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: