This essay is a response to Matt Taibbi’s recent essay “Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual” and an exploration of the difficulties that Marcuse was facing during his lifetime. Specifically, I’ll take a look at some of the ways Marcuse’s writings and ideas fit within the context of the struggle for socialism, at the problems and realities Marcuse was attempting to address, and how difficult it is to cleanly separate the left from the right, or to put it in Marcuse’s language, to determine what ideas assist human progress and which ideas are regressive and reactionary.
Along the way I’ll take excerpts from Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” and from Ben Burgis’ “Give Them an Argument” in order to explain just how we here at Zero Books are both repeating and attempting to get beyond the old problems for both socialism and liberal democracies.
In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx wrote that world history repeats itself. He observed that Hegel was right when he asserted that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice, but, Marx said, Hegel forgot to add that the first time history appears as a tragedy, while the second time history appears as a farce.
In 2021 we would be lucky if historical events only happened twice. Today history is like a skipping record, or like a youtube video set to loop.
But, being stuck in the same pattern, does have some advantages. It provides those of us who aren’t amongst the corpses to notice patterns, to look for structures. It’s like watching reruns of what might have originally been a compelling TV drama. By the fifth or sixth viewing, a sort of Brechtian alienation takes hold. For instance, you stop trying to figure out who the good guys are, stop rooting for a team, and start to wonder about the scriptwriters, about TV tropes, about the history of NBC. The sense of deja vu can give you some emotional distance from the material of your newsfeed on FB, the cable news, and even from essays published on Substack.
This is how I felt when I read Matt Taibbi’s essay on Marcuse. It’s how I feel when I read Taibbi’s critiques of woke culture generally.
The left has criticized the authoritarianism involved in its own projects from the very beginning. Marx critiqued the utopians for their insistence that socialism could be brought about through the development of various, often Christian or Christianized, ideologies. The anarchists critiqued Marx for his vanguardism and embrace of State power. The socialist Eugene Debs criticized the progressives for their moralizing and ineffectual efforts to rid society of vices through legal restrictions such as prohibition. Today’s current debate on the left, a debate sometimes characterized as a fight between woke and anti-woke players, dates back at least to the 90s. For example, Christopher Lasch in his book “Revolt of the Elites” pointed out that the political correctness on college campuses, the attempts to police language, only led to an entrenchment of racist attitudes amongst the lower and middle white working class.
Howard Zinn used to say that you can’t ever be neutral on a moving train, but if you find out the train is running on a circular track it might be time to do more than just react, and it’s for this reason that this video is not going to be an attempt to judge Matt Taibbi or Marcuse as people. It is not even going to be an attempt to judge them as writers or thinkers. At least, I am going to try to avoid judging them because to do so implies that there is a correct position that is already known, that I already have in my possession. Unfortunately, that is clearly not the case. If it were, we wouldn’t be stuck watching reruns. Instead of judging Marcuse and Taibbi as if I know what is true in advance, this video will try to point out the questions and problems that Marcuse and Taibbi share in common. It should be possible. Even though the two men don’t a common conception of the world, they are both facing problems born out of the same system, even if as they face different problems from dramatically different moments in history.
Having said that, if you’re remotely familiar with Marcuse and the Frankfurt School in general, it is easy to read Taibbi’s essay as a symptom of the very “one dimensionality” that Marcuse complains about. For example, when he describes Marcuse as disillusioned after WW1, despite not having himself experienced combat, as obsessed with the question “what form of Marxism would eventually triumph across the civilized world” he is not only being unfair to Marcuse, but he is also flattening out history, ignoring how the bourgeois revolutions in the 19th century were intertwined with struggles for socialism, and how even the most bourgeois dreams of the 19th century were smashed to pieces in the 20th.
Taibbi cherry-picks quotes from Marcuse, and in so doing he misses an opportunity to critique Marcuse adequately. For example, Taibbi quotes Marcuse from One Dimensional Man:
“Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the individuals through the way in which it is organized. Such a society may justly demand acceptance of its principles and institutions…”
But, what Taibbi leaves out is how Marcuse’s vision of socialism is precisely the development of social relations and technics so that needs are satisfied. Freedom, for Marcuse, must include freedom from want. What Marcuse is wrestling with is how it could be that a rising standard of living was not leading to the development of free individuals. Why were people working just as much as before, why was society still divided against itself, both externally between nations and internally along ethnic and class lines? What Marcuse wanted to know, after two world wars, was how it could be that increasingly powerful engines of production and technological sciences, weren’t leading to liberation but the threat of annihilation.
In order to understand Marcuse’s work you have to see him through the lens of history, or really through two lenses. His ideas were the result of the history of bourgeois development and of the history of Marxism. The horror of the trenches and the machine gun, the holocaust and the atom bomb are well known. What is less well known is the horror of the Belle Epoque and the terror of Pop.
Starting in the late 19th century the struggle for socialism had been in crisis. Rather than the contradictions of capitalism leading to a worker’s revolution, the Long Depression had led to a new boom. In the Second International, there was a debate about this crisis in Marxism, about how the new economic conditions seemed to discredit Marx’s and even more traditional Marxist ideas about how capitalism produces its own grave-diggers. Edouard Bernstein argued that there was no longer a need for revolution, but that socialists could find a path out of class society through electoral politics, the stock market, increased production, and the rational management of both production and distribution.
By the end of the second world war, Bernstein appeared to have been proven at least half right. The contradictions in capitalism could be overcome by what nearly everyone recognized to be state capitalism. The Fascists, the Soviets, and Fordist America were all functioning in the same way. The old way of letting capitalism manage itself through competition in the market was dead. Monopoly capital when working with the state could rationally plan for the future.
Rational planning was happening and the technocrats were working around the clock. The Americans had announced that production for use, that is true rational planning, was around the corner and the technological tools needed to create a post-scarcity society were already made, and yet rather than a world of freedom, Marcuse found an America filled with smiling conformists at home and military troops that called themselves “advisors” in Vietnam.
What Taibbi misses is that Marcuse, far from being a dogmatic Marxist, had turned away from Marx and revolution both, in an effort to hold onto a technocratic vision of socialism that, while at times thrilling and even beautiful, did not really inform a struggle for socialism, but by the seventies had been turned into its opposite.
In an essay entitled “Marcuse Among the Technocrats: America, Automation and Postcapitalist Utopias” J. Jesse Ramirez argues that Marcuse was, like the rest of the Frankfurt School critical theory guys, working within the economic theory of Friedrich Pollock, and Pollock, like Bernstein, believed that the aim of socialism was to create a new mode of distribution that would complement industrial production with social ownership of wealth. However, unlike the rest of the Frankfurt school, Marcuse made more of an attempt to hold onto his optimism about the possibility of evolutionary socialism. Further, he rejected the idea that the exploitation inherent in capitalism could be dissolved in the ways that Bernstein described, in so much as he asserted that capital was still produced and appropriated by private individuals, whether these individuals were Soviet Bureaucrats or CEOs made little difference.
What was necessary, however, was not the development of a proletarian force that could dictate a change in production and set up a truly new form basis for society, culture and consciousness, but rather the continued maintenance of the Welfare State, support for the unemployable and the victims of racist exclusion, and holding onto an admittedly irrational hope.
In 2009 Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism claimed that Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics. To set up this assertion he quoted from the Communist Manifesto.
[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
What’s worth noticing is that what Fisher quotes with sorrow, Marx wrote with excitement. For Marx, the fact that the old illusions and rituals had been stripped away and brutal exploitation made plain was to be celebrated, because these conditions of naked exploitation and brutal egoism would not long be tolerated. But, according to Fisher socialism has been put off indefinitely because what replaced the old ideologies, beliefs, and rituals was a cultural torpor and acquiescence. Rather than finding a new subjectivity we were, instead, immersed in Capitalist Realism.
Marcuse likewise believed that the struggle for socialism had been replaced by a semi-permanent capitalist ideology, an ideology that could maintain power, stave off a transformation. He believed that freedom from want and oppression was technically feasible, but oppression and exploitation would continue nonetheless.
From the vantage point of 2021 it is easy to see that, while a post-scarcity world may be technically possible if we only consider the forces of production, the social relations that are maintained in order to reproduce those forces still seem necessary even as our global society can no longer promise to produce ever-rising standards of living, suppress the threat of world war through a threat of mutually assured destruction, nor even maintain the possibility of a quiet life of conformity in the suburbs. We have reached a point where the old assumptions of both the socialists and the bourgeois managers have been smashed to pieces.
This brings us back to Taibbi. Clearly, from our perspective in 2021, there can be no sensible argument for calling for the suppression of the right to assemble and the right to think. Marcuse’s idea that students might be able to help bring about socialism by suppressing the dominant ideology of society on campus was ludicrous at the time, even this argument from Marcuse should be understood in the context of the moment it was written. Marcuse was addressing a student movement that was attempting to stop their own recruitment into the US military-industrial complex that was invading Vietnam and to alter a university system that was to turn their intellectual work into horrific weapons and programs. In that context Marcuse’s mistake, while still a mistake, is a bit more understandable.
As for Taibbi’s claim that Marcuse wanted to create a dictatorship of intellectuals, this is far less than charitable reading. His comments on the poverty of US education, and on the necessity for valuing the sort of education that goes beyond training in technical skills but also helps students and citizens develop an understanding of the context of their lives, his call for an education system that might empower us to change that context, has to be understood not as a call for the unwashed to shut up, but for the current administrators to get out of the way. Marcuse’s essay was written a year after Mario Savio, speaking for the Free Speech Movement, complained that the president of Berkeley University had compared the University to a business firm.
We were told the following: If President Kerr actually tried to get something more liberal out of the regents in his telephone conversation, why didn't he make some public statement to that effect? And the answer we received, from a well-meaning liberal, was the following: He said, 'Would you ever imagine the manager of a firm making a statement publicly in opposition to his board of directors?' That's the answer!
Well, I ask you to consider: If this is a firm, and if the board of regents are the board of directors; and if President Kerr in fact is the manager; then I'll tell you something. The faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw materials that don't mean to be—have any process upon us. Don't mean to be made into any product. Don't mean ... Don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!
On one point, however, Taibbi is clearly correct. When he writes that capitalism and its political representatives in the democratic party, can and have absorbed Marcuse and his books into itself, that his one-dimensional man and essays on tolerance can be used as bludgeons against the ordinary average guys (and gals) who are becoming increasingly fed up with the precarity of life during the last twenty years of what was once called the new normal, that the very society of unfreedom that he feared can now use his face and decontextualized ideas to justify the last gasps of a now neoliberal state capitalism, he lands a death blow.
In his final line, he says that we might laugh at the irony of the way Marcuse has been recuperated but claims that Marcuse himself could never get the joke.
Can we?