurt School's work on the "authoritarian personality" has received increasing attention in recent years because of the increase in immediate authoritarian pressures in democratic governments from Hungary and Poland to the US and beyond. The Institute for Social Research - the original institutional form of the "Frankfurt School" - did a major, groundbreaking survey in Germany to study the effects of family environment and child-rearing practices on citizens' attitude toward authority. The results were published in 1936 as Studien über Autorität und Familie (Studies on Authority and Family). The full volume has never been published in English, although some of the essays have, including the introductory pieces by Marcuse, Horkheimer, and Erich Fromm.

Another project headed by Horkheimer that is very much representative of the Frankfurt School's work included the Studies in Prejudice, that produced a series of five volumes that still hold up well today, most notably The Authoritarian Personality (1950). The Prophets of Deceit (1949) volume by Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman is a valuable reminder that what we now know as Trumpism didn't begin in 2015!

There has been a great deal of research on authoritarianism since then, including the recent book by John Dean and Robert Altemeyer, Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers (2020). Neither politics nor scholarship stand still. But much of that early work is still valuable. Erich Fromm's 1941 Escape From Freedom (British title: The Fear of Freedom) is still in print, for instance.

Advocates for a left third party in the American system and anyone who tries to maintain a posture of fundamental criticism from the left of US society and the political system face the dilemma of differentiating between "the enemy of my enemy sometimes agrees with me on particular issues" and "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." A criticism of Democratic Party liberals or the Biden-Harris Administration that uncritically adopts the framing of far-right ideologues is not a project for which I have any enthusiasm.

Marcuse's "Repressive Tolerance" essay, which Taibbi mocks, is a provocative but perceptive look at how the class structure of capitalist societies and the hegemonic narratives of ruling elites, with particular reference to the US, place some very real limits of freedom of speech and expression. In it, Marcuse describes how the ideology of tolerance can disguise a reality of unfreedom. "The antagonistic structure of society rigs the rules of the game," as he put it there.

I wrote my own evaluation of the essay in 2006, Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance 07/13/2006. And preceded it by a broader detailed description of Marcuse's outlook, Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy 07/12/2006.

This passage of Taibbi's column is probably more telling than he intended: "German communism flopped, Heidegger [an important intellectual mentor of Marcuse's] became a Nazi University Rector, and a stunned Marcuse soon exiled himself to Switzerland and eventually America." He "exiled himself" - because Adolf Hitler had taken over as Chancellor and imposed a Nazi dictatorship on Germany.

One might think anyone familiar with progressive criticism of corporate media today would recognize the valid insights "Repressive Tolerance" includes. Marcuse drew part of his argument from the post-Second World War anti-Nazi laws that the Allies imposed on the defeated Axis countries in Europe. But apparently that point just flew right by Taibbi. Even in the French, British, and American occupation zones, the reconstruction of democratic governments did not proceed by immediate, unrestricted freedom of expression and organized political activity by former Nazis. Nor, for that matter, did the reincorporation of the former Confederate states into the American Union take place without restricting secessionist political rights, at least for some period of time. (And there was a good argument for having them be longer and more restrictive.)

Taibbi rejects Marcuse as nothing but a "quack". He sneers at sneers at "Repressive Tolerance" as "the famed Bible of post-liberal thinking," whatever the heck that means. Then he sneers at a Marcuse book from a few years later (An Essay on Liberation) as having "anticipated 21st-century liberal attitudes."

Are today's liberals "post-liberal" liberals?

And outside of his most polemical works, Marcuse's 1941 book on Hegel, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, for instance, is still regarded as an important scholarly work.

Another scholar associated with the Frankfurt School, Rainer Forst, did an excellent book, "Tolerance in Conflict," that in part builds on Marcuse, about the development of the Western liberal notion of political tolerance. In particular, he provides descriptions of the historical events which Marcuse summarized in the "Repressive Tolerance" essay this way: "The tolerance which enlarged the range and content of freedom was always partisan - intolerant toward the protagonists of the repressive status quo."

But if his Marcuse column is any measure, Taibbi wouldn't grasp Forster's book, either. Admittedly, "Repressive Tolerance" was pointed in the way it poses the classic Platonic dilemma of who educates the educators?

This is a discussion between Taibbi and RJ Eskow about the column, The Zero Hour Taibbi & Eskow: The Marcuse Match 02/19/2021:



Eskow is more polite than I would be. But it confirms what a superficial view Taibbi takes on something that in this case he obviously barely understands.

In the video, Taibbi says that Jaime Dimon and Nancy Pelosi are currently following Marcuse's prescription (?!?), which Taibbi dislikes. Proving that Taibbi barely has any clue what Marcuse was writing about.

After hearing the exchange with Eskow, I'm even more inclined to think this is Taibbi's version of the "Cultural Marxism" scam. And that one is real gutter far-right stuff.

This is another discussion by Douglas Lain and Pascal Robert about Taibbi and Marcuse. Lain begins by mentioning that he often agrees with Taibbi, though not on that column: What Taibbi Got Wrong (and Right) about Herbert Marcuse Zero Books 02/23/2021:

"Conservative Revolution" and asymmetric partisan polarization in the US

I wrote in the immediately preceding post about how the radicalization of the Republicans party is part of a long-standing asymmetric partisan polarization in US politics. One of the features of that phenomenon is the fondness of Republicans for the rhetoric of "revolution", even though their perspective in distinctively conservative-to-reactionary by any normal historical standard. That has included a increasing willingness to use "revolutionary" measures - in the sense of illegal and extra-legal actions from voter suppression to political neutralization of the independence of the justice system - in pursuit of the comfort and increasing enrichment of the already wealthy.

While the Democrats have to be dragged kicking and screaming into even mild reformist measures that their voting base demands. The latest manifestation was the Party establishment's insistent rejection of "Medicare For All, aka, national health insurance, aka, the standard approach to health insurance in most wealthy nations from Canada to Europe to South Korea and China, as "socialist" and un-American. While Bernie Sanders call for a "revolution" in the sense of more active voter participation and national health insurance is treated with mock (and maybe real) horror by Democratic leaders dependent on corporate donors. National health insurance was a part of the Democratic Party's official program from 1948 to 1992 and is extremely popular among the Democratic base.

This is asymmetric political polarization, American style.

But what sense does "conservative revolution" actually have? For as long as I can remember, I've been hearing what I believe is known as the circle theory of radicalization, i.e., that radicals on the far right and the far left often switch to the other extreme. I generally react to the claim with at least a mental eye-roll and often a physical one. While we can certainly find examples of that happening, it's not a common political path. We see it in opportunistic cases, because opportunism is part of politics. We see it with people of an authoritarian mindset, although such people are generally more drawn to rightwing politics. We see it in some famous cases like Benito Mussolini, who went from being a militant Italian socialist to a militant Italian fascist, for whom both the opportunism and the authoritarianism were important.

And we see it in rightwing populism as in Steve Bannon's brand, which picks up on the Tea Party schtick. He has even described himself as a Leninist. (Victor Sebestyen, Bannon says he’s a Leninist: that could explain the White House’s new tactics Guardian 02/06/2017) But Bannon, like other rightwing populists, is interested in protecting oligarchs, not overthrowing them or even spreading their wealth to "the people" to whom they make demagogic appeals.

There was an intellectual movement in interwar Germany that was known as the Conservative Revolution - or at least group of thinkers who became identified . The best-known figure associated was Carl Schmitt, who became Hitler's favorite jurist and Nazi Party member, who is still taken seriously as a political theorist. Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West, provided them with an image of a decent, doomed liberal order. The writer Ernst Jünger is also often associated with this trend. Arthur Moeller van den Bruck is little remembered now, but the name of his 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) is well known from its real-world incarnation. As the Britannica Online article on him notes, "Though the Nazis denied him as an intellectual precursor, his thought helped create an atmosphere that was receptive to the National Socialist ideology."

Arnulf Scriba and Daniel Wosnitzka (Konservative Revolution Deutsches Historisches Museum 12.09.2014) define the trend this way:

Der Begriff Konservative Revolution bezeichnet eine geistig-politische Sammelbewegung jungkonservativer Kräfte in der Weimarer Republik, die sich für einen autoritären Staat einsetzten und den liberalen Werten der Weimarer Demokratie deutlichen Widerstand entgegenbrachten. Sie grenzten sich sowohl von den Ideen der Französischen Revolution und der Aufklärung wie von bloßer Restauration ab und forderten nach den Erfahrungen des Ersten Weltkriegs eine "neue abendländische Einheit unter deutscher Führung". Die Konservative Revolution verstand sich als Gegenrevolution, die nach dem Umsturz der bestehenden Ordnung konservative Maßstäbe setzen und die Auflösung der abendländischen Kultur verhindern wollte.

[The term Conservative Revolution refers to a spiritual-political collective movement of young conservative forces in the Weimar Republic, which advocated an authoritarian state and wanted to resist the liberal values of Weimar democracy. They distanced themselves from the ideas of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as well as from mere restoration and demanded, after the experiences of the First World War, a "new Western unity under German leadership". The Conservative Revolution understood itself as a counter-revolution that, after the overthrow of the existing order, wanted to set conservative standards and prevent the dissolution of Western culture.] (my translation and emphasis)

This was an intellectual trend, not a defined group with a common, formal program. But the notion of a "Conservative Revolution [that] understood itself as a counter-revolution" is a pretty good definition of what Bannonism, Trumpism, and the Tea Party/pro-COVID-19-protesters actually represent.

I closed the previous post with a 1972 quote from the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse making a grand generalization, "

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. ... The counterrevolution is largely preventive and, in the Western world, altogether preventive. Here, there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing. And yet, fear of revolution which creates the common interest links the various stages and forms of the counterrevolution.

Marcuse had been around in the 1920's and 1930s to engage with the idea of the so-called Conservative Revolution. His 1972 pronouncement is general enough that a lot of developments could be defined as having fit it. One could also make an argument that the "Western world" had been in counterrevolution mode since 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution), or since the beginning of the Cold War (1947), or since the beginning of the decolonization movement became a major force in the 20th century.

But I also think that the view Marcuse expressed there actually defines how today's version of the Conservative Revolution thinks about their role and how they view contemporary history. In some ways, the dramatic reform movements known by the shorthand of "1968" probably plays a bigger role in their minds than it does in the minds of the mainstream or those who considered themselves distinctively left. It's often been said that Trump's Make America Great Again slogan is understood by his followers in the sense of Make America White Again. That is, a return to a conservatively imagined 1950s. Those were the days:

It's also worth remembering that most histories of the market-fundamentalist economic and political outlook known as neoliberalism had its first major real-world implementation in Chile after the coup against Allende in 1973, and in Argentina after the 1976 coup against Isabel Perón's government. (The latter was actually more the government of José López Rega, the Dick Cheney of Argentine contemporary history, and was already practicing its own form of authoritarian neoliberalism and explicit counterrevolution against actual armed revolutionary groups.)

The subsequent military governments in both countries actually did practice extra-legal and extra-constitutional methods of government, i.e., methods that good Burkean conservative would consider "revolutionary". But those were real, violent, consciously counterrevolutionary regimes that understood themselves as part of an international reaction against the revolutionary impulses they identified with "1968" and the anticolonial revolutionary and independence movements of the time.

In American politics, the asymmetrical partisan polarization currently features one side that is composed of a continually radicalizing Republican Party and the associated far-right movements and that imagines itself as facing offing the imminent storming of the Winter Palace by an unruly mob of scientists, professors, angry feminists, black radicals, and dope-smoking hippies.

On the other side, we have a Democratic Party that thinks talking about national health insurance is way too radical to even talk about, because it might alienate some elderly white voters who would never in a hundred years consider voting for Democrats.(And who, by the way, already get their health insurance from Medicare socialism.)

This is very asymmetric!

Star philosophers of the alt-right (1 of 2): Heidegger

Erik Baker takes a look at how the American alt-right use the German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) in Why the Alt-Right Loves Nietzsche Jacobin 01/02/2019).

It's definitely worth reading to see how the two are portrayed by the highbrow portion of the alt-right as important intellectual icons of the their outlkook. Richard Hofstadter reminded us decades ago that there are "lowbrow" and "higbrow" versions of far-right ideology, even "middlebrow" ones. I like the latter term, but it never really seems to have caught on more generally. A not-inconsiderable amount of what passes for intellectual discussion on the far right is actually hack work dressed up with academic pretensions. "Middlebrow" would be the appropriate label for a lot of it. Mileage may vary on whether someone like Jordon Peterson rises to the "highbrow" level.

I won't try to nitpick Baker's article, which is a review of Ronald Beiner's book Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger and the Return of the Far Right (2018). Because he's arguing from actual positions that the two philosophers took (as processed by Beiner) and makes good points.

I'm much more familiar with Nietzsche's work and biography than Heidegger's.

But both of them are important philosophers whose work has influenced others who are not definitely not rightwingers. And their influence is such that it would be both historically inaccurate and politically confused to relegate Nietzsche and Heidegger as relevant only to the political right.

Martin Heidegger

To be very clear on one point: Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. As in, he was a member of the German NSDAP, Hitler's Nazi Party, all the way to the end of the Second World War. And he was a member by conviction as well as opportunism. The American occupation authorities after the war required him to go through the denazification process. Politically, Heidegger was literally a Nazi. Of course, after the war, he tried to downplay the significance of that. There could be some dispute about how much he rejected his past Nazi politics later in his life. Because of course he did a lot of mealy-mouthing about the whole thing. But I'm not convinced that he ever rejected his Nazi past. Whatever good ideas he had in philosophy, I find him to be an intensely unsympathetic character.

Key philosophical issues in and around Heidegger's philosophy include: his concept of truth as aletheia (ἀλήθεια), which he understood as the un-forgetting of the experience of Being; the privileged position he assigned to the pre-Socratic philosophers; his notion of the history of metaphysics as a long-term decay from the pre-Socratics; his concept of the inauthenticity of the present human Dasein (mode of existence); Heidegger's relation to Hegel's philosophy; his notion of historicity; the role of intense experience of living in Heidegger's outlook; the concept of death in his thought; the surprising adaptation of Heidegger's though in French philosophy not only in Sartre's existentialism but also by thinkers by Jacques Derrida and others in the deconstructionist school of literary criticism.

Argentine philosopher and political theorist José Pablo Feinmann wrote an interesting philosophical novel about Heidegger. La sombra de Heidegger (The Shadow of Heidegger) (2005). It includes an interesting twist in which the character serving as the novel's narrator decides that the Argentine Peronism of the 1940s represents the kind of political movement that Heidegger really wanted to see. This is a generous interpretation on the character's part, because Peron's movement was a complex one that was mainly left-populist with some authoritarian tendencies that also included a rightwing Catholic component. Heidegger might have liked the authoritarian part. The rest is more dubious. (The narrator winds up committing suicide.)

In a book of essays, La sangre derramada: Ensayo sobre la violencia política (1998/2006), Feinmann includes a chapter, "Digresión: Heidegger y el nazismo, ¿contingencia personal o necesariedad interna de su filosofar?", in which he identifies the concept of the Germans as a "metaphysical people" as the central problem in Heidegger's philosophy and political outlook. He quotes from Heidegger's description of the historical mission of the German people in Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), and concludes (my English translation):

Détras de estas líneas late el genocidio. Cuando un pueblo se adjudica un misión histórica, cuando esa misión consiste en rescatar a los otros pueblos de su decadencia espiritual y remitirlos a un centro originario y puro que él, ese pueblo, representa, aquí, exactamente aquí, se abre el horizont conceptual del genocidio.

[Behind these lines lies genocide. When a people assigns itself an historical mission, when this mission consists in rescuing other peoples from their spiritual decadence and sending them to an original and pure center {of existence} that they, this people, represent: here, precisely here, is where the conceptual horizon of genocide opens.] (italics in original)

Two important German philosophers, Herbert Marcuse and Karl Löwith, studied under Heidegger, and he was an important philosophical mentor to both. Marcuse and Löwith were both Jewish; Löwith himself was Protestant but his parents were Jewish, which made him Jewish in the Nazis' view. Both of them later expressed surprise at Heidegger's Nazi politics and anti-Semitism that became public after Hitler took power. So if he held those views strongly at an early period, he managed to compartmentlize them well. After the war, Marcuse and Heidegger had a tense correspondence, in which Marcuse expressed his view that Heidegger's political outlook must be rooted in his philosophy, as well (Correspondence with Martin Heidegger, 1947-48 Marcuse.org, Richard Wolin's 1998 English translation):

This week I will send off a package to you. My friends have recommended strongly against it and have accused me of helping a man who identified with a regime that sent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers (in order to forestall misunderstandings, I would like to observe that I was not only an anti-Nazi because I was a Jew, but also would have been one from the very beginning on political, social and intellectual grounds, even had I been "100 per cent aryan"). Nothing can counter this argument. I excuse myself in the eyes of my own conscience, by saying that I am sending a package to a man from whom I learned philosophy from 1928 to 1932. I am myself aware that that is a poor excuse. The philosopher of 1933-34 cannot be completely different than the one prior to 1933; all the less so, insofar as you expressed and grounded your enthusiastic justification of the Nazi state in philosophical terms.

Marcuse is considered one of the key figures in what came to be known as "Western Marxism" and part of the "first generation" of the critical theory/Frankfurt School. Another philosopher of that "first generation" was Theodor Adorno, who wrote a book called Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [The Jargon of Authenticity] 1964 that criticizes Heidegger's central concept of "authenticity".