The Norman Vincent Peale of the Left
AN ESSAY ON LIBERATION by Herbert Marcuse Beacon Press, $5.95; Paper, $1.95
In One-Dimensional Man, first published in 1964, Marcuse offered an analysis of advanced industrial society that was unrelieved in its disgust and pessimism. He saw in the United States, the most advanced, and therefore the most typical, manifestation of this society, a Welfare and Warfare State that was the very embodiment of Unfreedom and Irrationality. Worse yet, it had stabilized itself to an unprecedented degree. All the historical agents of change had been contained, and the contradictions that Marx discerned in the capitalist system were “suspended.”
It might be objected that this stability indicated that the system satisfied the needs of the overwhelming majority, who displayed their satisfaction in the freely given consent on which democracy rests. But, in Marcuse’s view, any such argument would be hopelessly naïve: in reality, the system is managed by totalitarian controls and sustained by obscene violence. To prevent the contradictions of capitalism from reasserting themselves, it is necessary for the media to create a desire for the waste products of affluence and for the government to manage a war economy that can generate adequate levels of demand. The manipulative powers of advertising and of the media by which the required desires and beliefs are instilled in the population are as totalitarian as, and perhaps more effective than, the terroristic methods of the police state. And the domestic prosperity that the war economy makes possible rests on the kind of furious violence and mass murder that are exhibited in the Vietnam atrocity.
It is because this violent, wicked, and unnatural society has lost all power to transcend itself that Marcuse describes it as one-dimensional. In Marcuse’s Hegelian terminology, it has lost the dialectical “power of negation.” In sphere after sphere of human activity, those agents, faculties, and resources that provide a critical perspective, or a revolutionary impulse, have been repressed. (Marcuse’s use of the term “repressed” in this very general sense reflects the ambition he shares with Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other thinkers associated with the Frankfurt Institut fur Sozialforschung to synthesize the insights of Marx and Freud.) Most conspicuously, the industrial working class, which Marx identified as the “absolute negation” of capitalism, and which he described as “the gravedigger of capitalism,” has lost any impulse to transform the established order. Indeed, enslaved as it is by society’s ability to satisfy its false needs, the laboring class may be counted among its fiercest defenders.
If society exploits the false needs of the masses, it also represses the true ones. To be sure, as Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents, the price of civilization is the repression of man’s instinctual nature. But, Marcuse argues, tlie repression required by the vested interests of contemporary society is far greater than anything the maintenance of society justifies. Much of the repression that contemporary society exacts is, to adapt a term of Marx’s, “surplus” repression. Furthermore, instead of permitting erotic sublimation, a form of genuine transcendence, society “desublimates” the erotic impulse, permits it only a genital expression, and exploits it for its own purposes. The permissiveness of contemporary society is, therefore, actually a form of domination.
This repression of man’s erotic nature can also be observed in the decline of high art and culture. The transcending, oppositional art of pretechnological society was alienated from that society. Its sublimated images made visible a “return of the repressed” (sublimation is a form of Hegelian “sublation” that preserves what it negates) and kept alive that promesse de bonheur of which Stendhal spoke. In advanced industrial society these images are “desublimated” and incorporated into the established order. The classics are read as commercials and lose what Brecht called their “alienation” effect. Mass culture is, of course, conformist by its very nature.
Finally, the disastrous consequences of advanced industrial society may be discerned in the realm of language itself. For advanced industrial society deprives words of their transcending connotations, and concepts of their universal implications. This closure of meaning, visible in the operationalism of contemporary physics, the behaviorism of academic social science, and the positivism of contemporary philosophy, makes social criticism impossible and renders speech increasingly Orwellian. For instance, the reigning empiricism deprives the word Freedom of its expansive historical connotations—connotations that were preserved in classical philosophy up through Hegel and Marx —and confines its meaning to the empirically “given,” that is, to the institutions of the “Free” World. But for Marcuse, who is at least as Orwellian as his opponents, this freedom is plainly slavery.
Given this diagnosis of contemporary society, it is plain that democratic government, as now practiced, is a farce, its apparently neutral liberties in fact permit the media, and “the interests,” to determine opinion and manipulate needs. The right to vote, when practiced by men who believe what they are told to believe and want what they are made to want, can only result in a more perfect, because biologically rooted, tyranny. No more self-perpetuating system of government has existed in human history. Only after men have been educated to the truth, only after they have rediscovered their true needs, will democratic “forms” produce true Democracy and true Freedom. Until then they form an illusion, and a vicious one.
In 1965, in an essay called “Repressive Tolerance” that has been much admired on the authoritarian left, Marcuse consequently called for the suppression of “false words” and “wrong deeds.” He plainly had no doubts about the source of these “radical evils,” for the Liberating Tolerance that he proposed “would mean intolerance against movements of the Right and toleration of movements of the Lelt. It was impossible to guess from reading his essay just who Marcuse expected to exercise this “educational dictatorship.” And the analysis offered in O n e-Dmensional Man was so pessimistic about the prospects tor social change that it was difficult to see just who he thought might impose it.
In his new book. An Essay on Liberation, the gloom of One-Dirncnsional Man lifts slightly, and .Marcuse acknowledges the existence of some definite historical possibilities. They are revealed principally in the revolt of the middle-class intelligentsia. This group played a crucial role in the opposition to the Vietnam War, and in the rebellion of the French students in May and June, 1968. an event which Marcuse thinks may possibly constitute a turning point in the development of contemporary societies. The present situation is. however, at best a prerevolutionary one. for any genuine revolution is impossible so long as counterrevolution is biologically rooted in the working classes. The confrontation politics, the sporadic violence, and the extraparliamentary activities of the student movements may nevertheless mark the beginning ol a period of enlightenment. and they did, in lact. spark a memory of the barricades and oi the general strike among the French working classes. One surmises that the student movement may constitute a preliminary phase of the “educational dictatorship" that will be necessary to liberate the working classes from themselves.
The prospects for transcendence that Marcuse now discerns are by no means exclusively political. The commercialization oi classic art is rejected in the surrealistic slogans of the French students, as the debasement of the public language is rejected in the paradoxes of the Negroes and the hippies. To say “black is beautiful” or to speak of “flower power” is to express sentiments that cannot be expressed in the received, one-dimensional language. All these phenomena suggest to Marcuse the development of a “new sensibility,” and he takes it to reflect a vital, biological need that advanced industrial society cannot satisfy. Resolution, too, has at last sent down tender, biological roots.
In contrast to the claustrophobic metaphysical atmosphere of OneDimensional Man, the ambience of An Essay on Liberation is almost empirical and open. Hut Marcuse’s assumption that the powers of negation are only now emerging, and that they are borne exclusively by those who exhibit the “new sensibility,” a sensibility at once surrealistic and utopian, psychedelic and antinomian, is not convincing. Change is significant even when it is not “qualitative,” and society at large is far less one-dimensional than Marcuse continues to suppose. For instance, Marcuse offers no satisfactory explanation of the fact that the working classes ac tually supported the French student rebels. And in general, he is all too ready to suppose that the working classes harbor no grievances. The fact is, however, that they are far from enjoying the possible benefits of a welfare state and unlikely to enjoy them without serious political conflict and change. Marcuse’s unsatisfactory interpretation of the working classes is undoubtedly related to his contempt for their achievements and aspirations.
Even aside from the working classes, however, it is plain that there are, and have been, significant movements and forces in opposition to the status quo. Indeed, the “new sensibility” is often no more than the latest phase of these movements, or a reflection of these forces. The sexual “revolution” provides a case in point. For the sexual freedom that one associates with the new sensibility (and which Marcuse fails to discuss) is plainly the culmination of a significant historical progress. Marcuse lias always disparaged this progress because it has not liberated men from their “desublimated” genital sexuality and allowed them to enjoy a polvmorphously pet verse eroticism. But Marcuse’s attitude is typical of the distortion that occurs when historical progress is judged by utopian, and in this case by dubious utopian, standards.
The modernist tradition in the arts has also, and consistently, opposed the status quo. The surrealistic slogans of the French students do not show that they are bearers of a new sensibility, but that commercial appropriation and exploitation have not prevented this remarkable movement from communicating itself to significant sections of the public. One of the custodians (although all too often, embalmers) of this tradition is the liberal university. It is, I believe, no accident that much of lhe significant criticism of the Vietnam War was mounted in these institutions, and it is possible to believe that this sustained intellectual criticism had more to do with altering public opinion than the sporadic violence of Marcuse’s admirers in the SDS. Marcuse has not chosen to explain how the universities, which characteristically express themselves in “behavioristic” social science and “positivistic” philosophy, managed to produce this criticism, nor has he explained how the alteration of public opinion was possible, given the totalitarian nature of the media.
All oi this suggests that the forces at play are more varied, and the possibilities of change more significant, than Marcuse’s analysis allows. It is to be hoped that as his imagination ceases to oscillate between the concentration camps of the recent past, and the aesthetic forms and erotic possibilities of the future, Marcuse will focus his forceful intelligence and moral sensibilities on the complex realities of the present. This new essay suggests that such a development is not out of the question. For too long now, Marcuse has sounded like the Norman Vincent Peale of negative thinking.