The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times: Marcuse's Thought in the Neoliberal Era 3031224884, 9783031224881

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
List of Contributors
1 Introduction
Part I: Neoliberal Authoritarianism
Part II: Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality
Part III: Aspects of Liberation
Part I Neoliberal Authoritarianism
2 Building on Marcuse: An Assessment of the New Phase of Neoliberal Despotism
Neoliberalism Now—A New Phase
Conclusion
3 The “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered: The Phantom of “Left Fascism”
Introduction
The Authoritarian Personality
The Distance Betweeen Pontresina and Zermatt
The Contemporary Left
4 Marcuse and the Social Networkers
Marcuse and the Italian ’68ers
From Practice to Praxis: The Necessity of “Die Sache Selbst”
A Long-Term Proposal for a Modern Politics
Using Social Networks
The Social Networkers
5 The Hedonism and Asceticism of Neoliberal Subjectivity: The Crude Needs of Consumer Capitalism and Its Social, Psychological, and Ecological Devastation
Introduction
Some Factors in the Entrenchment of Consumerism
The Coordination of Self-destructive Pleasure
The Twisted Persistence of the Ascetic Attitude
The Instinctual Roots of Political Struggle
Towards Breaking Free of Enslaving Needs
6 Turning Sense into Nonsense and Nonsense into Sense: Critical Theory to Refuse the Fallacy of Populism
Introduction: Neoliberalism in Crisis Begets the Crisis of Its Pseudo-Backlash, Authoritarian Populism
Make America Great Again: White Nationalism Perpetuating and Affirming “A World of Violence, Ugliness, Ignorance and Brutality”
Make-Believe Narratives of “Us and Them”: Authoritarian Populism’s Efforts to Mystify Through an External “Other”
Conclusion: Reasoned Passion/Impassioned Reason: The Substance of the Great Refusal
7 Refusals Redux
Introduction
Tranquility Above: Discontent Below.
History and Changing Subjectivity
The Rise of Refusals
From One-Dimensional man to “Great Refusals”
Down: Not Out—Great Refusals
Capitalism Hits the Fan
The Return of Refusals
Occupy Wall Street
Conclusion: Wither the Telos?
References
Part II Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality
8 Multiple Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times: Reflections from a Critical Theory in Latin America
Against Western Productivism
Marx and Saussure
Use Values and Signs
Materialist Turn for Semiotics
Final Reflections
9 Crisis and Critique: Receptions of Herbert Marcuse in Telos and Al Fekr Al Mo’āṣer
Introduction
The Reception of Marcuse’s Early Works
Toward a Critical Phenomenological Marxism in Telos
Toward Phenomenological Marxism in Al Fekr Al Mo’āṣer
Receptions of Marcuse’s Later Works
A Critique of the Great Refusal
Appreciation and Critique of the Great Refusal in Al Fekr Al Mo’āṣer
Marcuse’s Views on the Arab–Israeli Conflict
Conclusion
10 Towards a Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Settler-Colonialism Within the Affluence of Canadian Society
One-Dimensional Society: Conceptualizing Emancipatory Possibilities and the Actuality of Domination
Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation: Territorial Dispossession and Self-Determination
The Obliteration of Two-Dimensionality: The Culture Industry and Repressive Desublimation
From the Violence of Assimilation to the Administration of Recognition: The State, Indigenous Territory, and Indigenous Self-Determination
The Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Marcuse in Reciprocal Critical Coordination with Coulthard
Concluding Remarks on Modern Society: Settler-Colonialism, Containment, and Blocked Possibilities
11 Colorblind Racism and One-Dimensionality: Imagining Marcusean Conditions of Freedom Through the Black Radical Tradition
Colorblindness as the Proverbial “Mountaintop”
A More Perfect Union?
How We Get Conditions of Freedom
12 Artificial Reverie and Administered Negativity
Introduction
Artificial Negativity
Dialectical Subjectivity, Philosophical and Psychoanalytic
One-Dimensional Subjectivity, Philosophical, and Psychoanalytic
Structural Demands on Subjectivity
A Developmental Theory of Transcendental Schematism
Artificial Reverie
Administered Negativity
Conclusion
13 Reigniting Racket Theory: Horkheimer’s Unfinished Project and Marcuse’s Engagement with American Institutionalism
Introduction
The Fits and Starts of Racket Theory
State Capitalism and Institutionalism
Marcuse and American Institutionalism: A Way Forward
Veblen
Galbraith
Conclusion
Part III Aspects of Liberation
14 Human Rights: A Concrete Utopian Concept
Legal Norms or Legal Requirements—The Political Content of Human Rights
The Human Right to Private Property—The Nature of the Bourgeois Concept of Human Rights
Political and Social Rights—The Indivisibility of Human Rights
Universality or Eurocentrism?
The Globalization of the Protection of Human Rights
15 Revolutionary Ecological Liberation: EarthCommonWealth
The Call to Revolutionary Ecological Liberation
EarthCommonWealth: The Appeal of a New General Interest
The Foundation of Ethics in Commonwealth Labor
The Path to EarthCommonWealth
16 2020: Nature Said “Stop”
The Enigma of the Plague and the Fetishism of the Commodity
Free the Future
The Yanomami Perspective
Merchandise Love, a Critique in Factis
Brief Conclusion
17 Marcusean Pathways for Queer Agency Through Sonic Conceptions of Noise in the Twenty-First Century
Introduction
Marcuse and Queer Activism: Past and Present
Musical Forms and One-Dimensionality
Re-visiting Conceptions of Noise
Toward Marcusean-Informed Sonic Pathways of Queer Agency
Potential Applications
Conclusion
18 The Unfreedom of Moral Perception During Occurrent Experience
Marcuse’s Epistemic Subject: Reason and Drives
Feminist Affect Theory and Marcuse’s Epistemic Subject
Synthesizing Marcuse and Affect Theory Using Buddhist Philosophy
The Unfreedom of Moral Perception During Occurrent Experience
Conclusion: Marcuse’s New Sensibility and Buddhist Ethical Concepts
19 From Reform Politics Toward Liberation During the Suicide of Capitalism: Examples from Housing Policy
Introduction
The Context in Which Our Discussion Takes Place Has to Be Recognized Intersectionally
The Options for Social Action
Revolutionary Action
The Forces of Reaction
The Forces Toward Liberation
Reform Through Conventional Politics
Struggles Around Housing Issues
Reforms Such as Sanders Proposes
Resolving the Housing Crisis
Expanding Home Ownership
Home Ownership Further Has a Political Aspect
Reforms May in Fact Impede Progress
Micro-Housing
Adequate, Decent, Safe, and Sanitary
Non-profit Housing as Motor
Transformational Reforms in a Transformational Politics
Rent Controls
Public Housing
A Right to Housing
New Dangers
To Conclude
Afterword—On An Essay on Liberation
Afterword
Index

Citation preview

CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE

The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times Marcuse’s Thought in the Neoliberal Era Edited by Taylor Hines Peter-Erwin Jansen Robert E. Kirsch Terry Maley

Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

Series Editor Stephen Eric Bronner, Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpretations of the classics and salient works by older and more established thinkers. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged with immanent critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more broadly the link between theory and practice. Each in this series will, after his or her fashion, explore the ways in which political theory can enrich our understanding of the arts and social sciences. Criminal justice, psychology, sociology, theater and a host of other disciplines come into play for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engaging alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements, sovereignty, and the institutional problems of power. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an important niche. Innovatively blending tradition and experimentation, this intellectual enterprise with a political intent hopes to help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified field of study and to perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars and activists.

Taylor Hines · Peter-Erwin Jansen · Robert E. Kirsch · Terry Maley Editors

The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times Marcuse’s Thought in the Neoliberal Era

Editors Taylor Hines Honors College Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA Robert E. Kirsch Leadership and Integrative Studies Arizona State University Tempe, AZ, USA

Peter-Erwin Jansen Social Science Koblenz University of Applied Sciences Koblenz, Germany Terry Maley Department of Politics York University Toronto, ON, Canada

ISSN 2731-6580 ISSN 2731-6599 (electronic) Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice ISBN 978-3-031-22487-4 ISBN 978-3-031-22488-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © boonchai wedmakawand/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Peter Marcuse, with gratitude.

Preface

Professors Arnold Farr (University of Kentucky) and Andrew Lamas (University of Pennsylvania) initiated the establishment of the International Herbert Marcuse Society (IHMS) in Philadelphia in 2005. In 2013 the Society became a non-profit organization. As of 2021, the IHMS has held nine biennial conferences at various universities in the United States and Canada. The tenth will be held in Frankfurt in 2023. Contributions by numerous scholars from the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe and the commitment of many students at the respective universities serve as the basis for discussion of work on critical theory in general and the works of Herbert Marcuse in particular, as well as about current theoretical and political topics. The discussions focus on the consequences of global capitalism, threats to democratic societies, populist and neo-Nazi trends, ecological destruction, gender, and politics in Latin America. In addition to the biennial conferences, a group of scholars publishes special collections of works by Herbert Marcuse related to the conference themes. These include previously unpublished texts by Marcuse archived at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The proceeds from the sale of these volumes benefit the IHMS. Leading members of the Society also publish collections of papers presented at the conferences, such as those included here. This volume brings together contributions from the conferences at York University in Toronto in 2017 and the University of California in Santa Barbara in 2019. Contributions to the Toronto conference centered

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on “The Dialectics of Liberation in the Era of Neoliberalism,” while the Santa Barbara presentations focused on the theme “Critical Theory in Dark Times: The Prospects for Liberation in the Shadow of the Radical Right.” These are the themes of the articles published here. This collection is divided into three parts: (I) Neoliberal Authoritarianism; (II) Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality; and (III) Socialism(s): Still the Proper Response. These contributions are by renowned scholars from around the world working in multiple academic disciplines. They offer diverse perspectives and critical insights into the principal contradictions of contemporary capitalism while pointing to alternative economic and social models. As members of the IHMS and as the rights holders of the works of Herbert Marcuse, we are glad to advance the discussions about Herbert Marcuse’s critical theory and make it accessible to a wide audience. This anthology does that very successfully, for which we thank the editors. Santa Barbara, USA

Peter Marcuse Harold Marcuse

Contents

1

Introduction Taylor Hines, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Robert E. Kirsch, and Terry Maley

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Part I Neoliberal Authoritarianism 2

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Building on Marcuse: An Assessment of the New Phase of Neoliberal Despotism Terry Maley

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The “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered: The Phantom of “Left Fascism” Samir Gandesha

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Marcuse and the Social Networkers Luca Mandara

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The Hedonism and Asceticism of Neoliberal Subjectivity: The Crude Needs of Consumer Capitalism and Its Social, Psychological, and Ecological Devastation Rodney Doody

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CONTENTS

Turning Sense into Nonsense and Nonsense into Sense: Critical Theory to Refuse the Fallacy of Populism Christian Garland Refusals Redux Lauren Langman

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Part II Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality 8

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Multiple Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times: Reflections from a Critical Theory in Latin America Stefan Gandler

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Crisis and Critique: Receptions of Herbert Marcuse in Telos and Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser Haggag Ali

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Towards a Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Settler-Colonialism Within the Affluence of Canadian Society Wes Furlotte Colorblind Racism and One-Dimensionality: Imagining Marcusean Conditions of Freedom Through the Black Radical Tradition Nicole K. Mayberry

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Artificial Reverie and Administered Negativity Taylor Hines

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Reigniting Racket Theory: Horkheimer’s Unfinished Project and Marcuse’s Engagement with American Institutionalism Robert E. Kirsch

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239 253

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Part III Aspects of Liberation 14

Human Rights: A Concrete Utopian Concept Peter-Erwin Jansen

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CONTENTS

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Revolutionary Ecological Liberation: EarthCommonWealth Charles Reitz

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315 329

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2020: Nature Said “Stop” Imaculada Kangussu

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Marcusean Pathways for Queer Agency Through Sonic Conceptions of Noise in the Twenty-First Century Casey Robertson

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The Unfreedom of Moral Perception During Occurrent Experience James William Lincoln

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From Reform Politics Toward Liberation During the Suicide of Capitalism: Examples from Housing Policy Peter Marcuse

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Afterword

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Index

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List of Contributors

Haggag Ali Academy of Arts, Giza, Egypt Rodney Doody Toronto, Canada Wes Furlotte Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada Samir Gandesha Global Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada Stefan Gandler Coordinador del Cuerpo Académico Modernidad, Desarrollo y Región, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Querétaro, Qro., Mexico Christian Garland King’s College, London, UK Taylor Hines Honors College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Peter-Erwin Jansen Social Science, Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, Koblenz, Germany Imaculada Kangussu Belo Horizonte, Brazil Robert E. Kirsch Leadership and Integrative Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Lauren Langman Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA James William Lincoln Lasell University, Newton, MA, USA xiii

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Terry Maley Department of Politics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Luca Mandara University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy Peter Marcuse Columbia University, New York, NY, USA Nicole K. Mayberry Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA Charles Reitz Kansas City Kansas Community College (Ret.), Kansas City, KS, USA Casey Robertson York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

CHAPTER 1

Introduction Taylor Hines, Peter-Erwin Jansen, Robert E. Kirsch, and Terry Maley

Embedded in the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse is the promise that reason, with proper critical orientation, can provide an emancipatory alternative to the deforming domination of the given order. But the critical, substantive idea of reason that underlies Marcuse’s work is occluded in a one-dimensional society in which technological rationality constitutes, as

T. Hines (B) Honors College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] P.-E. Jansen Social Science, Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] R. E. Kirsch Leadership and Integrative Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. Maley Department of Politics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_1

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Marcuse said in One-Dimensional Man, “a world,” resulting in a society without meaningful alternatives.1 This volume, building upon the International Herbert Marcuse Society 2017 biennial conference The Dialectics of Liberation in an Age of Neoliberal Capitalism, and the 2019 conference Critical Theory in Dark Times: The Prospects for Liberation in the Shadow of the Radical Right, engages the dialogue between the twin themes of Marcuse’s critique of domination under capitalism (and now neoliberalism), and revived/new forms of authoritarianism globally. Contributors provide a multi-dimensional analysis of the current era and issues through the lens of Marcuse’s work. It seems undeniable that the global neoliberal order is experiencing a profound series of crises. The uneasy compromise between pseudoKeynesian welfare liberalism and free-market capitalism is crumbling under brutal austerity measures, the unregulated concentration of capital and wealth, and a resurgence of violent reactionary populism. In short, the culture industries, the professional-managerial/middle classes, and other structural mechanisms that once kept the contradictions of capitalism in check—or at least concealed—are no longer capable of legitimating the society which they ushered into dominance. Openly nationalist, fascist, and xenophobic parties are gaining power in governments globally. Institutions manipulated by elites are widening inequalities of wealth and power, and ecological degradation and climate change continue at an alarming pace. Debt traps as a result of uneven development, mass incarceration, and refugee detention policies proceed unhindered. In short, freedom becomes an increasingly abstract illusion under the guise of the “normally” functioning global economic system, giving the lie to neoliberal promises that critical theorists like Herbert Marcuse critique so incisively. Contemporary society, as Marcuse might today admit, no longer functions comfortably, smoothly, or seemingly reasonably as the society of “monopoly capitalism” he so astutely analyzed in One-Dimensional Man in the early 1960s. The crises of the neoliberal order, however, do not signal the disappearance of one-dimensional neoliberal subjectivity or the totalizing political economy and culture industries that are now entrenched in, and constitutive of, the neoliberal global economic order. In the various responses to systemic disintegration, we witness not only ongoing protests by global 1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: A Study in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

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social movements, but also a widespread inability to accept, explain, or even imagine alternatives. What has also emerged is a variety of pathological reactions that now oscillate wildly between authoritarianism and horizontalism, nostalgia and futurism, violent reaction, and apathetic withdrawal. The rise of nationalist and authoritarian populism around the world proceeds apace with the liberal establishment’s moralizing, the refusal to acknowledge the failures of the neoliberal model, and blind adherence to technological rationality. As one of the foremost critics of advanced industrial society, Marcuse can still help us make sense of this contemporary morass. The authors in this volume deploy Marcuse’s critical theory in conversation with both his interlocutors as well as current commentators and events to understand the historical evolution of neoliberalism, its relationship to current authoritarianism, populism, nationalism, and the way these relationships express themselves in contemporary neoliberal character structure. Moreover, we seek to explore how Marcuse can assist us in understanding how the crisis-ridden neoliberal order, institutionally and ideologically, struggles to maintain its hegemony and continues lurching forward. We expand on a key theme of One-Dimensional Man: The Study of Ideology in Advanced Industrial Society—and join it with both a political economy that was always implicit in Marcuse’s work, and with explorations inspired by Marcuse of the possibilities and limits of radical subjectivity, emancipatory counter-organization(s), and revolutionary, or “protean” character in the neoliberal era.2 Finally, we take Marcuse as a touchstone for ways in which an emancipatory future—ways of seeing, organizing, and envisioning a post-capitalist world—can be imagined and experienced in and beyond the current neoliberal context. With the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism on the right, we also see the possibility of a multidimensional resurgence on the left. And for the first time in decades, democratic socialism has moved from the radical left to (some extent) the mainstream of electoral politics. In the spirit of Herbert Marcuse, the emancipatory value of imagination lies “in its refusal to forget what can be,” and it is with this mindset that we do not foreclose the possibility that another, post-neoliberal world is possible. 2 See Lauren Langman’s discussion of Robert Lifton’s term, as an emancipatory subjectivity that can be a counter to the idea of the ‘flexibile’ (read precarious) worker under neoliberalism. See L. Langman and G. Ludskow, God, Guns, Gold and Glory and American Character (New York: Brill Publishing, 2016).

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Part I: Neoliberal Authoritarianism The first part of this volume, “Neoliberal Authoritarianism,” explores the phenomena of authoritarianism and nationalism under neoliberalism and establishes the historical and theoretical grounding of the project. Terry Maley unpacks the complexity of neoliberalism as reflected in recent discussions by political and social theorists who partly rely on, or have affinities with, Marcuse’s Watergate-era analysis of a “proto-fascist syndrome” after the decline of the New Left in the early 1970s. While Marcuse’s post-New Left work pre-dated the modern era of neoliberalism, Maley argues that there is a fruitful dialogue to be had between Marcuse’s analysis of the potential for (capitalist) liberal-democracies to become more authoritarian, or even to display neo-fascist tendencies. More recent discussions of neoliberalism by a wide range of thinkers are seen by Maley as a continuation of Marcuse’s critique. What Marcuse shares with recent commentators is a comprehensive critique, albeit with different (historical and theoretical) emphases, of the development of increasingly crisis-prone capitalist liberal-democracies of the global north after the 1970s. Using Marcuse’s analysis, Maley looks at how liberaldemocracy has morphed, in the four decades since Marcuse passed away in 1979, into the political project of a global neoliberal order that has a paradoxical historical relationship with both nationalism and authoritarianism. Maley looks at how neoliberalism has enabled new forms of anti-democratic, authoritarian political economies and forms of agency. In his discussion of Critical Theory’s refusal of populism, Christian Garland locates that refusal, in Marcuse’s work, against the backdrop of the growing authoritarianism that has emerged globally in the wake of the triumph of neoliberalism. Garland traces the most recent upswing in populism, including Trumpism in the US and Brexit in the UK, back to the great Great Recession of 2008. But Marcuse’s negativity toward “the given” and his critique of the false promises of populism, Garland argues, can point the way toward radical alternatives. In the chapter Garland offers a reasoned critique that is also fueled by cerebral anger, that is, a certain anger preceded by thought, yet underwritten by compassion, empathy, and the idea of emancipation, its theoretical expression, and its praxis . It is this latter juxtaposition with Frankfurt School-infused Critical Theory, and that of Herbert Marcuse in particular, that informs the chapter.

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Samir Gandesha writes about how a return to the Frankfurt School’s formulation of the authoritarian personality in psychoanalytic terms can lend insights into the study of the contemporary neoliberal personality. Specifically, he focuses on the Adorno-Marcuse correspondence of the 1960s, and their discussion of, and disagreement over, the student movements. Gandesha’s provocative discussion explores the idea of authoritarianism on the right and the left, after Habermas’s characterization of “Left fascism” in the student movement. Gandesha does not argue for their equivalence but notes that activists on the Left have to be mindful of re-enacting their own form of ressentiment. The chapter speaks to the challenges of activism on the Left today in a neoliberal context. Lauren Langman takes up some of those challenges in addressing Erich Fromm’s essay “The Authoritarian Personality,” and its application to contemporary character structure, looking at how the neoliberal personality dialectically opens up the possibility of alternatives. Arguing that many social movements, from the 1960s to today, have engaged in more horizontal forms of organization and activism that reflect many of the values of the New Left in the 1960s—cooperation, empathy, peace, respect for the ecology and a post-material ethos that is critical of capitalist acquisitiveness and aggressiveness. Langman sees more optimism in today’s younger generation of activists, their own forms of Great Refusal and their rejection of neoliberalism. Herbert Marcuse influenced the Italian debates on the Left in the 1960s, helping many extra-parliamentary movements to define alternative strategies different from the established political parties. In the age of neoliberalism, international populism and the digital revolution, new strategies on the Left are now needed again. Luca Mandara’s chapter discusses some of the proposals in Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, bringing their critique of “folk politics” into dialogue with Marcuse’s analysis and the current Italian Left-Wing party “Potere al popolo” (Power to the People). In Marcuse’s terms, Facebook (and social media) breaks the free play between imagination and intellect, subsuming imagination under a new Performance Principle defined by algorithms that quantify the self and which reward reified performances on social media platforms. From the exchange and critique, Mandara develops some proposals for building new connections among the “social networkers”, among militants, workers, and people who want to reclaim social media technology for emancipatory purposes.

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In his chapter on hedonism, asceticism, and the psychological, social, and ecological devastation of neoliberal capitalism, Rodney Doody argues that after decades of neoliberal restructuring, individuals continue to seek consumer fulfillment in a world that seems increasingly incapable of providing any lasting satisfaction. The cultural split between the incessant demands for immediate consumer gratification, and the denial of many other needs at work, socially and personally, means that the constant striving for “self-realization” and the need for continual, “flexible” adaptation to a neoliberal market imperatives are also the source of widespread dissatisfaction and psychological trauma. Rampant consumerism has been a catastrophe under neoliberalism, for both individuals and for the ecology of the planet. Doody argues that individuals must come to see that their personal trauma is not inseparable from the trauma caused to nature; that “retail therapy” is as much a symptom of our desolation as it is a cause of the devastation of nature.

Part II: Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality The second part of the volume, “Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality,” seeks to understand how neoliberalism avoids its own breakdown, continues capitalizing on the decay it perpetuates, and does so by supplying a rationality that legitimates its structural contradictions—what Marcuse called “technological rationality.” Under the aegis of comparative studies, Stefan Gandler analyzes how neoliberal subjectivity is formed in Latin America, as opposed to so-called “first world” economies. Subjectivity can be understood most broadly as a product of communication, Gandler writes, and under capitalism, this subjectivization is preconditioned by the production of value in its many different forms. Gandler builds on the work of Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría, who applies semiotic analysis to the production and consumption of use values. As Gandler writes, the production and consumption of use values is, in Echeverría’s theory, “the first and fundamental human sign system” and understood in this way, “the communication process is a dimension of the process of reproduction.” In Gandler’s reformulation, Echeverría provides a counterpoint to structuralist linguistics, in that “Saussure and Echeverría differ notably from one another, since Saussure considers semiotics to be embedded within social psychology, and this, in turn, within psychology in general, while Echeverría’s system of reference

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is the critique of political economy.” In this framework, Gandler fleshes out Echeverría’s semiotic critique of capitalism, with the goal of developing Echeverría’s theory into a new critique of political economy distinct from Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School; one which still draws on classical Marxist theory while avoiding the label of “eurocentrism.” Haggag Ali compares the reception of Marcuse’s theory in the journals Telos and Al Fikr Al Moasser during the years 1968–1973. The American and Egyptian journals both recognized the significance of Marcuse’s critique of advanced industrial society, but, as Ali shows, they applied and critiqued Marcuse’s work from different perspectives, shedding light on the different traditions of critical theory in the two countries. Ali focuses on the reception of several key categories of Marcuse’s thought, including phenomenological Marxism, “great refusals,” repressive desublimation, Marcuse’s synthesis of Freud and Marx, and Marcuse’s views on the Arab– Israeli conflict. Telos , founded by SUNY graduate students with ties to the US student movements of 1968, was well positioned to raise an immanent critique of Marcuse’s engagement with youth counterculture movements of the 60s and 70s. On the other hand, the Cairo-based monthly journal Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser was founded around the same time as Telos but under very different circumstances. The journal was sponsored and supervised by the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance within the Egyptian socialist project, which attempted to negotiate a “third way” synthesizing materialism and spirituality. As Ali notes, Marcuse’s critique of empirical rationality resonated with Egyptian socialism at the time, framed as a project of national resistance to imperialism. Because Egyptian Marxism at the time was in part seen as a counter-cultural response to Western imperialism, the editors and contributors to Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser understood youth movements quite differently than Telos . Wes Furlotte uses the critical indigenous theory of Glen Sean Coulthard, synthesized with Marcuse, to create a dialectical critique of the project of decolonization as conceived by the Canadian state. As Furlotte observes, questions of indigenous autonomy are often cast in the language of “recognition,” abstracted from economic policy. Furlotte argues that Canada’s neoliberal response to the demand for indigenous self-determination meets inherent limitations. Specifically, no language of “pure recognition” can generate “meaningful transformation on the key question of land, understood not only in the material sense but as the site of a system of a series of social relations/obligations that are non-dominating [and] non-exploitative.” Furlotte uses Marcuse’s critique

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of advanced industrial society to argue that there nevertheless exist real possibilities for the project of decolonization in Canada, which also gesture toward a universal emancipatory project. Taylor Hines reconsiders the “artificial negativity” thesis of Timothy Luke and Paul Piccone under conditions of totalizing neoliberalism; by synthesizing Marcuse’s theory of “intuition” with Melanie Klein’s object-relations theory, his chapter argues that a new mode of “administered negativity” is predominant for neoliberal subjects. “In Marcuse’s formulation,” writes Hines, “it is in the tension between actual and potential that negative thinking emerges, [and] Marcuse identifies intuition as the faculty by which we are capable of registering this difference.” Hines connects this faculty with the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, locating its development in a concrete phase of childhood. “We might understand Marcuse’s description of intuition and negativity,” he continues “as the manifestation in adult life of faculties developed in childhood through the successful navigation of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions.” With this framing in mind, the artificial negativity thesis as formulated by Piccone and Luke can be understood as a mechanism whereby the forces of capital modulate this dialectic in stunted form—what Hines calls “artificial reverie,” in connection with W. R. Bion’s theory of “maternal reverie” as the model of the early development of conscious thought. In a society in which this function is provided by the culture industries, Hines argues, “the culture industries have all the tools they need for the complete administration of subjectivity.” Nicole K. Mayberry brings Marcuse’s critique of one-dimensionality to bear on the ideology of “colorblindness” in contemporary politics. “If the project of one-dimensional thinking is to produce a one-dimensional society by eroding two-dimensional consciousness,” writes Mayberry, “then so too is the function of colorblind or post-racial framing whose project is to produce a one-dimensional understanding of race and racism by denying racial distinctions. The effect of this homogenization sustains whiteness and white supremacy.” Mayberry revisits One-Dimensional Man from a racial perspective, in light of the recent racial and social justice movements in the United States. Arguing that the so-called “post-racial” rhetoric used in contemporary politics is a form of one-dimensional thinking, she returns to Marcuse’s call to create “conditions of freedom” with a study of the Black Radical Tradition as a conceptual tool “that integrates into Marcuse’s critical theory to combat one-dimensional oppression.”

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Through an interrogation of financial innovation and institutions, Robert Kirsch concludes this Part by bridging the work of Horkheimer, Veblen, Galbraith, and Marcuse to concretize a foundation for a North American Critical Theory. “The idea behind racket theory,” Kirsch writes, is “the insight that organized crime is business, and business is organized crime, to the point that the two are indistinguishable.” Kirsch gives a comprehensive history of this thesis, beginning with insightful yet somewhat fragmentary contributions from Horkheimer and Adorno, and complements these initial forays with Kirchheimer and Marcuse’s understanding of American institutionalism and an articulation of the place of the state as arbiter among competing racketeers. Including a synthesis of these Frankfurt School thinkers with Veblen and Galbraith’s theories of institutionalism, Kirsch shows how a cohesive racket theory provides a useful tool for understanding the current authoritarian neoliberal regime and provides new insights into the political-economic contributions of American institutionalism.

Part III: Aspects of Liberation The final section of this volume provides a Marcusean grounding of materialist utopian thinking by exploring some of its dimensions. Part of this concretization means reaffirming Marcuse’s explicit and unwavering convictions that some kind of socialism presented the path for a viable alternative to the existing order, and that socialism—key aspects of which are discussed in this section—could be an emancipatory force that provides the register for the possibility of thinking in other dimensions, for creating and experiencing “new sensibilities” beyond the horizons of a harsh, global neoliberal order, or the “tribal,” populist/authoritarian, nationalist, xenophobic, and other toxic reactions to that neoliberal regime. This part takes up the insight that socialism, though not exhaustively defined here, or elaborated as necessarily a party program (though it could include this as well), is still the best response to a society that continues to be constituted by one-dimensional technocratic forms of domination under the political project of neoliberalism, and now also by far-right backlashes to neoliberalism’s market-based forms of social control. In this section, the authors think along with Marcuse about key aspects of a socialist future, or about what utopian theorization toward liberation can look like in the face of coalescing ecological, human, and

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social crises. The chapters in this section establish that Marcusean critical theory still has a vital and urgent value in the contemporary moment. Peter-Erwin Jansen challenges bourgeois notions of human rights. By deploying a Marcusean reading, Jansen salvages the concept of human rights by making it adequate for its task. Namely, as social movements form to confront transnational, shared problems, Jansen searches for the emancipatory potential of a concept of human rights that is similarly scaled to meet the scope of the crises they seek to address. Jansen then highlights the importance of political struggle to define, protect, and extend human rights, rights that, even with a bourgeois genesis, will remain important in a socialist society. In his chapter, Charles Reitz develops his theorization of EarthCommonWealth by laying out its Marcusean frame. Reitz argues that the ecological challenges wrought by global capitalism requires a response that is revolutionary and cannot be content with gradual reforms. Reitz centers the humanistic theorizing of Marcuse to show the intractable embeddedness of the ecological challenges facing contemporary society. That is, the ecological question is not something that can be considered in isolation, separate and discrete from other social problems. Rather, the radical potential of ecological liberation must be part and parcel of the broader liberation of Marcuse’s humanist socialism. This transvaluation of values to form new human subjects and new social relations is the basis for Reitz’s theory of EarthCommonWealth; a radical reconceptualization of how humans relate to nature and to each other. Immculada Kangussu’s chapter applies Marcuseans’ theory to the COVID-19 pandemic. Kangussu provides a vital philosophical framework for responding to the pandemic, regardless of whether it is ever “over,” becomes endemic, or intensifies. This philosophical and anthropological meditation on the catastrophic consequences of the dualisms of modern Western thought—particularly of human and nature—results in surplus alienation and social atomization. These conditions of daily life prevent social-level, more holistic (socialist?) responses to crises like a pandemic. Kangussu looks at Yanomami society to highlight an alternative way that humans can relate to nature. By revisiting the work of Herbert Marcuse, Casey Robertson’s chapter explores how a Marcusean framework can be employed to engage the potentiality of noise as an uncharted pathway of resistance to various power structures that perpetuate domination and democratic unfreedom. Through the violence of noise, one of the final spaces of resistance

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may be illuminated against a one-dimensional culture and society and their embedded structures of hegemony that are often overlooked, especially in relation to LGBTQ2S experiences. By synthesizing Marcuse’s aesthetic theory with interdisciplinary frameworks from queer theory, critical disability studies, and the work of sound studies theorists, Robertson explores new avenues for multi-dimensional consciousness, bringing into focus a new circuitry for political action. Robertson explores forms of sonic agency and unrealized possibilities against a contemporary backdrop that often seems to be bereft of effective possibilities for radical social transformation. By linking the sonic experience of everyday life and the liberatory potential of pushing the boundaries of music in terms of “glitches” and other noise components of sonic landscapes, Robertson finds the affective register for thinking through sonic life not as part of consumer culture, but as an open field of contestation for aesthetic development. James William Lincoln’s chapter also takes up a dimension of everyday life by synthesizing Marcuse’s notion of a new sensibility with a Buddhist ethos. Lincoln’s concept of “Dialectical Consciousness,” or DC, builds the framework of a Marcusean affect theory. DC allows us out of the epistemic limitations of consciousness as a purely subjective experience, and through bringing in Buddhist teachings on interconnectedness builds an analysis of consciousness that strives toward what a new sensibility might look like. This theorization is a contribution in an effort to “re-interrogate the relationship between rationality, affective dispositions, and moral perceptions.” Lincoln’s effort continues a Marcusean vein of looking for new epistemologies of new sensibilities, an important step for being able to refuse the existing order. Finally, Peter Marcuse lays out the different political paths facing us in the current context. The layered and cascading crises of the moment prompt Marcuse to surmise that “capitalism may commit suicide,” but he also is quick to point out that this does not automatically solve the political challenges of creating a qualitatively different society. Marcuse surveys the landscape for avenues of change and also offers material goals for which to strive, such as a right to housing. Marcuse does not lose sight of the urgent need to transform society so that truly liberated people may determine their own lives, while at the same time urging policy prescriptions that are attainable now to make such sweeping transformations possible. He closes out this volume with the struggle at the core of Marcuse’s notion of liberation, whereby the concrete utopia of liberation is only possible through theorizing liberation in the present moment.

PART I

Neoliberal Authoritarianism

CHAPTER 2

Building on Marcuse: An Assessment of the New Phase of Neoliberal Despotism Terry Maley

In this chapter, I want to situate Herbert Marcuse’s thought within the context of a neoliberal era whose systemic dysfunctions have enabled the rise of populist authoritarianism or what political theorist John Keane calls “the new despotism” in “phantom democracies.” Given Marcuse’s discussion of a “proto-fascist syndrome” in the early 1970s, how that discussion was based on the Frankfurt School analyses of fascism in the 1930s, and the relevance of these themes today, it is not coincidental that Marcuse’s thought has of late been making a comeback.1 Revisiting Marcuse’s analysis, in the early 1970s, of the “counterrevolution” of the elites that helped bring about the end of the New Left, and his earlier work on fascism, can shed light on the continuing 1 Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke, eds., The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017).

T. Maley (B) York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_2

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relevance of his (and the first-generation Frankfurt School’s) critique of the increasingly authoritarian cultural, political and socio-psychological forms of domination that the uneven, jagged development of neoliberalism since Marcuse’s death in 1979 has facilitated and enabled. We are now dealing with the global consequences, forty years after Marcuse noted them in incipient form in Counterrevolution and Revolt and in his neglected but important essay, “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy” (HFBD), of the immanent tendencies and contradictions created by the political project of the neoliberal counterrevolution from above that Marcuse analyzed so presciently in these two works from the early 1970s against the backdrop of the Watergate scandal (an ultimately failed attempt at counterrevolution by stealth). This new phase or form of neoliberal capitalism that was designed to supplant the Keynesian Welfare State (KWS) was initiated in the 1970s by political and economic elites in a counter-revolution against the postWWII redistribution of wealth and the social safety net. It would, in the 1990s and 2000s, usher in a much harsher, “leaner” neoliberal social order, leading to what political theorist Sheldon Wolin called, just before the second election victory of George W. Bush in 2004, an “inverted totalitarianism” in the US and the liberal-democracies of the global north. As we proceed, I will try to show why Marcuse’s analysis points in the direction of what Henry Giroux has recently called an even newer configuration—“neoliberal fascism.”2 Marcuse and his first-generation Frankfurt School colleagues are uniquely qualified to act as guides for us now, in a moment of global disintegration fuelled by populist movements trying to forcefully reestablish older, more traditional authoritarian and nationalist hierarchies, social orders, and powers. As Jeremiah Morelock has reminded us, the first generation of Critical Theorists had outlined the contours of farright movements and the authoritarian personality in the 1930s in their ground-breaking studies of fascism.3 In the post-WWII/Cold War atmosphere of triumphalism regarding American-led economic development that was thought by many at the time to have brought about the “end of 2 Mark Karlin, Interview, “Henry A. Giroux: The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism,” Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/henry-a-giroux-the-nightmare-of-neo liberal-fascism/. 3 Jeremiah Morelock, ed., Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism (London: University of Westminster Press, 2018).

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ideology,”4 no one conceived of the idea that US liberal democracy, the “best of all possible worlds,” could have anything to do with fascism or even authoritarianism (though, of course the Black population had experienced the savagery of slavery, and women had experienced patriarchy and sexism for generations). Yet, the Critical Theorists who emigrated from Germany to the US were already pointing to an authoritarianism that was immanent in Western industrial/capitalist democracies, an authoritarianism that has resurfaced recently after the accumulated wreckage of forty years of neoliberal policy “reforms” and restructuring buttressed by “neoliberal rationality”. Things have and have not changed greatly since Marcuse last wrote in the late 1970s. In the mid-2000s, against the backdrop of the centrifugal forces of neoliberalism and globalization, Sheldon Wolin saw the emergence of a new configuration of powers he called Superpower or the Megastate, in which the union of global capital and the modern state reached new heights that were threatening to undermine the already attenuated forms of liberal democracy in the global north. Now, after Trump, many commentators—both academics and journalists—are openly talking about authoritarianism, populism and even the rise of fascism not only beyond the west/global north, but within it. The liberal democracies of the global north are now marked by the deepening authoritarian tendencies that Marcuse first identified in his work for the Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, and then again in HFBD at the end of the New Left period. Below I make the point that we are now in another new (and global) phase of an ongoing, decades-long counterrevolution against democracy, equality, and social justice.5 The authoritarianism (in the forms of racism, sexism, homophobia and imperialism) that had long been there, even in the post-WWII era and then into the modern neoliberal period (from the 1970s to just a few years ago), had operated on the margins of mainstream political and cultural discourse and institutions, and/or by stealth. Now the reactionary backlash against progressive/ left ideas that could pre-figure socialist or post-capitalist ways of seeing and being is out in the open, unrestrained. The “New Despotism,” as 4 Robert J. Antonio, “Max Weber in the Post-World War II US and After,” Ethics and Politics 7, no. 2 (2005). 5 Despite recent talk of a possible return to economic nationalism that has accompanied the populist turn to the far-right, whether globalization is restrained, undermined or in some ways reversed remains to be seen.

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John Keane calls it, is the continuation of an openly autocratic class counterrevolution from above, within both established and newer liberal democracies.6 In the early 1970s, Marcuse had said of the post-1960s counterrevolution of the elites that helped bring an end to the New Left, “The defense of the capitalist system requires the organization of counterrevolution at home and abroad. [It is] altogether preventative. Here there is no recent revolution to be undone, and there is none in the offing.”7 At the time Marcuse had argued that “the consumer society is the form in which monopoly state capitalism reproduces itself at its most advanced stage. [Yet] it is at this stage that repression is reorganized: the ‘bourgeois-democratic’ phase of state capitalism terminates in the new counterrevolutionary phase [emphasis added].”8 I argue that in the early 1970s, Marcuse began to trace the historical moment in which the reorganization of repression inflected and began to change what Wendy Brown has called the moral project of neoliberalism. By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, with their antidemocratic campaigns to de-legitimize the welfare state and the very idea of society, had captured state power.9 This enabled the political project of neoliberalism. Today we are witnessing a similar shift, one that prefigures new, more advanced, shape-shifting political and cultural forms of social control, authoritarianism and autocracy. The recent reorganization of repression in this new phase of the decades-long counterrevolutionary neoliberal project is also “altogether preventative.” Today, there is also no recent “…revolution to be undone,” and there is “none in the offing,” even amid the ongoing protests of global movements.

6 John Keane, The New Despotism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). 7 Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 1–2. 8 Marcuse, 23–24. 9 Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). See the excellent discussion of neoliberalism, and critiques of it by Brown, Nancy Fraser and others, in Critical Theory, Democracy and the Challenge of Neoliberalism, Brian Caterino and Phillip Hansen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019), 112, 120.

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Neoliberalism Now---A New Phase There are new cultural signs of the shift from what Marcuse had seen as the monopoly capitalism of the KWS era, and its culturally “totalitarian” tendency to produce and integrate subjects as compliant consumers. These signs reflect and symbolize the harsher realities of neoliberalism and its aggressive, hyper-market-driven attempts to overcome what is left of the post-WWII KWS that was reflected in Marcuse’s critique of ideology in the advanced industrial societies discussed in One-Dimensional Man. There are now cultural manifestations of this harsher world view (in addition to the brutal economic consequences that have characterized globalization for many millions in the global south and now, increasingly, the working and even the middle classes in the global north). The Hunger Games, the film Parasite, or the grandiose, self-absorbed narcissism of the television series Succession, based loosely on the Rupert Murdoch family and business empire. At the apex of this global entertainment complex but going well beyond the older genres of reality television seen in the Survivor series or Trump’s The Apprentice—where hapless contestants were simply told: “You’re fired”—is the brutal tv series Squid Games. In Squid Games, desperate contestants voluntarily compete in ferocious survival games to escape their miserable conditions of destitution. If they lose, they die. These examples from the culture industries are reflections of the hyper-consumerism, voyeurism, and nihilism of global neoliberal/ capitalist culture in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. They are the new faces of neoliberalism’s ubiquitous, totalizing global entertainment complex, or advanced neoliberalism’s version of the culture industries. In fact, the entirety of the cultural and entertainment industries, streaming services, and social media now produce a staggering, disorienting, and endless stream of “content” that is, at one and the same time, both remarkably homogenous and fragmented. The late-night television talk shows parade a steady stream of wealthy celebrities, with similar formats, that mix popularized, brief discussions of serious issues with segments of frivolous “entertainment” in a seamless continuum. The fetishism of celebrity culture is assiduously reproduced on a massive global scale by a huge marketing machinery in every area of culture; from film and television to sports, music, politics, on-air news personalities, and now social media “influencers.” In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, mega-billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson

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thought it cool to fly into space for fun, or as one newspaper article put it, (before the invasion of Ukraine), “Celebrities fiddle while the world burns”.10 This disconnect was prefigured in the left-Hollywood dystopian science fiction film Elysium a decade ago. The film depicts a corrupt plutocracy that has fled an ecologically destroyed Earth, which they still rule remotely, and from which they still extract resources under Earth’s apocalyptic, near-Mad Max conditions. Elysium is an artificially created, hermetically sealed, lavish, and highly securitized (suburbanlooking) oasis in space that hovers above the wreckage of a depleted earth ruined by excessive capitalist resource extraction. The rulers and the ruled/exploited are literally on different planets. There are other warnings about the potentially disastrous ecological effects of untrammelled capitalism that cannot control itself in the hit television series, The Handmaid’s Tale. The series, based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous novel of the 1980s, depicts the transformation, after a civil war in the US, of American liberal democracy into a puritan, fundamentalist/misogynist theocracy that emerges after an ecological catastrophe has rendered the female population mostly incapable of reproducing. After a bloody coup organized by a cadre of religious fundamentalists, young women who can still become pregnant are kidnapped, brought to “Gilead,” and forced, under torture, to bear children for the brutal and corrupt ruling Puritan plutocracy. This is a reactionary version of a response to eco-catastrophe, the extreme extension of both American puritanism/protestant fundamentalism and capitalism that has devastated the reproductive capacity of the human species very nearly beyond repair. The Handmaid’s Tale and Elysium are dark visions of what could happen in the future (or what is happening already) if the “centrifugal” forces that globalization and neoliberalism have unleashed are allowed to develop further in dystopian directions. Much has rightly been made of the shift, under neoliberalism, to the dominance of global financial capital and its democratically inaccessible international institutions such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization. But we see another

10 Leanne Delap, “Stars Aren’t Like Us: Why Dolce & Gabbana’s Vapid Venice Fashion Show Is the Worst of Celebrity Culture,” Thestar.Com, September 3, 2021, sec. Fashion & Beauty, https://www.thestar.com/life/fashion_style/2021/09/03/starsarent-like-us-why-dolce-gabbanas-vapid-venice-fashion-show-is-the-worst-of-celebrity-cul ture.html.

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dimension of the new despotism of the neoliberal global order play out in the contradiction between the totalitarian workplaces designed by Jeff Bezos and Amazon, and the deepening global precarity of work. The founder of Scientific Management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, would have been envious of how rigidly controlled workers are at the huge Amazon “Fulfilment Centers,” as they are called without a hint of irony. This is a fundamentalist capitalism realized in a totalizing, authoritarian work environment of which Taylor could only dream. As one worker said, “my boss is an algorithm.”11 Workers have no time for bathroom breaks, so they urinate into empty plastic water bottles. These Fulfilment Centers feed on the precarity of labor in the first and third worlds, global supply chains, the ubiquity of social media, and a new global, pandemic-fuelled stay-at-home consumerism in which anything can be delivered to anyone anywhere at any time. On the other hand, the latest trend in global precarity is the hyperalienating work done by “Mechanical Turks,” survey “research” (and consumer or polling surveys for Amazon and other corporations) done by individual “virtual workers who do surveys, content moderation, data validation and other tasks – tasks that many people assume are done by artificial intelligence.”12 Mechanical Turk micro-jobs, invisible to the public eye, are paid almost literally in pennies. It is the work of the marginal and desperate, as is the low-tech work of retrieving first-world plastic waste from the massive landfills in Kenya, the Philippines, or Malaysia. The disposable (largely BIPOC) global workforce continues to toil in precarious, sub-standard, often brutal conditions of extreme alienation and poverty in the global south and increasingly in the highly unequal societies of the global north. Globally, people’s lives are lived in an uneasy, fluid, never completely controlled/resolved tension between one-dimensional cultural and economic totalizing tendencies on the one hand, and increasing social disintegration, fragmentation, and inequality that signals extreme forms of alienation, on the other. These totalizing tendencies, an extension of what Marcuse had envisioned in his discussion of the “liquidation of the subject” and the

11 The Gig Is Up: A Very Human Tech Doc, Documentary (CBC Docs, 2022), https:/ /www.cbc.ca/documentarychannel/docs/the-gig-is-up-a-very-human-tech-story. 12 The Gig Is Up.

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totalizing incorporation of advanced capitalist consumerism in OneDimensional Man, are today reflected in the extreme impersonality of domination by algorithms. Facebook and its manipulative algorithms are the emblems and tools of the new totality, its apex form of impersonalized social control. The social-psychological mechanism of the new surveillance capitalism of algorithms has been referred to as “Brain hacking.”13 The algorithmic “infinite scroll” of social media interferes with more communal and democratic forms of cognitive functioning. The algorithms are at once totalizing, extremely divisive (using social cohesion as a wedge) and addictive, designed to maximize advertising impact, consumption, and division with every click. This is not the consumerism of which Marcuse was so critical in the 1960s.14 These are newer, inextricably linked facets of a global, uneasily hegemonic, now rampant neoliberal rationality. They provide the context for defining historical and theoretical reflections on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown and Nancy MacLean. Both Brown and MacLean note that the political project of neoliberalism began as an ideological counter-movement to Roosevelt’s New Deal and to communism, with its initial formulation in the Mont Pelerin Society in the 1950s. It was initiated by Friedrich von Hayek, economist Milton Friedman, their lesser-known contemporary, “political economist” James Buchannan, and other advocates of a strong libertarian view of market freedoms radically free from government constraints. Brown notes that this was conceived by the Mont Pelerin founders as a moral notion of strong, market-based individualism.15 After the social turmoil of the 1960s had shaken the ruling Establishment, these ideas were championed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who formulated a systematic attack on the KWS and unions that included deep cuts to social spending, deep tax cuts for the wealthy justified by “trickle down” “Reaganomics,” the privatization of public/state assets, the deregulation of public policy

13 The Gig Is Up. 14 For a feminist critique of Marcuse’s view of consumerism in ODM and today, see

Patricia McDermott’s “The Potential for Transforming Gendered Consumption” in my One-Dimensional Man 50 Years On (2017). 15 Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism; Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).

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and finance capital from state policy controls, facilitating their disintegration from the real (i.e., manufacturing) economy. This ideological suite of ideas comprised the beginnings of the post-1960s political project of neoliberalism, when it moved from theoretical/intellectual articulation in the rarified circles of the Mont Pelerin society to business “roundtable” groups and then, by the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, to real political power and control over government policy in the US, the UK, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere in the global north. This counter-revolt of the elites was a multi-dimensional class, political and cultural offensive that aggressively promoted unfettered corporate power justified by the anti-KWS principles just noted. As Nancy MacLean has noted, this political project was designed as a long-term strategy, over decades and by stealth. It was by stealth because the highly undemocratic and inegalitarian policies the counterrevolutionaries espoused were highly unpopular. These included an extremely aggressive elite defense of private property, corporate rights, and power that included governance of international trade and finance by democratically inaccessible institutions such as the World Trade Organization and World Bank—institutions designed and facilitated by the political classes of the wealthy liberal democracies of the global north after WWII that would certainly not bring about the revolutionary goals of equality and social justice espoused by the protest movements of the 1960s. The ideological components of neoliberalism that did find popular traction, and which have been hugely enabled by the elite counterrevolution, were the ideas of individual self-reliance and market “freedom,” an anti-statist populism with its sexism, racism, and xenophobia that today is in full bloom, attached to an anti-elitism, anti-globalization, and anti-intellectualism that have been part of American political culture for generations. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, these have congealed into what the mainstream media and even the current American President are calling authoritarian populism. This authoritarian neoliberalism of the early twenty-first century is still highly technocratic, but it is now much harsher and more unabashedly inegalitarian. It involves the surveillance and disciplining of marginal and “surplus” populations, still—globalized economic production and consumption, all brought about by a shifting combination of organized, well-funded campaigns of state and institutional “capture” by corporate, multinational capital, and more public campaigns for the hearts and minds of consumer-citizens in

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an effort to induce/entice/cajole them to participate, as Marcuse said then and as John Keane says now, in their own subordination.16 The fraying social cohesion under neoliberalism has been evident for many decades now. Wolfgang Streeck has recently drawn some stark conclusions from his own studies of the “maturation” of neoliberalism globally. He has argued that raw neoliberal capitalism, unmoored from its former grounding in KWS-era forms of regulation and policy constraints, is undermining itself from within and cannot save itself. It has undermined its own legitimacy, and the legitimacy of the thin version of liberal democracy that has, through its own policies, corrosively undermined social cohesion and democratic solidarity. Neoliberalism has destroyed collective, democratic agency, and is thus paving the way for a protracted, bumpy period of jagged economic and social disintegration that could lead to neoliberal fascism.17 This is because neoliberalism’s combination of selective deregulation (i.e., unregulated global financial markets like the multi-trillion dollar derivatives markets that the public was largely unaware of until after the 2008–2009 financial collapse), and the neoliberal state’s self-inflicted restrictions (i.e., tax cuts, less public spending) have severely curtailed both its own ability to act democratically, and undermined the democratic capacities of the demos. The result is that the neoliberal state can no longer control or contain the disintegration that haunts global capitalism in the era of advanced neoliberalism, or the voracity of the global plutocratic elites. Streeck thinks that the global social and protest movements have provided little effective resistance; they are dispersed, and engaged in fragmented identity politics. They do not conform to Marx’s view of the working class as a universal political agent capable of developing the consciousness and organization necessary to engage successfully in a fundamentally transformative revolutionary struggle. Contributing to this situation, and adding to Streeck’s view, is the counterrevolution’s attack on publicly funded education based on the 16 Keane, The New Despotism; Terry Maley, “The Relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s Thought Today: Or the Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy in and Beyond the Neoliberal Era,” Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 7–8 (December 1, 2021): 107–129, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211051419. 17 These issues have been taken up recently in the context of discussions about whether or how much neoliberal capitalism still needs democracy, a question Marcuse had asked in HFBD. See, for example, Colin Crouch et al., “Democracy in Neoliberalism,” Anthropological Theory 16, no. 4 (2016), 497–512.

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liberal arts, which is in full force in the US and in the UK now; the corporate, privatized, anti-liberal attack on critical thinking, the liberal arts, and the critical social sciences and humanities. Henry Giroux has spelled this out in stark detail.18 He also uses the term “counterrevolution” to describe the dystopian anti-education agenda that has gutted the liberal arts curriculum for corporate profit and citizen compliance. This is reaching truly Orwellian proportions in the US, where Republican-controlled states such as Texas and Florida are having elementary school textbooks re-written to eliminate any (critical) discussion of white supremacy or racism in US history. Critique has now been criminalized; teaching the actual history of slavery, for example, is now against the law. Or, as the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki has said of the Canadian Big Oil lobby’s cynical, decades-long campaign to deny the detrimental effects of climate change, “Those with power often exploit the uneducated and uninformed to further their own ends - and in many cases work to degrade education systems to prevent people from acquiring critical thinking and logical skills.”19 Marcuse’s version of Critical Theory as a form of immanent critique (in ODM , Counterrevolution and Revolt and elsewhere) contributed to the flourishing of the critical social sciences in the 1960s and after the New Left waned in the 1970s—another important dimension of his legacy. The critical social sciences and the project of left criticism of the given, engaged in this paper by Keane, Brown, and MacLean in their “dialogue” with Marcuse and/or many of his key themes, is under attack by authoritarians globally today, not only in the US. This context is the backdrop for the recent discussion of the Ruins of Neoliberalism by Wendy Brown. The entire totality or constellation of what Brown calls neoliberal rationality has deeply nihilist consequences. These consequences are not necessarily the direct or intended result of neoliberalism, not as it was formulated by its founders in the Mont Pelerin Society. But they are part of what I see as a dialectic of structural disintegration that is the primary consequence of neoliberal rationality. For Brown, 18 Henry A. Giroux, “Beyond Dystopian Education in a Neoliberal Society,” Fast Capitalism 10, no. 1 (2013). 19 David Suzuki, “A Planet Imperiled by Greed-Fueled Climate Crisis and War,” Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/03/12/planet-imperi led-greed-fueled-climate-crisis-and-war.

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There is a kind of return of the repressed in neoliberal reason - a ferocious eruption of the social and political forces that the neoliberals at once opposed, underestimated, and deformed with their de-democratizing project. What this means is that actually-existing neoliberalism now features…an enraged form of majority rule (my italics) arising from the society that neoliberals aimed to disintegrate but failed to vanquish…20

Brown makes the important point that this ugly resurgence—of white male supremacy, racism, sexism and nationalism/xenophobia, traditional hierarchies—has not been directly caused by the neoliberal restructuring of the global political economy, but that in the now symbiotic relationship between these forces, neoliberalism’s creation of insecurity and extreme forms of precarity and alienation have enabled the opening of cultural and political spaces for these populist phenomena to flourish, drawing them from the cultural fringes into the political and cultural mainstream. Brown draws on both Foucault (for how neoliberal rationality constitutes subjectivity), and Marx’s political economy, arguing that both frameworks are mutually necessary when it comes to making sense of this new configuration of powers. Brown argues that neoliberalism is not only an economic phenomenon but a more totalizing, constitutive constellation of forces that has facilitated the emergence of new forms of subjectivity that are no longer grounded in repression of the instincts or the echoes of Christian conscience. Brown enlists a modified version of Marcuse’s idea of “repressive desublimation” in her explanation of the unleashed aggression and rage of white men losing their power and “identity” under neoliberalism. The term “repressive de-sublimation,” as Marcuse used it in Eros and Civilization, denoted, for Brown, “the non-liberatory release of instinctual energies in postwar capitalism.” For Brown, repressive de-sublimation is characteristic of “…an order of capitalist domination, exploitation and ‘false needs’ as technology reduces the demands of necessity and as desire is everywhere incorporated into a commodity culture…”21 In Freud’s view of the superego conscience was once a source of social restraint within the individual, and an important foundation for social cohesion. But in a society that is not liberated, Brown notes, “…conscience relaxes not just in relation to the subject’s own conduct, but 20 Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, 16. 21 Brown, 165.

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also in relation to social wrongs and ills…which are no longer registered as such. …less conscience…in an individualistic, unemancipated society, means less ethical–political concern across the board.”22 The loosening of social behavior from the regulation of conscience is, for Brown “amplified by the neoliberal assault on the social and attack on intellectual knowledge as well as the depression of conscience fostered by nihilism.” This “disinhibition (manifest in Alt-Right tweets, blogs) symptomizes the [existing] order’s violence and prejudices…”23 What has emerged in recent discussions of the rise of authoritarianism and neoliberal fascism is the dawning recognition—not only on the far-Left but in more mainstream, liberal commentary, as journalist Adam Serwer has noted in his recent book, The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America—that cruelty is the point. The cruelty of the markets, the “everyone for themselves” culture of neoliberalism, and the reorganization of repression in more extreme forms of social discipline and control. The explicit, intentional cruelty of fascism, white supremacy, and the misogyny of American Republican lawmakers (and in EU countries such as Poland) banning abortion. Trump’s inhumane policy of separating kids from their parents at the southern US border, engineered by Steven Miller from inside Trump’s White House. Or the Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s recent bizarre, hyper-masculinized “documentary” called the End of Men, in which the narrator says, “When society collapses you are in hard times, and iron sharpens iron …and we need men who are tough, men who are resourceful and can survive, and go on to re-establish order…” [emphasis added]. Psychologists noted rising levels of distress during the coronavirus pandemic. But trauma is inherently a part of neoliberalism, as it was in the context of Weimar Germany, where cultural and economic disintegration and post-war societal trauma were also manipulated cynically by the reactionary aristocratic and military elites who claimed that Germany had never lost WWI.24 Trauma has always been socially pervasive, long 22 Brown, 166. 23 Brown, 167. 24 See the eerily compelling article in the Toronto Star’s New York Times section, “1918 Germany’s Warning for U.S.” (December 5–6, 2020, p. 15), by Jochen Bittner. Bittner draws the parallel between the Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election and his denial that he lost to Joseph Biden, and the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the back myth propagated by the defeated German political elites after WWI. As Bittner notes, “…Military officers,

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before the COVID-19 pandemic, for the marginal and the excluded/ degraded, especially in times of extreme crisis. The right-wing counterrevolutionary elites have known, enabled, and accepted this as part of their guiding ethos. Today cruelty is rampant and on open display in the Facebook and Twitter (now X) worlds of social media, as well as in the neoliberal global economy, to say nothing of the Dark Web. From Me Too, to pervasive sexual violence on college campuses, in elite women’s (even Olympic-level) sports, in the military (in the US, Canada, and elsewhere), in Hollywood, to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls movements in Mexico and Canada, the inter-generational trauma of murdered Indigenous children in the unmarked graves of the colonial Residential School system in Canada, the ongoing, reverberating trauma of slavery in the US, the for-profit incarceration and the perpetual impoverishment of, and discrimination against, black and brown people in America.25 Capitalism and imperialism have always been traumatic for the working classes, people of color and Indigenous people, the marginal, the oppressed, and excluded. This has still been so on a global scale for decades under neoliberalism for the vast global, racialized precariat that is no longer the white, male working class of Marcuse’s ODM in the global north. Cruelty and trauma are pervasive under neoliberalism, but they are unevenly distributed across class, gender, race, and ability; not everyone is equally touched by trauma. But there are large concentrations of the traumatized that have been created by the unleashing of neoliberal rationality, practices, and deliberate policies. In response to and alongside these proliferating, constitutive traumas, and the perennial neoliberal/counterrevolutionary concern with containing them to maintain the thin forms of social cohesion characteristic of neoliberalism, neoliberal states and societies have also developed not only disciplinary but also more inclusive practices. Glen Coulthard monarchists and right-wingers spread the myth that had it not been for political sabotage by the Social Democrats and Jews back home, the army would never have had to give in.” The fact that “…this claim was palpably false did not matter. Among a sizeable number of Germans, it stirred resentment, humiliation, and anger” in a context of extreme social disintegration in which people were starving, a loaf of bread cost 1 million Reichsmarks, and the economy had collapsed. Bittner notes tellingly that, “Denial over losing the war led to the rise of Nazism.” 25 Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Angela Y. Davis et al., Abolition. Feminism. Now (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2022).

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has discussed how the liberal politics of recognition has obscured the brutality and memory of settler-colonial dispossession in Canada.26 In a mix of sports and entertainment, capitalism and healing, the Montreal Canadiens, one of Canada’s two storied NHL hockey teams that are an integral part of the North American sports-entertainment complex (and key symbols, historically, of white settler-colonial “national” culture), held their inaugural Indigenous Celebration Night on March 26, 2022, at a game at the Montreal Forum. Hockey sweaters were designed with Indigenous logos, marketed, and the proceeds from their sales went to local programs for Indigenous youth. This is one of many examples of the neoliberal phenomenon described in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. Giridharadas talks about how the philanthropy of the billionaire class that includes not only Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, but the owners of professional sports franchises, has itself become a global industry with hangers-on, ex-Presidents, etc. who meet and talk at Davos, donate to charities and good causes, start health initiatives for the impoverished in the global south, and increasingly for the disadvantaged in the global north as social, racial and economic inequality widens, while not changing the fundamental structure of neoliberalism or global capitalism. Corporations and billionaires fund charitable foundations and causes. As Rinaldo Waldicott has noted, in the global north new neoliberal forms of the recognition and inclusion of diversity have in part defeated the Left by incorporating it. Equity initiatives such as EDI are now part of pervasive neoliberal managerialism in the corporate sector, in government, and in public institutions.27 Nor is it the case that the KWS is completely gone, but as many political economists and others have noted for years, it has been dramatically attenuated.28 One might think that Marcuse, whose critiques of capitalism and the conformist consumer culture of the 1960s revolved around

26 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 27 Rinaldo Waldicott, roundtable webinar discussion at Scholar’s Strike Canada labour action, March 21, 2022. The webinar took the form of a two-day series of virtual teachins and a day of action from March 21st-23rd. The significance of the March 21st date is that it is International Day for the Elimination of all forms of Racism. 28 As David Harvey, Leo Panitch, Greg Albo, David McNally and others have argued in The Socialist Register and many other publications, Socialist Project workshops, etc.

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the totalizing, “inclusive” envelope of an integrative KWS (mostly for white males), may not be as relevant today for discussions of neoliberalism, in which the position of the white, male working class has changed in sometimes reactionary directions, and in which the massive concentration of wealth and the explosion of social inequality and precarious work brought about by globalization has been the new normal for decades now. The common thread, of course, between the KWS era and today is capitalism; the arguments Marcuse made in the early 1970s can be adapted to this new phase of neoliberal capitalism in the early twentyfirst century; there has certainly been innovation and change, but also continuity. Marcuse’s critique can now be complemented by critiques of the newer, subtler forms of social, political, and ideological control that John Keane outlines in The New Despotism. One might ask whether the recent resurgence of the COVID-19 era version of the welfare state has changed neoliberalism significantly— whether big-spending government and budget deficits are back, and whether mainstream neoliberal parties (the Democrats in the US, the Liberal Party in Canada) have become New Deal-era social reform parties, turning back the tide of the last forty years that insisted that small, lean, anti-union government was best. Whether this turns out to hold beyond the pandemic remains to be seen. The question is, can the (momentary?) resurgence of social spending heal the deepening (but unevenly distributed) trauma of the past forty years, the trauma of growing inequality, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, the resurgence of toxic masculinity and heterosexism that neoliberalism has enabled and abetted? Can the neoliberal genie be put back in the bottle, or be significantly changed by this recent global crisis? Redistributive changes are important, such as the national-provincial childcare program spending announced by the federal and provincial governments in Canada in 2022, but they have not fundamentally changed global capitalism. What they are trying to do is shore up the already thin basis of social cohesion that the COVID pandemic/crisis has exposed and tested, the already significant degree of social disintegration that is the legacy of forty years of neoliberalism, marked by its extreme forms of inequality, deregulation, tax cuts, and social program cutbacks. And as the Canadian economist Armine Yalnizyan has noted recently, “…the business pages are full of opinions that say there’s already too much spending, deficits are dangerously high, and so new spending must focus on supporting – surprise! – business,

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the self-proclaimed source of wealth creation.”29 The counterrevolution is back with a vengeance, after being thrown off course for the last couple of years by a raging global pandemic. There is another more sinister, almost Malthusian calculus at work here as well. As the Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur has written with cutting accuracy, in a discussion of masks and mask mandates in 2022, “It’s a trade: the removal of a mild inconvenience before it’s necessary in exchange for the lives and health of some of society’s most vulnerable citizens.” In line with the merciless logic of self-preservation and the myth of individual self-reliance that are constitutive of neoliberal rationality, Arthur cites an anonymous Ontario public health official who said, “ruefully” that, “The public are abandoning the protection of people who are most vulnerable…That’s it.”30 But it was not the public writ large who abandoned the poor, the marginal, the elderly, and disposable to COVID-19; a majority wanted to keep mask mandates, and to see higher vaccination rates. It is the neoliberal, market-driven Conservative Parties and leaders across Canada (and Republicans in the US) and their vaccine-denying elected representatives who want to see the end of mask mandates and other public health measures. In the case of Doug Ford in Ontario, this is the same provincial Premier who, true to neoliberal form, quietly gave tens of thousands more rapid antigen test kits to a small number of elite private schools, and a select number of politically important corporations, while only 20% of the 21 million tests distributed by the provincial government went to at-risk hot spots or largely racialized areas.31 These are the same neoliberal COVID-19 Hunger Games that have played out horribly in the post-colonial imbalance between vaccines

29 Armine Yalnizyan, “When It Comes to This Federal Budget, Deficit Is Not a Dirty Word,” Toronto Star, April 6, 2022, sec. B1, https://www.thestar.com/business/ opinion/2022/04/06/amid-spiralling-costs-for-canadians-and-atrocities-abroad-deficit-isnot-a-dirty-word.html. 30 Bruce Arthur, “COVID Is Running Rampant. So Where Is Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health?,” Toronto Star, April 4, 2022, sec. A3, https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2022/04/04/covid-is-runningrampant-so-where-is-ontarios-chief-medical-officer-of-health.html. 31 Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Mendleson Rachel, and Bailey Andrew, “Private Schools, Large Firms Won Big in Ontario’s Rapid Testing Program, While Hot Spots Lost out, Star Analysis Finds,” Toronto Star, April 10, 2022, sec. Investigations, https://www.thestar.com/news/investigations/2022/04/10/just-20-of-rapidtests-went-to-ontarios-covid-19-hot-spots-star-analysis-finds.html.

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in the global north vs global south. They match Keane’s analysis of the shape-shifting manipulation of social and other media in defense of democratically unpopular, counterrevolutionary policies that have been and are still being enacted by stealth. ∗ ∗ ∗ This is the cultural, economic, and political/ideological terrain on which I want to situate Marcuse today. The recent critiques of neoliberalism echo back to Marcuse’s analysis of the emerging counterrevolution in the early 1970s. In Counterrevolution and Revolt (Marcuse, 1972) the social turmoil of the 1960s had opened new terrains of struggle not only from below but also from above. The protests of 1968 and then changes in the global political economy in the early 1970s had rattled the elites.32 Marcuse also saw more authoritarian possibilities emerging in a counterrevolt of the elites that prefigured a new kind of authoritarianism within liberal democracies, as previously noted. Not only were the elites revolting against the threat of democracy and progressive systemic change. There were other complex reactions from below. Marcuse argued that “… among the people at large, a configuration of political and psychological conditions point to the existence of a proto-fascist syndrome.”33 Marcuse here reveals a cruel paradox that he thought could replace the relative security of the KWS: that is, the tension between the elites’ revolt against democracy, the working class, Blacks, the marginal, the poor, and women, on the one hand, and the complicated, volatile identification of a destabilized, insecure (largely white male) working (and even middle) class with elites and power, on the other. That volatile identification includes what Wendy Brown has called the unleashing of a nihilistic and toxic mix of aggression, nationalism, racism, and white male rage that are different dimensions of an ambivalent, fearful identification with power that is a reaction to a powerful sense of trauma, loss, and grievance under advanced neoliberalism. Marcuse saw that, under these conditions, if the fundamental changes in consciousness 32 The assertion of energy sovereignty by the emergent/formerly colonized OPEC powers, organized initially by the Minister of Energy from Venezuela, and the effect on production and consumption in the West, as well as competition between the new reconstructed post-WWII capitalist powers such as Germany, Japan, and the UK were key aspects of this change. 33 Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, 24–25.

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that parts of the New Left tried to bring about could not be sustained, the demos could become a reactionary social force. In his 1972 essay, The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy, Marcuse traces the moment when bourgeois democracy, historically a force for progressive liberal change, becomes a reactionary force—a neoliberal capitalist/warfare/security state in which the “ideological restraints” of the post-WWII era were being abandoned by the global plutocratic elites in their own class revolt against liberal-democracy.34 In HFBD Marcuse outlined the beginnings of the post-KWS neoliberal counterrevolution. Under neoliberalism, as secure, well-paid, full-time jobs continue to disappear into global outsourcing and precarity, previous restraints on social aggression have been loosened. The conformism/ integration Marcuse saw in ODM was morphing into, a “mental structure that identifies with institutional brutality and aggression,” even among the “blue collar working class.”35 This has developed, under the conditions of advanced neoliberalism described by Streeck, into (1) “the union of big capital and the state … (that) is most immediate and overt,”36 and (2) the populist militancy of the Trumpian (and global far-right) base. This insight is even more relevant now than it was when Marcuse wrote. In this foreboding configuration, and in a precursor to current discussions of signs of fascism even within liberal (or illiberal) democracies, Marcuse tellingly noted that “bourgeois democracy no longer offers a barrier to fascism.”37 In 1979, the year before the election of Ronald Reagan, Marcuse posed an urgent question that is every bit as relevant today:

34 Herbert Marcuse, “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy,” in Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 2, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1972), 165, 171. 35 Marcuse, 170. 36 Marcuse, 176. 37 As Douglas Kellner has rightly noted in the introduction to the third volume of Marcuse’s collected works, “As a refugee from German fascism, Marcuse was extremely sensitive to the dangers of fascist tendencies.” But this does not invalidate Marcuse’s sensitivity to authoritarian tendencies in the present, and to the possibility, which he outlines in HFBD, that the frustrations of the people can become aggressive and can be turned (i.e., by plebiscitary leaders like Trump) in profoundly anti-democratic directions within and through the electoral, institutional and judicial mechanisms of existing liberal democracies. John Keane makes a similar argument about the way the “new despotisms” in both the global south and the global north are using the institutional mechanisms of liberal democracies to create “phantom democracies” run by corrupt, self-dealing “poligarchs.”.

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“The life-and-death question for the Left is: Can the transformation of the corporate state into a neo-fascist state be prevented?”38 As Trumpism has shown, we cannot simply dismiss Marcuse’s view that advanced neoliberal capitalism and its enabling security/surveillance state no longer needs liberal-democratic institutions or even liberal values to function.39 As previously noted, Streeck and others are asking this question again today with renewed urgency. Within this complex field, Marcuse signaled a strategic shift in emphasis from the Marxian analysis of the relationship between revolution and economic crisis: “This shift in the strategic emphasis [from total revolution] is motivated by the notion of a crisis of capitalism different from the traditional Marxist concept” [of recurring economic crises]. Marcuse calls it “…a structural disintegration while the economy, in its institutions, still operates: a moral disintegration, in the daily practice, at work and outside of work.”40 Precisely what Brown documents as the “ruins of neoliberalism,” what Streeck sees as a historical moment that could slide into neoliberal fascism, what is happening now, as John Keane notes, in emerging democracies globally and in the liberal democracies of the global north. This distinction between economic crises and broader social disintegration is important because Marcuse did not believe that the recurring economic crises of capitalism would inevitably lead to a revolutionary change from below. Comprehensive revolutionary change would require fundamental changes in both consciousness and forms of political and economic organization. Moral and social disintegration, already greatly accelerated under neoliberalism, is precisely what Trumpism reflected and enabled. For Marcuse, this structural disintegration was giving rise to another historically specific populist, or neo-fascist syndrome. The reactionary revolt in American (and global) politics and culture that has been unleashed with such ferocity by Trump supporters and other authoritarians is also not new. As Lauren Langman, Nancy MacLean, Cornel West, and many others have noted, these deeply reactionary (racist, misogynist, and nationalist) strains have deep historical roots in American culture. It

38 Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 6, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2014). 39 Marcuse, “The Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy,” 177–178. 40 Marcuse, 173.

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is also part of the mixed cultural legacy of both older and newer liberal democracies globally. In HFBD Marcuse noted that, “These are some of the extreme issues which confront the radical left in this period: they operate in zones not yet elucidated and incorporated into theory and praxis.”41 This insight still applies today in this new counterrevolutionary phase of advanced neoliberalism. At the same time, the Left needs to be mindful of its own potentially authoritarian reactions, as Samir Gandesha reminds us in this volume. It is important to be self-reflexive about, and keenly aware of this to ensure that the multi-dimensional effects and traumas of neoliberal capitalism and rationality, do not morph into authoritarian forms and practices within the protest movements (particularly those rooted in identity politics), or within Left organizing. On the other hand, in the dialectic, or push and pull between these forces of extreme neoliberal alienation and contradiction, there are also forces, as Langman and Leanne Simpson have noted, of hope, solidarity, and resilience. There are capacities and reservoirs for regeneration and recovery. From the Idle No More and Land Back Indigenous movements in Canada, to grassroots, upstart independent union organizing by the racialized workforce at the Amazon Fulfilment Center on Staten Island, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too. And perhaps there is now something approaching a new global awareness, or quasi-universality, in the ecology movements that now intersect with so many other social justice struggles globally. Regarding organization and strategy, Marcuse in his New Left period in the late 1960s did talk to students about a more loosely organized “libertarian socialism,” consisting of smaller, fluid groups, cross-class, cross-race alliances, and coalitions.42 He thought that, against advanced capitalism’s enormous powers of integration, the traditional, industrial working class could no longer be the only or even primary revolutionary force or agent. But if revolutionary change were to develop, it could also not do so without the working class. This is a complicated story under the current circumstances of an advanced, crisis-prone advanced neoliberalism ruled and dominated by extremely aggressive plutocrats. Today the global

41 Marcuse, 173–174. 42 Herbert Marcuse, The New Left and the 1960s: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse,

vol. 3, ed. Douglas Kellner (Routledge, 2004).

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precariat, the social movements, and Left parties continue to be engaged in multi-dimensional social justice struggles on an ongoing basis. Marcuse states in ODM that the dilemma was that Critical Theory’s version of the dialectic or immanent critique was not incorrect: “Dialectical theory is not refuted…”. But at the same time, he lamented that “…it cannot offer the remedy.”43 Despite his analysis, neither the objective, external conditions nor the internal, subjective consciousness necessary for the emergence of a revolutionary subject that had the capacity to overthrow capitalism had (or have now) materialized historically. One could say the same dilemma is still with the Left today. In HFBD Marcuse wanted to see more genuine democratic engagement but thought that it needed to be separated from capitalist institutions. One response that can point in directions beyond Marcuse’s/Critical Theory’s impasse can be found in the work of socialist-feminist UK author Hilary Wainwright. Among socialist thinkers, Wainwright’s view captures some of the dilemmas that seized Marcuse regarding the question of socialism. I will offer some brief remarks on the tension I see in her prescient work. On the one hand, in her publications on Participatory Budgeting and social movement organization and strategy from the 2000s, prior to Trumpism, Wainwright saw prefigurative, democratizing possibilities in global social movement organizing that took place both before and after the financial crash of 2008. New horizontal forms of organization that were fluid, dynamic, and nimble, emerged largely outside of the state and were fugitive in that sense. Wainwright noted that these new political forms do not have to be organized under one unified, universal theory, idea, party, or form of the state. She noted that movements such as UK Uncut, were “… purposefully autonomous from political parties [and provide] an example of the decisive material impact of a new kind of multi-centered, molecular campaign, bringing together all kinds of social actors.”44 These movements are “…coordinated horizontally and rotated responsibilities, developing… a diffuse leadership through which capacities were developed and spread.” In the Indignados movement in Spain,

43 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 253. 44 Hilary Wainwright, “Radicalizing the Movement-Party Relation: From Ralph

Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn and Beyond,” in Rethinking Revolution: Socialist Register 2017 , ed. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 60.

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as Wainwright noted, people participated in “decision-making by thousands, many of whom have never occupied anything.”45 The demos is capable; it has unrealized, immanent, suppressed capacities for renewal, healing, solidarity and action, capacities for coping with the collective and individual traumas of neoliberalism, capitalism, and colonial dispossession, that have not been completely destroyed in the way Streeck suggests. What follows for me from reading Marcuse in light of Wainwright’s analysis is that an immanent critique of neoliberalism does not need to result in, or carry the entire weight of, a singular form of working-class party organization or program that can be called a socialist. These kinds of participation and organization created new forms of knowledge and affective solidarity that, in acts of more radically democratic participation (like organizing a union at Amazon), reject the top-down technocratic knowledge (thought to still be necessary by most left or social democratic parties globally) still deployed by the plutocrats and billionaires who run and control the giant global corporations and rely on friendly state power to do so. Under advanced neoliberalism, even elected populist officials in right-wing administrations are deploying this kind of technocratic, specialized knowledge openly against the demos. When Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour Party in the UK, Wainwright pivoted to the view that there was at least a chance, in that context, for the movements, particularly Momentum, to influence state policy in more profoundly progressive ways than had been thought possible previously, to break through the barriers of the neoliberal state and possibly democratize it more radically. There were significant policy proposals, for example, for democratizing state finances under Corbyn’s leadership that were never realized because, of course, he lost the 2019 UK national election. Yet some leading socialist commentators such as Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Sam Gindin have suggested that things had, with the Sanders and Corbyn insurgencies into some of the established liberal-democratic parties in the global north, moved from protest (movements) to (partystate focused) politics. The implication is that there still needs to be a socialist party that can win state power (electorally) and lead, that can organize and galvanize a new hegemony that points in the direction of, and can implement, a different kind of post-neoliberal, post-capitalist

45 Wainwright, 60.

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state. For Panitch and Gindin, protest/social movements agitating for change outside of the state alone are not up to the task of bringing about more far-reaching change on their own. Wainwright’s discussion of the Corbyn insurgency in the UK Labour party and its relation to Momentum, the movement organized outside of the party to support Corbyn, suggests two things. The first is that pressure from outside movements that are autonomous from the state and electoral politics is still critical for organizing society against the most regressive changes made by authoritarians and populists who have captured state power. The second is that radical changes to the internal party apparatus and party policy can still be difficult, facing significant resistance from within. Attempts to incorporate more radically left-leaning social justice challenges and structures into more mainstream social-democratic, or even left parties which must function within the frame of neoliberal rationality have not been easy. The Corbyn and Sanders insurgencies both encountered sustained efforts to block them and/or to incorporate their more radical positions when they pushed to radically democratize their parties and party platforms. Loren Balhorn’s recent, detailed discussion of Die Linke in Germany today, following its electoral decline in the 2021 federal elections, is indicative of a related set of issues operating in the neoliberal context discussed in this chapter.46 Balhorn’s article addresses the complexities of trying to fashion new sensibilities in the tension between more critical social movements focused on anti-globalization, radical ecology, issues of gender or race, and a Left political party trying to function within the frame of the neoliberal state. Balhorn looks at both the early success of Die Linke in building from a working-class base (largely from the former GDR) in the mid-2000s, and its more recent fate that led to the electoral failure in the 2021 federal elections in Germany. The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and the Electoral Alternative (WASG) decided to join forces/electoral lists in 2005, becoming Die Linke, or the “Left Party.” As Balhorn notes, “Most of its (the former PDS) active cadre came from the middle ranks of the East German State apparatus - teachers, government officials, and a not-insignificant number of dedicated Marxists for whom the …GDR represented a genuine, if flawed, attempt to build

46 Loren Balhorn, “Are These the Last Days of Die Linke?,” Jacobin, February 14, 2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/02/are-these-the-last-days-of-die-linke.

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socialism.”47 Most of the WASG base consisted of more left-leaning West German trade unionists who had been members of the Social Democratic Party, (SPD) and had become disaffected with the SPDs neoliberal positions on a variety of issues. Several developments over the next fifteen years changed the dynamics within the party and began to erode its early success. One was that “Germany’s core industrial unions were becoming a significantly less hospitable environment for socialists of all stripes.”48 Another was that as the older PDS members and Die Linke founders, many of whom were retired or already in their 60s in 2005, began to pass away the party’s base shifted, with younger cohorts from the social movements joining the party ranks. The new generation, which had grown up knowing neoliberalism and the social movements, did not have the same grounding in either the trade union movement or Marxism. Balhorn notes that “Like the Left in most of the Western world, German socialists’ ranks had been thinned by the rise of the Green’s and the anti-globalization movement in the 1980s and 1990s. For Die Linke, this translated into incredible difficulties building a coherent political culture and a consistent strategic vision after the founding generation began to retire.” As Balhorn notes, “Today, Die Linke encompasses everything from Trotskyist groups for whom the party is a …stepping stone to a more radical formation, to the politicians in Thuringia who run the state government competently but who have taken few steps towards anything resembling socialist reform.”49 These three examples, outlined here only briefly, show that attempts to challenge the neoliberal state from within, on its own terrain, are not easy or linear; there is no guarantee of success. Nor do they take only one form, either outside of neoliberal state/party systems or within them. The pressures of neoliberal integration—economic, socio-psychological, cultural, and political—are still significant. As are the simultaneous, contradictory pressures today, of both integration and exclusion, on both the globalized working class and on Left movements and parties in light of neoliberal states that are now pressured from, or even taken over by, farright populists. Yet the presence of social justice-oriented Left voices and parties on the periphery of, or even at times within, the neoliberal state

47 Balhorn. 48 Balhorn. 49 Balhorn.

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is still a critical bulwark. The neoliberal state is not completely homogeneous or hermetically sealed either, not as totalizing or “one-dimensional” as its leading counterrevolutionary critics on the Right would like us to believe. There is still space, at least in many liberal democracies, for contestation, protest, refusal and for rebuilding out of “the ruins of neoliberalism.” The social movements outside of the state, which influenced and helped create the Corbyn experiment, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad” in the US Democratic Party, or more recently changes within Die Linke, have been much more critical of the technocratic systems of knowledge and power upon which the neoliberal state, parties and global capital rely. While the mainstream of the shrinking private-sector trade union movement—in Germany and elsewhere—has been, as Marcuse already noted in the 1960s, far more integrated into the “system, there has recently been significant strike activity across the global north”50 The relatively more militant sections of the trade union movement globally are now often found in public-sector unions that still adhere to a more social justiceoriented form of “social unionism”—closer to social justice issues that can at times be pre-figurations of new sensibilities. Wainwright, Panitch, Albo and Gindin make a critical point—that movements need to find multiple ways of engaging both within, and when they need to strategically, against the neoliberal state. Erik Olin Wright developed this idea further, noting that acting against or within the state is not an either/or choice. Based on his work over many years on the Real Utopias Project, Wright sees a continuum of anti-capitalist forms of resistance and possibilities arising from them. He notes that “anticapitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism. These logics often coexist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism.” Taming and escaping capitalism could be seen, Wright argues, as strategies for reducing 50 And there have, of course, been long-standing issues regarding gender and race within the mainstream trade-union movement, and even within those unions that are or have been committed to ‘social unionism’. See, for example, Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott, (1993), and the Fernwood series edited by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, (2021) (2018) for current discussions of social justice-oriented social unionism in the context of neoliberalism and the pandemic. For a discussion, through a Marcusean lens, of social unionism in the context of neoliberalism in North America, see Dean Caivano, Rodney Doody, Terry Maley and Chris Vandenberg (2016).

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the harms of capitalism, while smashing and eroding capitalism (i.e., from within, in the cracks and gaps, in the case of eroding ) are strategies for transcending its structures.51 These could all be seen as aspects of Marcuse’s multi-dimensional, complex idea of the Great Refusal . And precisely along the lines discussed by Wright and the examples above, the recent special edition of the journal New Political Science titled, The Question of Tactics in an Age of Authoritarian Neoliberalism, makes an important contribution to these ongoing discussions, ones that Marcuse would have recognized and in which he would have actively participated as a Critical Theorist and scholar-activist.52 As these examples show, this is and will be a complicated, difficult, and ongoing struggle. This is one of the key dilemmas for the radical Left in terms of vehicles of transformation. Can the modern state, which both the far Left (and now the far Right) have subjected to withering criticism, still be a vehicle of radical transformation? Even if the answer to this question is likely a resounding no, with the rise of the authoritarians discussed by Keane globally, the Left cannot ignore the state either, or leave it to the autocrats. The Left must engage, simultaneously, in these tough struggles to build more radically democratic capacities—“new sensibilities,” to use Marcuse’s still-evocative phrase—in both spaces, in the relative autonomy of more horizontal, participatory, “fugitive” movements, and in and inbetween the inhospitable institutional spaces of the neoliberal state, now often led by elected radical right populists, still dominated by plutocrats, their technocrats, and the representatives of global capital. The Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Calou and her municipal party, En Comú (In Common), is still perhaps one of the best (but also complicated) post-2008 examples of how a social justice movement (anti-eviction, in this case) can perform this difficult balancing act—remaining grounded in and being guided by a radical, transformative politics while dealing with the challenges of holding institutional power. 51 Erik Olin Wright, “How to Be an Anticapitalist Today,” Jacobin, December 2, 2015, https://jacobin.com/2015/12/erik-olin-wright-real-utopias-anticapitalism-democr acy/. For Marcuse’s own discussion of very similar strategies and tactics during his New Left period in the late 1960s (where he discusses the idea of resistance in the gaps and cracks of the system), see Terry Maley (2021). 52 See New Political Science: The Question of Tactics in an Age of Authoritarian Neoliberalism 41, no. 4 (2019), eds. Nicholas Kiersey and William Sokoloff. For a parallel, related set of discussions, see the Latham et al.’s volume, Challenging the Right, Augmenting the Left: Recasting Leftist Imagination.

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Conclusion Marcuse’s critique urges us to think dialectically again, valuing and struggling to be open to, while remaining grounded in, the diversity, complexity and contradictory nature of our own and others’ experiences of neoliberalism. This solidarity needs to be informed by the ongoing critique of neoliberal capitalism, the global plutocracy and their myriad forms of domination. Within this terrain of struggle, which is both personal and political, lie possibilities for creating a kind of ecological, anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and open-ended socialism. Possibilities that open-up spaces for thinking and experiencing new, more holistic sensibilities that can emerge from an immanent critique of, and resistance to, the given reality of advanced neoliberalism. This kind of Marcusean way of seeing has deep affinities with the holism of Indigenous Resurgence theory, its connection to the ecology, to the land, to the idea of an “intercultural common-wealth,” in Charles Reitz’s wonderfully lucid phrase. The Lakota healer/sage Lame Deer had said that people in the rationalized modern world have lost “the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, their dreams”—older, non-rationalized, non-institutionalized, and non-capitalist ways of seeing and experiencing the world since time immemorial.53 New sensibilities, recovered beyond the fragments, that can resist and see beyond the fracturing, centrifugal forces of neoliberal domination but grounded in, as Marcuse suggested, still following Marx, a larger social whole and a holistic, but not always singular, social ontology.54

53 David M. Levin, “Transpersonal Phenomenology: The Corporeal Schema,” Humanistic Psychologist 16, no. 2 (1988): 282–313. 54 For the important ecological dimension of Marcuse’s thought see, for example, Marcuse (1992). On the relation between Marcuse’s view of ecology, nature and Indigenous knowledge/epistemology, see David Bedford and Tom Cheney (2017). For the holism of radical resistance and Indigenous Resurgence theory, see Leanne B. Simpson (2021). For a feminist view of seeing holistically beyond the fragmentation of early, Thatcherite neoliberalism, see Rowbotham et al. (1979/2013). For a discussion of the centrifugal forces thrown off by globalization/neoliberalism, see Sheldon S. Wolin, (2004) and (2008).

CHAPTER 3

The “Authoritarian Personality” Reconsidered: The Phantom of “Left Fascism” Samir Gandesha

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster … when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you. F. Nietzsche

This chapter was initially published in The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 79 (2019): 601–624. I am indebted to Morgan Young for her editorial assistance on this slightly modified draft. S. Gandesha (B) Global Humanities, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_3

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Introduction The term Left fascism might call to mind various points of convergence between the ideas of the far left and the far right; for example in the Strasserite faction of the Nazi Party, or the French Nouvelle Droit (New Right) or, more contemporarily, the so-called “fourth political theory” of a Russian ideologue, known for fascistic views.1 These overlaps and convergences are what Alexander Reid Ross has recently called the “fascist creep,”2 and Timothy Snyder describes how Russia weaponized information warfare, with the help of schizo-fascism, which actually entails fascists labeling their opponents fascists.3 But what I mean by the term has less to do with these possible overlaps than it does with the discussions around the student movement (68-er Bewegung ) against authoritarianism and hypocrisy in the West German state (for the students the German chapter of fascism was not yet closed), in the crucial decade between 1967 and 1977. The term “Left fascism” was coined by Jürgen Habermas in a lecture entitled “The Phantom Revolution and its Children,”4 in which Habermas suggests that the senseless confrontations of the students, who sought to will a revolution into being in the absence of objective conditions for its success, could not but be characterized as fascistic. Although the following year Habermas takes steps to revise his hasty formulation of “leftist fascism,”5 this characterization then becomes the basis for a vitally important exchange of letters between Herbert Marcuse and Theodor W. Adorno from January to August of 1969.6 Adorno, stung by the students’ occupation of the offices of the Institute for Social Research, sides with Habermas and is deeply critical of the students’ undiscriminating embrace of the primacy of praxis.

1 Alexandr Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory (London: Arktos, 2012). 2 Alexander Reid Ross, Against the Fascist Creep (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2017). 3 Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim

Duggan Books, 2018). 4 Matthew G. Specter, Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 112. 5 Robert C. Holub, Jurgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56. 6 Ester Leslie, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement,” New Left Review 233: 118–136.

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Today, we possibly see some of the very tendencies identified by Adorno, which is to say, the raw exercise of power relative to moral conduct, afoot in certain quarters of the Left both in the contemporary university and beyond it. We have seen ample evidence of the Left’s reluctance to tolerate dissent within its own ranks. For example, we have seen it in the students’ demands at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, for the resignation of tenured professors who made principled objections to political actions that they understood as re-instituting forms of segregation in the name of combatting it.7 We’ve seen it in the case of a letter signed by over 800 academics demanding the retraction of an article on “trans-racialism” by a young assistant professor, Rebecca Tuvel, in the feminist journal Hypatia.8 One may also think of many prominent feminist academics excusing the predatory abusive behavior of NYU academic Avital Ronell in her seductive relationship with a graduate student. “We testify to the grace, the keen wit, and the intellectual commitment of Professor Ronell and ask that she be accorded the dignity rightly deserved by someone of her international standing and reputation,” the professors wrote to NYU.9 Beyond the university, we’ve seen it in the demand made by British New York-based artist, Hannah Black (2017), that “non-Black” artist Dana Schutz’s (2017) painting of Emmett Till not simply be criticized but actually be destroyed.10 Perhaps more consequentially, sections of the Left have defended figures like Milosevic, Vladimir Putin, Baathist regimes of Saddam Hussein and Bashar al-Asad, despite evidence that all of these regimes brutally suppressed and murdered their own people11

7 Anemona Hartocollis, “A Campus Argument Goes Viral. Now the Campus is Under Siege,” New York Times, June 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/us/ evergreen-state-protests.html. 8 Julian Vigo and Lorna Garano, “Open Letter on the Hypatia Controversy,” Feminist Current, https://www.feministcurrent.com/2017/05/25/open-letter-hypatia-contro versy/. 9 Zoe Greenberg, “What Happens to #MeToo When a Feminist Is the Accused?” New York Times, August 13, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/nyregion/sexualharassment-nyu-female-professor.html. 10 See discussion in Samir Gandesha, “Insurgent Universality,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 4 (2019), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/insurgentuniversality. 11 Faisal Al Yafai, The Cult of Bashar Extends from the Far Right to the Far Left, 2017, https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/the-cult-of-bashar-al-assadextends-from-the-far-right-to-the-far-left-1.621909.

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under the banner of anti-imperialism, on the basis of the logic of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”12 Moreover, recently Steve Bannon, former advisor to Donald J. Trump and architect of a new fascist international, shared pleasantries with left-wing firebrand George Galloway.13 The structure of my argument is as follows: In the section “The Authoritarian Personality”, I sketch out Adorno’s conception of the “authoritarian personality”14 with the help of Sándor Ferenczi’s ideas of the “identification with the aggressor” (1933), before proceeding to section “The Distance Betweeen Pontresina and Zermatt”, where I examine the correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse in 1969. Finally, in section “The Contemporary Left”, I try to draw some conclusions about the authoritarian tendencies of the contemporary Left.

The Authoritarian Personality The problem of authoritarianism in US politics was first defined by the landmark study—profoundly informed by Freudian psychoanalysis, especially Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 15 —by Theodor W. Adorno and his colleagues entitled The Authoritarian Personality, originally published in 1950.16 Motivated in part by a concern for the existence of authoritarian attitudes in the aftermath of the Second World War and employing a unique synthesis of both European qualitative or interpretative and North American quantitative methods, the study used what it called the F-scale (where F = fascist) that could, itself, be boiled down to a measure for rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and “otherness.” The influence of Freud’s Group Psychology on Adorno becomes especially clear in an essay Adorno published in 1951, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in which he shows how Freud illustrates 12 Rohini Hensman, Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2018). 13 Alexander Reid Ross, “Fascism and the Far Left: A Grim Global Love Affair,” Haaretz, May 27, 2019, https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-fascism-andthe-far-left-a-grim-global-love-affair-1.7288230. 14 Theodor W. Adorno, “Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford,” in The Authoritarian Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993). 15 Sigmund Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” in Standard Edition, 18 (London: Hogarth, 1920). 16 Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality.

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the manner in which “people become a mass” by sacrificing their interests through the identification with an idealized “great little man” or, as Adorno puts it, “a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber.”17 A key aspect of the theoretical framework of this study is that the institutional transformations of late capitalist society, particularly that of the family as a means of socialization, contributed to the conditions of regression. In other words, massification within a Fordist regime of accumulation—entailing mass production and consumption and the corresponding foreshortened space for individual initiative and experience—contributed to a propensity toward authoritarianism in the form of a relatively undisciplined Id, overdeveloped super-ego and, above all, ego weakness or the tendency of the ego to be overwhelmed by the drives, on the one side, and a powerful super-ego, on the other. As Arendt also argued, authoritarian personalities had little capacity for judgment which lies at the heart of reflection.18 Authoritarianism expressed itself, therefore, in an obsequious relation to authority and excessive cruelty toward those with comparatively less power. Adorno quotes Hitler’s famous formula: “Vertanwortung nach oben, Autorität nach unten” (“Responsibility towards above, authority towards below”).19 Just one year before the publication of The Authoritarian Personality, Leo Löwenthal and Norbert Guterman published their critical study of the figure of the American agitator, Prophets of Deceit. The book amounts to a detailed analysis of the speeches of archetypal populist demagogues such as Father Coughlin, a contemporary of Huey Long, who can, in some sense, be regarded as a precursor to populist figures such as George Wallace and, of course, Donald Trump. Löwenthal and Guterman compare the agitator with two other types, the reformer and the revolutionary, all of whom seek to address a prevailing socio-economic problem or crisis. While the latter two types strive to appeal to the ego by providing a reasoned analysis of, and program for, action to transform the situation so as to address the causes of the fears, anger, and frustrations of the people, the agitator, in marked contrast, encourages regression or a 17 Theodor W. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. E. Gebhardt and A. Artao (New York: Continuum, 1982), 27. 18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1951). 19 Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” 128.

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dissolution of the ego into the mass, and appeals to the Id by inciting the crowd to express its emotions which it then directs at the particular groups who, through a process of personalization, are to be held responsible for the crisis. Both studies are profoundly indebted to Horkheimer and Fromm’s Studies on Authority and the Family and to the first part of Eric Fromm’s essential book Die Furcht vor der Freiheit, translated as Escape from Freedom (1941) or more literally “fear of freedom.”20 This lineage might be contrasted with the parallel and rather influential work of Wilhelm Reich who also developed the idea of a sado-masochistic personality based on the repression of libido. The difference has to do with the individualistic premises of Reich, on the one hand, and the attempt by Fromm to develop a conception of social character.21 The methodological appendix to the book initially published in 1941, “Character and the Social Process,” was especially important insofar as it synthesized the Freudian account of the self (character) and the Marxian account of society (social process). It is also deeply indebted to Max Horkheimer’s notion of the “anthropology of the bourgeois epoch.”22 Of particular importance in Fromm’s Escape from Freedom, for our purposes, are the implications for political theory. Well before Isaiah Berlin’s landmark discussion, Fromm (1941) takes as his starting point the opposition between negative and positive conceptions of liberty.23 The first (negative) conception of liberty is established in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and J. S. Mill, while the second (positive) conception finds expression in the writings of Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant and German Idealism, and Marx. Generally speaking, one is free in the negative sense to the 20 Max Horkheimer, M. and Erich Fromm, Studien über Autorität und Fam Forschungs-

berichte aus dem Institut für Socialforschung (Paris: Alcan, 1936). 21 Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and Institute for Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 92. 22 See Max Horkheimer, “Egoism and the Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era,” Telos 54 (1982): 10–60. For a discussion of the importance of the idea of the “anthropology of the bourgeois era” see John Abromeit’s (2011) excellent intellectual biography of Horkheimer, Max Horkheimer and the Foundation of the Frankfurt School. 23 See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty [From an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 31 Oct. 1958] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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extent to which one’s actions are unencumbered by the state. One is free in the positive sense to the degree to which one possesses the capacity and opportunity for self-determination or rational self-legislation. It is of course possible to be free in the first sense without necessarily being free in the second sense, although the reverse is not the case. That is, it is possible, for example, to live in a society with a free market which, at the same time, allows few or no opportunities for participation in democratic self-legislation. This is, in fact, the nature of political life today under what we call neo-liberalism.24 Negative liberty tends to occlude positive liberty; there are fewer formal constraints on market participation and a greater alienation of citizens from the political process.25 It is an order in which the state becomes less the site of democratic will formation and governance and more of a repressive apparatus. The neoliberal state becomes, as it were, both leaner and meaner. This is a point to which I shall return below. Fromm argues that the spread of negative freedom, that is to say, a reduction in traditional constraints facing individuals, is not an unequivocal good.26 Without a corresponding deepening of positive freedom, that is, the possibility for self-governance, such an extension of the sphere of negative freedom could be understood as threatening and encourage precisely the form of regression Freud maps out in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Such an extension of negative freedom could be perceived as contributing to a feeling of powerlessness insofar as there would exist an absence of secondary bonds to replace the primary bonds represented by traditional institutions such as the family, community, church, etc. As Adorno suggests in his 1966 radio address, published as “Erziehung Nach Auschwitz” (Education After Auschwitz)

24 Lynn Layton, “Grandiosity, Neoliberalism, and Neoconservatism,” Psychoanalytic

Inquiry 34 (2014): 463–474; Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 25 Robert Prince, “The Lonely Passion of the ‘People,’” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 78 (2018): 445–462, 8–9. 26 See Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1941).

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… one must accept that fascism and the terror caused are connected with the fact that the old established authorities of the Kaiserreich decayed and were toppled, while the people psychologically were not ready for selfdetermination. They proved to be unequal to the freedom that dropped into their laps.27

In other words, living with liberty without equality, or freedom without democratic institutions for genuine self-determination, individuals allay their anxieties by subordinating themselves to an all-powerful father figure. The love of such a figure consolidates the social bond by simultaneously exacerbating the fear and hatred of those who remain outside of it.28 One cannot overestimate the point that in many of his public lectures and writings, Adorno showed himself particularly preoccupied with the product of the authoritarian personality. Indeed, the “vade mecum” of Adorno’s entire oeuvre is the problem of the identification with the aggressor.29 This is, in my view, to be understood both at an existential and a philosophical or conceptual level. The two are brought together in Adorno’s Lectures on Negative Dialectics in which Adorno states clearly that he only became suspicious of Hegelian dialectical logic, with its claim that the negation of the negation culminates in the positive or a total, meaningful structure in which freedom is realized, in his years living as an enemy alien in the United States.30 It was the necessity of standing up to and resisting identifying with the aggressor that impelled Adorno to engage in a critique of identity thinking, a form of thinking that has its roots in the capitalist exchange principle. This way of thinking subordinates the non-identical or difference to sameness in the

27 Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models: Interventions

and Catchwords, ed. H. W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 194. 28 See Prince, “The Lonely Passion of the ‘People,’” 450–452. 29 Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Introduction: Origin is the Goal,” in Things Bear Resem-

blance. Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11. 30 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum Press, 2007); Jamieson Webster, “Critiques and Cure: A Dream of Uniting Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” American Journal of Psychoanalysis 73: 145. Webster writes, “Adorno was in exile in Los Angeles (1941–1949), a city he found both fascinating and horrifying. Adorno’s many works on the culture industry view it as a kind of barbarism that was verging on fascistic hypnosis of the masses… he found it difficult to make himself even remotely understood.”

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same way that concrete labor must be reduced to abstract, quantifiable, and measurable abstract labor objectified in commodities in order to be rendered equivalent and therefore exchangeable within the market. As I recently argued in the journal Constellations, the concept of the authoritarian personality can be developed with the help of Hungarian psychoanalyst, Sándor Ferenczi.31 And such a refinement of the concept can help us come to terms with what I call the “neo-liberal personality.”32 In a paper entitled “The Confusion of Tongues Between the Adults and the Child (The Language of Tenderness and of Passion),” first presented in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1932, one year prior to Hitler’s Machtergreifung (seizure of power), Ferenczi elaborates a theoretical approach33 to understand how abused children rather than challenging their abusers, actually come to identify with the aggressor. Such a form of identification entails a robotic self-subordination to the will of the aggressor to the point at which the child’s emerging and fragile subjectivity becomes obliterated. The aggressor is transferred from being part of the child’s extra-psychic to their intra-psychic world.34 Perhaps the most wounding

31 Samir Gandesha, “Identifying with the Aggressor: From the Authoritarian to Neoliberal Personality,” Constellations 25 (2018). 32 Gandesha, “Identifying with the Aggressor: From the Authoritarian to Neo-liberal Personality,” 147–164. 33 See Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues Between the Adults and the Child. The Language of Tenderness and of Passion,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 30 (1949): 225–230. Also, in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1994), 156–167. The work presented in Wiesbaden followed Ferenczi’s many years of intense concern with the dynamics of the subjugation of the weaker. As Erös (2014) writes, “The key concepts of his earlier works (Ferenczi, 1908, 1911, 1913) are the notions of “unnecessary compulsion” and “excessive repression.” Repression in contemporary society, Ferenczi argues, demands not only a minimum of instinctual renunciation that the already sufficiently pressing external circumstances require, but also the subjugation of its members, the deprivation of their freedom, human dignity, and autonomy. “Excessive repression,” speculates Ferenczi, sets free those instinctual forces that lead to religious superstitions, to the cult of authority and to a rigid adherence to obsolete social forms. In “Psychoanalysis and Education” he argues that “liberation from unnecessary inner compulsion would be the first revolution to bring real relief to mankind, for political revolutions have achieved only that the external powers, i.e. the means of coercion, have changed hands, or that the number of the oppressed has risen or fallen. Only people liberated in this real sense will be able to bring about a radical change in education and prevent permanently the return of similar undesirable circumstances (Ferenczi, 1908, p. 283)”’ (Erös, 2014, p. 371). 34 Gandesha, “Identifying with the Aggressor,” 162.

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aspect of the aggressor’s relation to the child is the insistence that it was the child who was the initiator of the unwanted contact. This is the dimension of hypocrisy that first drew Ferenczi’s attention to this hitherto overlooked phenomenon.35 In contrast to Anna Freud’s understanding of the term, which suggests an impersonation of the aggressor and a directing of aggression toward a third person as a way of feeling for that time more secure,36 Ferenczi’s use of the term entails a “pervasive change in/of someone’s perceptual world…[and is] more about actually protecting oneself than about simply feeling more secure.”37 Drawing on his clinical experience with adults who had suffered a deeply traumatic encounter with an abusive adult in early childhood, Ferenczi reasoned that identification with the aggressor is a typical response to conditions of pervasive social and emotional insecurity. It is a response to a situation in which, to quote Frankel again: we have lost our sense that the world will protect us when we are in danger with no chance of escape. What we do is make ourselves disappear. This response goes beyond disassociation from present experience: like chameleons, we blend into the world around us, into the very thing that threatens us, in order to protect ourselves. We stop being ourselves and transform ourselves into someone else’s image of us.38

There are three dimensions of Ferenczi’s conception of identification with the aggressor that distinguishes it from Anna Freud’s: rather than displaced aggression, we find compliance, accommodation, and submission. And this works in the following way, as explained by Frankel: First, we mentally subordinate ourselves to the attacker. Second, this subordination lets us divine the aggressor’s desires—get into the attacker’s mind to know just what he is thinking or feeling, so that we can anticipate exactly what he is about to do and know how to maximize our own survival. And, third, we do the thing that we feel will save us: usually we make ourselves 35 Gandesha, 158. 36 Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International

Universities Press, 1966). 37 According to Jay Frankel, “Exploring Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with the Aggressor: Its Role in Trauma, Everyday Life, and the Therapeutic Relationship,” in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 12 (2002): 102–103. 38 Frankel, “Exploring Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification With the Aggressor,” 103.

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vanish through submission and a precisely attuned compliance with the attacker.39

In response, far from repudiating or violently repulsing the malevolent adult, the child acquiesces and reflects to the adult what the latter requires of her. As in the so-called “Stockholm Syndrome,” according to which the hostage comes to identify with or even love his captor, the child identifies with the abusive adult. Added to the process of identifying with the adult as a threatening external object, as another mechanism of defense the child may also introject or transfer from external to internal reality the adult’s guilt as a form of mastery of a force that, if not mastered, could actually threaten the integrity of the child’s ego. By introjecting the adult’s guilt, the child effectively assumes the blame for the event. Moreover, the child undergoes a process, particularly at the moment of assault, of splitting and dissociation—a distancing of that part of the child that experienced the violence. What Ferenczi is describing in this essay is a two-fold trauma that the child experiences. The first is sexual abuse whereby the adult mistakes, perhaps willfully, the language of tenderness for that of passion, what we might call after William Blake, a song of innocence for a song of experience.40 The second is the assignation of blame from the adult to the child. The first amounts to an attack on the integrity of the child’s body, and the second amounts to an attack on the child’s mind and capacity to think.41 We can understand these three moments in terms of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s presentation of the formation of subjectivity, that I outlined above, in their text authored in 1944 entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment . Drawing on both Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (1887) and Freud’s (1905) account of sexuality, the text sought to understand the way it could be that while promising emancipation, enlightenment left only destruction in its wake—“the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”42 Horkheimer and Adorno 39 Frankel, 103. 40 William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1967). 41 I’m indebted to Jonathan Sklar, student of Enid Balint and Ferenczi expert, for clarifying this point (personal communication, May 2018). 42 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment : Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1944), 1.

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show the way in which the implosion of the enlightenment culminates in the exterministic logic of anti-Semitism. First, faced with a social world marked by a Hobbesian war of all against all, an apparent state of nature that is, in fact, the natural-historical reality of capitalism, the individual must divest himself of empathy and become cold and hard in order to be able to compete against others in the interest of self-preservation. He must subordinate himself to and therefore identify with the external imperatives of the prevailing performance principle of this order. At the same time, to do this successfully, such an adaptation to the outside must be introjected or internalized. This takes the form of an internalization of sacrifice or self-renunciation. The late bourgeois subject is, in its essence, self-sacrificial, constituted by guilt. The psychic cost of this dialectic of identification with and introjection of the external forces in the interest of self-preservation is a diminution of the capacity of the self to fully experience the world, to think, and to act within it. The self is reduced to a bundle of un-reflective, quasi-automatic reactions to external stimuli. And this entails dissociation. The life that is to be preserved at all costs turns, paradoxically, into mere existence; it becomes a kind of living death, “Each to his own specialty,” declares Hamm to Clov in Beckett’s Endgame, “I can’t stand, you can’t sit.”43 The accumulation of aggression that results from deepening repression and sublimation is unleashed on those groups that are taken to personify civilization itself. As previously suggested, an important implication that flows from the idea of the identification with the aggressor is the “internalization of sacrifice.” As Horkheimer and Adorno argue, In class society, the self’s hostility to sacrifice included a sacrifice of the self, since it was paid for by a denial of nature in the human being for the sake of mastery over extrahuman nature and over other human beings. This very denial, the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of proliferating mythical irrationality; with the denial of nature in human beings, not only the telos of the external mastery of nature but also the telos of one’s own life becomes confused and opaque.44

43 Samuel Beckett, “Endgame,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 89–134. 44 Beckett, “Endgame,” 42.

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According to Ferenczi’s paper from 1928, “The Elasticity of Psychoanalytic Technique,” the super-ego itself ought to be dissolved insofar as it both embodies in the form of the external moral norm, on the one hand, and in its internalized form as conscience, on the other, the aggressive imago or after-image of the father. Ferenczi suggests in this paper: But I should like to add that it is the business of a real character analysis to do away, at any rate temporarily, with any kind of super-ego, including that of the analyst. The patient should end by ridding himself of any emotional attachment that is independent of his own reason and his own libidinal tendencies. Only a complete dissolution of the super-ego can bring about a radical cure [emphasis added].45

In Negative Dialectics Adorno argues this suggestion for the dissolution of the super-ego represents the very culmination of the heroic phase of psychoanalysis and therefore a way of thinking through the entailments of a “new categorical imperative” after Auschwitz.46 Referring to Ferenczi’s 1928 paper on elasticity, Adorno argues in his Lectures on History and Freedom from 1964–1965: For, on the one hand, it criticized the authority of moral autonomy, the super-ego, or, to put it in ordinary language, the conscience, as, in origin, a mental equivalent of unfreedom, and in its heroic phase psychoanalysis even called for the dissolution of the super-ego, in a noteworthy essay by Ferenczi.47

However, Adorno is, ultimately, disappointed by Ferenczi’s retrenchment and suggestion of distinguishing between a so-called “good” or conscious and a “bad” or unconscious super-ego.48 Adorno suggests, because he

45 Sándor Ferenczi, “The Elasticity of Psychoanalytical Technique,” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1994), 98. 46 Ferenczi, “The Elasticity of the Psychoanalytical Technique,” 365; see also Samir Gandesha, S. “Adorno, Ferenczi, and a New ‘Categorical Imperative After Auschwitz,’” International Forum of Psychoanalysis (2019), https://doi.org/10.1080/0803706X.2019. 1648869. 47 Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965 (Polity Press, 2006),

198. 48 Ferenczi, “The Elasticity of the Psychoanalytical Technique,” 100–101. Ferenczi states: “…I feel it necessary to clarify one of the ideas put forward in this paper. I refer

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ultimately fails to remain true to his own insights, Ferenczi remains caught within a contradiction. To recommend the superego on grounds of social utility or inalienability, while its own coercive mechanism strips it of the objective validity it claims in the context of effecting psychological motivations—this amounts to repeating and reinforcing, within psychology, the irrationalities which psychology braced itself to “do away with.”49

Adorno seeks to show how the formation of the enlightenment subject culminates in the fateful antimony that comprises Kantian moral philosophy: the antimony between duty, on the one hand, and desire or inclination, on the other; this is the antimony between pure and empirical practical reason. Indeed, for Kant, it is almost definitive of morality is a force that is antithetical to inclination. The gap between these two forms of subjectivity generates a guilt complex. In other words, for Adorno, guilt itself is the coercive condition of freedom understood in the Kantian sense. As a concept of freedom, therefore, negates itself. While the concept of the “authoritarian personality” is key to understanding the crisis of contemporary liberal democracies, in order for it to continue to generate diagnostic and prescriptive insights, the criticism that it has received must be addressed. One significant criticism is that it was exclusively focused on the authoritarianism of the right and avoided addressing the authoritarianism of the Left. I shall suggest that it is, however, possible to reconstruct an account of left authoritarianism by examining the exchange of letters between Adorno and Marcuse in 1969.

The Distance Betweeen Pontresina and Zermatt Before approaching this exchange of letters, it is important to address a certain kind of mythology that surrounds both men. Adorno is taken to be the negative, pessimistic defender of high European culture against, for example, the degenerate musical form of Jazz, who once claimed

to my suggestion that a sufficiently deep character analysis must get rid of any kind of super-ego. An over-logical mind might interpret this as implying that my technique aimed at robbing people of all their ideals. In reality my objective was to destroy only that part which had become unconscious and was therefore beyond the range of influence.” 49 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 274.

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that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”50 However, as John Abromeit shows in his insightful essay “The Limits of Praxis: The SocialPsychological Foundations of Theodor Adorno’s and Herbert Marcuse’s Interpretations of the 1960s Protest Movements,” the picture is much more complicated.51 Up until the occupation of the offices of the Institute for Social Research in January of 1969, Adorno not only profoundly influenced the student movement, he was also a strong supporter of it. He saw its politicization of West German society, agitation for democratic reforms within the university, and also it’s raising of the question of the “rope in the country of the hangman”52 to be key to what he called Erzeihung nach Auschwitz (Education after Auschwitz) (1966a). Marcuse, in contrast, was a great deal more pessimistic than is commonly recognized. This was made particularly clear in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man in which Marcuse develops and deepens Pollock’s argument53 that with the advent of state capitalism, all oppositional tendencies have been incorporated by the system in the form of “repressive desublimation” or a certain relaxation of inhibitions that, far from challenging the existing order, only served to tighten its hold.54 The backdrop to Adorno’s and Marcuse’s exchange of letters is the crucial decade between 1967 and 1977.55 This decade was marked by the death of Benno Ohnesorg at a demonstration against the Shah of Iran in West Berlin on June 2, 1967, and in the deaths of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Enslinn in Stammheim prison in the German autumn of 1977, the events of which were allusively represented in the film by Adorno’s 50 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. S. Weber and S. Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 34. 51 See John Abromeit, “The Limits of Praxis: The Social-Psychological Foundations of Theodor Adorno’s and Herbert Marcuse’s Interpretations of the 1960s Protest Movements,” in Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, ed. B. Davis, W. Mausbach, M. Klimke, and C. MacDougall (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 13–38. 52 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, trans. R. Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2005), 384. 53 Freidrich Pollock, “State Capitalism: Its Possibilities and Limitations,” in Critical Theory and Society, ed. S. E. Bron and D. M. Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 95–118. 54 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1964), 59–86. 55 See Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence of the German

Student Movement,” in New Left Review, ed. E. Leslie, 233, 1 (1969): 123–136.

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one-time student and, subsequently, lawyer, Alexander Kluge, entitled appropriately Deutschland im Herbst (Germany in Autumn) (1978). Between 1967 and 1977, one witnesses the rise and fall of the SDS (Socialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) and the APO (Ausserparlamenarische Opposition) as a response to the formation of the Grosse Koalition between the SDP and the CDU, and passage of the Emergency Law, in the context of the escalation of the insurrectionary violence of the guerilla organization Rote Armee Fraktion, also known as the Baader Meinhoff gang (Aust, 1985). Upon returning to Frankfurt am Main in 1949, Horkheimer and Adorno, the objects of ambivalence in the classical psychoanalytical sense, were simultaneously loved and hated by the students. On the one hand, their writings had a tremendous impact on the nascent student movement. Copies of Dialectic of Enlightenment circulated illicitly among its members because Horkheimer, now grown conservative, thought that the substantive arguments of the text could be damaging to the Institute, which was increasingly intent on protecting its academic reputation and sources of funding—an issue that Adorno himself would refer to in the exchange of letters with Marcuse.56 On the other, the very argument set forth in Dialectic of Enlightenment , which suggested it was akin to a “message in a bottle”57 addressed to a future rather than the present addressee, seemed to the students a capitulation before the necessity of praxis. So, the ambivalence of the students toward Adorno was reflected by his ambivalence toward the demand that theory and practice be unified in revolutionary political action. Adorno’s one-time star student HansJürgen Krahl, who would become one of the key instigators of the occupation of the offices of the Institute for Social Research, himself manifested such Oedipal ambivalence in his own personality and actions. He expressed the tension poignantly when he stated: When we were besieging the council of Frankfurt University, the only professor who came to the students’ sit-ins was Professor Adorno. He was overwhelmed with ovations. He made straight for the microphone, 56 Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence of the German Student Movement.” 57 See Thomas Wheatland, The Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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and just as he reached it, he ducked past and shot into the philosophy seminar. In short, once again, on the threshold of practice, he retreated into theory.58

In Adorno’s view, this demand that theory be unified with praxis, which is to say the connection between thought and action (not to be confused with the notion of “praxis” as a medical or psychoanalytical practice), was in league with the now ubiquitous claim that what does not in some way serve measurable social utility has lost its right to exist. He states that “I still believe that one should hold on to theory, precisely under the generalized coercion towards praxis in a functional and pragmatized world.”59 In other words, theory and scientific activity as a whole, we might say, requires autonomy from other, socio-economic or political, and therefore heteronomous imperatives. Such coercion is not unlike that described above which entails the subsumption of the non-identical by the identical, the hysterical fear of what is different, or what refuses assimilation. Yet, with the increasing violence that the students saw directed against them, marked by the murder of Ohnnesorg by the police (although it seems now that the East German Stasi had been involved60 ) and the attempted murder of Dutschke by a disturbed far-right extremist, that faction of the movement led by Krahl became convinced that non-violent opposition had reached its very limits—that the very generation that had orchestrated Auschwitz was never going to be swayed by non-violent tactics. In a moment of decision of what they, themselves, also described as a moment of “madness,” to use Gudrun Enslinn’s words, the Red Army Faction (RAF) proceeded to play out what can be understood as the transgenerational transmission of trauma.61 The parents being traumatized by forced submission to authoritarian dictates, repress their wish to

58 Krahl, cited in Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, 460–461. 59 Theodor W. Adorno, “Who’s Afraid of the Ivory Tower? A Conversation with

Theodor W. Adorno,” in Language Without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. G. Richter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 237. 60 See Derek Scally, “A Bullet that Changed Germany: The Shooting of Benno Ohnesorg,” The Irish Times, June 1, 2017, https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/ a-bullet-that-changed-germany-the-shooting-of-benno-ohnesorg-1.3104212. 61 Gudrun Enslinn, cited in Gerd Koenen, “Element of Madness,” Sight and Sound, July 12, 2009, http://www.signandsight.com/features/1964.html.

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resist the dictate, which then dwells in the self as a phantom buried in a crypt of the self, and is transmitted to their offspring through dialogues of the unconscious.62 The idea of the phantom can help explain the roots of political movements, or the periodic return of political ideologies, suggests Rand, the editor of Abraham and Torok’s work.63 The phantom that is transmitted represents the repressed trauma of the parents. Paradoxically, it was by actualizing this disavowed resistance that the earlier generation had refused that the students established distance from their parents, whom they viewed as profoundly ethically compromised as a generation. The protest movement marked, in this case, a generational caesura. Yet, while it undoubtedly contained fascist elements within it, the German Federal Republic could no more be characterized as a fascist state than could Italy or Japan at that time. And in this revolutionary pantomime, the RAF mirrored the actions of their comrades in the two former countries. Adorno’s critique of the violent tendencies of the students was consistent with his understanding of the self-destruction of the Enlightenment more generally: that in seeking to master a terrifying nature outside itself, the subject mirrors and internalizes that very terror, which it then directs against itself. Enlightenment was the internalization of sacrifice and self-renunciation. Yet this self-renunciation engendered a murderous return of the repressed. In a similar way, in its attempt to confront fascism by using its own tools against it, the radical arm of the students reproduced some of the conditions that made possible the Holocaust rather than striving toward, genuinely confronting, reflecting on, and working through this historical trauma. Another way of expressing this is that the parents had identified with the aggressor, in submission to the authoritarianism of the Nazi regime, and transmitted this introject as a phantom to their offspring. The child thus used similar violent tactics as the Nazi predecessors who had been previously introjected as aggressors by the parents. One must be clear, however, that this does not imply any moral equivalence between the two sides.

62 Sándor Ferenczi, “Psychogenic Anomalies of Voice Production,” in Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-analysis (London: Karnac Books, 1994), 105–109. 63 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, vol. 1, ed. N. T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 169.

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Ferenczi, in his Clinical Diary, also referred to the super-ego as forced introjection dwelling inside the victim as a foreign body, which needs to be eradicated for the subject to be free from external influence on the real self.64 Adorno agrees with this view—that the super-ego as a form of heteronomy must be abolished—in his dialectical critique of both psychoanalysis and the Kantian concept of autonomy.65 Key to this project, for Adorno, was addressing the psychological structure of the late modern subject. Interestingly, this leads Adorno to take up Ferenczi’s suggestion of the possibility of elimination of the social super-ego, in his attempt in the “Models of Freedom” section of Negative Dialectics to refashion Kantian moral theory after Auschwitz.66 Some components of the protest movement, in Adorno’s view, reproduced the very authoritarianism that it sought to confront in a West German society in which the continuities between the Nazi past and the Adenauer present were uncomfortably evident. Adorno was working assiduously on Aesthetic Theory as he related to Marcuse, while the latter had already published in that same year An Essay on Liberation. In their 2017 video entitled The Distance from Pontresina to Zematt is the Same as the Distance from Zematt to Pontresina, the artistic partnership Camel Collective—comprised of the artists Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats, based in New York City and in Mexico—capture this theoretical distance between Adorno and Marcuse that they were ultimately unable to bridge by emphasizing the geographical distance.67 The title is taken from a statement Marcuse makes in his letter to Adorno on July 21, 1969, and symbolizes the unwillingness of either philosopher to compromise on the locus of a much-needed discussion, presumably

64 Sándor Ferenczi, The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi, trans. J. Dupont, ed., M. Balint and N. Z. Jackson (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1988). 65 See Samir Gandesha, “Insurgent Universality,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 4 (2019), https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/insurgent-universality. 66 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 211–299. 67 Camel Collective, La Distancia Entre Pontresina Y Zermatt es La Misma Que La

Que las de Zermatt a Pontresina [The Distance from Pontresina is the Same as the Distance from Zermatt to Pontresina] (Mexico City: Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, UNAM, 2017). This text includes the complete correspondence between Adorno and Marcuse (1969), first translated into English by Esther Leslie and published in 1999 in New Left Review.

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leading to a synthesis of the opposition between the two on the question of the relation between theory and praxis. It is rather comprised of a series of debates, or force-fields to use Adorno’s term.68 It points to the inadequacy of either a detached theory or praxis that displaces reflection and the importance of the tension between them. They are held in tension without being synthesized or reconciled. In a sense, the politics of Critical Theory lie in this important constellation between Marcuse, Adorno, and the protest movement rather than in the attempt to reconstruct liberalism in line with a philosophy of communication. The debate can be understood in terms of three basic themes: the historical significance of the Institute for Social Research, whose offices had been occupied; the correctness of unequivocal support of antiimperialist struggles; and the relation between theory and praxis—a question that Adorno would, of course, take up in his piece “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis” (1966b). For this article, I shall focus on the third theme. The crux of the debate between Adorno and Marcuse has to do with Adorno calling the police to address the occupation of the Institute’s offices, which itself symbolized the demand, in Adorno’s view, for not merely a dialectical unification of theory and practice but a subordination of theory to praxis, that is, an anti-intellectual annulment of the Institute’s (and by extension the university’s) autonomy. Let’s look at this question in somewhat more detail. From the text version of La Distancia, which includes the entirety of their 1969 correspondence, we can see that while Adorno and Marcuse agreed in their disavowal of an unmediated relation between theory and praxis, Marcuse, having experienced “Les Événements ” of May 1968 in Paris and writing from the US, argues that there are times at which praxis can push theory forward.69 While their historical moment, in the advanced industrial world, did not represent a “revolutionary” or even “pre-revolutionary” moment, Marcuse argues, the situation was “so terrible, so suffocating, so demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological physiological reaction. When one is suffocating,” Marcuse continues, “one longs to breathe fresh air, but this is not the air of

68 Adorno, Prisms, 165. 69 Camel Collective, La Distancia Entre Pontresina Y Zermatt.

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‘left fascism’.”70 Here Marcuse refers directly to Habermas’s lecture, and declares that the very idea of a “Left fascism” is a “contradictio in adjecto” or a contradiction in terms. Such a characterization of the students goes to the heart of the disagreement between Adorno and Marcuse. Adorno retorts that thinking dialectically entails precisely the possibility of such a contradictio in adjecto and that, in this case, it was an accurate characterization of the students. The reason for this is that the student movement was complicit with what Adorno elsewhere calls “identity thinking” that manifested in the very “technocratization of the university that [the movement] claims it wants to prevent.”71 In line with prevailing anti-intellectual tendencies in society as a whole, the students sought to reduce reflection as a means to an end—this end being revolution. The crux of the exchange thus hinges upon whether praxis, in the emphatic sense, that is, revolutionary praxis understood was, itself, at this time, blocked. Adorno, writing from the West German context, argued that the student movement in the Bundesrepublik had little or no prospect of sparking a revolution. Adorno’s point is that it was precisely because the situation was far from revolutionary that the student’s actions could draw out fascist tendencies in society. As Adorno noted elsewhere, the most significant fascist threat to democracy manifested itself within rather than beyond democracy itself. Not only were the students not to be considered a “revolutionary” force, but Adorno also held the view that they represented the possibility of a real regression. This analysis is especially prescient if one considers the political trajectory of Horst Mahler—a founder of the RAF who is now an open anti-Semite and key figure in the extreme right (see Mahler, 2007). Adorno argued that the Student Movement could be seen as regressive, Firstly, inasmuch as it inflames an undiminished fascist potential in Germany, without even caring about it. Secondly, insofar as it breeds in itself tendencies which—and here too we must differ—directly converge with fascism. I name here as symptomatic of this the technique of calling for a discussion, only to then make one impossible, the barbaric inhumanity of a mode of behaviour that is regressive and even confuses regression with 70 Camel Collective, La Distancia Entre Pontresina Y Zermatt, 88. 71 Camel Collective, 95.

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revolution; the blind primacy of action; the formalism which is indifferent to the content and shape of that against which one revolts, namely our theory.72

The Contemporary Left So, what I’ve tried to argue thus far is that the core idea lying at the heart of Adorno’s concept of the “authoritarian personality” is the Ferenczian notion of “identification with the aggressor.” This itself, as I suggested, can be broken down into three aspects: identification, introjection, and dissociation. Central to this logic of the identification with the aggressor is the internalization of the image of the father that takes the form of “conscience” and guilt. But beyond that, “identification with the aggressor” as aggressive oppression of the other, who diverges from the now new aggressor, can be seen as a dynamic in the creeping fascism of the psyches of the leftist students who cannot tolerate dissent from their “enlightened” perspectives. How can this logic help us to understand some aspects of the political Left today? Arguably, “identity politics” seems to characterize large segments of the contemporary Left, which is to say a politics grounded in the substantive experiences of particular oppressed groups and can, indeed, also include an understanding of the experience of intersecting forms of oppression. It is the experience of oppression that generates moral insights and norms. Such a moralization of politics can be seen to arise out of and feed back into the neo-liberal personality type. Historically speaking, neo-liberalism has been understood as the transformation of what Wendy Brown calls homo politicus into homo economicus, pressuring individuals to take more responsibility for their lives.73 And the inability to take such responsibility is understood as a moral failing. In his dialectical critique of Ferenczi, Adorno addresses, specifically, the question of responsibility: The more freedom the subject—and the community of subjects—ascribes to itself, the greater its responsibility; and before this responsibility it must fail in a bourgeois life which in practice has never yet endowed a subject

72 Camel Collective, 106. 73 See Brown, Undoing the Demos.

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with the unabridged autonomy accorded to it in theory. Hence the subject must feel guilty.74

In other words, neo-liberalism crystallizes in extremis this logic of bourgeois society as expressed in the Kantian antinomy of practical reason.75 That is, neo-liberalism requires the individual as an ever-isolated atom to become ever-more responsible for his or her well-being, on the one hand, and yet austerity policies diminish the very resources for the actualization of such responsibility, on the other. This deepens guilt, anger, and frustration that is, then, unleashed on society’s “strangers,” who are turned into political enemies. The reader will recall that Adorno’s assessment of the students was that (1) they drew out fascist tendencies in society; and (2) they manifested some of those very tendencies in themselves. Can we understand the contemporary Left to harbor “fascistic” tendencies in themselves? According to the definition of the F-scale, where F = fascist, which can be interpreted to measure rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and fear of otherness, and a certain sense of tribalism, we might, but this is highly unlikely in our customary and profound historical understanding of the word fascist. The social base, institutional structure, and political discourse of the Left cannot be said to resemble fascism. To suggest otherwise is to play into the hands of figures like Trump, who, resorting to his often-used false equivalency, said in the aftermath of Charlottesville that there “are some fine people on both sides.”76 There are, as I’ve suggested, some authoritarian tendencies emerging within the Left that can be discerned here, but they cannot be given the same label. In particular, as I alluded to earlier, a certain nostalgia for strong father figures such as Stalin, Putin, and Bashar al-Asad, the libidinal investment in which, according to Freud’s social psychology (1920), has the function of constituting the basis of the social bond. This, of course, comes at the

74 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 221. 75 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Gregor (Cambridge, UK:

Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95. 76 Rosie Gray, “Trump defends White-Nationalist Protestors: ‘Some Very Fine People on Both Sides’. The President Backtracked from his Remarks on Charlottesville Just a Day Earlier,” The Atlantic, August 15, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ archive/2017/08/trump-defends-white-nationalist-protestors-some-very-fine-people-onboth-sides/537012/

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expense of the oppositional forces in societies such as Russia, Iran, and Syria.77 Can the Left provoke fascist tendencies in certain segments of society? Here a good case could be made for an affirmative answer. If a vocal and increasingly influential part of the Left engages in what I’ve called the moralization of politics, rooted in a reified, absolutistic understanding based on narrow personal experience, then rather than challenging the neo-liberal order, such a politics—as critics such as Adolf Reed, Jr.,78 Walter Benn Michaels,79 and, more recently, Asad Haider80 have argued—it simply reflects or expresses many of the key features of this order. Increasingly, identity becomes a dimension of what C. B. McPherson calls possessive individualism, an aspect of the self that can be strategically deployed by an increasingly entrepreneurial subject.81 Moreover, one of the more dangerous features of such moralizing politics is that it allows the so-called alt-right, in its own pseudo-critique of neoliberalism, to portray itself as transgressive and rebellious. It is dangerous because of its appeal to young people, who are attracted by its mystique and revolutionary élan, but disregard the falsifications of historical facts. The alt-right, for example, goes virtually unchallenged in positioning itself as the authentic defender of free speech. The irony of this should be clear given the historically iconic role the free speech movement played at the University of California Berkeley (Cohen and Zelnick, 2002) and to a lesser extent my own institution, Simon Fraser University, in the 1960s. The defense of free speech today has, strangely, become synonymous with the white nationalist fascistic movement. It should go without saying that neither Hitler nor Mussolini were defenders of free speech. It is at this particular moment, then, that the Left mistakes confusing politics with moral puritanism, which impels it increasingly to police forms of “unacceptable” speech and action with no symptomatic analysis of the 77 See Hensman, Indefensible. 78 Adolf Reed, Jr., Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Racial Equality

(London: Routledge, 2018). 79 Walter Ben Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love and Ignore Inequality (New York: Holt, 2007). 80 Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in an Age of Trump (London: Verso, 2018). 81 See C. B. McPherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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former. In other words, the contemporary “Social Justice” Left would rather be morally correct than political efficacious; its very impulsion toward purity is what prevents it from building the kinds of broad-based, intersectional, and working-class hegemonic politics that Fred Hampton first termed the “Rainbow Coalition.” Insofar as it seeks to elaborate and apply rigoristic, absolutistic moral norms it begins to occupy the historical terrain of traditional conservatism. The right, in contrast, adopts something of the posture—though completely bereft, of course, of the complexity of intellectual and emancipatory content—of the twentiethcentury avant-garde. As Ana Teixeira Pinto argued in a recent issue of Text zur Kunste addressing the role of Nick Land’s conceptualization of accelerationism and the “dark enlightenment” in contemporary art: The distinction between alt-right and the conventional far Right, on the other hand, is not so much a matter of content but of style, with the altright extoling nihilism, sarcasm, and anti-establishment sentiments, among other modalities of dissidence that were formerly the preserve of the Left, traditionally associated with the term “alternative.”82

This is where we see an important convergence of right and left authoritarianism in the identification with the aggressor: the authoritarian right promotes a self-sacrificing identification with capital or the existing unequal structure of property relations, particularly via its embrace of neoliberal supply-side economic doctrine. The authoritarian left, in contrast, grounds its epistemic and normative claims in “experience” which is in some sense proper (eigentlich) for, or, indeed, is understood to be the property (Eigentum) of a given group to which individuals must unprotestingly subordinate themselves. Debate and contradiction—the organon of dialectical thinking—become characterized as nothing more than forms of harm or “epistemic violence”83 done to “marginalized communities” with no consideration of the harm done to democracy by such authoritarian closures. This is intrinsically indefensible but, worse

82 Ana Teixeira Pinto, “Artwashing—on NRX and the Alt Right,” Texte Zur Kunst, July 4, 2017, https://www.textezurkunst.de/articles/artwashing-web-de/. 83 G. C. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 24.

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still, it subverts the possibility of a truly anti-authoritarian, radical democratic opposition to the rise of creeping fascism, which, it should go without saying, is so necessary today.

CHAPTER 4

Marcuse and the Social Networkers Luca Mandara

Herbert Marcuse influenced the Italian debate in the 1960s, helping many extra-parliamentary movements to define an alternative strategy different from the established parties. In the age of neoliberalism, international populism and the digital revolution, new strategies on the Left are needed. Discussing some of the proposals in Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, and confronting them with some of Marcuse’s analysis and the current Italian Left-Wing party “Potere al popolo” (Power to the People), I will develop some proposals to build new connections among militants, workers, and people willing to break from “counterrevolutionary” oppression.

L. Mandara (B) University of Naples “Federico II”, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_4

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Marcuse and the Italian ’68ers The first Italian translations of Marcuse’s works date back to the second half of the 1960s,1 but it was only when the protests broke out in 1968 that Marcuse got “on everyone’s lips.”2 Due to the peculiar character of the ’60s in Italy, dominated by political and extremist tendencies more than libertarian ones, Marcuse was mainly discussed from the perspective of political revolution. In this sphere, his thought divided the Italian debate on the Left: either he was an agent of the CIA; an old, romantic, liberal rhetorician, or he was the third “M” with Mao and Marx; a keen observer of the new industrial societies.3 In the early 60s, Italy was experiencing rapid industrialization under the political alliance between Catholics (DC) and Socialists (PSI), the so-called: “centro-sinistra.” The consequence, however, was not the interruption, but the revival of the working-class movement. Yet, even if the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was one of the strongest in the Western 1 Reason and Revolution was first translated into Italian in 1966, Eros and Civilization in 1966, One-Dimensional Man in 1967, Soviet Marxism and Critique of Repressive Tolerance in 1968, Negations , An Essay on Liberation and Ontology of Hegel in 1969. Not one of Marcuse’s books was translated by Editori Riuniti, the “official” publishing house of the PCI. According to Giachetti (2004), the books by Marcuse, Adorno, and Horkheimer published by Einaudi and sold by 2002, were 1,054,100. The 50% of it belonged to Marcuse (561,000 copies). One-Dimensional Man has reached 250,000 copies (150,000 in 1967), Eros and Civilization (140,000), An Essay on Liberation (50,000), Authority and Family (47,000). 2 Enrico Filippini, “Ricordo di un rivoltoso tranquillo,” La Repubblica, July 31, 1979; Laura Bergagna “Feltrinelli, editore del dissenso,” La Stampa, November 21, 1968. In 1968, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the very famous militant-editor, said: “I have never read Marcuse. He is the only one who can explain in a systematic and coherent way what all of us feel.” 3 Corrado Ocone, “Il Sessantotto e il mito della ‘rivoluzione tradita’” Paradoxa, 2, 2018. See also: Lucio Colletti, Ideologia e società (La Terza: RomaBari, 1969), 189–191; Diego Giachetti, “Giugno 1969: i “caldi” giorni italiani di Herbert Marcuse,” Il Protagora, 4, July–December, 2004; Enzo Golino, “La terza ‘M’ dopo Marx e Mao,” La Repubblica, July 31, 1979; and the interview available on: https://www.raicultura.it/storia/articoli/2020/06/Herbert-Marcuse-05c6ad002ab4-4042-b816-92cfc3acdc30.html. Luciana Castellina, a former communist militant, stated that for them Marcuse was not a libertarian philosopher, but a Marxist who stressed that true liberation was to be found in the material process of production as liberation from the capitalist relations. For her, the view of a libertarian Marcuse belongs to the later and repressive misunderstanding of the movements of 1968. Available on: https://www.raicultura.it/storia/articoli/2019/01/Studenti-e-ope rai-in-lotta-ea0e4e77-fc87-439c-91a6-49e60f13195b.html.

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Europe, it was stuck in a reformist-democratic position by the Cold War.4 Marcuse recognized this situation in One-Dimensional Man when he argued, in somewhat contradictory fashion that, on the one hand, the PCI was “condemned” to be “non-radical”5 because the working class was mostly integrated into the system. On the other hand, in a footnote he admitted that “strong segments of the militant labor movement are still alive (such as in France or Italy), their force is pitted against accelerated technological and political rationalization in authoritarian form.”6 However, one could argue that if Italy had followed the path of Western industrialization, without an earlier rupture, it would have followed the same “one-dimensionality” of most advanced countries. This was the consequence drawn by many left-wing tendencies that criticized the parliamentary strategy of the PCI based on the idea that Italy was still an underdeveloped country, one not ready for revolution. According to Luciana Castellina, who would break with PCI to found “il manifesto” in 1969, Marcuse’s analysis of neo-capitalism contributed to recognizing the advanced features of Italian development, and the necessity to find new strategies beyond the PCI.7 Likewise, Augusto Vegezzi, in Quaderni Piacentini, a paper founded in 1962 that was close to PSI but looking for independence from it, used Marcuse’s principle that theory must remain relatively abstract from immediate political contingencies in order to criticize the dominant “social-democratic” tendency. This is the revolutionary

4 See John Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). In the early post-war, Palmiro Togliatti, Secretary of PCI, asked Stalin if the Party could seize power. They had wide mass support (after all they had just liberated the country from the fascists!) and, most of all, the weapons. Stalin blocked him in accordance with the Conference of Yalta. Marcuse himself, in a report for the Office of Intelligence Research titled The Potentials of World Communism, wrote: “At the war’s end, Communist strength in France and Italy was probably sufficiently great to warrant a revolutionary effort to seize power. The Communists were deterred not only by the presence of the Allied armies but also by Soviet interest in avoiding an open break in the wartime alliance. Under such circumstances, they may have decided that they could gain power by operating within the governmental Coalition” (Laudani, 2012, p. 592). This created the myth of the Revolution Betrayed, which inspired much of the Italian Sixties. See: Corrado Ocone, “Il Sessantotto e il Mito Della ‘Rivoluzione Tradita,’” Paradoxa 2 (2018). 5 Herbert Marcuse, L’uomo a Una Dimensione (Torino: Einaudi, 1999), 35. 6 Marcuse, p. 52, footnote 2 (my translation). 7 Luciana Castellina, “La frazione Ingraiana di Roccaraso’,” Menabò (2020): 138.

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content of Marcuse’s “utopian” thought.8 In both cases, Marcuse argued indirectly for breaking with the established Left-wing parties. The young group “Circolo Marcuse,” founded in 1970 in the northeast of Italy, was directly committed to Marcuse’s work. It is an exemplar of the appreciation, if not the myth, of Marcuse among young students. They had an enthusiastic exchange of letters with a patient Marcuse, sharing their analysis of the Italian political situation; sending him their journal, “Rottura,” where they also published their letters and Marcuse’s answers; asking him for financial help (Marcuse sent 50$, noting he was not able to send more because he was living only on his royalties), and for materials on Angela Davis, published in the seventh volume of Rottura, to support her cause.9 These cases demonstrate the existence of a fertile heterodox Marxism in Italy that shared with Marcuse the desire to renew Marxism and to free it from dogmatism, to open new political possibilities.10 However, due to the peculiar situation of Italian society, Marcuse was also harshly criticized not only by the “Old Left,” but also by the “New Left,” particularly for his view of the integration of the working class. The Italian experience showed the emergence of a new subject inside work: the so-called “mass-worker”: typically young, unskilled, and emigrated from southern Italy to the north, and who lacked discipline, and thus did not identify with their own work.11 This is why the socalled “Autonomia,” or “Italian Theory” (mainly its second generation, i.e., Antonio Negri), who based their strategy on this new social subject, could appreciate Marcuse’s idea of the “Great Refusal,” which aligned with their tactic of the “refusal of work” (the refusal of the ethic of work, the new practice of sabotages, and so on). They also appreciated his attention to the international dimension of liberation and to neo-colonialism, but they could never accept either the idea of the integration of the

8 Augusto Vegezzi, “Eros e Utopia. Letture di Marcuse,” Quaderni Piacentini III (17–18, July–September, 1964): 36–46; Augusto Vegezzi, “H. Marcuse: Tecnocrazia e Marxismo in URSS,” Quaderni Piacentini V (March 26, 1966): 12–24. 9 See “Schreiben der italieneischen Gruppe ‘Circolo Marcuse’ zu ihren Veranstaltungen und Aktionen,” UBA Ffm Bestand 3, no. 536 (1972). 10 See Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 11 The new subject appeared for the very first time in “Piazza Statuto guerrilla,” Turin, July 7th, 1962.

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proletariat, or Marcuse’s condemnation of terroristic violence.12 Even the group “Circolo Marcuse” attacked him on this issue, but he responded by noting that in the age of “preventive counterrevolution” every threat of revolution in Italy would be stopped by NATO.13 This weak faith in the revolutionary role of the working class caused many interruptions during Marcuse’s Italian conferences of 1969, titled “Beyond One-Dimensional Man.”14 In that year the struggle radicalized (the so-called “hot autumn”), and many extra-parliamentary groups, usually based in journals (il manifesto, Lotta Continua), were born. They delivered their papers among workers outside the factories, like Turin or Milan, attempting to facilitate that alliance which Marcuse had discussed in An Essay on Liberation. Yet, even though he had acknowledged that in Italy and France the students “have been able to obtain precarious (and passing!) aid from powerful leftist parties and union,”15 he also used to criticize the practice of “going to the workers.”16 In those conferences, he rather underlined the emergence of new subjects of liberation outside of the working-class provoking contestations such as one that broke out in Rome—“the most contested lecture of the last ten years,” according 12 Marie Thirion, Le Fabbriche Della Rivoluzione: Discorsi e Rappresentazioni del Potere Operaio Nelle Riviste di Pisa, Marghera e Torino (Padova: University of Padova Press, 2017). For Tony Negri’s position on Marcuse see Negri, “Postfazione: Marcuse Oggi e Ieri,” in Oltre L’uomo a Una Dimensione (2005); Myriam Miedzian Malinovich and Herbert Marcuse, “An Interview,” Social Research 48, no. 2 (1982): 389–390; Bruno Gravagnuolo, “Riquadro Biografico,” La Repubblica, July 1979. 13 In the letter of October 31, 1970, Marcuse clarified that in Italy and France the working-class situation was different from the US, but he already talked of «preventive counterrevolution» that would prevent every threat of revolution, even in a military way through NATO. And he concluded saying: «this is neither “pessimism”, nor “defeatism,” but realism. The counterrevolution can and must be defeated, this is the historical duty today, and it needs a very different strategy from the one valid for revolutionary situations». See: Schreiben (1972) (my translation). 14 A precise description of these events is in Giachetti (2004). Marcuse titled in the same way a conference for the “First Annual Hans Meyerhoff Memorial Lecture” at UCLA in October, 31, 1968 published in Marcuse (2001). 15 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 44. The Secretary of PCI Luigi Longo received a delegation of students in Via Botteghe Oscure, headquarter of the party, guided by Oreste Scalzone. See Oreste Scalzone, Biennio rosso. Figure e passaggi di una stagione rivoluzionaria (Milano: Tassinari, 1988), 63. 16 See Han Magnus Enzensberger and Herbert Marcuse, “Herbert Marcuse,” in Aspettando la rivoluzione, ed. Michel-Antoine Burnier (Rimini-Firenze: Guaraldi, 1975), 44–45.

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to Marcuse. There Cohn-Bendit, the leader of the French student movement, accused him of being paid by the CIA, and it was impossible to continue the conference. However, Marcuse acknowledged the difference between the Italian situation and the US in subsequent lectures. The Italian and French situations made him clarify his thesis on the integration of the working class not only in time, but also in space, and not only for the lessdeveloped countries, but also for some advanced ones. These cases prove that Marcuse did not just influence the new Italian subjects, but that he was also influenced by some of them in developing his analysis of the alternative path to liberation in the most advanced industrial society. This could be confirmed by the appreciation that Marcuse showed in Counterrevolution and Revolt for the analysis of Lucio Magri, one of the founders of il manifesto, regarding the necessity of a different strategy for socialism based on changing ideas of revolution itself.17 Even though Marcuse was interviewed in 1972 by Luciana Castellina of “il manifesto”18 and in 1978 by Lotta Continua,19 his work became less important as the student movement declined. The latter interview was followed by an article on L’Unità, the official paper of PCI, where Angelo Bolaffi stated that Marcuse—the “last prophet”20 —had anticipated the need and the search for a qualitatively different life experienced by the young Italian movements of the ’70s. But the way forward was different from the one that Marcuse recognized. In Italy, the student movement did not disappear, but radicalized throughout the ’70s until the Armed Struggle. The killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by “Brigate Rosse” in 1978 coincided with the end of mass mobilizations and, contrary to its intentions, led to violent repression by the State and to the systematic cancellation of the memory of that decade—and the effects are still reverberating in Italy today.

17 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 8–9. 18 See Luciana Castellina, Che c’è in Amerika? (Verona: Bertani, 1973). 19 See Golino, “La terza ‘M’ dopo Marx e Mao”; Mario Bolognari “Non fu che un inizio. Analisi e interpretazione di un movimento politico e culturale,” Humanities VIII, 15, 1, 18 (2019): 17. A former militant of Lotta Continua, reported that, in the evening, “after some pages of One-Dimensional Man, I used to read the verses of La Ginestra by Giacomo Leopardi” (my translation). 20 Gollino, “La terza ‘M’ dopo Marx e Mao.”

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Just one year later, after Marcuse’s death in 1979, Glauco Casarico, introducing some of Marcuse’s essays from 1928 to 1936, complained that “an absolute silence fell upon Marcuse mainly in Italy.” The commemorative articles were “too short, not very exhaustive, inspired too much by a reductive perspective, and show clearly the will to make an end with him within the narrowest space possible, because he is regarded as not being current anymore and too much exploited.”21 In one of these commemorative articles, Enrico Filippini wrote that not one of his friends had Marcuse’s books anymore, unlike a young student he met on a train. She was reading Reason and Revolution, like “a student of today: studious and without illusions […]. Marcuse has become ‘culture.’”22 It sounds like a condemnation of one who had harshly criticized the “affirmative character of culture.” Much like in Germany, Brazil, and the US, Marcuse has been rediscovered thanks to the Italian translation of Marcuse’s unpublished writings by Raffaele Laudani. Six of Marcuse’s works have appeared in Italian in the last five years.23 The Italian rediscovery began with a conference on Marcuse in 1998 at the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” In his opening remarks to the conference, Leonardo Casini stated that, “Marcuse must be read like a classic and not like a contemporary author.”24 In Italy Marcuse is not discussed within the current political or social movements, but generally, in some cases, among academics. However, feminism, the ecology movement, the search for a direct and personal engagement with politics, and the idea that culture and technology must be part of it are among the many of Marcuse’s ideas that have been taken up by the current generation. Moreover, and maybe beyond Marcuse and the Frankfurt School critical theorists, they do not suffer 21 Glauco Casarico, “Introduzione,” in Fenomenologia ontologico-esistenziale e dialettica materialistica. Tre studi 1928–1936 (Milano: Unicopli, 1980), I–II. 22 Enrico Filippini, “Ricordo di un rivoltoso tranquillo,” La Repubblica (July 31, 1979). 23 Herbert Marcuse, Sulla filosofia concreta. Alle radici del pensiero di Marcuse (Firenze:

Clinamen, 2018); Herbert Marcuse, “Sulla dialettica. Materiali di Alpbach,” Shift: International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1 (2018): 185–201; Herbert Marcuse, Sul concetto di essenza (Pisa: ETS, 2019); Herbert Marcuse, Filosofia e politica. Scritti e interventi, vol. V (Roma: manifestolibri, 2019); Herbert Marcuse, Ragione e rivoluzione. Hegel e il sorgere della “teoria sociale” (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020); Herbert Marcuse, Lezioni americane (1966–1977) (Milano: Mimesis, 2021). 24 Leonardo Casini, “Premessa,” in Eros, utopia e rivolta (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004),

7.

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from the nostalgia of a “defeated” revolution. On the contrary, they face the destruction of its memory. As such, they are free from dogmatism, and open to embracing rational and imaginative energies that seek to redefine a social alternative to capitalism. Maybe this is the very territory upon which Marcuse can be discovered again.

From Practice to Praxis: The Necessity of “Die Sache Selbst” In the conclusion of Counterrevolution and Revolt , Marcuse underlined that the persistent aggressive stance of the “people” toward rebels, as well as the spontaneous submission of the people to their masters, was based not only on a repressed sensibility, but also on a repressed but justifiable rationality given the reality of the situation. The masters, he wrote, “still deliver goods.”25 However, we may ask: is this still true? Since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, society is unfolding its basic contradictions. In some European countries, this has become an opportunity, a political kairòs, to develop aesthetic practices into political praxes: spontaneous, unplanned practices of solidarity engaged in by small groups to break the deformed experience of their senses and subvert the social structure itself.26 Matching individual and social transformation is what we are trying to do in Italy with the political movement “Potere al Popolo.” This is what Srnicek and Williams have recently called for in their critique of “folk politics.”27 But this change presupposes the engagement of “those who still sustain the established work process, who constitute 25 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 131. 26 One of these is so-called “mutualism”; activities which help people to deal with daily

problems, many of which are a result of the dismantling of the welfare state. Such activities are also meant to improve solidarity and consciousness among people. In Naples, the militants of “Ex-Opg Je ‘so pazz” have become a recognized “institution” in the territory thanks to their relentless action. They have also published a book on their mutualist experience. Je so’ Pazz – Ex Opg, Manuale del Mutualismo: Camera Popolare del Lavoro (Berlin: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2019). 27 Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventare il Futuro: Per un Mondo Senza Lavoro (Roma: Nero, 2018). By “folk politics” Srnicek and Williams mean the spread of common sense among leftwing movements in which immediacy is always better than rational mediation. Folk politics prefers short-term and spontaneous actions rather than long-term and organized strategies. They are supporters of localism rather than globalism because it is more “authentic.” Finally, they are skeptical of any conceptual and complex theory, indeed with abstraction

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its human base, who reproduce its profits and its power.”28 This has become more and more urgent as the counterrevolution is creating and mobilizing a new movement that could keep workers from embracing transformation: right-wing populism. A deep analysis of the origins of twenty-first-century right-wing populism is beyond the scope of this chapter. However, one appropriate way to understand it is rooted in the basic law of the Marxian critique of political economy: the theory of value. According to the Marxian view, capitalist value and capitalist profit come from living labor. But capitalism also tends to substitute living labor with dead labor—machines—to increase productivity and the exploitation of living labor. Capital itself is, according to Marx in the Grundrisse, “the moving contradiction.”29 In our “second age of the machines,” this tendency moves toward the substitution of all living labor indifferently, manual and intellectual; affective or cognitive.30 Inasmuch as this contradiction engenders sharper crises of profitability for capital, dead labor (in the form of private property) becomes destructive of the productive forces (nature and labor) of capitalism, exploiting them to their last drop of blood. Currently, we conventionally call the destructive forces inherent in capitalism today the “neoliberal order.” It means, on the side of work and nature: the precarity of work, impoverishment of the labor force, unemployment, the weakened political power of unions; an indiscriminate destruction of the oceans, mountains, forests, and so on. On the side of itself. According to Srnicek and Williams, the origin of this common sense is the corruption of the movement that arose against Soviet Communism and Western Social democracy between the ’60s and the ’70s. 28 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 132. 29 See Herbert Marcuse, L’uomo a una dimensione (Torino: Einaudi, 1999); Herbert

Marcuse, Negations , Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFlyBooks, 2009). Marcuse quoted many times the very important Fragment on the machine by Marx in the Grundrisse. 30 In The Second Machine Age (2014), Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain that the new digital goods are not productive in terms of Gross Domestic Output (GDO). Indeed, they account for just the 4% of the US GDO. They reveal, perhaps unconsciously, the inner contradiction of the commodity shape between useful value and exchange value, human and capital: the impossibility of measure the new useful value in terms of profitability for private capitals as they are increasingly common goods. The two authors try to invent new way to measure the national income in the light of digital values, but they do not comprehend that the measure of value is not a matter of invention, but an objective law of the capitalistic society.

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capital, it means mostly financialization: the turning from productive to unproductive and “fancy” capitalism. It is also important that the catalyst of this order is not the “crisis of the state,” but the neoliberal state itself. The state is the main weapon in the war of capitalism against human and non-human life, with the dismantling and privatization of welfare, and an increased reliance on private financing for formerly public services. Many aspects of neoliberal governance are now carried out by undemocratic, supra-national institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the European Central Bank, and so on. These institutions have accomplished the “historical” duty of capitalism: creating a world market. Using the logic in Marcuse’s essay, “State and Individual under National Socialism,” we can see that neoliberal institutions have done on a global scale what the Nazis did in Germany.31 They have coordinated, directly and consciously, and not simply through the blindness and the anarchy of the free competition, the market above and against individual citizens, creating new transnational monopolies in a global market.32 In Europe, through the European Institutions, Germany and other Northern Countries have been trying to do the same to southern European countries for decades. Yet, after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, global economic competition seems to have reached a new stage of aggressiveness. The political consequence of this crisis of profitability can be seen when we compare our current society with Marcuse’s analysis of advanced industrial society in One-Dimensional Man. There Marcuse pointed out that the combination of welfare and warfare helps capitalism to deal with its own contradictions. Thanks to the growth of the productivity of labor, he 31 Herbert Marcuse, “State and Individual Under National Socialism,” in Technology, War and Fascism: The Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1998). 32 On the category of “transnational capitalism,” see: Anthony, 1991; Chris Harman, “The State and Capitalism Today,” International Socialism 2, no. 51 (1991); Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2010); Gianfranco Pala, Economia nazionale e mercato mondiale: la fase transnazionale dell’imperialismo (Napoli: Laboratorio politico, 1995); Gianfranco Pala, Il fondo monetario internazionale: il centro operativo dell’imperialismo transnazionale (Napoli: Laboratorio politico, 1996); Williams I. Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change and Globalization (London: Verso, 2003); William I. Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Transnational Production, Transnational Capitalists, and the Transnational State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

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wrote, the advanced industrial societies could distribute commodities and services to a larger segment of the population, integrating them seamlessly into the system. The hegemonic economic powers would accept this situation in the name of the self-preservation of the system.33 The welfare and warfare state has nurtured capital through public investments and national debt, absorbing unemployed workers and providing services necessary to reproduce the labor force, but also mediating between the interests of workers and capital. Over the last three decades, however, this situation has changed, and the state has promoted a different strategy: not mediating but attacking labor through austerity in public expense, supporting directly and indirectly financialization of Western economy and delocalization of factories. This has negatively affected populations all over the world. However, every new stage of domination is always due to the growth of the potentiality of freedom. The enforcement of slavery is always due to the fear of the enemy, and the enemy is “the real specter of liberation.”34 It is located in the tremendous social potential that can be activated by the development of its contrary: the destructiveness of capitalist private property. In the catastrophe of neoliberal globalization, the historical form of the capitalist tendency of domination by world markets, the contradiction between ever the more social productive forces and an ever more anachronistic form of property explodes again. Moved from this tendency for global profits, capitalism has developed into an international phenomenon: ecological and biological crises (such as the very recent and terrible experience of COVID-19), catastrophic migration, technological unemployment, and so on. These issues, which are not unique to our current period but that have arisen in historically unique form under neoliberalism, demand international and cooperative answers, based on solidarity and community. Right-wing populism tries to prevent or subvert common, solidarity-based ways out of neoliberal crises. The mass-ressentiment of populism finds its origin in the economic and political necessity to save the system (and its hierarchies, inequities and traditions, forms of exploitation) from self-destruction. What Marcuse called the “technostructure” seems to be experiencing more acute crises of legitimation. The techno-austerity dogmas are

33 Marcuse, L’uomo a Una Dimensione, 52. 34 Marcuse, L’uomo a Una Dimensione, 65.

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feeding more Refusals than they are improving the GDP. In The Destruction of Reason, György Lukács said that pure formal reason is enough for the dominant consciousness only when the contradictions of the system have not come to light yet. But neoliberalism makes it more and more difficult to directly integrate larger numbers of the population—workers, young people and the marginal—into the productivity of the system itself. It thus becomes necessary to renew “ideological” elements, mainly those that Marcuse called “operational values,” to provide the population with a basic worldview in the interests of the upper classes. Perhaps this is the main historical task of the current right-wing populism. Right-wing populism is nothing but the enforcement of this order once the technological veil (and just the veil) has been almost completely crushed, the brutality of the system has been revealed, and international competition has become more intense in the global markets. And, of course, as the Frankfurt School analyzed in their work, this corresponds to the triumph of instrumental rationality itself, as it is the rationality of self-preservation. Populism is very capable of providing a seemingly simple cognitive roadmap that can be used as a guide in the current situation, a map that does not refer to boring technical details or policies, but rather as a kind of political finalism. These maps channel the discontent against the whole to some determinate enemy (immigrants, EU-bureaucracy, transgendered and BIPOC people, communists, and so on), to create a “people” around traditional values which confirms the existence of a bygone time, and to reassure people who are afraid of change. Underlying populism is the complete elimination of any mediation or nuance, practical and theoretical, and of the intellectual horizon that characterized Western modernity. It feeds off nationalism, anti-internationalism, and anti-intellectualism.

A Long-Term Proposal for a Modern Politics Yet, our challenge is very tough. We must be an alternative to both rightwing populism, and for those who, scared by populism, continue to prefer the old, polite/moderate traditional forces (of capital and in the state). It is depressing to be forced to choose between the clothes of the masters:

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whether a suit and tie in Parliament or Bermuda shorts on the beach35 ; or the blond-haired aggressive macho Outsider versus the docile but very polite American politicians (whether Democrat or Republican). Of course, a critical, radical consciousness is scarcely developed. Recently, in their “utopian” book, Srnicek and Williams claimed that the main task should be the reconstruction of a new common sense within the framework of a project of social transformation which recalls Marcuse’s request for a very long period of theoretical and practical Enlightenment. Firstly, Srnicek and Williams ask for a more plural study of economics. In Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse pointed the falsity of pluralism to give the appearance of a democratic society. Advocating pluralism is too ambiguous. Rather, we need a rational theory, that means a theory which begins with the dialectical negation of the dominant political economy, one that ends with the comprehension of the objective conditions of our society, its tendencies, its possibilities, and the limits of political action. Secondly, agreeing with Srnicek and Williams, we need a universal perspective. Marcuse was always committed to underlining the individualistic trait of Marxian socialism. Likely, this emphasis on individual was due to the failure of the transition from capitalism to socialism and from socialism to communism due to the “betrayal” of the Soviet and Western Revolutions. Nonetheless, Marcuse never forgot the social basis for individual freedom: a true individuality can develop only on the basis of a true community. Nowadays, we do not have to differentiate ourselves from any Soviet Union, or “Real Socialism.” However, we do need to recall the almost forgotten fundamental ideals of a socialist community. In On Hedonism, Marcuse sketched out four features of such a community: “the disposal over the means of production by the community,” that is, their socialization; “the reorientation of the productive process toward the needs and wants of the whole society”; “the shortening of the workday,” thanks to the increasing automation of production.36 This is indispensable to the fourth point, a more specifically political one: “the active participation of individuals in the administration of the whole,” 35 In summer of 2019, when former Vice-Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, leader of the Right-Wing Party “Lega Nord,” was filmed singing the national anthem on the beach wearing just Bermuda shorts among almost completely naked cheerleaders. This caused a very noisy scandal by those who called for respect of the “Nation.” 36 Herbert Marcuse, Negations : Essays in Critical Theory (London: MayFly Books, 2009), 144.

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that is the effective power of the people over the process of production, its duration, purposes, directions, and so on. We should never forget that only these measures can economically and politically contradict (and change) what is still the fundamental pillar of the current, neoliberal society: private property. Because Srnicek and Williams never cite the latter, their work remains ambiguous. Of course, calling now for a social appropriation of the means of production can seem naïve, but it is even clumsier to not name the radical problem we must face: the force of private property and the political weakness of the working class.37 Yet, maybe something is changing on this too. In Italy, for instance, after such delocalization despite the public funding, the issue of the nationalization of strategic sectors and industries is spreading among workers and citizens as a whole. Thirdly, we need an aesthetic individuality as a measure of the forthcoming freedom and, at the same time, as its condition. As a presupposition of politics, the aesthetic dimension indicates first, the necessity of negating the immediate (competitive, acquisitive) sensibility within which we are all trapped in the antagonistic society; second, the need to explore new ways of living in our body and mind, and in community with the others; a new common sense, as Srnicek and Williams argue. It is true, but only if it does not just mean having a (technically) utopian consciousness, as Srnicek and Williams suggest but, with Marcuse, creating a new sensibility. The senses must be experienced differently. In the advanced countries, a new political force cannot be only a politics imposed on the masses, but it should involve individuals and people in activities that do not coincide with the class struggle. It is necessary to activate in individuals the solidarity which break with the immediate, egoistic sensibility in which we are usually confined. The need for many people to experience nature in a different way (i.e., veganism, vegetarianism, defense of animals and forests), or the spontaneous actions by many NGOs to help immigrants certainly do not change the society on their own, but they demonstrate the social need to overcome the familiar repressive consumer sensibility. Our political work is rooted in this, too. Besides, they anticipate the future in the present: a society without class violence against human beings and nature. Since no one dares to 37 In an interview in 1978, Marcuse repeated that, even if it was not possible to summarize every new socialist institution precisely, it was much worse to not recall their necessity.

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remember that this is the true freedom because it is too far, too utopian, too general, everyone forgets that real change will never come from a new technical innovation in productivity, but in the expansion of Eros to our relations in the broadest sense possible: from work to daily practice. This means, essentially, that the problem is not just to accelerate production, but to develop true cooperation and solidarity among men, women, and nature: to make social freedom the need of free individuals and vice versa. This is the true way out of capitalism, and this goal influences the means to accomplish it. It may also mean stopping the idea of endless growth in productivity to rest and enjoy what we have already produced. Who knows?

Using Social Networks Now the question is: how can we reach people? Can our digital infrastructure help us to gather people around such socialist objectives? Of course, these questions imply the key role played by social networks in politics, and more specifically to question whether they allow us to communicate a view that is so complex and abstract. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the rise of right-wing populism, it is difficult to deny that social networks have a decisive role in politics today. The recent use of social media by populists has revealed that this role is not neutral; it is being used to manipulate consciousnesses and needs, and to align political interests with the interests of private property. I would suggest that this has worked because of the manipulation of our sense perception to prevent perceptions of different possibilities. Social networks like Facebook or Instagram seem to verify some of Marcuse’s idea that the reality tends to become aesthetic by virtue of its material dynamic but, within the limit of the commodity form, every emancipatory and true aesthetic potentiality of technology is betrayed. Social networks dominate what was the dominion of art: sounds, words, and images are organized for the endless stimulation of our perception, leading to the commodified discharge of our vital energy. The more stimulation, the less intellectual comprehension. In Marcuse’s terms, Facebook (it may well be for other social networks, too) breaks the free play between imagination and intellect, and violently subsumes the former to the command of instrumental reason: a new Performance

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Principle. The social network is objectified in plugins aimed at quantifying the self, and in algorithms which reward this performance.38 As a result, people internalize the logic of their masters: they rush to accumulate themselves in terms of quantity of likes, friends, followers, and images. Their language is the one of their masters: “how many likes do you have?” “Trump has the most followers in the world,” “post a selfie…, etc.”39 The union of technology and aesthetic materials creates the framework in which people can forget their reason and venture capital can make money. The need to enhance our sensibility is satisfied in a repressed way just as repressed satisfaction can enter into the circle of profits. The promises of a free sensibility, a free mind, a free voice, are betrayed by the same Web 2.0 from which they were born. The excitation hides the loss of public education, health care, secure occupation, and the growth of social inequalities. The consequent social isolation feeds, in turn, the social ization that reproduces the atomization while claiming for abandoning our personality to the owners of social media platforms. It remains true, with Marcuse, that people must free themselves before getting free from the external powers once the domination has been internalized. The question, of course, is how. Marcuse remains instructive to remedy this situation. Even in his most pessimistic book, One-Dimensional Man, he opened a third way between those who say they do not use the instruments of capitalism, and those who believe that using them coincides with the transformation of the world. Far from condemning formal rationality and its practical conquests in an abstract and absolute way, Marcuse underlined that even though they are real products of capitalism, they are subject to the same dialectic: the growth in productivity conflicts with its own rationality. But this is not automatic; the transformation from domination to liberation is not a matter of inevitable technological progress, nor of arithmetic or algorithmic modeling. It is a matter of human politics and human subjectivity, whose objectives should not be measured only by technological “progress” for its own sake, but by every imaginable possibility of resting, 38 Matteo Pasquinelli, ed. Gli Algoritmi del Capitale: Accelerazionismo, Macchine Della Conoscenza e Autonomia del Comune (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2014). 39 Luca Mandara, “Per una Critica Della Società Dello Spettacolo Partecipato,” Il Ponte LXXIV, no. 5 (2018): 129–139; Luca Mandara, “‘I like it ’: Tempo Libero e Società Capitalistica,” Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics XXI, no. 3 (2019): 583–608.

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pacifying the world, truly enjoying life. With his critique, Marcuse wanted to give individuals back the power to transform their reality and (their own) nature. The paradoxical dialectic of technology is due to the betrayal of its inner possibility to satisfy human needs, in and beyond the realm of necessity. This is a good point of view from which to assess the private social networks “from below”: universal pacification, widespread knowledge, or incompatibility with dictatorship or authoritarian tendencies.40 The idea of betrayal predisposes us a priori to look for a revolutionary potentiality in these technologies. Technology belongs essentially to us, but apparently not yet. We must make technology our own.

The Social Networkers As we have just seen, Marcuse highlighted the inner contradiction of technology: the conquest of nature through the automation of labor leads to the end of self-preserving instrumental reason. A new aesthetic a priori will create its own science, technology, and a new common sense. Nowadays, in the case of alternative political communication through social networks, we could picture a diversified strategy in two directions: automation of the old, or incomplete anticipation of the forthcoming. Communications in Potere al Popolo via the main social networks (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), are particularly interesting in this regard. These social networks have been fundamental from the very beginning, when no one knew anything about them because other entertainment, personal or even political content on mainstream social media far outweighed their own. Until now, their use of social media has followed a double direction and objectives. In some way, they have been inspired by right-wing populistic communication on social media. On the one hand, their communication on social media is committed to show what people actually are. On the other hand, they are showing people what they could be and what they are not yet. The videos, pictures, and information show concrete examples of solidarity that breaks the daily veil of individualism and consumerism embodied by the mainstream social networks which most people use and in which they see themselves 40 The theme of the betrayal is under many works of the critics of Web 2.0, even though not explicitly: Geert Lovink, Nicholas Carr, Andrew Keen, Sherry Turkle, Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov among others.

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reflected. Within the limits of the immediacy of social media, this can produce acts of solidarity based on a new common sense. Instagram is particularly effective in this regard.41 Besides, right-wing populistic communication has brought to the light the idea that social networks can become a sort of political action itself. When followers re-tweet the leader’s tweets, this mass of comments becomes an action itself. But this is still a relatively passive mass, manipulated more than conscious. Indeed, a huge amount of social media commentary is made by false profiles; they are posted to make money and they are amplified by the mainstream mass-media. Nonetheless, within a political community like Potere al Popolo, inviting all comrades to participate in a discussion—even against a political adversary, to re-tweet and share a post or a comment, becomes a direct action of subjectification of the community: a practice that, among many others, makes militants of the Potere al Popolo community. Their response to the current isolation in, or fragmentation of, social media becomes the infrastructure for a collective action; it complements a city street during a rally. They can create a block on digital autoroutes, perhaps easily bypassed, yet constituting a political subject. Twitter and Facebook are more effective than Instagram in this regard.42 In addition, these actions can be potentially engaged by all militants. Social networks have spread a techno-social literacy enabling everyone to create or engage in some basic digital practices (i.e., making a profile, sharing, commenting, advertising an event, and so on).43 What we are trying to do in Potere al Popolo is essentially to move these abilities from the entrepreneurial, market-oriented and spectacular promotion of the 41 Such as filming the action by the Brigades of Volunteers after the earthquake of Amatrice in 2016. 42 The future perspective is empowering the uses of the social networks trying to

diversify the communicative strategies according to the features of each platform. For instance, Facebook or YouTube is better for a little deeper contents respect to the absolute immediate communication of Instagram or Twitter. The Spanish movement “Podemos” has used YouTube to record debates between the leaders of the movement on current issues, and the other networks to inform about it. An appropriate usage of technology according to the need. 43 On this, see Tiziana Terranova, “Occupy Social Networks: The Paradoxes of Corporate Social Media for Networked Social Movements,” in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, eds. Geert Lokink and Miriam Rash (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2014), 296–311; Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Tiziana Terranova, “Red

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Self, toward new and contradictory usages and services. In a certain sense, social networks have produced the language to invalidate their inner logic. However, we need to dare more. The limits of these forms of communication are huge: economic, due to the nature of the social network algorithms which select and spread posts in a way to make you pay; context limits, as complex thinking can still barely break through the overall experience of amusement, advertisements, and self-promotion that are the a priori of the social network experience. Besides, the latter is ideological because it hides abyssal social differences behind the appearance of private friendships and personal sharing. We need a new platform where, on the contrary, individuals can live a radically different experience. In contrast to mainstream social media, I would propose the project of social networkers. The basic idea is socializing experiences of social struggles within one digital platform. Beyond what I have already said, I have drawn this idea from No Logo by Naomi Klein, and from direct experiences of social struggle. In that book, Klein highlighted how important it would be to share experiences of struggle between Southeast Asian workers and Western consumers. She cited, for instance, the boycott of Nike shoes by black young people in many cities in the US as people learned of Nike’s exploitation of Southeast Asian children. And from my direct experience in Italy, there is very recent threat to withdraw the factory in Naples of Whirlpool, a multinational manufacturer of electrical appliances. Tremendous help came from some comrades who contacted workers at the Whirlpool factory in Amiens, France, to learn about how the struggle had developed there: how the workers, the trade unions, the employers, and the State behaved in a similar situation. The result of this meeting has been an invitation by the French movement France Insoumise to their Summer School. What if we made this communication more regular and faster by using a new social media, through new “social networkers ”? The fundamental condition to participate should be, in terms of the individuality, the social and living conditions (workers, the unemployed, precarious workers, and so on), their consolidated social struggles, their interest in transforming the society in a general sense. On the side of society, being part of a group involved in collective processes of stack attack! Algoritmi, capitale e automazione del commune,” in Gli algoritmi del capitale Accelerazionismo, macchine della conoscenza e autonomia del comune, ed. Matteo Pasquinelli (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2014).

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struggle with work, the environment, gender, war, and so on. The social networkers could consist of organizations already active in social conflicts and struggles, and individuals that, through this service, could know and reach the closest, the most interesting, the most necessary struggles, protests, and demonstrations. Instead of job matching, we would have conflict matching between individuals and organizations not necessarily active in their own country or territory. At this very moment, we can imagine an algorithm to select the requests of new accounts, for instance using a preliminary test. This algorithm would be the product of the intelligence and the solidarity of a movement: it would be the Marxian “general intellect” in an activist sense. Furthermore, beyond offering the same Facebook services in terms of creating a friendly network among people, the social networkers could allow to easily share documents, pictures, videos of our own meetings, rallies, ideas, and political opinions. They could also send alerts about ongoing conflicts, according to localized situations and interests. Groups could promote and share common knowledge of international conflicts, as well as the constitution or promotion of trade unions or political movements based on clear manifestos. And this aggregation also must overcome the too “polite” or the “conciliatory” compromises of syndicates or parties. The social networkers would be a form of “linguistic therapy” from the dominant social network language. Selfie would become Ourselfie: when a “We” acts like an “I”; Like would become Dislike: when the foolish acceptance of the world becomes an instinctual reaction against the violence suffered by comrades; Follower would become Comrade: when petrified private relations turns into living, social solidarity; Share would become Cooperate: when a very immediate feeling becomes an activity mediated by reason; Gratis (free) would become Praxis: when the essence is unfolded behind the appearance. The benefits would come not only from the consequences of such networkers communicating. What would make the social networkers really innovative would be the process of their design, defined by participation “from below.” It should be developed through a circle involving potential users, activists and, of course, technicians. The first step would be an inquiry into the users’ information needs. “What do you need to be automized?” “Which contents are necessary to share?” These should be the main questions, as automation and innovation are not dogmas but instruments.

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The next step should be the translation of these needs into software designed by activists and technicians. Finally, the platform should have ways to innovate itself according to the requests of the users, a process governed by activists. In philosophical terms, the form would be developed from the content through a process of mediation between needs and technical expertise instead of being a pure form imposed on the individual contents. In this case, technology would be appropriate, based on a concrete need and not be in the interests of productivity; the innovation would be a conscious innovation as people would be really involved in the construction and development of what they are using. Obviously, this is not possible under neoliberalism, but it could be if collective technologies are integrated into—and actually invented them from—collective processes which already aim at reconstructing an international organization and consciousness based on concrete social struggles. I want to make clear that only in this social and political framework can the social networkers make an important contribution, rather than wasting social energies. Capitalism has already created the basis for it. Now it is time to make it our own.

CHAPTER 5

The Hedonism and Asceticism of Neoliberal Subjectivity: The Crude Needs of Consumer Capitalism and Its Social, Psychological, and Ecological Devastation Rodney Doody

Introduction Contemplating life in the slums of England’s industrial zones in the nineteenth century, Marx noticed how people (some of the most impoverished people) could be made into a mass without need, or rather, a mass with the crudest of needs—the need to eat, sleep, relax, party, and drink to a state of intoxication. He saw in the workers a mirror image of the frugal capitalist, an image defined through their very sensibilities in terms of the harshness of their lives. But because the needs of the workers were so crude, and because the labor required of them was so arduous, he was well aware that these needs were not just an expression of some basic

R. Doody (B) Toronto, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_5

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hedonism but were an expression of the search for pleasure within a world that demanded considerable mental and especially (in that time and place) physical effort just to survive. Their search for pleasure was a search for the right kind of relief that could help them bear the hardship of their lives. In this way, economics, he rightly noticed, was a science that had nothing to do with making life better, but was more of a “science of denial,” the “true ideal” of which was “the ascetic but rapacious skinflint and the ascetic but productive slave.”1 Over a century later, Marcuse pointed to how, in the most affluent society the world had ever known, social control was now sustained on the basis of “an ever more methodical creation of conformist needs and satisfactions.”2 The birth of this consumer society with its excesses of production and consumption, Marcuse thought, could mark the demise of that tired asceticism on which capitalism was founded. But after decades of neoliberal restructuring, individuals continue to seek viable ways to be satisfied—in the acquisition of money, skills, things, and experiences—in a world that seems increasingly incapable of providing any lasting satisfaction. To confront the environmental catastrophe, we will have to reckon with these attempts at self-realization and adaptation, tendencies which are also the source of widespread dissatisfaction and psychological disturbances in the population. Individuals must come to see that their personal trauma is not inseparable from the trauma caused to nature; that “retail therapy” is as much a symptom of our desolation as it is a cause of the devastation of nature. Even though the wealthy consume far more than the poor, and the impact of their consumption is far more destructive, the question remains as to how the working class becomes incorporated through consumption into the capitalist universe, and adopts the same consumptive behaviors that would become, if they had the income, as damaging as the consumption by the affluent. Our society not only tolerates but actively encourages forms of pleasure-seeking which serve to render us “immune against other and better forms of life,” as Marcuse

1 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 361. Original emphasis. 2 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 62.

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put it.3 If this kind of manipulation is not confronted, and if people do not themselves learn how “to confront and deal with their wants,” the chances of revolutionizing our destructive relation with nature, and with each other, slip away.4

Some Factors in the Entrenchment of Consumerism Under capitalism, accumulation for its own sake, which means for the sake of producing commodities and turning them into money, is a socially necessary activity. So, for capital to accumulate and realize its value it has to find consumers in a market. Consumption, as Marx recognized, is an indispensable moment and stabilizing feature in the realization of surplus value. Because of the expanding nature of capitalism, as the capacity for production grows, and our developing intellectual and technological capabilities increase productivity, it becomes increasingly necessary to find consumers willing and able to buy what is and can be produced. If capital is to realize the potential profits contained in its own productivity, its products have to be consumed or the whole apparatus falls into crisis. One of capitalism’s basic contradictions and inbuilt irrationalities lies here in its inability to organize production and consumption efficiently. Neoliberalism was initially institutionalized as a response to one such crisis, the crisis of overproduction, or, alternatively, underconsumption, a crisis which was expedited by the oil shocks of the 1970s. In this way, neoliberalism has been understood as a political project in which captains of industry, academics in think-tanks and universities, politicians across the spectrum, and other capitalistic “organic intellectuals,” responded to a crisis of profitability.5 The idea here is that the welfare state, with its generous social safety net and protections afforded to unionized workers,

3 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore,

Jr., Herbert Marcuse, Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 81–118; 111. 4 Herbert Marcuse, “On Hedonism [1938],” in Negations : Essays in Critical Theory, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Mayfly Books, 1968), 144. 5 See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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created “artificially” high wages and left labor undisciplined.6 A situation approaching full employment constituted a disaster for capitalists because the relatively high wages cut into their profit margins and mitigated the influence of the “whip of poverty,” a long-cherished technique of capitalist domination. Though productivity and wages were both high, workers were no longer purchasing household commodities at the accelerated rates seen through the new prosperity of the post-war era. With the consumer society still in its infancy, stagnation had already set in, in part, because consumers seemed to have quickly acquired everything and more than they ever wanted. With Keynesian-style capitalism in trouble, the macroeconomic question arises as to how to overcome the problem of underconsumption while also limiting wages, the very means by which the subjects of capital consume. In the decades that followed, consumerism, necessary for the highly productive capitalist system, had to continue to grow even as real wages stagnated. One way in which aggregate demand was sustained was by creating more consumers, by welcoming more people around the world into the cycle of wage work and consumption, otherwise known as “economic development.” These poorly paid workers have continued to serve as a crucial condition for the possibility of growing consumption rates in the wealthier parts of the world. Workers in the affluent countries who were, within a generation or so, left in a much more precarious position than their parents and grandparents, had to be able to continue to buy the products on offer. From the 1970s onward, consumption rates were kept high through a combination of cheap globalized labor

6 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978– 1979, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2010), 138; 133. One of the main shifts here, from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, is the role of the state in relation to the economy. Whereas the role of the welfare state is to bolster aggregate demand in the economy by putting disposable income in people’s pockets, the role of the neoliberal state is to stabilize prices through monetary interventions, by printing money, adjusting interest rates, and controlling inflation. The primary objective of intervention here is not to maintain full employment so that people can buy commodities, but to maintain price stability. In his history of neoliberalism as an intellectual movement, Foucault noted that this interventionism made neoliberalism stand out from its liberal predecessors. Looking at numerous foundational neoliberal texts from German, British, French, and American theorists he concluded in this respect that “In all the texts of the neo-liberals you find the theme that government is active, vigilant, and intervening in a liberal regime, and formulae that neither the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century nor the contemporary American anarcho-capitalism could accept.”

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and low-interest rates which facilitated mounting private debt.7 With the protection afforded by newly established international trade regimes, manufacturers went off in search of the cheapest reliable reserve army of labor they could find, taking advantage of some of the poorest and most desperate people on the planet by paying them paltry wages while severely limiting their right to organize, a trend that continues to this day in the face of worker struggles against it. The availability of cheap products made it possible to erode the relative stability of wage-work in the advanced capitalist countries while keeping people sufficiently satisfied. Forms of work which had been relatively secure were slowly replaced by flexible forms of far more precarious kinds of work, often made available on a temporary basis and paid in piecemeal wages, in what is today referred to as the gig economy. Workers who were formerly paid livable wages in advanced economies were increasingly replaced by a new generation of service-workers to provide for the vigorous consumption-based economy, one which continued to be based on forms of “compensatory consumerism.”8 In general, as labor under capitalism becomes more productive, there is a growing need to enlarge the production of “luxuries,” of things like status symbols and contraptions to assuage and entertain, things to be consumed not for the sake of human well-being but primarily for the sake of profit, and a kind of contentment that is tailored to profit-making.9 That luxuries eventually become “basic needs” is demonstrative of the way in which capitalism expands by constantly creating new needs and satisfactions. Thus, another feature that made possible this expanded consumer 7 See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). 8 André Gorz, “Chapter 4” in Critique of Economic Reason, trans. Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso Press, 1989), 39–51. Gorz (p. 50) says he borrows this notion of compensatory needs from Rudolf Bahro in his book, The Alternative Eastern Europe, trans. David Fernbach (London, 1978). This idea is also clearly found in Marcuse’s notion of the production of false needs under advanced industrial capitalist societies. As an example, in the context of discussing why people do not revolt but continue to behave according to the dictates of capitalism, Marcuse pointed to how opposition is “blocked” by a kind of “compensation which seems more satisfying than the refusal.” Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 71. For a more recent take on the roll of compensatory consumerism see David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” Jacobin, March 3, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harveycoronavirus-political-economy-disruptions, accessed May 22, 2020. 9 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 50.

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economy, and how this form of life extends its grip over more and more people, was how it became increasingly segmented along the lines of income. Different classes and qualities of products were made available for associated income brackets, with the cheaper products imitating the more expensive ones to the point where only those obsessed with making distinctions without difference ever notice the supposed importance. Whoever purchases something because it looks expensive or because it is expensive is someone whose self-image is tied to conspicuousness. But being noticed in this way is as much about fitting in as it is about standing out. Segmented commodity markets, along with cheap labor, and easy access to credit, have all combined to make it possible for more and more people (i.e., poor people) to have disposable income and play along like the middle class. With this, they are granted more “freedom” to consume and act on those wants that help them fit in by standing out in the right way, by being able to act upon more of their desires. Segmented consumerism, which is facilitated through the mass media and intensified by the Internet, is a process that continues the “flattening out of the contrast (or conflict) between the given and the possible, between the satisfied and the unsatisfied needs.”10 The point here is not just that more desires can be fulfilled, but that enjoyment by the rich and poor of products that are virtually the same, “the illusory bridging of the consumer gap between the rulers and the ruled,” functions ideologically to ensure that workers will seek their satisfactions in the very avenues that will preserve their subjugation.11

The Coordination of Self-destructive Pleasure The ongoing growth and spread of consumerism, not just in the more affluent countries but around the world, in the decades since Marcuse was writing, speaks to the way in which the vast majority of individuals, those who have nothing to sell but their labor, have continued to be mentally and instinctually coordinated by the demands of profit-making. Essential to this coordination is the way in which limitations are imposed on human consciousness, on the instincts and the imagination. To get at the roots of this coordination, we have to grasp how the human body and

10 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 8. 11 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 30.

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mind are organized and shaped by the demands of the mode of production itself. Marcuse’s theory of consumer society, and of the “repressive desublimation” that sustains it, can help us make sense of the way in which consumer capitalism continues to preserve itself. Social cohesion always depends on the capacity of certain objective tendencies in a society to harness and govern individual interests. The needs and goals of individuals, their desires and wishes, are determined to a large extent by society’s objective needs.12 To make sense of the way in which human beings were incorporated subjectively (especially instinctually) into twentieth-century consumer capitalism and its objective conditions of exploitation, Marcuse historicized and critically appropriated certain Freudian concepts. Freud argued (here using metaphors of physics) that “the mental apparatus endeavors to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant.”13 He speculated on the existence of a natural pleasure principle in the human organism: “Our dreams at night and our waking tendency to tear ourselves away from distressing impressions are remnants of the dominance of this principle and proofs of its power.”14 In addition to a primary pleasure drive, the human organism is also driven by a basic death instinct, a drive that likewise seeks to escape from heightened levels of stress and painful tensions, striving instead to return to a “life in the womb.”15 The death drive is externally and internally destructive. First, the individual destroys things within its environment, other living things and

12 See Herbert Marcuse, Chapter X in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud [1955] (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). Marcuse notes from time to time that harmony between the individual and society would not be a negative thing if society offered individuals possibilities to develop their human faculties and freedom. However, a society that makes use of desperation and, in a directly related way, makes a virtue out of unnecessary labor is not one in which developing human freedom is a priority. Any such harmony is false. 13 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Liverlight, 1961), 1–2. 14 Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 12, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1958), 219. 15 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Five: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 211.

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nature itself, to ensure its survival. In this way, the death drive is necessary because living always depends on some basic level of destruction, on some basic struggle with nature which makes labor (abstract labor: “a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society”) an “eternal natural necessity” of human life.16 While external destruction is a condition that made technological progress and today’s civilization possible, it can go and has gone (for most of human history) beyond what is necessary for progress.17 This kind of external destruction can also be highly destructive of the individuals who are themselves utilized and dominated, as the destruction of external nature is very much conditioned on human domination. Thus, the destruction of nature is directly related to the life-denying instincts that are cultivated within the individual when the destruction turns inward. Marcuse’s appropriation of Freud does not actually go that far beyond his theory of the instincts but extrapolates what was already latent in it.18 Marcuse speculated that the impulse to escape pain is primarily a lifeaffirming drive, “an unconscious flight from pain and want” and “an expression of the eternal struggle against suffering and repression.”19 The death instinct, as the “regressive impulse for peace,” can hamper the life-fulfilling impulses, depending on the form of life under which the life instincts are given shape.20 In a hierarchical social order, the drive for pleasure and comfort can function to accommodate the organism to its oppressive form of life. The point here is not only about the death instinct’s destructiveness, but about its therapeutic function. Marcuse also makes a crucial distinction between the necessary struggle for existence and the unnecessary pain and suffering that hierarchical societies maintain, but which could otherwise be abolished based on the level of technological development that has already been achieved in a given society.21 16 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I , trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin Books, 1990),

133. 17 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 51–52. 18 See Herbert Marcuse, “Herbert Marcuse in 1978: An Interview by Myriam Miedzian

Malinovich,” Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Six: Marxism, Revolution, Utopia, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 372. 19 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 16. 20 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 76. 21 Marcuse, 35.

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There is always some measure of struggle that people will have to deal with, within themselves, in their interpersonal relations, as well as with nature, but in a society that maintains artificial scarcity, there remains a need for constraints to be put on human instincts to get people to toil more than they would otherwise have to. Such constraints are necessary for the maintenance of any hierarchical society that imposes scarcity on the many and where the social wealth produced is siphoned up by a small but powerful group of beneficiaries. This relationship between those who control and those who are controlled can only be maintained on the basis of surplus repression, a repression beyond what is necessary to produce the goods that are so inequitably distributed.22 The instincts strive for pleasure, peace, and calm, but in a society whose progress depends on the perpetuation of “domination and toil,” this basic drive for pleasure must be constrained and guided toward activities and satisfactions that are socially useful.23 Not only this, but the more advanced the technological capacities and the higher the productivity in a society that maintains artificial scarcity, the higher the degree of repression required to keep people functioning. In Marcuse’s telling, the social order does not exercise controls directly over the instincts, but does so over consciousness which, in turn, mediates the instincts, collaborating with them but in a kind of conspiracy to direct them toward socially useful goals and away from goals more appropriate for a human. Part of this functions by way of what Marcuse referred to as the “automatization” or “corporealization” of the superego.24 This process speaks to the way in which social expectations and sanctions, prohibition and license, become experienced unconsciously by individuals themselves, as if the social order and the instincts are in collusion. This occurs when the otherwise amorphous human drive for pleasure (which is never actually without form) is taken advantage of and given a direction that contributes almost entirely to the functioning of the social order. If the ego is left out of this part of Marcuse’s Freudian story it is because, in the use and abuse of pleasure that happens under capitalism, the ego itself, the great “reality tester,” gets absorbed and becomes a “weakened” ego, caught between the tyrannies of culture and pleasure. Automatization of

22 Marcuse, 35. 23 Marcuse, 35. 24 Marcuse, 94, 103.

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the superego happens in such a way that, without thinking, people only ever seem to want that which is offered, and the more options there are, the more freedom there seems to be. “Consciousness, increasingly less burdened by autonomy, tends to be reduced to the task of regulating the coordination of the individual and the whole.”25 At a certain level of technological development, Machiavelli’s question, as to whether it is better for a ruler to be loved or feared, loses some of its relevance. Rulers need not worry about love or fear as long as those being ruled find the libidinal satisfaction they feel they need or have been promised. In order for society to defend itself against uprisings, to reproduce itself, and to keep people functioning, surplus repression must be rendered invisible. One of the most effective ways to do so is to make use of people’s inherent desire for pleasure and to give it license. To secretly, or not even so secretly, turn people’s desire for pleasure against them, turns out to be the most efficient way to exercise social control.26

The Twisted Persistence of the Ascetic Attitude Marcuse recognized clearly that even though consumerism offered individuals avenues toward both material and ideational modes of selfexpression, such “freedom” not only transpires under a system of domination that limits autonomy but helps to legitimate and sustain such oppression by concealing it. “To the degree that the advanced industrial society integrates its administered population into the struggle for a heightened standard of living, and isolates the opposition,” said Marcuse in 1968, “to that degree it binds its people to the given whole and

25 Marcuse, 103. 26 See Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Subjec-

tivity and Truth [1980],” trans. Mark Blasius in Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198–227, 203–204. In this way, Marcuse’s take on domination is not so different from Foucault’s, despite Foucault’s supposed opposition to Marcuse. For Foucault, in liberal societies heavy-handed “sovereign” forms of power come to be supplemented by a form of power which operates in a more dispersed way whereby people are always being governed, even when they are “free.” Indeed, individuality itself is the product of a certain historical configuration of power. The neoliberal subject is governable in and through its autonomy. In Foucault’s early works he studied power relations in terms of techniques of domination, but later, from The History of Sexuality onward, shifted to studying power relations in terms of “techniques of the self” as well as studying the interaction between the two.

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makes the population into the human foundation that voluntarily reproduces it.”27 The expansion of needs and their fulfillment by way of technological developments further entrenches and secures the social and psychological basis of the established way of life. Even though life comes to be lived more and more in the sphere of consumption, the sphere of labor overshadows and dims all possibilities: “the time devoted to alienated labor absorbs the time for individual needs—and defines the needs themselves.”28 At the same time, Marcuse pointed to how consumerism, with the liberties it required and opened up, was starting to bring about a change in human sensibility which loosened the “moral fiber and cohesion of society.”29 In Max Weber’s influential but contentious thesis, asceticism, along with its accompanying belief that the purpose of life was to work, were part of the guiding subjective foundation on which capitalist society depended. But consumer capitalism inaugurated a “dissolution of social morality,” which manifested as an increased disobedience to rules, a rejection of frugality, and a “weakening of work discipline, responsibility and efficiency.”30 In the early 1970s, Marcuse claimed to be able to ascertain the emergence of a “complete denial of that spirit of inner worldly asceticism which was, until recently, the mainspring of capitalism.”31 He imagined that growing contradictions within society would eventually give rise to widespread feelings of dissatisfaction with the arduous and aggressive performances required of people to maintain their own surplus repression. It was possible that subjective strains and stresses could lead to opportunities for taking advantage of the related breakdown unfolding in the objective conditions of existence. “The result would be a spread, not only of discontent and mental sickness, but also of inefficiency, resistance to work, refusal to perform, negligence, indifference—factors of

27 Marcuse, “Peace as Utopia,” trans. Charles Reitz, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume Five: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 169. 28 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 111. 29 Marcuse, “The Movement in a New Era of Repression,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology

16 (1971–1972), 1–14, 7. 30 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 83; Marcuse, “The Movement in a New Era of Repression,” 7. 31 Marcuse, “The Movement in a New Era of Repression,” 7.

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dysfunction which would hit a highly centralized and coordinated apparatus, where breakdown at one point may easily affect large sections of the whole.”32 In retrospect, the forty years of neoliberalism can perhaps be viewed as a much more glacial degradation, not of the work ethic itself, but of the mental strength required for life under capitalism. The high degree of emotional and psychological deprivation that people are increasingly forced to live with in itself constitutes a kind of unconscious revolt against the life they are forced to live. We see such “revolts” in the high rates of depression and anxiety, in widespread feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness, profound sadness, low energy, overall apathy, and rising thoughts and acts of suicide in the population.33 We see it in high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction and in the addiction to shopping and other forms of escape. Even in Marcuse’s day, a point had already been reached where “psychopathology is considered normal.”34 If decades ago people seemed to be losing the inner strength it takes to get along in such a world, some version of that resilience seems, despite or because of the hardship endured, to have somehow persevered. It is as though, the harder things get, the more willing people are to do what it takes to hold on to what they have or might possibly have if they continue to struggle. The breakdown observed by Marcuse in the morality of everyday life, and in the rising rates of distress and dysfunction, did not subvert the ascetic attitude but seemed to have invigorated it. While many young 32 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 84. 33 See Mark É. Czeisler, Rashon I. Lane, Emiko Petrosky, Joshua F. Wiley, Aleta Chris-

tensen, Rashid Njai, Matthew D. Weaver, Rebecca Robbins, Elise R. Facer-Childs, Laura K. Barger, Charles A. Czeisler, Mark E. Howard, Shantha M. W. Rajaratnam, “Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic—United States, June 24–30, 2020,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 69(32), August 14th 2020. For instance, in a recent survey conducted by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control in the US, respondents were asked: “Have you seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days?” Of those who responded, 25% of 18–24-year-olds and 16% of 25–44-year-olds answered “yes.” 10% of all those who responded said “yes.” Half of the survey population said they were experiencing major depressive and anxiety disorders, according to their own sense of what counts as disorder, a self-report which gives us just as much insight into social dysfunction as if we relied solely on a medical diagnosis. If it takes one health crisis and a social disruption to lead to this level of distress, the pandemic appears as little more than a catalyst for something already festering underneath. 34 Marcuse, “Peace as Utopia,” in Collected Essays of Herbert Marcuse: Volume 5—Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Emancipation, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 170.

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people are indeed averse to authoritarianism these days, preferring to follow their pleasures and go with what feels right in the moment, they are also incredibly anxious about their performance in relation to work. This is of course related to a central characteristic of neoliberalism which has to do with the entrenchment of competition as a way of life. After all, neoliberalism was founded on a theory of pure competition, not as a natural given that needed to be nurtured, but as “a structure with formal properties,” a formal structure that had to wait until a concrete space was created for it in the 1970s before it could start to function.35 Now as before, the psyche of the individual is organized around principles of competitive performance, even if now in contrast to before, more and more individuals have nothing to fall back on but their own social, cultural, and economic capital. Adapting to competitive market life requires that the individual become constantly engaged in a calculus of maximizing their utilities, to become, as Foucault put it, a kind of “enterprise” or entrepreneur of oneself: “He is an entrepreneur of himself who incurs expenses by investing to obtain some kind of improvement.”36 A system based on expansion will always have certain kinds of “improvement” as an objective necessity. Existing in a highly competitive arena, the neoliberal subject is one who must be constantly open to receiving suggestions about ways and means for personal improvement. This openness is premised on a self-understanding that is measured in relation to criteria that can, at least imaginably, be attained. In this way, the administration of the neoliberal world is carried out, to a large extent, by a kind of self-administration rooted in shame and anxiety and a sense of unrelenting insufficiency. In this society, self-worth remains tied to possessions (commodities), of course, but also remains deeply anchored to one’s work life, what one has become and might become in the future. Where it cannot be tied to having a career, because careers are increasingly hard to have, self-worth remains tied to a line of work, to a profession or the educational credentials one has accumulated in the search to accommodate oneself to the world. Where self-worth cannot be tied to credentials it is simply tied to having a paid job, even if that job is a “bullshit job,” the kind of job that a truly human society would abolish.37 It is still a badge

35 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 131–132. 36 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 230. 37 See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

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of pride in some circles to say that you contribute to society through its tax regime, as if the shame directed at the rich will not land on those too poor to be taxed. Indeed, to say that people continue to value themselves in terms of their paid employment, and the related status, is to say that their value is measured in terms of their capacity to adjust to the world as it is. Under neoliberalism, this measure of self-worth, the self-worth that comes from simply functioning, does not seem to have declined but has perhaps even intensified. Our self-worth will have to become detached from paid employment before we truly confront the role it has in facilitating environmental devastation. To reference David Graeber again, the destruction of the environment is rooted, not so much in our hedonism, but in our puritanism (or in a strange marriage of the two) and in the feeling that we must be constantly working, in a way that perpetuates our consumerist pleasure-seeking. Today’s capitalism cannot exist without mass consumerism. At the same time, mass consumerism, and the aggregate demand on which it is based, in no way entails universal employment and indeed already operates alongside masses of “human waste,” people who are superfluous to the flow of capital.38 These people—those for whom survival (whether or not they have enough food to eat, clean water to drink, and decent shelter to live in) is often the very activity of their lives—are an affront to the system and a direct consequence of the dominance of its logic. However, while their very existence speaks against the system that forsakes and has no need for them, most are quite understandably struggling to become a part of it (to neoliberalism, Foucault tells us, even “the migrant is an investor”39 ). These outsiders, whether outside or inside the borders of wealthier countries, do not necessarily represent its negation, at least not subjectively and at least not until they become integrated as workers, as the kind of workers on which the maintenance of capitalist valorization would depend. Their dreams, and indeed the dreams of most people, the integrated as well as the marginal, remain the manufactured dreams transmitted through channels of mass communication at the speed of light; dreams that are realizable in the existing world, if only you have the money or credit to access them. To have a job with the security of

38 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004). 39 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 230.

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regular income, to not have to worry about food and shelter, to be free of fear and the threat of physical violence, and to help themselves and their children attain a better life—these are the dreams of most people around the world. It is an atrocity that such basic dreams remain most people’s dreams, but it is also true that any demand for inclusion into a system that relies on exploitation and produces such an atrocity will be insufficiently radical. Who knows what revolutionary possibilities might be opened up in the future by today’s reformist demands, but at present, revolts against the system continue to be operationalized almost as soon as they are articulated. Any attempt that focuses only on improving a group’s economic status or socioeconomic standing, however understandable and justified, leaves the ladder itself in place and does not get at the roots of alienation itself. Whereas most people are restricted in their capacity to buy things, relative to those on the higher rungs of the ladder, the argument for lowering inequality misses the deeper point about how the instincts for life itself becomes the manipulated playthings of capitalist valorization. Lowering or even eliminating inequality, while obviously humane and crucial, does not reckon with the covetousness encouraged and the fixations nurtured under capitalism. The inhumanity of capitalism lies not only in the inequality it produces and reproduces, but in the way it dehumanizes people at the level of their instincts and deepest desires; the way it turns human beings into things and pushes them to relate to each other, and to other beings, as mere utilities for self-fulfillment or self-realization.

The Instinctual Roots of Political Struggle The repressive desublimation so central to mass consumption, argued Marcuse, is “practiced from a ‘position of strength’ on the part of society, which can afford to grant more than before because its interests have become the innermost drives of its citizens, and because the joys which it grants promote social cohesion and contentment.”40 The question remains whether today, after decades of neoliberal restructuring, society remains in a position of strength or whether it has lost some of its capacity to deliver the goods. Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, a “depoliticised Keynesianism” has started to gain legitimacy in some of the more

40 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 72.

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affluent parts of the world.41 The market has broken free of decent public norms, the argument goes, and needs to be re-embedded in society and guided by more humane liberal values. State intervention is required to redistribute a portion of the global wealth to the poorest to ensure that economic development continues in a more forgiving way. This shift is a recognition that, objectively, aggregate demand has to be reinvigorated to save capitalism from its own crises. With growing inequality, rising personal debt, the reduction of real wages, and the prospect of widespread unemployment, people’s goals and fantasies are becoming increasingly difficult to realize because they are becoming increasingly unaffordable, a fact that threatens the expansion of capitalism. Growing enthusiasm for such reforms speaks to the resilience and staying-power of capitalism, the way in which it has produced what Mark Fisher called a “pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”42 For readers of Marcuse, it is immediately apparent that a return to Keynesian-style capitalism, a welfare state, would constitute a return to one-dimensionality, which, since it has not disappeared would be a return to a version of one-dimensionality perhaps more at ease with its repression than presently exists; a return to a “life in the womb.” A “Green New Deal” or some similar environmental policy package, loaded with jobs that allocate disposable income, however humane when compared with the neoliberalism of the past few decades, and however necessary in terms of providing people with a small measure of economic security, is also a way of shoring up the conditions for capitalism. It leaves intact the repressive desublimation and all the dehumanization that entails. Reformism is never aimed at people’s true interests but at giving them access to commodities, something the technocrats are increasingly aware of. The “true interest” of individuals, as Marcuse put it, “requires not piecemeal change but the reconstruction of the productive process.”43 The “politics” of taxing the super-rich (and only the super-rich) to redistribute 41 Oliver Levingston, “Minsky’s Moment? The Rise of Depoliticised Keynesianism and Ideational Change at the Federal Reserve After the Financial Crisis of 2007/08,” Review of International Political Economy 20 (2020): 1–28. 42 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2009), 16. 43 Marcuse, “On Hedonism,” 146.

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the spoils of exploitation, and of raising only slightly the minimum wage, seem to be the extent to which the present moment might go in order to manage the destruction of human and non-human nature. And even that will be a battle.44 This is not an argument for accelerationism. On the contrary, simply letting the contradictions unfold expecting them to take care of themselves is illusory and provides no guarantee against devolution into further barbarism than already exists. Since this vital need for change is manifesting itself in unconscious and distorted ways, we have to find new approaches to raising the source of our trauma to the level of consciousness. This has to be achieved, not only on the left as it exists, but even on the right and in the apolitical majority. Marcuse noticed that this capacity for recognizing the source of our trauma was already evident in some individuals and groups in the late 1960s and early 70s. He argued that “the distinguishing mark of most radical movements” of the day, was the recognition of the mental and emotional damage that was being done to them by the conditions of their lives, something he characterized as the “politicization of erotic energy.”45 He saw these radical movements as “existential revolts against an obsolete reality.”46 These movements were composed, not just of those no longer able to find a place in the structural violence of the system, but of people no longer able to tolerate the conditions forced upon them by the performance principle. It was a revolt that started out, as many do, as a deeply private rebellion: This rebellion assumes a consciously emphasized personal character, methodically practiced. It features a preoccupation with one’s own psyche, one’s own drives, with self-analysis, the celebration of one’s own problems, that famous voyage into man’s own private world.47

But as a movement, those rebelling wanted to understand the source of their trauma by sharing their stories with others. Marcuse’s point was that 44 To the growing reactionary movements, even those pushing for reforms within capitalism are branded communists, a trend which plays into the hands of those mainstream counterrevolutionaries who want only reforms. 45 Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” 212. 46 Marcuse, 212. 47 Marcuse, 210.

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the personal basis of this instinctual and emotional rebellion should also be seen as the basis of political rebellion. He got his notion of “politics in the first person” from the Black liberation and feminist movements of the time. Within second-wave feminism, which had “the personal is political” as its main slogan, consciousness-raising groups all over the US were started and attended by women from all corners of society who wanted to talk about their own experiences of living in a patriarchal society. However, these sessions were avoided by the mainstream and even critiqued by some on the left as a form of mere personal therapy. Carol Hanisch confronted this criticism in her 1969 essay which took the movement’s slogan as its title.48 These sessions were not mere therapy, she said, but were thoroughly political because such personal concerns are products of systemic oppression. While recognizing the tendency of forms of personal liberation to get “bogged down in self-indulgence,” Marcuse argued that liberation must at the same time be oriented toward the common good.49 Sharing in experiences of trauma is a praxis that works toward developing a language that reveals the shared sources of the trauma (the kind of trauma that could be abolished in the creation of a better world) while producing the kind of attention that takes the focus off individual struggle and places it onto the need for group or class struggle.

Towards Breaking Free of Enslaving Needs We already see this kind of “politics in the first person” today in certain environmental movements. Members of the Wretched of the Earth Collective keep pointing out that the fight for climate justice, though nothing new for them, is the fight for their lives. For the youth

48 Carol Hanisch “The Personal Is Political,” was originally published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation in 1970, and it is published on her website where she notes that she did not give it the title http://www.carolhanisch.org/CHwritings/PIP. html. 49 Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence with Rudi Dutschke,” Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse: Volume Six—Marxism, Revolution, Utopia, ed. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 335.

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movement, anxiety and panic are important sources for mobilization.50 However, this is not really about making people feel something on behalf of ecological destruction so that they are then sufficiently motivated to act. Our mental and emotional well-being is tied to nature but is not simply dependent on whether the ongoing destruction of the environment saddens or angers us. The psychological distress manifesting itself in relation to the environmental disaster is not reducible to what psychologists are calling “environmental illness”51 ; nor is our mental and emotional well-being linked with nature through some mystical connection. The issue here has to do with the way in which the devastation of non-human nature has the same source as the devastation of human nature; people must come to learn that the forlornness through which they relate to themselves and to other people is tied to the desolation of their environment and that both are rooted in their form of life. A “primary importance” is attached to recognizing just how deeply determined we are down to our very instincts; the needs we seem to have, the things available to satisfy them, and the forms of escape available to us, are all contributing to our collective destitution. In other words, because consciousness has become so utterly determined by the social world in which it arises, opposition has nowhere to turn but inward. This is why the imagination and the role it plays in projecting alternatives becomes so central. “Under these circumstances, radical change in consciousness is the beginning, the first step in changing social existence.”52 What is needed, according to Marcuse, is nothing less than a “radical enlightenment,” an active political education that would give rise to an awareness and a sensibility that would help those who are exploited “loosen the hold of enslaving needs over their existence—the needs which

50 Greta Thunberg “‘Our House Is on Fire’: Greta Thunberg, 16, Urges Leaders to Act on Climate,” The Guardian, January 5, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/env ironment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-cli mate. “I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.” 51 See the guide to mental illnesses related to climate change published by the APA. Susan Clayton Whitmore-Williams, Christie Manning, Kirra Krygsman, and Meighen Speiser, Mental Health and our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2017). 52 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 53.

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perpetuate their dependence on the system of exploitation.”53 The ways in which individuals seek out pleasure (the ways they manage their pleasures and how they practice them) are already a kind of attempt at liberation. The search for authenticity and self-transcendence which is widespread under neoliberalism, arises, in part, because so many feel their lives are inauthentic. These subjective tendencies, along with the psychopathology that prevails in the population today, are just so many symptoms of a damaged way of life, a way of life that has come to colonize and plunder life on earth. Like the symptoms of psychoanalysis, they are messages to the human organism and ways of keeping the life instincts in play. These are symptoms waiting to be talked about, not so one can learn to live with themselves in the world as it is, but so that people can learn that the world they are living in is not as it should be. Only when individuals begin to recognize “the horror of the whole” in their most private frustrations and start to actualize themselves in this recognition, will there be movement toward radical change.54

53 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 57. 54 Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 115.

CHAPTER 6

Turning Sense into Nonsense and Nonsense into Sense: Critical Theory to Refuse the Fallacy of Populism Christian Garland

Introduction: Neoliberalism in Crisis Begets the Crisis of Its Pseudo-Backlash, Authoritarian Populism The past five years have seen a belated—and thoroughly contrived— backlash to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, reaching its apogee in what became The Great Recession of 2008, followed by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis and years of unending Austerity in the early part of the next decade, the 2010s. Donald Trump becoming President in

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: The Ideology of Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 248. C. Garland (B) King’s College, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_6

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the US and Brexit in the UK consumed the energies of much of the electorates of both countries in what was—and is—a fatally flawed channeling of those energies. It is one of the contentions of this chapter that these developments are, in large part, a displacement of class anger and consciousness. Describing this channeling of energies as “fatally flawed” is meant to portray the drawing-in and occupying the energies of people. Many people have legitimate grievances with the structure of US and UK society, as those who do very well from the existing structure of these countries, with the diversion and an exaggeration of unrelated existing prejudices and assumptions. The chapter includes a brief survey of populism on a global scale, taking in ten countries where it existed in 2019 (and still does in 2021) and setting up a case study of the US and Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. The one exception to the global survey is the UK and Brexit which has been relatively quietened after a last-minute deal with the EU and is eclipsed by the Covid-19 pandemic. This section will offer a brief survey of global populism before embarking on its case study of Trump and the MAGA movement. In Continental Europe, and indeed South America, the far-right further confirms Walter Benjamin’s maxim “Behind every fascism there is a failed revolution”1 —to use discontent as a means to power, being in government in at least three countries. In the US, and in the UK to a lesser extent, the “alt-right” assumes an undue radicalism in shocking liberal consensus and “saying the unsayable,” this being of course what is itself merely ultra-conservatism.2 Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s democratically elected farright regime, whose supporters attempted a repeat of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 2021, two years almost to the day on 1 Walter Benjamin, ed. Ernst Jünger, New German Critique, “Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior,” No. 17, Spring 1979, 120–128. 2 By “undue radicalism” it is meant that reactionary and right-wing rhetoric is wrongly portrayed as “radical” because it represents something so different from what is considered acceptable in 2021, regardless of whether the content of this rhetoric actually means earlier, much more traditional and repressive social relations. A brief survey can be made of other examples illustrative of the title of the conference at which the chapter first found shorter and earlier form and in its and the earlier conference paper’s contentions: Critical Theory in Dark Times: The Prospects for Liberation in the Shadow of the Radical Right and these also provide further substantive evidence.

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January 8 2023, by storming Brazil’s Congress in Brasilia, its rehabilitation of the military juntas of 1961–1985, and its deforestation policies of slash and burn laying waste to the Amazon, to Recep Erdo˘gan’s “democratic Islamism” in Turkey (also coming to power through representative and secular democracy), both authoritarians who are prepared to make use of electoral democracy, these are dark times for the emancipation of humanity. Elsewhere, Narendra Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism in India has cynically tapped into religious and sectarian feeling by making use of the country’s secular political system, something its own ultraconservative and authoritarian ideology does not accept as necessary or desirable. Meanwhile, in The Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte practices a version of authoritarianism embodied in extra-judicial killings to target an internal “Other,” while nationalism takes care of foreign policy.3 Heading back to Europe from Southeast Asia, we can go through Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s caricature of democracy is at once cynical of such “Western” notions but finds the veneer of elections it always wins better for the projection of an image of itself than outright dictatorship. In Hungary Viktor Orbán’s “national conservative” government upholds its own version of traditionalism and nationalism, having made use of the electoral channels it dismisses as it advocates “illiberal democracy.”4 Elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Polish President Andrzej Duda’s Law and Justice Party uses its right-wing national conservatism to airbrush the country’s culpability in the Holocaust by retrospective “interpretations” of history that fit its reactionary and ultra-conservative narrative. Into Western Europe, Italy’s populist “Conte I Cabinet” coalition between the “post-political” Five Star Movement and the right-wing Lega, Forza Italia and far-right Fratelli d’Italia put the far-right in coalition government in a “mature”

3 Rod Nordland, “Authoritarian Leaders Greet Trump as One of Their Own,” The New

York Times, 1 February 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/01/world/asia/don ald-trump-vladimir-putin-rodrigo-dutert-kim-jong-un.html. Rodrigo Duterte former President of The Philippines has made much use of being a Mindanaoan, a minority Philipino group not “from Manila” denoting formerly postindependence elites in the capital who were too close to the US, which had been the Western governing power prior to independence. Duterte has employed nationalistic rhetoric toward neighboring states, notably China: this is widely seen internationally as bluff and grandstanding. 4 Fareed Zakaria, The Rise of Illiberal Democracy in Foreign Affairs, November/ December 1997, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1997-11-01/risenextremerightilliberal-democracy.

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democracy.5 This survey of ten countries from South America, where Europe meets the Middle East, Southern Asia, back into Europe through the Continent of Russia and into Western Europe sets out the global nature of populism; global regions with “local characteristics” and “local” problems but linked by the same reactionary and populist backlash. The recent rise of the radical right and the origins of its populist surge can be traced to the Great Recession a decade ago, and in Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK we do indeed have paradigmatic examples. In Trump’s America as for the UK bitterly divided by Brexit, an external “Other” is found and used to displace class anger and mystify any burgeoning consciousness toward the social and political forces responsible for societal problems and the experience of them by many in the general population. Critical Theory and Marxism—unlike populism—of course “make no promises” and do not pretend to offer easy answers to what are complex problems, but their inveterate negativity toward the existent and the false promises of populism can help find ways toward the radical alternatives: here I seek to offer a reasoned critique fueled also by cerebral anger, that is, anger preceded by thought and underwritten by compassion, empathy and emancipation the expression of the means and ends of its theory and practice and praxis . It is this latter juxtaposition with Frankfurt Schoolinfused Critical Theory and that of Herbert Marcuse in particular, which also inform the substance of the chapter.

Make America Great Again: White Nationalism Perpetuating and Affirming “A World of Violence, Ugliness, Ignorance and Brutality”6 Donald Trump’s White House and indeed its cynically confected lowestcommon-denominator populism, and the lumpen and inchoate populism of Brexit, can be seen as two paradigm examples, among the liberaldemocracies of the global north, of the rise of right-wing and reactionary populist narratives that emerged in the second half of the previous

5 See John Keane, The New Despotism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020). 6 Herbert Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press,

1972), 3.

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decade—the fallout from which, along with the ongoing pandemic, has marked the start of the 2020s.7 Both Brexit and Trump’s Presidency are now of course things of the past, the latter’s flirtation with running again in 2024 notwithstanding. Besides the many lawsuits over losing the Presidential election of 2020, all of which were either ruled against or dismissed by judges or voluntarily dropped, the former President’s inability to even comprehend having lost meant an uncertain three months until Joe Biden’s inauguration. As these frivolous cases all failed, the uniquely disturbing events of January 6 at the Capitol in Washington, DC following Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and thinly veiled call to action unfolded.8 To be sure, the ex-President’s authoritarian populism can be understood as merely the personification of all that was already there historically and had been building in the US—and continues—best summarized as “Make America Great Again” (MAGA). MAGA could broadly be seen as a Twenty-First Century American incarnation of what was defined in Eros and Civilization as Thanatos or the Death Instinct. It is a collective expression of Thanatos given legitimacy by ideology and magical thinking. Indeed, much of this same ideology and magical thinking comes from the extremities of the political right. Many consider the alt-right, which originated in the US, to be merely a slick rebranding of the far-right. Within the alt-right, various right-wing and nationalist militias as for the Christian Right have been very much to the fore. Marcuse’s work, and Critical Theory in its original Frankfurt School incarnation, is diametrically opposed to the alt-right, refusing its false claims and magical explanations of the world. This chapter aims to enlarge this in some depth. Such erroneous claims and explanations are, as in

7 Christian Garland, “Taking Back Control of Nothing: Elites Denouncing Elites to Mobilize Populism in the Service of Power—From NAFTA to Trump, Brexit, and the EU,” Fast Capitalism 16, no. 1 (2019), https://fastcapitalism.journal.library.uta.edu/ index.php/fastcapitalism/article/view/29/154?fbclid=IwAR3_c3wIedmwRZwNxMUump 5VPJ3wadIgpf7E7FkYKxUQlJ9y9ACMWjEclak. Brexit will be put to one side for this chapter, but it should be said that the author, who is British and based in London, UK, has published a substantial article which critically analyzes the subject in some detail. 8 Jessica Gresko, “Supreme Court Rejects Court Trump Election Challenge Cases,” AP News, February 22, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-pen nsylvania-elections-us-supreme-court-5cc6aee8c328c7bb1d423244b979bcec?fbclid=IwA R10NiSg1FdF7APrp9grmJktS_VOdFM6T3QMy2BQ5dGAQP_4hIEA8tSP6n4.

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the tradition of authoritarianism and fascism, both bad faith and deeply cynical, since these are based on hierarchical power, submission, and obedience of the majority who merely passively accept and follow whatever they are told. Authoritarianism, and the version of ultra-conservative white nationalist ideology embodied by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, shapes the “belief systems” of its followers as well as its militant activists top-down and over their heads, just as it does this over the heads of the electorate that may well have hoped to democratically elect an authoritarian “strong man” against its own needs and interests: the fact that around 74 million Americans voted for Trump verifying that disconcerting fact. That at least 10 million more electors voted for Trump than in 2016 can be understood as a significant section of US society being adamant to “have its voice heard.” It is a deeply conservative and in large part religious section of American society—which often finds itself the prey to demagogues such as Trump—who embodies at least “enough” of what they want to see in a President. This faction made sure they voted for him, again or for the first time in 2020. That over seven million more Americans voted for Joe Biden, who is now US President, can also be seen as an even more substantial section of America—more than 81 million electors and crucially securing majorities in key swing states to win 306 College Votes—who were no less adamant that their “voices be heard” and that Biden should win, and Trump should lose—which of course is what happened, Trump failing to believe that fact or indeed accept it. The example of the US and former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement which took shape during his tenure are of key significance for developing an understanding of authoritarian populism. While it is not a contention of the chapter that Trump and MAGA are an embodiment of fascism per se, the tendency for them to become an American incarnation of fascism is certainly there,9 and not merely because they are happy to accept the endorsement and support of the “alt-right” and 9 Larry Buchanan, Lazaro Gamio, Christina Kelso, Dmitriy Khavin, Lauren Leatherby, Alicia Parlapiano, Scott Reinhard, Anjali Singhvi, Derek Watkins, and Karen Yourish, “How a Pro-Trump Mob Stormed the U.S. Capitol,” The New York Times, January 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/06/us/trump-mob-capitol-bui lding.html; Larry Buchanan, Lazaro Gamio, Christina Kelso, Dmitriy Khavin, Lauren Leatherby, Alicia Parlapiano, Scott Reinhard, Anjali Singhvi, Derek Watkins, and Karen Yourish, “‘77 Days: Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election,” The New York Times,

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far-right. The nature of this right-wing conservatism and white nationalism has its recent origins in the Tea Party which came to prominence in the late-2000s and the election of the US’s first black President, Barack Obama. It can be traced back that much further in American history, however, as something that has always been a nascent tendency in US society. In Counterrevolution and Revolt ’s focus on the US in the early70s, Marcuse noted that “The whole complex of aggression and targets indicates a proto-fascist potential par excellence.”10 Mentioning the “anomaly” of George Wallace,11 Marcuse quotes a dialogue that researchers had with a mother whose three sons had been present at the notorious Kent State College killings in 1970. There four students were shot dead by the National Guard. The mother said she thought that her sons also should have been killed if they had disobeyed the orders of the National Guard.12 This gives an historical snapshot of the attitudes and assumptions of ultra-conservative America 50 years before it found its personification in an authoritarian demagogue in the person of Trump and the broader MAGA movement. The “true horror story” of researchers interviewing the mother over the Kent State shootings in 1970 related by Marcuse gives expression to the authoritarian populism perpetuated by the MAGA movement.13 After answering one of the interviewers’ questions, “Is long hair a justification for shooting someone?” affirmatively, this woman further reveals that she is a schoolteacher at the local high school. One of the researchers then asks her: Professor: You mean you are teaching your students such things?

January 7, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/01/06/us/trump-mobcapitol-building.html. 10 Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, 28. 11 George Wallace was the extreme right-wing Democratic Governor of Alabama

opposed to desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-late 1960s and supportive of racist Jim Crow policies. After several unsuccessful runs for the Democratic Presidential ticket, he ran as the American Independent candidate with a campaign of populist white nationalism and secured 46 Electoral College Votes and 9,901,118 ballots in the popular vote. 12 Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, 24–25. 13 Marcuse, 24–25.

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Mother: Yes. I teach them the truth. That the lazy, the dirty, the ones you see walking the streets and doing nothing all ought to be shot.14

This woman’s murderous attitude and belief that anyone choosing to be unlike her deserves to be shot very much applies to Trump supporters and the MAGA movement: a toxic mix of American chauvinism, white nationalism and magical thinking often “explained” by conspiracy theories, which being unprovable are defined as “the truth.” This dialogue from 50 years ago in which the schoolteacher who believes those she disapproves of “all ought to be shot,”15 including her own children should it come to that, is telling for the fact that she believes her views are “the truth.” This is, of course, something that over Trump’s four years in office 2017–21 became standard for both Trump’s time as President, its fallacious concept of “alternative facts,” and the magical thinking of the MAGA movement.16 Trump was the personification of something that had long “been there” in the hearts and minds of much of the US going back to at least the mid-Twentieth Century. Drawing on racist and white nationalist feeling going back to the country’s cultural legacy of slavery which wrought it apart in the Civil War around 170 years ago—its effects remain potent in these prejudices today. What is called the MAGA movement has now been emboldened by Trump and has had its own—often violent— “explanations” of the world, including the belief that it can and should use force to make the world correspond with those beliefs. This mentality is now “beyond Trump,” and crystallizes a nascent “mass base for fascism”17 that cannot be overlooked. Nor should it be underestimated by Critical Theorists. The fact that Trump’s conclusive defeat in the 2020 Presidential election was followed by many dozens of lawsuits, all of which were either ruled against or dismissed by courts (including the Supreme Court, which had three new conservative judges appointed by Trump) and more recently aggressive attempts in Republican-controlled state 14 Marcuse, 27. 15 Ibid. 16 Rachael Revesz, “Donald Trump’s Presidential Counsellor Kellyanne Conway Says Sean Spicer Gave ‘Alternative Facts’ at First Press Briefing,” The Independent, January 22, 2017, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/kellyanne-conway-sean-spi cer-alternative-facts-lies-press-briefing-donald-trump-administration-a7540441.html. 17 Ibid., p. 25.

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legislatures to roll back voting rights, certainly provides much evidence of at the very least a tendency toward fascism. The former President mistakenly believed that the new Supreme Court justices and Republican state officials and lawmakers would do his bidding. When the rule of law held and the judiciary remained impartial, what followed on January 6, 2021, was a much more open display of this distinct tendency toward fascism when a MAGA mob, estimated at 1,200 people, mounted a violent assault on the Capitol in Washington DC. They had been encouraged by the words of their “Great Leader,” with the intention of staging a coup against the 2020 election result: in the true sense of fascism, “might is right.” Even after the election, when the US Congress confirmed that Joe Biden had won the 2020 US Presidential election, Trump refused to accept that he had lost fair and square. This meant continuous lawsuits over the supposed “fraud” of the ballot counts18 and subsequent months inventing fabricated “reasons” as to why “victory” had been “stolen” from him despite the election being the most secure and scutinized election in US—and probably world—history.19 Again, the invention of erroneous reasons as to why authoritarianism had not already triumphed—before it used brute force to do so, as it attempted to do on January 6, 2021—is very much a composite part of fascism and its neo-fascist variants. “The will of the people”—who happen to share the strongman’s beliefs that he should be in charge by force if necessary—has been frustrated by a “corrupt elite” and a strongman leader who “the people” want (defined as his supporters) is stopped by these same forces (or in reality by having lost the Presidential election). However, against these falsities to which the ex-President clung, and the MAGA movement confirming its biases online through Breitbart and other right-wing “news” sources telling those hearing or seeing them what they want to hear or see, the rule of law survived. Indeed, the rule of law was not amenable to the former President’s expectation that at least

18 “Fact Check: Courts Have Dismissed Multiple Lawsuits of Alleged Electoral Fraud Presented by Trump Campaign,” Reuters, February 15, 2020, https://www.reuters. com/article/uk-factcheck-courts-election-idUSKBN2AF1G1?fbclid=IwAR0bcaLg9F3t6 gnoupo55baR3dDgBxVi1sKE_arEMdaytLGsWqfMJsbK2xM. 19 “No Voting System Deleted or Lost Votes in U.S. Election: Security Groups,” Reuters, November 7, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-cyber/novoting-system-deleted-or-lost-votes-in-u-s-election-security-groups-idUSKBN27T038.

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those judges appointed by him would follow his demands and intervene to overturn the election results. The narrative of magical reasons for authoritarianism being thwarted by “fraud” or “corruption” has been spun since the 1920s and 1930s when fascism became a world-historical force in the early-Twentieth Century that was finally stopped (at the cost of tens of millions of lives) after six years in World War II, and only after the overwhelming of Europe by the fascists and their terrifyingly near-success in carrying out a highly organized and rationally planned program of mass-extermination and genocide. As such, “Stop the Steal” has been and is the brand of both Trump and the MAGA movement following Biden’s win, even after Trump was roundly defeated in the Electoral College (306 votes to 232), Biden receiving more than 81 million ballots20 in the popular vote, defeating Trump by more than 7 million votes.21 No amount of evidence, and in fact proof , reasoned argumentation, or countering disinformation has had the slightest effect on Trump’s true believers, who remain impervious to anything contradicting what they want to believe: that being an act of faith that relies on confirmation bias, contextual fallacy, and false equivalence—as well as magical thinking. In Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society, Marcuse notes that in an advanced technological-consumer society such as the US, “efficient and profitable performance requires (and reproduces) the qualities of smart ruthlessness, moral indifference, and persistent aggressiveness.”22 It is precisely these same qualities that are prized by Trump and the MAGA movement. These qualities are seen by those not sharing the same white nationalist and reactionary assumptions as highly dubious and not to be 20 “US Election Results 2020: Joe Biden’s Defeat of Donald Trump,” The Guardian, December 7, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2020/dec/ 08/us-election-results-2020-joe-biden-defeats-donald-trump-to-win-presidency. 21 306 Electoral College votes is by no means narrow: it is bigger and clearer than the Presidential wins of Truman (303), Kennedy (303), Nixon’s first win in 1968 (303), Carter (297), and both those of George W. Bush (271) and (286). Besides many recounts and scrutiny of results which found no evidence of corruption of fraud of any kind in key swing states, the popular vote for Joe Biden of 81,268,224 and a margin of 7,052,770 would under normal circumstances have definitively ended any conjecture, but Trump as defeated opponent has proved to be far from normal. 22 Herbert Marcuse, Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society, 1967, https://www. marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/aggressiveness.htm.

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encouraged or affirmed. They are certainly not undisputed truths; they are views that are open to, and even demand, criticism. Indeed, Trump and the movement that has followed is, as this chapter contends, the crystallization of many different right-wing, sometimes disparate, currents, all of them converging in a toxic amalgam linked by their American chauvinism and white nationalism. Often contradicting themselves and each other or changing tack—like the former President himself—based on their own assumptions and prejudices and what they feel is right, they have a visceral loathing for thought, and most of all for critical thought: a uniquely malignant American belief-system, aspects of which certainly exist outside of America, but only in America in exactly the way the chapter critically observes. In the US, the effects of forty years of neoliberalism—offshoring, structural unemployment, and precarious underemployment—are all framed as the fault of “liberal elites” and minorities.23 Cynically spreading disinformation and manipulating half-truths, the vested interests running Breitbart, News Max and One America News are content to run what are effectively propaganda conduits calling all actual news networks such as Associated Press, the BBC and NBC “fake news.” None of those farright outlets are actual news networks. They propagate whatever Donald Trump is currently claiming or repeat the nonsense of the right-wing pseudo-news channels that they are. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse observed:

23 See David Harvey, A Brief Introduction to Neoliberalism (Oxford: OUP, 2005);

Angela Davis, Peter Funke, Todd Wolfson, and Andrew Lamas, The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements (Philedelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 29–54. 1979 in the UK and 1980 in the US are the two key dates when the Anglo-American Model of capitalism aka Neoliberalism first came to power: in the US, in 1980 Republican President Ronald Reagan first became President winning a second term in 1984 thus retaining the White House for most of the 1980s. In the UK, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher won the first of three General Elections to remain Premier for the whole decade. These two individuals oversaw neoliberal policies which the rest of the world, both states and supra-state institutions such as the G7, G20, IMF, OECED, World Bank and WTO would follow over the following four decades. Such supra-state institutions were effectively captured by neoliberal policy lobbyists, economists, and journalists and opinion formers and any dissent made inaudible. The neoliberal turn was much more uneven for states depending on global locale: for example, Germany and France as well as Scandinavia with traditions of strong social safety nets and a well-funded public sector, did embrace a version of Neoliberalism, but set against those same local traditions.

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By the same token, all cognitive concepts have a transitive meaning: they go beyond descriptive reference to particular facts. And if the facts are those of society, the cognitive concepts also go beyond any particular context of facts – into the processes and conditions on which the respective society rests, and which enter into all particular facts, making, sustaining, and destroying the society. By virtue of their reference to this historical totality, cognitive concepts transcend an operational context, but their transcendence is empirical because it renders the facts recognizable as that which they really are.24

It is this transitive meaning that is twisted and made to be whatever Trump and the MAGA movement want it to be, and to mean whatever they want it to for their captive audience. During Trump’s term in office the concept of “post-truth” appeared, although it was not merely applied to him or MAGA and has become a term for the pronouncements of authoritarian populists the world over in the past eight years. The nature of the concept in which facts become variable and largely dependent on who is making use of them, frequently substituted altogether for value judgements or disputable assertions, is made cynical use of by authoritarian demagogues because like fascism itself, post-truth is not about thought, much less critical thinking. Instead, it makes use of emotion and plays on the hopes and fears of its audience—the naiver and more malleable the better. Besides former US President Donald Trump, post-truth is employed by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and was also made much of in the Brexit referendum on the UK remaining in or leaving the EU. In the Brexit-divided UK, right-wing and reactionary voices sang a siren song to a disgruntled and “forgotten” section of the electorate that the EU and the UK’s membership in it were responsible for all its problems. Brexit became, for a time at least, a catchall for anything and everything completely unrelated to it. In both examples, much is made of ideological obfuscation and mystification in holding the attention and credulity of—enough of—the majority: disingenuous and fallacious claims that are designed to be eye-grabbing and to play on the fears of those who are vulnerable to simple answers to complex problems.

24 Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 106.

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Trump and the MAGA movement are the case study of this chapter, and we will return to them, but the comparison with Brexit is worth investigating further here. Trump makes cynical use of lowest-common-denominator populism to hoodwink a swing demographic, as well as providing straightforward confirmation bias for his supporters.25 There are distinct similarities here with Brexit and the extreme right-wing figures who sought to push for a “No Deal” in which the UK would crash out of the EU without any agreement in place at all—with all the cataclysmic effects that this would have. The “Leave” side in the Brexit referendum campaign of 201626 and the subsequent four-year negotiation of a deal with the EU made much use of manipulated half-truths and emotively played on the anxieties of those seen to be open to such cynical messaging27 : …the equation Reason = Truth = Reality, which joins the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity, Reason is the subversive power, the “power of the negative” that establishes, as theoretical and practical Reason, the truth for men and things – that is, the conditions in which men and things become what they really are. The attempt to demonstrate that this truth of theory and practice is not a subjective but an objective condition was the original concern of Western thought and the origin of its logic – logic not in the sense of a special discipline of philosophy but as the mode of thought appropriate for comprehending the real as rational.28

This quotation from One-Dimensional Man illustrates well Marcuse’s ontology and clearly sets out the basis for his Critical Theory. In radically setting itself apart from notions of truth and reality being open to 25 Chris Garland, “It Needn’t Be True as Long as It’s Believable: Manipulating

Data to Strategize Propaganda in the Era of ‘Alternative Facts’,” Discover Society, April 3, 2018, https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/04/03/it-neednt-be-true-as-long-asits-believable-manipulating-data-to-strategize-propaganda-in-the-era-of-alternative-facts/. 26 Rob Merrick, “ Brexit: People Voted Leave Over Fears of ‘80 Million Turks Coming to Live in Their Village’, Says Vince Cable,” The Independent, July 11, 2017, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-vince-cable-vote-leave-turks-live-village80-million-liberal-democrat-leader-church-halls-turkey-eu-membership-a7835891.html. 27 Patrick Worrall, “Boris Johnson Falsely Claims He ‘Didn’t Say Anything About Turkey’ in the Referendum Campaign,” Channel 4 News Fact Check, January 18, 2019, https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-boris-johnson-falsely-cla ims-he-didnt-say-anything-about-turkey-in-the-referendum-campaign. 28 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 123.

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interpretation, or there being something called “post-truth” or “alternative facts,” it incises the existing populist narrative using all of the recourse that narrative would discount: evidence, reasoned argumentation and consistent and principled opposition. For both Marcuse and this chapter’s critical standpoint, Critical Theory refuses the claim of the nature of society and the world as being “relative.”29 “Reason = Truth = Reality, joining the subjective and objective world into one antagonistic unity,” making “Reason the subversive power,” the “power of the negative,” making Marcuse’s Critical Theory like that of Marx from 100 years earlier, the foundational basis for negating populist authoritarianism and indeed the relativization of social reality, be it from the alt-right, far-right or Postmodernism. Against “fake news” and evidence-free assertions without any basis in fact, propagandized ceaselessly online and on social media, we have the resolution of thought committed to the critique of this nonsensical, irrational account of the world which is developed and continued by social forces determined to uphold and maintain this system and society. The apparent impossibility of comprehending the world for those who are vulnerable to simplistic and easy explanations of things by demagogues such as Trump and all the other populist authoritarians is very much how such individuals and the parties and groups they brought to power have been able to capitalize on discontent. “Fake news” gives a substantial section of society an easy and indeed a One-Dimensional explanation of why the world is the way it is, what causes social problems, and how supposedly a strongman leader is solving them. It is itself the most cynical form of instrumental reason that pretends to be a key to the locked doors of technological and instrumental rationality. It gives the apparent answers to those it knows will not question them critically and lack the critical thinking skills or education to do so. Breitbart and One America News—as for all other bogus “news networks” beloved by authoritarian populists the world over—take factual events and decontextualize them, taking unrelated fragments and recomposing these as their own specific narrative for their viewers or readers who selectively believe whatever they are told. These are usually presented 29 Except when these are historicized as indicative of an epoch by the likes of Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1992).

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as straightforward reporting of events rather than (right-wing) “opinion,” offering a comprehensible and easily digestible “understanding” of things to those who want an account that will confirm their biases and reassure them that they are right in their beliefs and existing grasp of the world. The bigger question as to why the appearance of “fake news” has happened or has been possible in the last five or so years is that it would seem to have filled the gap left by the crisis of legitimacy of existing elites and of Late Capitalism. Late Capitalism is a crisis-ridden social system, a form of domination and exploitation.30 Authoritarian populists have taken advantage of this and make use of fake news and alternative facts (which they themselves define) to make claims that this refracted reality is reality itself. This account is given at the same time as all the while diverting discontent from the social problems capitalism creates while branding them as the fault of those who did not cause them but who are nonetheless targeted as being responsible for them. Critical Theory maintains that populism and authoritarianism are not and never have been the products of a free society, nor are their bogus claims to be from below and the will of the people any such thing. Frankfurt School-infused Critical Theory critiques the operation of propaganda such as Breitbart and One America News, using all of the resources of Philosophy, Social Theory and Sociology, and in bold contradistinction, evidence to support its critique.

30 Ceylan Yeginsu, “ If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know (And Amazon Has a Patent for It),” The New York Times, February 1, 2018, https://www.nytimes. com/2018/02/01/technology/amazon-wristband-tracking-privacy.html; Thomas Frank, “From Rust Belt to Mill Towns: A Tale of Two Voter Revolts,” The Guardian, June 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/07/from-rust-belt-tomill-towns-a-tale-of-two-voter-revolts-thomas-frank-us-and-uk-elections. In 2021, domination and its administered variants in Late Capitalism, take the form of Amazon using drones in its “fulfilment centres” to monitor the time employees take to process orders. Amazon employees who are employed on zero-hours contracts or “self-employed” and paid the minimum wage or near it, are often working at the only big employer in places in the US and UK where Neoliberalism off-shored all production decades ago.

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Make-Believe Narratives of “Us and Them”: Authoritarian Populism’s Efforts to Mystify Through an External “Other” What has been defined as Neoliberalism earlier in this chapter is indeed the form capitalism has taken over the last 40 years. It was initially a response to 35 or so years of the Keynesian social compromise and very much capital’s response, but also that of political elites initially in the US and UK then Western Europe and globally. At the time Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man were published, Western capitalism took the form of JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society: the post-WWII incarnation of consumerism or “the steered satisfaction of material needs,” and indeed the manipulation of real needs and the continuous manufacture of false ones. Marcuse’s theory and the rest of the Frankfurt School’s, much like Marx himself from an even earlier era, retain much that can be applied to our own crisis-ridden time of the early-Twenty-First Century.31 In 2021, consumerism most certainly still dictates the imperatives of advanced economies, along with the singular nature of Global Capitalism and Modernity, in all countries and across the whole world, albeit very unevenly. There are, however, notable differences and to ignore these would be thoroughly un-Marxist, and that of course includes the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Before defining some of the key developments of One-Dimensional Society in the late Twentieth Century and the first three decades of the Twenty-First Century, it is important to note the essential features of the concept: In classical Greek philosophy, Reason is the cognitive faculty to distinguish what is true and what is false insofar as truth (and falsehood) is primarily a condition of Being, of Reality – and only on this ground a property of propositions. True discourse, logic, reveals and expresses that which really is as distinguished from that which appears to be (real), and by virtue of this equation between Truth and (real) Being, Truth is a value, for Being is better than Non-Being. The latter is not simply Nothing; it is a potentiality of and a threat to Being – destruction. Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.32

31 Marcuse, Counter-Revolution and Revolt, 14. 32 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 124.

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In this excursus into Classical Philosophy, Marcuse sets out the Western concepts of Being, Reality and Reason, which pace the claims of the alt-right and MAGA remain essential and universal—whether in their Western form or translated into non-Western incarnations. All these core concepts to understanding the world and existence itself are examples of how Critical Theory in its Frankfurt School version, Marxism and thought of any kind, rests on certain immutable truths. Taking these core conceptual foundations, it can also be stated that One-Dimensional Society, the affluent “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” of 1964 is in many ways different from 2021, but that opening description from One-Dimensional Man is very similar. Rather, some of its details may have changed but the description remains largely the same.33 The case study of this chapter is of course the former US President and the MAGA movement. An example of OneDimensional thought in this context would be how the use of “fake news” and its success with its target demographic, how it purports to be making the world comprehensible but in fact mystifies it while creating this as its own very selective narrative. In the US, make-believe narratives of “Us and Them” are observable in MAGA and the former President’s fixation with “building the wall”—to keep the Latino hordes out of otherwise peaceful and happy America. It is a make-believe narrative, because America was of course built on immigration and by immigrants, and in very large part a Latino presence—and Mexican in particular—having long become a permanent part of the country. According to Donald Trump and MAGA, and the white nationalism digitized via the likes of Breitbart and One America, the wall should be built to seal off the US from would-be immigrants, from outsiders who bring drugs/crime/disease, etc. with them. Thus, it represents a solution to problems that were brought by a social other. Such a simplistic one-dimensional narrative can be understood as an embodiment of Marcuse’s concept in the crisis-ridden world of the 2020s.34 Crisis-ridden, because in large part neoliberalism’s failure is “the long crisis” and now, in addition to this, there is the crisis of the populist backlash which is, of course, the spurious and opportunist response of

33 Marcuse, 1. 34 “Drug Dealers, Criminals, Rapists’: What Trump Thinks of Mexicans,” BBC News,

August 16, 2016, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-37230916.

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right-wing and reactionary authoritarian demagogues (pretending to) denounce elites while mobilizing a substantial base of those far below and outside their world against their own interests.

Conclusion: Reasoned Passion/Impassioned Reason: The Substance of the Great Refusal Taking this standpoint of Marcuse’s thought as a basis for critique of the one-dimensional Society of 2021 and its false explanations for its state of crisis, the forces of opposition and resistance can take considerable succor from Marcuse’s Critical Theory. There is a rational critique based on Reason, argumentation and logic, but this is also infused by feeling passion and emotion, and the insistence of total social change felt as a consuming need. This reasoned passion and impassioned reason defines itself in terms of negativity, in the work of Marcuse and the first-generation Critical Theorists, toward the existent, the given, and all that is seen as “natural, inevitable and immutable.” The disingenuous claims made by populism are wholly about attempting to shore up the one-dimensional society of which it is a product, even as it claims to be its social reckoning. Populist narratives pretend to be “from below,” although they are very much “from above,” being the work of elites and vested interests. The populist backlash of the second half of the last decade continuing into the early part of the 2020s makes cynical and instrumental use of social problems projected onto the Other. Others are arbitrarily defined as being less worthy and less deserving of help, or even recognition, than those whom it sees as the rightful inheritors of what they mistakenly believe they have lost. However, a Marcusean Critical Theory in bold contradistinction is coldly logical and bases its critique on logical argumentation and radical political practice. But also feeling and none more so than cerebral anger, as this chapter has endeavored to show, anger preceded by thought yet underwritten by compassion and empathy. This version of Frankfurt School-infused Critical Theory, like that of Marx, has emancipation as its expression of the means and ends of its theory and practice and praxis , and understands humanity itself as the subject of this project, not just one section of it divided against it as being unlike it and external to it. From the extraordinary mass protests against racism and white supremacy involving a substantial number of white protestors alongside and with black protestors following the police killing of George Floyd

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across both the US and UK—a particular concern which also contains the universal demand for recognition and emancipation and justice—to the youth-led Climate Justice movement and school children organizing school strikes globally for the future understanding that we have to act now to even have a future, there are prospects for radically progressive social change and contestation of crisis-ridden neoliberalism and the fallacies of the populist backlash. Both the massive anti-racist protests over the summer of 2020 and the youth-led Climate Justice movement could be seen as Historical Moments. However, as Marcuse himself noted in the closing paragraph of One-Dimensional Man, Nothing indicates that it will be a good end. But the chance is that, in this period, the historical extremes may meet again: the most advanced consciousness of humanity, and its most exploited force. It is nothing but a chance. The critical theory of society possesses no concepts which could bridge the gap between the present and its future; holding no promise and showing no success, it remains negative. Thus, it wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal.35

A moment of hope is found in the edited collection, The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements; in its many chapters, many of them began a decade ago in 2011. Writing the book’s foreword, Marcuse’s former student, Angela Y. Davis, notes that “Freedom is a constant struggle. The linkage between resistance and liberation is a teaching of every freedom struggle.”36 Emancipation is the guiding force of The Great Refusal, where we find “concern with human happiness, and the conviction that it can be attained only through a transformation of material existence.”37 It is this kind of materialism, the recognition that we are “in and of” this world which is also the recognition that we have the capacity at least potentially to remake it, which “goes beyond” merely refusing the existing world and begins the long process of creating a new one.

35 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 257. 36 Angela Davis, Peter Funke, Todd Wolfson, and Andrew Lamas, The Great Refusal:

Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, vii. 37 Herbert Marcuse, Negations : Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 147–154.

CHAPTER 7

Refusals Redux Lauren Langman

Introduction The work of any great scholar typically shows a great deal of continuity over time, while it evolves with changing social conditions. We can see this continuity and change in the work of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was one of the more significant members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and was one of the first to read Karl Marx’s (1972) critique of alienated labor in the newly discovered Economic and Plilosophical Manuscripts.1 More specifically, as feudalism waned, with growing trade, people were increasingly paid cash wages in a contractual exchange for their labor power, the time they spend transforming raw materials (Nature) into commodities they did not own, using tools they did not own, in work processes they did not control. Nevertheless, it was their labor that created value. The capitalist “resold” the labor embedded 1 Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris Manuscripts)” in The Marx Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1972), 469–500.

L. Langman (B) Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_7

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within these commodities in the market for their “exchange value,” but the exchange value received was far greater than the worker was paid for creating this “surplus value” appropriated by the capitalist that became the basis of wealth for the capitalist and the alienation and the immiseration of the worker. In this process, that created private property, labor became external to the worker, who was denied creative realization in their work and who became estranged from his/her self and potential selffulfillment; workers became powerless, dehumanized objects. Toiling all day in the “satanic mills,” workers became estranged from their communities. They were also estranged from their “species” being, the unique qualities of human consciousness that allow people to see themselves as members of a larger species that could remember the past, imagine the future, and freely and creatively transform nature through work to realize their full human potential. The ultimate result was a warped and distorted person, whose selfhood was truncated and as Hobbes (1651 [2012]) put it whose life was truly “poor, nasty, brutish and short.” About seventy-five years after Marx had critiqued alienated labor, capitalism had been radically transformed as the huge assembly lines of factories mass-produced goods, typically sold in showrooms, department stores, and/or through mail order catalogs. The size and complexity of these newer corporations led to the separation of ownership and management, and management became increasingly bureaucratized to rationally administer enterprises for maximum efficiency. By then, most largescale organizations—government, military, financial educational—were bureaucratically administered. Max Weber (1968) had seen “functional rationality” as the most efficient, calculable, and predictable way to organize work activities—albeit entrapping workers of all classes into the “iron cages” of instrumental rationality. In developing their interdisciplinary neo-Marxist framework, the Frankfurt School scholars incorporated Weber’s (1868) critique of “Instrumental Reason” and began to see abstrct labor, as a general quality of advanced capitalist societies that was no longer specific to industrial workers. Most workers became estranged and objectified by the Rational “disenchantment of the world,” where scientific understandings supplanted belief, instrumental, rational goals were paramount, there was no more myth, nor mysticism in a world without magic gardens.2 Such 2 As will become evident later, the sterility of the rational order, and the attenuation of social relationships in a fragmented world would create the conditions that, in the face of

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was the Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment itself became a new form of domination.3 It should also be noted that as the Frankfurt School was first emerging, world capitalism was facing a number of economic crises. There was widespread hardship, anger, and frustration among the working and lower middle classes. In their early research and analyses, drawing upon Freud (1930) and Reich (1933), they found that authoritarian, sexually repressive child-rearing, especially typical among the working and petty bourgeois classes, laid the foundations for an authoritarian character that, in face of crisis and adversity, supported authoritarian parties and leaders promising redress and restoration of the Golden age, culminating in the rise of Naziism and Hitler. The Frankfurt School scholars, many of whom were leftist as well as Jewish, had to leave Germany to survive. After WWII Marcuse chose to remain in the United States. Given his background and experiences he, like many of his colleagues, feared the authoritarian tendencies in American society.4

Tranquility Above: Discontent Below. After WWII, the United States had half of the world’s manufacturing capacity that was still intact. After years of rationing, and the legacy of FDR’s Keynesian policies, the American economy enjoyed a time of relative affluence, social mobility, peace, and tranquility—notwithstanding a war in Korea and the Cold-War anti-communist paranoia of McCarthyism. But beneath the surface other social trends were in process. Little noticed at that time was the legacy of Freudian theory that, influencing pediatric advice, encouraged changes in child-rearing practices (at least among the better educated and more affluent). The socialization of children changed from the more authoritarian emphasis on submission

crises would lead many people to join reactionary, indeed, fascist movements that created “meaningful” communities held together by irrational beliefs. 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment : Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. Schmid Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 4 This would of course be clear in studies such as Lowenthal and Guterman (1949), Prophets of Deceit, Adorno’s (1950) classical study on authoritarian character, and the radio programs of Martin Luther Thomas (1960).

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and obedience to authority, to the encouragement of creativity, selfrealization, and empathy—caring for other people.5 Between economic security and changing child-rearing practices, by the 1960s a new generation was emerging in which a large number of youth were rejecting economic gain, material rewards, and/or possessions, and embracing “post-materialist values,” seeking lives and careers that enabled expressive identities and lifestyles emphasizing creativity, self-fulfillment, meaning and community, cooperation and empathy.6 These values had more intrinsic meaning than conformity, competition, self-aggrandizement materialism, and consumerism. Inglehart’s (1971) extensive large-scale survey research indicated what will be a very important point in our argument, namely the historical basis of a changing post-materialiist character qua the underlying psychological structure, the organization of drives, desires, and defenses expressed in one’s behavior, one’s self-conceptions, relationships with others, and understandings of the world. The post-WWII years were times of relative economic growth and security, and a degree of mobility for many, especially white men. Marcuse, like most critical theorists, is primarily concerned with capitalist culture, ideology, and subjectivity. Economic adversities, poverty, scarcity, and precarity were not as salient than for understanding authoritarianism, one-dimensional culture, and the “repressive desublimation” that sustained consumerism and “civic privatism.” Jurgen Habermas (1992) saw personal concerns with work, leisure, and consumption as a means of legitimating capitalist society by eliminating any serious concerns about its functioning and/or adversities.7 Capitalism was providing secure jobs, stable careers, and abundant consumerism (again, mostly for white men). But neither work nor consumerism, nor escapist mass media, could erase the underlying forms of twentieth-century alienation, ennui, and meaninglessness. Despite the relative material affluence provided by capitalism and the unending images of happiness through possession/consumerism that 5 This began with the work of Benjamin Spock, the extremely influential pediatrician

who had studied and incorporated Freudian theory into his child-rearing advice. 6 Ronald Inglehart, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-Industrial Societies,” The American Political Science Review, 65, no. 4 (December 1971): 991–1017. 7 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992).

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flooded the mass media, there were nevertheless signs of dissatisfaction. These were first noted by sociologists such as Robert Nisbet (1953), David Riesman (1950), and C. W. Mills (1959) who, while not Marxists, also critiqued the alienation, detachment, rampant individualism, status competition, social fragmentation, loneliness, apathy, conformity and homogenization of people. At the same time, many traditionally subordinated and stigmatized groups grew ever more impatient with the status quo. People understood their discontents as “personal troubles,” and not as social issues; that understanding depended on what he called the “sociological imagination” which connected one’s biography and personal troubles with the larger social issues that concerned the founding fathers of sociology.8 Secondly, a small group of writers and poets, the Beat Generation, somewhat influenced by European existentialists, offered a literary critique of conformity and repression while extolling drugs and sex, gay or straight lifestyles, as hedonistic realms of authenticity. Meanwhile, Freud’s (1930) version of the social contract, which claimed that guilt-based repression was necessary for civilization—qua beauty, cleanliness, and order, along with repressive conformity, libidinal as well as behavioral, was being called into question. Further, the widespread status anxiety and compulsive conformity belied the happiness and satisfaction promised by consumerism, exemplified by the smiling faces in advertisements, ecstatic if not orgasmic, over the latest detergent, toothpaste, or car. It was in this context that Marcuse (1995) suggested that contemporary alienation was linked to the “surplus repression” of sexuality, Eros, or the “life instincts,” the libidinal, the playful, and the aesthetic that pleasurably joined people together. Sexual repression, over and above what was necessary for social tranquility and harmoniously working together, was imposed by the elites in order to motivate the “performance principle,” to ensure the constant diligence of workers engaged in the alienated labors of production and administration necessary for capital accumulation.9 The alienation of sexuality, the thwarting of Eros, was a moment of capitalist alienation. It meant suffering for the sake of capitalist domination/ reproduction. But that repression facilitated manifestations of aggression, 8 See C.W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 9 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953).

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moments of Thanatos, the “death instinct” in forms such as military spending, arms races, imperialist interventions, wars, etc. (The Korean War was in process). For Freud (1913), the basic model of social character, that which is the personality type most typical in a group, has little changed from the time when primal hordes, controlled by a powerful father, roamed the world. But his monopolization of sexual access to the women fostered a revolt by the sons who slew the father, and afterward, felt guilty. From that time on, society depended on the internalization of the father as a powerful superego, to control “disruptive” desires for the sake of social harmony.10 Contrasting Freud (1913, 1930), Fromm (1947) argued that social character was an adaptation to the demands of the external environment, primarily its political economy, to ensure motivation for the necessary labor be performed, authority respected, and the society reproduced over time.11 Under feudalism, the passive dependent, receptive character was the most prevalent type, but with capitalism, “freeing” the individual to compete in markets, we would find the hoarding character, the exploitative character, the necrophilia character (loving death and destruction as his/her own fulfillment was thwarted) and by the mid-twentieth century, the marketing character who sold him/her self as a commodity in order to “fit in” to corporate work and suburban life. But these iterations of character types, shaped by the demands of the economy rather than the gratification of human needs, resulted in thwarted, monstrous kinds of character. But these stages of character development were moments toward the emergence of the biophilic character, the productive character who loved life, found creative fulfillment in his/her work or play, and lived harmoniously with other people and with Nature. The dominant value was being fulfilled, psychologically and interpersonally, rather than having things. While Marcuse (1955) was critical of Fromm (1947) for moving away from classical Freudian theory, he would eventually do the same as would be clear in the trajectory from the orthodoxy of Eros and Civilization,

10 Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, trans. J. Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1914). 11 Erich Fromm, Man for Himself; an Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (Rinehart, 1947).

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in which the “surplus repression” of sexuality, qua strict, punitive internalized superego, was necessary to instill the obedience/complacency required of workers in capitalist enterprises. Later, with growing acceptance of [female] sexuality, sexuality became liberated, normalized, and colonized at the same time, as “artificial needs” for various aspects of consumerism were insinuated within the person. “Repressive desublimation” served to encourage consumerism, narcissism, privatism, and indifference to the social. Finally, in the “Obsolescence of Freudian Man” (1970), Marcuse discussed the waning of sexual repression, along with the eroding power of the father, and the decline of Oedipal conflict, as a historical transformation of character. “The evolution of contemporary society has replaced the Freudian model…the struggle with the father as the paradigmatic representative of the reality principle—this situation is historical: it came to an end with the changes in industrial society which took shape in the inter-war period.”12 The 1950s seemed a time of prosperous consumerism and quietude, escapes to suburbia, and backyard barbecues. But beneath the surface a number of stresses and strains were festering. While the affluence of the bourgeois class gave them luxury, having material possessions but losing oneself does not make people satisfied.13 The bourgeoisie remained an alienated, lonely, insecure class, trapped and stifled within bureaucratic organizations. As Fromm (1955) put it, “The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”14 Notwithstanding a number of superficial relationships, the “lonely crowds” lived in a fragmented society. For Marcuse (1955), the legacy of sexual repression and its suffering still endured. But in the 1960s, the sexual revolution “suddenly” exploded, although the researchers thought it was more of a lengthy evolution that began in the roaring 20s. This “revolution” for Marcuse was less about sexual “freedom” than the colonization of sexuality and the insinuation of “artificial needs” to encourage impulsebased consumerism, intertwined with mass-mediated dissemination of

12 Herbert Marcuse, “The Obsolescence of Freudian Man” in Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics and Utopia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 50. 13 Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1976). 14 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Henry Holt and Company, 1955), 102.

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one-dimensional thought, that maintained domination—without any critique.15 By the early ‘60s however, things began to change, despite the passivity and indifference of the 1950s a number of new, contentious social movements suddenly emerged. Most of these mobilizations were quite different than traditional social movements that had been organized by political parties, labor unions, or even progressive social movement organizations. These new social movements were protests against “the colonization of the life world” by the rational logic and imperatives of the system.16 This colonization by rationality, much akin to one-dimensional thought, stifled human fulfillment and genuinely meaningful social interactions based on freedom and equality. Rather, these protest movements were primarily based on transforming identity and values toward more humanistic, fulfilling, and egalitarian democratic ends closely associated with quests for recognition, decency, and dignity.17 Several of these newer social movements, “great refusals,” primarily sought cultural changes and identity-based changes that granted equality and dignity, such as struggles for civil rights, feminism, and LGBTQ. Meanwhile, some of these movements had more specific political goals. The anti-war movement, for example, sought an end to American imperialism in Southeast Asia. At this time many noted the despoliation of the water and air—the beginnings of environmentalism.

History and Changing Subjectivity While Marcuse (1969) did not link this historical change of character to social movements in this essay, it was clear that the great refusals represented a major change in underlying social character, moving from maintaining authoritarian repression, obedience, stifling conformity, and insatiable materialism to seeking a “new sensibility,” a libidinal,

15 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). 16 See George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). As Habermas suggested, the echoes of Lukacs critique of reification should be noted. 17 Lauren Langman, “Political Economy and the Normative: Marx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity” in Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Normativity, Praxis, ed. Michael Thompson (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 59–85.

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and aesthetic, valuing “life instincts over aggression,” human values of collective caring, sharing, and empathy, over individualism and material gain, and seeking creative fulfillment over stifling conformity and mindless consumption.18 This new sensibility was both the impetus for “great refusals” and the desired goal of these refusals, the realization of a new iteration of character in a postcapitalist society providing equality dignity freedom and fulfillment for all. The “new sensibility” for Marcuse (1969) was a different way of understanding the world, an emancipatory transformation of character, liberating selfhood, overcoming alienation, domination, and repression, moving toward freedom, celebrating Eros and life, not Thanatos and death. This “new sensibility” was more than the reproduction of the objects in the mind as sense data organized by a priori categories, as for Kant (1781), but an emancipatory possibility of freedom, re-creating the world to allow for creativity, self-realization, egalitarian, cosmopolitan relationships where people lived in supportive communities in harmony with each other and indeed, in harmony with, rather than domination over, nature. Indeed, many of these movements, “great refusals,” have been termed “post-materialist,” as youth seeking expressive, creative lives, and identities rather than economic and physical security.19 Marcuse (1969) saw that individual actors who had achieved some aspects of a “new sensibility” were most likely to become the activists of the ‘60s, participating in the great refusals of the period, trying to achieve a society in which that newly emergent form of subjectivity would be typical for all and humanity would be free to realize its potentials within a community of sharing, caring, living in harmony with each other and with nature. The social conditions, then and now, are such that the more empathic, nurturant socialization practices are more general, and so too have there been basic changes in social character, at least among many segments of the population that foretell generationally based progressive social change. While the changing nature of social character was essential for a critical theorist, a number of academic social scientists had also charted various historical changes in subjectivity, identity, and values. Quite independent

18 Herbert Marcuse, Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 19 See Ronald Inglehart, (1971) “The Silent Revolution in Europe.” American Political

Science Review, 65, (December. 1971): 991–1017

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of either philosophy or concerns with political economy, a number of academic scholars began to note the emergence of a newer and different kind of social character seen in many ways, offering a track parallel to Marcuse’s but not concerned with political economy let alone embracing a radical perspective. Moreover, most of this writing had taken place before the current explosion of progressive movements. The move of the locus of “real selfhood from institutional roles to personal feelings” is charted.20 The more flexible, changeable, multiple, “Protean self” is better adapted to the changing world and open to new kinds of experience.21 Note the affinity between the Protean self and more democratic relationships. James Ogilvy called this pattern “many dimensional man.” It is more radically democratic and egalitarian and far better adjusted to the new kinds of social organizations that tended to be flatter and more egalitarian rather than hierarchical and authoritarian.22 For Zygmunt Bauman, we live in a time of “liquid modernity” where all that was solid as now melted into thin air, and where the production of information is now far more important than the production of steel.23 These conditions have led to what Bauman called “liquid selfhood,” which is more flexible, open, democratic, and with multiple and sometimes contradictory identities. Indeed, today we see growing numbers of young people embracing gender fluidity, having more empathy for the unfortunate, and whose relationships are more egalitarian and multicultural. Surveys by PPRI, Pews, and Gallup have suggested more than half of young people are now economically progressive, especially the Z Gens, who prefer socialism to capitalism.24

20 Ralph Turner, “The Real Self: from Institution to Impulse,” American Journal of Sociology, 81, no. 5, (March, 1976): 989–1016. 21 Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 22 James Ogilvy, Many Dimensional Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 23 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Maternity (London: Polity Press, 2000). 24 See Lydia Saad, “Socialism as Popular as Capitalism Among Young Adults in U.S.,” Gallup, November 25, 2019: https://news.gallup.com/poll/268766/socialism-popularcapitalism-among-young-adults.aspx. Few who have actually studied Marx can simply equate socialism with universal healthcare and free college. In 1872, Bismarck understood that reformist measures were the best defense against socialism. Welfare state entitlements can be found in many of the right-wing governments in Europe such as Hungary or Poland.

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The Rise of Refusals By the 1960s it became evident that a large segment of the youth generation had become both politically and psychologically different from the mainstream of older Americans in numerous ways. They revolted against the stifling conformity of the ‘50s, which included the subjugation of racialized minorities, the suppression of women, and the closeting of LGBTQs. But the most prevalent and often largest mobilizations and demonstrations were against the imperialist war in Vietnam. The massive protests led by French students in 1968 were sympathetic to underpaid, exploited workers. Their protests struck a resonant chord, and within a short time got a great deal of support from labor unions and the French Communist Party. At one point, over 1/3 of the French population, not just in Paris but throughout France, came out to protest in the streets. These newer movements were typically more spontaneous, “bottom-up,” rhizomatic movements. These protests, especially the role of the Situationists, required major changes in social movement theory, directing protests against capitalism’s consumer culture of endless spectacles through carnivalesque absurdity and reversals (detournments ) of meanings.25 Habermas (1981) had pointed out how these newer movements were largely over issues of identity, motivation, and values, especially at times of legitimation crises.26 His views were more fully developed by Touraine and his colleagues into new Social Movement Theory (NSM) in which these newer mobilizations, generally independent of political parties (which they disdained in any case), labor unions, or even “established” progressive social movement organizations.27 Most of these movements valorized “participatory” governance. A key feature of these movements was for activists to treat each other in their everyday lives as they would like to see universalized in a future society, as equals, with respect, recognition, and mutual support. Civil Rights : While the postwar years may have been overtly tranquil, conformist, and peaceful, with perhaps occasional anxiety and “moral panics” over “communist infiltrators,” at the same time there were growing strains and discontents some of which, such as the persistence of 25 Guy De Bord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black Press, 1967). 26 Jurgen Habermas, “New Social Movements” Telos, 49, (September 1981): 33–37. 27 Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye: An Analysis of Social Movements (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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racism and discrimination found in seventeenth-century plantation slavery and the Jim Crow laws of the South, had very long-standing historical roots.28 African Americans saw a contradiction fighting for democracy and freedom while in segregated units in WWII. Many black GIs noted German POWs were treated better than they were. Nevertheless, some African Americans had outstanding service records. The Tuskegee pilots, for example, had an outstanding record of protecting American bombers from Nazi interceptors. Some were subsequently able to gain college educations and/or parlay their military training into better paid jobs. But many Black GIs stationed in France tasted an equality quite foreign to the United States and were so favorably impressed by the society with little racial prejudice that they chose to remain in France.29 However, for a growing population of African Americans, there was growing discontent and impatience with the blatant racism that still endured. It was in this context that the Southern Christian Leadership Council, operating primarily through Black churches, was one of the only realms of society not controlled by white people. A new generation of activist leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, and John Lewis spoke to these discontents; they envisioned an egalitarian, multiracial society where all people would be judged on the basis of their character and not their skin color. They organized, mobilized, demonstrated, and subsequently marched in protest. With the advent of television, protests for voting rights, met by State violence in the Jim Crow South, were widely seen across the nation.30 Images of water cannons, police dogs attacking children, and police beatings came into everyone’s living room. American audiences witnessed the Montgomery bus boycott as well as the brutality and violence of Selma, which led to growing nationwide support for the racial justice movements. The massive march on Washington was witnessed throughout the country. The ultimate consequence 28 This enduring racism, structural and individual, could (and still can) be seen in many other parts of the United States, for example, the wanton murderers and destruction of the African-American community, Black Wall St, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. 29 There was a long tradition where African Americans especially entertainers/writers, felt more comfortable in France than in racist America, for example, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Richard Wright, Eartha Kitt, etc. 30 The civil rights movements of the ‘50s and ‘60s were still “traditional” kinds of movements, but nevertheless, would open pathways for the newer kinds of social movements such as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, Black Panthers and of late, Black Lives Matter.

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was the political support for the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts that enabled the assent of more political power, and social mobility for a few, culminating, of course, in the 2008 election of Barack Obama. Ironically, the election of an African-American president increased the level of racism on the part of large numbers of White Americans, who basically did not think Obama was one of them. Racism persisted. An especially egregious form was the extent to which white policemen might murder African Americans with impunity. While this blatant racism became louder and more visible, the nation as a whole, especially younger generations became more tolerant, accepting, and inclusive. Feminism: Almost seventy years after feminism first emerged in Seneca Falls New York, women got the right to vote, but in some ways that had changed little. But with World War II, as many women began to work in the defense plants, they experienced agency, empowerment, wages, and indeed recognition for working in the “arsenals of democracy.” They demonstrated their ability to use complex machine tools to produce vast amounts of military supplies, or fly bombers to war zones, and/or even serve in the military. They pushed back against traditional, subordinated female roles that restricted them to childcare, housework, and caretaking. The “unpaid work of social reproduction” was functionally necessary and celebrated in the media, but most of the workers in these fields were women. Such work was regarded as lowly and ever less satisfying, and the workers, typically women, were denigrated.31 In 1953, when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, her message of the “problem that has no name” resonated with large numbers of dissatisfied women who would join together and share their feelings—and anger—especially in intellectual circles on college campuses where a new generation of young women gathered in the consciousness-raising groups, twentieth-century versions of [counter] public spheres.32 Within these “consciousness-raising” groups, women shared the manifold experiences of sexual harassment, assault, and subsequent denigration, blaming, and “slut shaming” the victim. Meanwhile, by the 1960s many women had become involved in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Yet, even in progressive or sometimes radical movements, women were still often 31 Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: toward a Unified Theory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University press, 1983). 32 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 56–80.

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relegated to subordinate roles of serving coffee, answering the phone, or operating the mimeograph machine. It was still the men who made most of the decisions regarding strategies, tactics, and goals. As women entered the heretofore male-dominated workforces, discrimination in hiring, promotion, and wage gaps, added to the discontent of subordination. As a result, we began to see the rising growth of second-wave feminism as a protest against the enduring patriarchy and toxic masculinity that women faced every day, along with the structural basis of male domination. Feminists embraced visions of freedom, equality, and more fulfilling roles and lives than the traditional caretaker roles. Further, feminism intersected with the sexual revolution, and for many women, sexuality, and reproduction became essential aspects of agency and self-determination, whether it was access to birth control or abortion rights. While the sexual revolution gave women the same rights to erotic pleasures as men had long possessed, it also gave women the right to say, NO!33 Anti-war : Among the most widespread movements of the 1960s was the anti-war movement. Reflecting a different psychological posture, the movement was primarily directed against American imperialist policies. Young students, with a sense of empathy for the suffering of others, mobilized. There were years of huge protests as millions of youths protested the financial and military support for right-wing dictators that was very costly in dollars, human lives, and suffering. Most American universities witnessed teach-ins, protests, mobilizations, and marches. The most notable protest was, of course, the “days of rage” that took place in Chicago in 1968 at the time of the democratic convention. The demonstrators were demanding that Vice-Presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey renounce the war that had been continued by President

33 As would be noted later, second wave feminism is nationally concerned with the academic or corporate careers of white women and paying attention to either minority women or class (political economy). This would of course lead to concerns with intersection pioneered by Kimberly Crenshaw (1989). Further, many second wave feminists were strongly opposed to pornography and/or sex work that they claimed demeaned, objectified, and commodified women’s bodies/sexuality. Finally, only a few academic feminists located their struggles in political economy following Marx and Engels. More recently, third wave feminists have attempted to be more multicultural, intersectional, inclusive of queer women, and more tolerant, if not supportive of sex workers, many of whom actually enjoy their work.

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Lyndon Johnson.34 The protesters, some of whom were scholars with an actual knowledge of the history and culture of Vietnam, as well as the history of American imperialism, were clearly aware of the vast numbers of lives lost not only in Vietnam, but the not so secret wars in Laos and Cambodia meant to disrupt Vietcong supply routes.35 The leak of the Pentagon Papers supported the claims of the activists about how several administrations saw the conflict in terms of thwarting China; the United States and its sycophant allies were willing to sacrifice the lives of millions of Southeast Asian peasants and tens of thousands of soldiers while hundreds of thousands were wounded and suffered long-term PTSD. Most scholars or experts knew well that the propped-up governments of South Vietnam could not last without American support.36 This became evident when the Viet Cong took over Saigon and American helicopters evacuated the Americans from the embassy. Gay Rights : In view of the major social mobilizations of the day, as racial minorities and women struggled for their rights, so too did the LGBTQ community attempt to gain their rights. Not the least of which was the recognition of their humanity, and their rights to live unfettered from various forms of prejudice and violence. In 1966, the major gay organization at that time, the Mattachine Society, staged a “sip in.” Several gay men entered the bar, ordered drinks, and announced they were gay. The police were called, arrived, and the gay men were promptly arrested. This sparked a great deal of discontent, outrage, lawsuits, and support for greater toleration of queer. This was an opening gambit. But the most significant contestation took place in 1969 at a gay bar, Stonewall, in Greenwich Village, where after long-term continued police harassment, the gays fought back. Contrary to the cultural stereotypes of weakness and passivity that were prevalent at the time, the queers were able to successfully fight back and thwart the police. We should also note, that with the AIDS epidemic primarily among gay men, the ACT UP

34 For the sake of full disclosure this author was a participant in the movement and the Grant Park events. 35 Anyone with the slightest familiarity of the history of Asia would know that the Vietnamese and the Chinese have no love for each other, as was seen when they actually had a fighting war. 36 After the war, it was revealed that the head of South Vietnamese intelligence was actually VC, who typically warned VC cadres of impending American actions. The VC then quickly disappeared into the tunnels and jungles.

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movement embraced visibly obstructive practices to call attention to the paucity of research on the prevention and treatment of AIDS. We should also mention the budding environmental movement that followed growing awareness of the poisoning of the waters, the land, and the air. While Horkheimer and Adorno (2002) had critiqued the domination of technological rationality, Marcuse added warnings of the adverse consequences, despoliation coming from the domination of nature, and violence toward it. In 1970 there was the first nationwide celebration of Earth Day. In the years to follow, while not seeing major change at least yet, there have been a number of victories, for example, the establishment of the EPA, the elimination of DDT and Roundup.

From One-Dimensional man to “Great Refusals” How did these movements influence Marcuse? The movements of the 1960s led Marcuse to change his perspective regarding the role of onedimensional thought that reproduced the status quo, to rethink the crises and contradictions of late capitalism that were engendering “great refusals,” and possible transformations to transcend these crises, to move from a society based on necessity to one of freedom—and that freedom would be for all. After the somewhat pessimistic tone of One-Dimensional Man (1964) where the colonization of consciousness by Instrumental Reason had become one of the primary ways late capitalism had reproduced itself, Marcuse needed to rethink his positon, given the explosion of emancipatory social movements in the 1960s.37 Harkening back to his Hegelian Marxist roots in which the Telos of history (Spirit, Geist) moves dialectically toward self-knowledge and freedom, he saw these movements within a cycle of repression, negation, and moving toward freedom, that would in turn mobilize a counter-reaction. The “great refusals” were not simply about changing the ownership of the means of production, restructuring the class relations of capitalism, or a more equitable distributions of wealth and resources, but transforming subjectivity, rescuing one’s humanity from repression and conformity. Marcuse wrote:

37 Marcuse, Essay on Liberation.

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In proclaiming the “permanent challenge,” (la contestation permanente), the “permanent education,” the Great Refusal, they recognized the mark of social repression, even in the most sublime manifestations of traditional culture, even in the most spectacular manifestations of technical progress. They have again raised a specter which haunts not only the bourgeoisie but all exploitative bureaucracies: the specter of a revolution which subordinates the development of productive forces and higher standards of living to the requirements of creating solidarity for the human species, for abolishing poverty and misery beyond all national frontiers and spheres of interest, for the attainment of peace.38

While not “great refusals” as such, and more retreatist than engaged in social or political change, the rise of the counterculture should be mentioned as well. Counter-cultural critiques of the conformity, emptiness, and general repression of the times were enacted in the parks, rock concerts, backyards, and basements, extolling drugs, sex, and rock “n” roll. But while not promoting social transformation as such, their alternate aesthetics, tie-dyed clothes, tattoos, piercings, hair coiffures and colorations, and blatant celebrations of sexuality opened up spaces for political critiques and considerations of alternatives; what had been “deviant” slowly became acceptable, and today typical.

Down: Not Out---Great Refusals All good things may or may not come to an end but understanding the dialectical movement of history based on contradictions, and crises of legitimacy, (economic political or cultural), often leads to the withdrawal of loyalty to the system and openness to change, if not transformation, to overcome such crises or contradictions. This establishes conditions that may lead to another crisis.39 For example, the rise of the welfare state to alleviate worker discontent created the problem of its costs, paid through taxation, lowering productivity.40 The progressive movements of the ‘60s empowering African Americans, elevating the status of women, accepting

38 Marcuse, ix–x. 39 Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis. 40 Claus Offe and John Keane, Contradictions of The Welfare State (New York:

Routledge Press. 1964).

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their claims for sexual agency, along with massive protests against American imperialism, and after Stonewall, LGBTQ demands for equality would, as might be expected, lead to a massive backlash.41 Cosmopolitan values and identities that challenge traditional, often ahistorical essentialist identities and values typically precipitate populist backlashes and counterreactions.42 This was surely evident in 1968 with the election of Nixon, whose “states’ rights” policies meant the maintenance of racism and restriction. And Nixon pursued the war in Vietnam, notwithstanding the “communist protesters” in the street. By the late 1970s, the United States had been defeated in Vietnam, Roe vs Wade had passed, and although a few progressive groups persisted in organizing and mobilizing, it would seem as if the period of mass mobilizations was over. Not so soon! Despite the seeming quietude of the early twenty-first century, more likely the lack of attention, much as we saw the 1950s, this was also a time in which grievances were growing, ultimately leading to the Great Refusals of the current time. But this time, many of the discontents were clearly tied to the neoliberal global political economy, there were greater hardships for the majority, suffering, grievances, and ultimately a variety of contentious social movements. Thus, it becomes necessary for us to update the nature of “great refusals” for today insofar as (1) neoliberalism, fredom of markets from government regulation and retrenchments of benefits, has led to vast wealth accumulation, but only for a small few who now own/control almost half of the world’s wealth. With growing inequality, adversity, hardship, and discontent, plus new forms of organizational leadership, many people joined in collective efforts at social transformation that would alleviate discontent. (2) Moreover, the changes in character that were nascent in the 60s not only endured, but the historical transformation from authoritarianism to cosmopolitanism, from a unified self to more flexible, multiple, often contradictory bricolages of selfhood has become far more typical.

41 Norris Pippa and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2019). 42 Lauren Langman, “The Dialectic of Populism and Cosmopolitanism” in Cosmopolitanism in Hard Times, eds. Chichelli, Vincenzo and Sylvie Mesure (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 339–354; Pippa and Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism.

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Political Economy: One of the most fundamental changes in our society since the period in which Marcuse wrote was a time of relative prosperity and economic security, and the impetus for many of the social movements was largely cultural focusing primarily on creating and realizing progressive, cosmopolitan identities, lifestyles, and values. Meanwhile, the Keynesian economics that had led to a degree of economic growth then led to capitalist crises of stagflation, economic stagnation, and at the same time, rapid inflation. But meanwhile, as previously mentioned, the contradictions of Keynesian capital led to the embrace of neoliberalism as the legitimating ideology of increasingly globalized capital, that was transforming the world into a seamless deterritorialized market, with major reductions of government controls and regulations, free trade, open borders, job export, financialization, automation, “justin-time” delivery of components, privatization of heretofore government provided goods and services, and general retrenchment of social benefits. Neoliberalism promised that the free market would bring prosperity to all, nevertheless, there was growing inequality, precarity, and hardship, especially for peasants in developing countries and the working classes in the developed countries, whose jobs were being automated or sent abroad. At this point it would become evident that progressive movements, the great transformations, of the twenty-first century, would need to bring the political economy back in. While there had been a number of demonstrations and protests, especially in the Third World, for the most part they garnered little attention. This would change in Mexico. By the end of the ‘90s, we began to see a variety of peasant movements throughout the world such as via campesino or the NST (landless peasant movement). They were reactions to neoliberalism, most notably, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, who were adversely impacted, initially by NAFTA, the opening shot of neoliberalism. Their spokesman, subcommandante Marcos, a Marxist sociologist or philosopher, elegantly pleaded their case, their victimization by both the Mexican central government and foreign powers alike. The Zapatistas demanded, and ultimately gained, a degree of autonomy, (though not independence) from the central Mexican government. Importantly, they were able to utilize the then-advanced electronic means of communication to gain sympathy and funds for their struggle from around the world.43 43 Lauren Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Internetworked Social Movements,” Sociological Theory, 23, no. 1 (2005): 42–74.

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In 1999 the World Trade Organization met in Seattle to discuss trade and tariff issues. An unexpected mass movement of 50,000 progressive activists converged, organized via the Internet, suddenly appeared, and shut down the meeting. And global justice movements emerged everywhere in response to the many adversities of neoliberalism, ranging from growing inequality and precarity to the privatization of social benefits. The entire world suffers from fossil fuel-induced climate change. Throughout the world, indigenous peoples struggle to preserve their cultures and their land rights. In 2002 the World Social Forum, which first met in Brazil and has been meeting since then, till the pandemic, has remained a gathering of social justice activists struggling for a multitude of classes from all over the world.

Capitalism Hits the Fan An important aspect of neoliberalism was the reduction of governmental regulation, as was seen in the dismantling of the legislation that required a separation between commercial banking and investment banking. With legislation that breached the firewall between traditional savings banking and investment banking, speculation exploded, leading to “casino capitalism.”44 A variety of new economic instruments were created or expanded, especially the derivatives market. A number of new financial enterprises emerged, hedge funds managing leveraged buyouts, etc. In Marxist terms there was an explosion of wealth without any commensurate increase in values, commodities, or jobs, what Marx (1894 [1996]) described called “fictitious capital”45 NB! Today the value of derivatives is about $620 trillion, approximately 10 times the GNP of the world. While the various players in this new age of finance—Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, KKR—have amassed skyrocketing fortunes, for most people, the last two or three decades have seen greater inequality, stagnant or

44 Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism (London: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1986). 45 See Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 3, Chapter 29. “With the development of

interest-bearing capital and the credit system, all capital seems to double itself, and sometimes treble itself, by the various modes in which the same capital, or perhaps even the same claim on a debt, appears in different forms in different hands. The greater portion of this ‘money-capital’ is purely fictitious. All the deposits, with the exception of the reserve fund, are merely claims on the banker, which, however, never exist as deposits.”.

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declining wages, greater precarity, and for growing numbers of youth, gig jobs, temporary (often unpaid (consultancies, or internships), and astronomical indebtedness of college loans. And then came the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007 and the collapse of the derivatives/subprime mortgage market.46 Derivatives were a contract, actually a bet, between two parties based on the value and estimated value of a particular asset. As if sprinkled with magic fairy dust, subprime mortgages were transformed from debts into assets which were then bundled together, cut into tranches, marketed as investments, given erroneous credit ratings, and then sold to other banks and pension funds throughout the world. It was a house of cards at best, an illegal scam at worst, and when the teaser rates of subprime mortgages expired, the massive numbers of foreclosures took down the entire world economy. Notwithstanding the embrace of neoliberalism, the solution was old-fashioned Keynesian economics. The government printed trillions of dollars to bail out the major banks and some heartland industries. In the United States banking executives received huge bonuses. Only in some countries like Iceland did the bankers go to jail.

The Return of Refusals For Marcuse the fundamental goal of the “great refusals” was a radical transformation of society, seeking not simply reforms, or even more generous redistribution agendas, but a more radical and total social transformation that enabled the full realization of biological/libidinal basis of personal and collective freedom for creative self-realization within an egalitarian, cosmopolitan community providing mutual recognition hearing sharing and dignity for all. Such a society would require the transcendence of capitalism, the end of private property and class domination which are inimical to human fulfillment and meaningful social attachment among “freely associated people.” Such individual and communal freedom meant overcoming the inherent domination and alienation of 46 Subprime mortgages are typically given to people that are likely to be higher risk, often induced by low rate ARMs, adjustable-rate mortgages, and for many less sophisticated buyers, buying a three bedroom house in the suburbs for thousand dollars a month may seem like a dream come true, but that dream becomes a nightmare when the payment goes up to $3000, which meant that the borrower loses his/her home, the bank, having “bundled” mortgages together, has sold the packages as investments and so they were unlikely to suffer losses. Lehman Brothers was not so fortunate.

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capitalism. For a variety of reasons such a transformation will not, nor cannot possibly, be a replay of 1917 or even 1949. There will be no storming of the Winter Palace by an alliance of peasants and industrial workers organized by a Communist Party. Indeed, for a variety of reasons the working classes might not be the primary agents of social change.47 But that said, Marcuse’s legacy nevertheless provides us with a vision of the possible which gives us a hope for its realization. It is extremely important that the social movements of the ‘60s were quite different from more traditional social movements, such as workers seeking better wages and/or working conditions, political parties/organizations mobilized for or against a particular policy, or even revolution. The Montgomery bus boycotts, for example, were mass direct actions in which the entire African-American population of the city joined together to refuse to use the bus system, causing a severe drain on city finances. This form of protest was a very different strategy with a broader range of social actors that would influence the movements of the 1960s. They resonated among larger numbers, and many organizations joined the protest. Elements of this strategy were seen in the protests of civil rights activists, anti-war groups, feminists, gay rights, and perhaps most clearly, in the 1968 protests in Paris, Prague, and Chicago, the spirit of which was captured by Marcuse. As noted, the protests of the time did not fully consider the implications of political economy, and for the recent movements the economic factors have become more salient. Welcome back Karl! With neoliberalism came growing inequality, indeed, impoverishment, and precarity that was especially difficult in countries with corrupt, indifferent, typically undemocratic, comprador leadership that were able to garner vast fortunes as most of the population suffered. This was especially the case in the Middle East after the 2007–8 meltdowns. In Tunisia, at the end of 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a poor street peddler was asked for a bribe 47 For Marcuse, between mass media and consumerism, revolutionary fervor of the workers had waned, and he saw young college students, along with minorities as the primary agents of social change. Moreover, the working classes, typically with less than college education, typically authoritarian, not only reluctant to change but quite often quite racist and prone to support reactionary politics. But as this chapter has tried to argue, things have changed radically since Marcuse’s time, and there are many segments of the working classes that do support radical social change in many do support progressive change. Moreover, given the current economic circumstances, we do see a resurgence of unionization especially among many professions such as healthcare, teaching, etc.

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by a policeman. It was a bribe too much, he set himself afire and ignited a wave of protests across the Middle East that came to be known as the Arab Spring. These twenty-first-century “great refusals” quickly spread across the Middle East to Egypt, Libya, Syria, etc., and in a short time similar protests erupted in Greece, Spain, and Portugal protesting the austerity imposed by Brussels.48 There were widespread, mass protests, and occupations of town squares. In the short run, they might ultimately have failed or degenerated into anarchy, but the genie was let out of the bottle, and we must be reminded that for many social movements, it often takes generations to accomplish earlier goals. Let us note, however, some of the more recent social movements that can give us hope. Occupy Wall Street Meanwhile, Adbusters, a satirical anti-consumer magazine, called for an occupation of Wall Street. Bingo! A large number of progressive activists protested, and faced a number of violent confrontations with the police, but ultimately established a camp in Zuccotti Park in New York (renamed Liberty Park) near Wall Street and for a short time, engaged in a number of progressive activities and most memorably, offered a critique of the growing inequality, especially the growing wealth of the 1%. The nature of this inequality was clear after the subprime mortgage crisis and implosion when the bankers responsible got huge bonuses rather than jail sentences, as the protesters chanted, “They got bailed out we got sold out.” While these movements were clearly a reaction to economic adversities, equally salient, and perhaps more so, they could be considered “mobilizations for dignity,” as young cohorts face ever greater precarity but were given little recognition. Encampments and occupations suddenly sprouted up across the country and, in many other countries as well. The occupiers were provided with food, clothing, books, medical services, etc. For a few months, much like the Paris commune, a “leaderless,” egalitarian community was democratically organized, in the endless meetings, all voices were likely to be heard. But given the anarchist/horizontalist nature of the 48 Lauren Langman, Tova Benski, et al., “From the streets and squares to social movement studies: what have we learned,” in Current Sociology, 16, no. 4 (2013): 54–61. The Southern European protests were as much directed toward the EU financial policies as much as the local leadership allied to Brussels who pushed the austerity programs.

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occupations, eschewing political parties (“the deathbed of movements”), the camps were eventually shut down by the police—often violently. But was there any impact? For the corporate media the movement was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But that was not quite true, beginning with the fact that the national discussions and consciousness moved from fretting over debt and austerity to inequality and precarity. Moreover, while many aspects of OWS were evident in earlier social movements, organization via the Internet/social media, radical equality, participatory democracy, and everyday life within the occupations as a glimpse of what a transformed future might be, OWS contributed to the transformation from critique and discontent to activism that would become a model for subsequent movements such as sunrise, 350.org, BLM, or #MeToo. As such, much like the Situationists decades earlier, OWS provided a template for strategy and organization that will be necessary to fully achieve the transformative, emancipatory goals of great refusals. We may perhaps also mention that the upsurge in youth activism would become evident in the support for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns—surely undermined by the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, but nevertheless, the growing strength of the party’s progressive wing has had some impact on elections and government policies, not the least of which has been the rejection of neoliberalism. Might this be considered a great refusal? No, it remains reformist however progressive, but it does nevertheless expand the space for organizing the emancipatory “wars of position” necessary to realize radical, total transformation. Social Justice: The struggles for racial justice in the United States have a very long history, perhaps beginning with the English Quaker efforts to end the slave trade, slave revolts, abolition, and the Civil War. Organizations, especially the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Council, were the primary actors mobilizing the increasing numbers of discontented African Americans, especially in the South with the persistence of Jim Crow laws and lynchings. In the North, where most African Americans lived in highly segregated communities, structural racism served to maintain subordinated life chances and social positions reinforced interpersonal racism and interaction. While there have been a number of recent mobilizations in response to the indiscriminate violence, and even murder of, African Americans in the past decade not only has there been continued if not rising numbers of murders of Blacks by whites, all followed by protests (think of Ferguson). In 2013, following the well-publicized murder of Trevon

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Martin, a small group of activists went online with #BlackLivesMatter, now a national—indeed international—collection, more or less a decentralized, anti-capitalism movement with relatively autonomous chapters emerging nationwide, sharing information, coordinating protests and actions. And then came the murder of George Floyd in 2019 at the hands of the police (should we say the knee on the neck). But given the ubiquity of cell phones the murder was videotaped, went viral and all could hear his pleas for air. Within a short time, there were massive protests across the country, which the New York Times called the largest movement in American history. Indeed, on June 6, 2020, 25 million Americans across the country in big cities and small towns marched in protest. Rarely does a social movement attract more than 3% of the population. But in this case, protesting the murder of George Floyd about 10% of adult Americans marched, held rallies, protests, and/or posted signage support for BLM from their homes. Feminism: Following the second way feminisms of the ‘60s, between organizing, protesting, litigation, and running for office slowly but surely, feminism was embraced by more and more women, especially women with higher education, acutely aware of the multitudinous nature of female oppression, sexual harassment, and indeed assault. There were growing demands that women have the right to control their own bodies/reproduction. As we have seen, oppressed groups often suffer in silence, but certain conditions or events trigger voices, especially the angry voices of victims. This became very clear with the rise of the “MeToo” movement, another grassroots, bottom-up movement, organized via the Internet, that became the marker that women would no longer be willing to suffer in silence, often with shame and self-blame but instead, would become empowered and break the silence by naming victimizers and abusers. If the statistics are reasonably close to being representative, about one-fourth of all women face some kind of sexual harassment and 1/8 have actually been raped. Important markers of the effects of refusal movements would of course note how hundreds of otherwise rich, powerful men have had to face the consequences of their actions, Harvey Weinstein is the prime example, Jeff Epstein, Bill O’Reilly, and most recently Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Hundreds of men have been exposed. More recently, in response to Trump with his history of blatant sexism, sexual assault, and boastful pride in genital grabbing, following his election came the massive women’s March in Washington in 2017.

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And more recently, while this paper was being written, there were massive abortion-rights protests throughout the country. Gay Rights: As was previously noted, LGBTQ has moved from a denigrated minority considered perverts to the mainstream of the American population, as seen in the many celebrities that have come out and are warmly accepted by their fans. Millionaire captains of industry have also come out as well as a number of politicians being openly gay and sometimes bi-sexual. The majority of Americans now accept gay marriage. Ecology: Perhaps the most important transformative movements in progress now are the various ecology movements, clear in the 60s when Marcuse not only criticized the domination of technological reason, but the extent to which capitalism did violence to Nature. There are many who say that the ever more devastating climate change/global warming might be thought of as mother nature fighting back. However, poetic that might be, scientific opinion warns that if global warming continues, we may very well face a “sixth extinction.”49

Conclusion: Wither the Telos? As right-wing governments have attained power, often the result of authoritarian populist movements, the future may seem quite bleak— but if we seriously consider the analysis given to us by Marcuse, there is room for hope. As is now evident, Marcuse was not only one of the most acute observers of the social movements of the 1960s, but he was also in many ways amazingly prescient. Fifty years later, his work critiquing the adverse qualities of capitalism, from its alienation and deformation of human subjectivity to its one-dimensional thought (an important ingredient of contemporary anti-intellectualism, anti-scientism, and embrace of conspiracy theories), and his demands for radical transformation to not only realize a more democratic, humanistic, and gratifying society, but the very preservation of the human species calling for “a liberation which must precede the construction of a free society, one which necessitates a historical break with the past and the present.”50 The goal of great refusals would be a complete transformation of society, moving beyond

49 Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt and Co., 2014). 50 Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 7.

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a fossil fuel-based capitalism in which most work is alienating, while its hegemonic mass culture offers escapism and palliatives; it’s media, now including the Internet, totally intertwined with consumerism, valorizing “having” over “being,” colonizes desire to ensure the reproduction of capital, creates huge profits for the few while thwarting and contorting human fulfillment.51 The broader impact of Marcuse’s work has had little impact on mainstream social movement theory and research, but as neoliberalism implodes before our eyes and capitalist crises proliferate (including evermutating COVID and devastating climate change), there is now a growing interest in his work. There are several points that were essential to his perspective yet endure. Bottom-up movements : These refusals were not directed or organized by authoritarian hierarchies. Indeed, Marcuse was very critical of authoritarian “top-down” Stalinist-Leninist leadership in the role of the Communist Party in the former USSR. Quite often, as seen in contemporary mobilizations, small groups of progressive activists go online and send out a message that resonates with many others who then forward that message to a plethora of “submerged networks”—then hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands, if not more suddenly join in these contemporary social justice movements.52 They tend to be highly decentralized, and leadership tends to be emergent, democratic and typically embraces horizontalism.53 Cohort flow: In addition to these mobilizations being more spontaneous, bottom-up movements that mobilize broader segments of the population, it would seem, given the current political power and massmediated visibility of conservative, if not reactionary leadership, it is quite easy to overestimate their actual power. The shrillness of their diatribes, typically breaking all the rules of political decorum and seeming fortitude makes reflects how strongly they are motivated by anger, humiliation, ressentiment, and shame as their hierarchical, authoritarian identities, values, and lifestyles are slowly but surely leaving the stage of world 51 Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be. 52 Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in

Contemporary Societies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 53 The horizontalism embraced by Graeber and Sitrin, a twenty-first-century version of the anarchism of the Paris commune often has its drawbacks to promoting a general consensus.

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history, facing culture demise and psychosocial extinction, they are desperately trying to resist, if not reverse the course of history. And while they may well succeed in the short term, we often forget that these backslash movements, resisting progressive social change, are basically fighting rearguard actions to forestall extinction. The analysis of “cohort flow” and the generational mediation of social change is quite central to this discussion.54 Mannheim (1972) argued that the larger social context, the historical context, the state of the economy, political realities, culture, and perhaps crises that occur, which impacts identities, values, and lifestyles of every generation at that stage in the life course when individuals are most likely to seek autonomy from their parents and are most open to change (although within each generation there are different “generation units” that may have fundamentally different responses and reactions to the context). Historical change not only leads to a different context for every generation, which in turn leads to historical transformation of social character, as was pointed out by Erich Fromm (1947). Moreover, values shaped by the context of one’s youth generally tend to endure, and over time, as generations move through the life course the youth of today eventually replace older cohorts that hold power. What had at one time been highly progressive if not radical and even deviant, becomes acceptable, and eventually typical, the new normal. But the important point is that the social conditions of today, and for the last several decades, have generally fostered a more liberal, tolerant society. But each step forward, whether by racial minorities, women, LGBTQ, or the ecology movement, precipitates backlashes that resist progressive change. But then these reactionary backlashes themselves foster progressive backlashes. Thus, social change is a cyclic process of change/resistance to change that in fact again fosters change; it is not a clear-cut linear sequence. In the Victorian era sexuality of any kind, especially for women, was seen as a dire threat to the very existence of civilization. As we began to see some change, we also saw the banning of birth control information. Today, a century later for most people, at least in the advanced industrial countries, sexuality is considered rather ho-hum, about as exciting as the morning weather forecast. But at the same time, even today, various “right to life” movements still attempt, and often succeed, to maintain control of women’s bodies. 54 Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 276–320.

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La Lucha Continua: But even though the ‘68 Paris protests were a response to the conditions of the French proletariat, NSM theory completely moved away from political economy to largely focus on contestations over identities and values in the cultural terrains, at least until the Arab Spring.55 Today there is an 800-pound gorilla in the room, neoliberalism, and many of the refusals we have are responses to greater inequality and precarity along racial, gender, or gender orientation lines. This has led many young (and not so young) people to understand the need to move beyond neoliberalism, indeed beyond capitalism, abolish private property and wage labor. While seemingly all-powerful, as has been pointed out, between its contradictions, failures, and growing hardships, the adversities of capitalism have become more and more evident, especially after the pandemic. As we pointed out, a critical theory of social movements in the shadows of the Marxist critique of political economy must necessarily consider the importance of political economy. Only a postcapitalist egalitarian society can move from the pursuit of wealth to the conditions that enable genuine, participatory democracy, equality of all, freedom, fulfillment, and perhaps most important the very survival of our species. As we survey the contemporary world is increasingly evident between its extreme inequality, and its inability to ameliorate its consequences, including adequately dealing with COVID, we can already see a variety of movements that would seek a different kind of political economy. The telos of history are impelled by dialectical contradictions between class interests, between generations, and between the promises of capitalism and the reality of its adversities. As society moves toward greater self-knowledge and freedom, not in a linear fashion, but in a dialectic of progress that evokes backlash and counter-reactions, these counter-reactions evoke resistance that takes a progressive form. Given these conditions, today we also see a growing number of “organic intellectuals,” informed by Gramsci’s notions of hegemony, the ideological control of culture, and the need for a “war of position” to not simply transcend capitalism, to realize a new subjectivity, a “new sensibility.” As we survey the political and cultural trends of today the analysis of great refusals offered by Marcuse seems more relevant than ever, ever more vindicated, and perhaps most important gives us a measure at a time of growing hopelessness.

55 Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope (London: Polity Press, 2014).

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Thank you, Herbert Marcuse.

References Antonio Gramsci, (1971). Quintin Hoare (Editor) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers. C. Wright Mills, (1959). The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press. David Reisman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, (1950). The Lonely Crowd. New York: Oxford University Press. Erich Fromm, (1947). Man for Himself . New York: Henry Holt and Company. Erich Fromm, (1955). The Same Society. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Herbert Marcuse, (1955). Eros and Civilization. Boston: Beacon Press. Herbert Marcuse, (1969). Essay on Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. Hobbes, (1651 [2012]). Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Immanuel Kant, (1781 [1929]). Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N.K. Smith, London: Macmillan. Karl Marx, (F. Engels, Ed.) (1894 [1996]). Das Kapital, Volume III, Part V Chapter 25. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing. Robert Nisbet, (1953). The Quest for Community. New York: Oxford University Press. Sigmund Freud, (1930 [1962]). Civilization and its Discontents. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Sigmund Freud, (1913 [1960]). Totem and Taboo. New Yori: W. W. Norton & Company Wilhelm Reich, (1933 [1980]). The Mass Psychology of Fascism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Weber, Max, (1978). Guenther Roth; Claus Wittich (eds.). Economy and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 24–6, 399–400

PART II

Neoliberalism and Technological Rationality

CHAPTER 8

Multiple Subjectivities in Neoliberal Times: Reflections from a Critical Theory in Latin America Stefan Gandler

In order to understand the multiple existing forms of subjectivity (in cultural, geographical, and civilizational terms, or in the critical Marxist terminology: in terms of the use value side of production and consumption) in neoliberal times, we will start from contributions made outside the so-called “first world” with the Ecuadorian-Mexican philosopher Bolívar Echeverría. Echeverría is an important Latin-American author in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. To understand the multiplicity of subjectivities that exist today, he begins by analyzing the relationship between use value and communication, which is the conceptual base of his theory of the four ethe of capitalist modernity. Echeverría set himself a

S. Gandler (B) Coordinador del Cuerpo Académico Modernidad, Desarrollo y Región, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, Querétaro, Qro., Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_8

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task that cannot be resolved easily. He wants to provide concrete content to the concept of praxis, and thereby to grasp it in its historical dimension. The problem consists of the following: if the concept of praxis is inseparably linked to the concept of the autonomous subject who freely decides, then how can this “free action” be understood as something determinate, with concrete content? How can we theoretically reproduce this complex ensemble of particular subjective decisions on the basis of historical-concrete conceptual determinations, which must necessarily seek out the general ? To put it differently, and more closely in line with the materialist theory of culture toward which Echeverría aspires: how is it possible to understand a specific cultural determination of human praxis, especially the productive (and consumptive) one, without falling into ethnologizing human subjects in their respective everyday forms of reproduction or constructing biological fixations? Echeverría, who does not limit human culture to its “elevated” forms—for example, art at a gallery—and bases his analysis, rather, on the precise manner of material reproduction (as the unity of production and consumption). He finds an adequate image of this relationship between freedom and tradition, between individuality and a historically and geographically determined collectivity in human languages and their innumerable speech acts and in a science that studies the relation of interdependence among them: semiology, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure. To develop this semiotic image of human praxis, Echeverría refers to authors like Roman Jakobson and Louis Hjelmslev.1 In his article “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social” he supplements his analysis, on average every two pages, with graphics with schematic representations 1 See Bolívar Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” Cuadernos Políticos, 41: (1984), 33–46. Bolívar Echeverría emphasizes the importance of these two authors in his study of the natural form: “To a certain degree I approximated above all Jakobson and Hjelmslev, they are the two that I treat as crucial in questions of semiology and linguistics” (Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, 11 September 1996, in the Faculty of Philosophy and Arts of the UNAM. In the absence of a unified counting method, the tape position is indicated according to the apparatus utilized (Panasonic 608), here: cassette I, side A, pos. 247–250 [cited hereafter as Interview with Bolívar Echeverría].) In so doing, he draws support from Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in Style and Language (New York: Wiley, 1960); Roman Jackobson, ‘Two Aspects of Languages and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ in Selected Writings, II: World and Language (The Hague: Mouton,1971); Louis Hjelmslev, La Stratification du Langage, in Essais Linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971 [1954]), 55. See Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 42, 3, and 40.

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of the processes of communication and reproduction which allow us to grasp the authors’ similarity visually.2 We should not overlook his affinity for Saussure’s figures, although Echeverría’s are much more complex and can only be understood after a meticulous study of the primary text in question. Here, what is crucial is the fact that Echeverría does not refer to semiotics in order to grasp all reality as a mere sign and thereby to see history only as an “unfinished text,” but the opposite. Echeverría posits the indissoluble unity between the process of production of use values and the process of production of meanings. In this sense, the work process is conceived as a process of social communication, process of production, circulation, and consumption of message goods, as a sign process. Every time we work, we inscribe a meaning in the matter worked.3 Not only does Echeverría want to demonstrate that the first and fundamental human sign system is, in every case, that of the various forms of producing and consuming use values, but he wants to show even more than this: for Echeverría, the communication process is a dimension of the process of reproduction. “So I make visible a parallel between the process of reproduction and that of communication. … That is to say, the latter (the process of communication) is an aspect, a dimension of the former [which is to say, the process of reproduction].”4 That is, the process of reproduction can be compared to the process of communication not because the world as a totality can only be grasped as a complicated combination of “texts” and “ways of reading,” but the reverse. Communication, as the unity of the production and consumption of signs, is in itself one among many productive and consumptive acts that human

2 See Carlos Oliva Mendoza, “Los Diagramas de Bolívar Echeverría: Producción, Consumo y Circulación Semiótica,” in Valenciana: Estudios de Filosofía y Letras, 11: (2013), 186–187. This mention of the schematic representation and its capacity to represent visually the problem must not be taken as a secondary subject. More authors have noted the importance of these exercises within Echeverría’s thought. As is clearly noted by Carlos Oliva, Echeverría’s “reflection, in much of his work, is full of figures. They are not an exercise of youth or training.” Moreover, the author adds that these figures are “metaphysical schemas that try to show the primordial relation of the human being with the nature and the matter.”. 3 Concepción Tonda, “La Teoría Crítica de la Cultura en Bolívar Echeverría,” in Raquel Serur Smeke Bolívar Echeverría Modernidad y resistencias (Mexico City: UAM/Era, 2015), 163. 4 Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, cassette 1, side A, pos. 264–267.

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beings must undertake in order to organize and maintain their lives, but it isn’t the fundamental form of human life itself, which inevitably has materiality as its foundation: Speech [el lenguaje]5 in its basic, verbal realization is also a process of the production/consumption of objects. The speaker presents to the listener a transformation of nature: his voice modifies the acoustic state of the atmosphere, and this change, this object, is perceived or consumed as such by the ear of the other.6

Echeverría is concerned with explaining the process of producing and consuming use values through reference to the theoretical contributions of semiotics, but without denying the primacy of nature and the primacy of the material as the inalienable foundation of human communication. Here, we find an essential difference vis-à-vis a series of contemporary approaches which are caught up in the concept of communication (or related conceptions, for example, that of “articulation”), and which see its theoretical horizon, real or imagined, as both the explanation and the salvation of the world. Saussure subordinates linguistics to semiotics (sémiologie)7 and realizes that knowledge of the “true nature of language” is only possible within 5 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 9. Evidently, by “lenguaje” [“speech”] Echeverría understands what Ferdinand de Saussure (who he cited at various points in the text here analyzed) calls langage. Saussure also uses this term as a synonym for faculté de langage and explains: “l’exercice du langage repose sur une faculté que nous tenons de la nature.” (Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot, 1979, 25). English translation: “the use of speech is based on a natural faculty.” Saussure already indicates here that we should understand by “langage” [“lenguaje” in Spanish] not only the languages [“langue” in French, “lengua” in Spanish] spoken, but also the totality of all possible forms of expression or also of forms of exteriorization; it should be used to refer to any systematization or homogenization of any forms of expression. Note: “Whereas speech is heterogeneous, language, as defined, is homogeneous … Language, once its boundaries have been marked off within the speech data, can be classified among human phenomena, whereas speech cannot” (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 15). Compare also: “faculty of speech” (Saussure, 10). 6 Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 45. Echeverría refers here to Nicolas S. Troubetzkoy, Principes de Phonologie, trans. J. Cantineau (Paris: Klincksieck, 1970), 38. 7 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 16. “Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics,

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the category of “all other systems of the same order [tous les autres systèmes du meme ordre]”8 which semiotics studies. Echeverría, on the other hand, seeks to classify semiotics (understood by him as the production and consumption of signs) under the even broader field of production and consumption in general. It is clear that Saussure and Echeverría differ notably from one another, since Saussure considers semiotics to be embedded within social psychology, and, in turn, within psychology in general, while Echeverría’s system of reference is the critique of political economy.9 Nevertheless, we can find a parallel between the two, since in their study of the general, they both set out from the most complex among particular objects. Saussure writes: Signs that are wholly arbitrary realize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches of semiology although language is only one particular semiological system.10

and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts.”. 8 Saussure, 17. “But to me the language problem is mainly semiological, and all developments derive their significance from that important fact. If we are to discover the true nature of language we must learn what it has in common with all other semiological systems.”. 9 Saussure, 16. “A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable; it would be a part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology; I shall call it semiology (from Greek s¯emîon ‘sign’).” Elsewhere he speaks not of “social psychology” but “group psychology” (Saussure, 78). Note that Saussure implicitly understands social psychology as a science whose object is “society” [“la vie social” (Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, 33)]. So what interests Saussure is to establish the semiotics he has founded within the social sciences, with the only limitation being that he here thinks about above all social psychology, which is to say, he seems to see society first of all determined by one aspect of those dynamics that Marx calls “ideological forms,” distinguishing them from the “economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science.” See Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Nahum Issac Stone (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1903), 12. 10 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68.

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Against Western Productivism Despite all of the differences, there is a degree of similarity with Marx’s methodological procedure, summarized in the phrase: “The anatomy of the human being is the key to the anatomy of the ape.”11 Formulated differently, Saussure’s method reminds us of the Marxian distinction between the trajectory of research and the trajectory of explanation, which, in the case of Capital, move to a large extent in opposite directions. Echeverría, who wants to link Marx with semiotics, also seeks to employ a similar method in his research. In his analysis of production and consumption generally, he refers largely to the production and consumption of signs. He does not choose this approach because the latter are more important than other forms of production or consumption, but quite simply because it is in semiotics that we can grasp something general, and moreover because the production and consumption of anything, above all objects with use value, always contains production and consumption of signs. Moreover, there is a broad presence of communicative elements in material reproduction itself. One could feel tempted to retort “naturally, since to organize the process of reproduction it is necessary to communicate; it is necessary to discuss projects, to resolve problems verbally and to carry out other linguistic acts.” While this is correct, it is not the central aspect of Echeverría’s understanding of how similar and interwoven the processes of reproduction and communication are. Rather, he sees in the very production and consumption of use values an act of “communication,”12 and possibly the most decisive communicative act for social life itself. For example, prepare a meal and eat it is, in Echeverría’s theory, to produce a determinate sign and to interpret it.

11 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 300. 12 Already in his earliest works, Echeverría suggests the importance of other types

of languages distinct from commonplace ones. However, in so doing he does not refer to economic praxis, as in his more recent works, but rather to political praxis. See, in this regard: “For the guerrilla discursive propaganda is essential, but this arrives afterward, when it can fall upon fertile soil.” (Bolívar Echeverría, “Einführung,” in Ernesto Guevara, ¡Hasta la victoria siempre! Eine Biographie mit einer Einführung von Bolívar Echeverría. Zusammengestellt von Horst Kurnitzky, trans. Alex Schubert. Berlin (West): Verlag Peter von Maikowski, 1968, 16–17). It is clear that these formulations are separated by a chasm from the idea of a ‘coercion-free discourse’ or anything of the sort.

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To produce and consume objects is to produce and consume meanings [significaciones ]. To produce is to communicate [mitteilen], to propose a use value of nature to someone else; to consume is to interpret [auslegen], to validate this use value that another has found. To appropriate nature is to make it meaningful [significativa].13

We find, here, an important difference between the production of use value and the production of value generally. Capitalist production can leave aside the real satisfaction of human needs if the creation of surplus value is guaranteed. The catch lies in the fact that the production of surplus value cannot be completely independent from the production of use value, which is its “natural” foundation. It is from this point, for Echeverría, that the possibility of overcoming the apparently eternal capitalist mode of production emerges. Marx bases his hopes for putting an end to the ruling relations on the fact that the current social formation cannot exist without proletarians, and hence they are the potential revolutionary subject. In contrast with this view, Echeverría is not fixated exclusively on production, and he critiques Marx on this point. As Diana Fuentes notes: Echeverría emphasizes that in Marx’s work there is no thematization of what should be understood by “concretion” of life; there is no specific problematization of the consistency of the use value of things, nor of the natural form of social reproduction.14

Echeverría’s point of departure lies more in the unity of production and consumption, and with it, in the unity of the production of value and the production of use value, since it is only in consumption that we can determine if an object effectively has use value and with it value as well (which Marx formulates succinctly when he says that a product must

13 Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social”, 42. Here, Echeverría refers to the following text: André Leroi-Gourham, Le geste et la parole, I: Technique et langage (Paris: A. Michel, 1964), 163. 14 Diana Fuentes, “Semiótica de la Vida Cotidiana: Bolívar Echeverría,” in Mabel

Moraña, Para una Crítica de la Modernidad Capitalista: Dominación y Resistencia en Bolívar Echeverría (Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Boívar/Corporación Editora Nacional/El Equilibrista, 2014), 238. As mentioned before, is here where Echeverría believes that, through the task of providing a concrete content to praxis, is possible to reconstruct Critical Theory.

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realize its value in the market).15 It is only a product’s use value that makes it possible for it to be consumed and, therefore, to be bought in the first place. Thus, Echeverría, inspired by Marx, takes as his starting point the claim that the production of value does not proceed without the production of use value, but rather that it simultaneously and by necessity controls, oppresses to an increasing degree, and tends toward the destruction of that use value; in this it is possible to note one of the central contradictions of the neoliberal production: as it produces use value, it produces it in direct subordination to value.16 This antagonistic contradiction inherent to the capitalist mode of production gives him some indication of a possible way out. Dogmatic, Soviet-style Marxism presumed that the way out of capitalism lay in simply overcoming shortages of working-class consumer products, to be accomplished through a massive and continuous increase in the productive forces, which entailed a narrow productivism, a naïve progressivism, and the most brutal methods for increasing productivity under Stalinism.17 Subsequently, with the rejection of Soviet-style Marxism, Echeverría separates himself from dogmatic leftist thinking; while the Mexican-Ecuadorian thinker critically appropriates the concept of use vale, his contemporaries Enrique Ramírez y Ramírez, Miguel Aroche Parra, Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo, and Carlos Sánchez Cárdenas enclosed themselves in a pragmatic-mechanic approach to Marx. As Aureliano Ortega Esquivel writes of the Central American Marxist tradition:

15 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I, trans. B. Fowkes (London: Penguin 1976), 179–180. “Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values. On the other hand, they must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values. For the labor expended on them only counts in so far as it is expended in a form, which is useful for others. However, only the act of exchange can prove whether that labor is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others.” 16 Marx himself notes this contradiction and shows its importance, mainly in the chapter “The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret thereof” of the first volume of the Capital. 17 Observe also, in this respect, the powerfully Eurocentric tendency of Stalinism, in

which the scarce efforts (by Lenin, above all) in the first post-revolutionary years to eliminate or soften racist oppression toward the non-Russian inhabitants of the Soviet Union (efforts which materialized as a degree of sovereignty, in particular autonomous regions under the banner of different nationalities), were practically abandoned, restoring the Tsarist model of Russian control over the entire territory.

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Mexican Marxism from the 1930s to the 1960s gained the status of “dogmatic” on the basis of its reluctance to think for itself and, in contrast, its docility and complete surrender, as far as theory is concerned, to the Dictates of Soviet Marxism in their Stalinist and post-Stalinist versions, themselves examples of evident dogmatism and a scandalously erroneous interpretation of the original ideas of Karl Marx.18

Echeverría, like the majority of Western Marxist thinkers, believed that in quantitative terms, the satisfaction of all human needs has long been possible through the deployment of a relatively limited amount of labor. According to him, the problem lies not in the quantitative, but in the qualitative: what is produced and how it is produced, or in other words, the question of production and consumption insofar as these refer to use value: Only the reconstruction of the critical and radical concept of use-value can demonstrate the absence of a basis for that identification of Marxism with Western productivism, the economistic progressivism of capitalism, and bourgeois political statism.19 18 Aureliano Ortega Esquivel, “El Pesamiento Teórico-filosófico de Bolívar Echeverría en el Contexto del Marxismo Mexicano,” in Diana Fuentes, Isaac García Venegas y Carlos Oliva Mendoza Bolívar Echeverría: Crítica e Interpretación (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México / Itaca, 2012), 185–186. According to Aureliano Ortega Esquivel, Mexican commitment to leftist thinking and Marx’s works can be classified into four different groups: dogmatic Marxism, academic Marxism, pre-critical or non-dogmatic Marxism, and critical Marxism. Of these, the only group that actually interpreted Marx taking into account the Mexican context without subordinating it to the Eurocentric point of view was the last one. Among others, the most important members alongside Echeverría were José Revueltas, Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, Pedro López Díaz, Jaime Labastida, Carlos Pereyra, and Juan Garzón Bates. The theoretical distance between the first group and the last one can be explained, mostly, by two reasons: first of all, the dogmatic thinkers were more politically than philosophically active, with their works presenting anecdotal and descriptive studies of Mexican reality. Thereby it is possible to find books like La Derrota Ferrocarrilera de 1959 (Aroche Parra 1960) and Evolución del Movimiento Juvenile Mexicano (Ramírez y Ramírez 1966). And, lastly, the critical group, in addition to their philosophical vocation, had an important poetic and literary background, mostly incarnated by Revueltas, who wrote Ensayo Sobre un Proletariado sin Cabeza (1962). This allowed their thinkers, in the next decades, to write El Sujeto de la Historia (Pereyra 1976) and La Filosofía Política: arma opresiva o liberadora en América Latina (López Díaz 1981). 19 Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 34. The cited phrase continues: “[an identification] that led K. Korsch in 1950 … to raise again, for the second half of the century, the theme, vulgarised in the 70s, of the inadequacy of Marxist

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In this passage, two themes are touched when Echeverría makes a critique of the “identification of Marxism with Western productivism.” In the first place, he indicates the need for a critique of Eurocentrism, something which has not been surmounted on the Left, even in non-dogmatic sectors. The terminology of “developed” and “underdeveloped” countries—naïvely taken up all too often—expresses a deeply rooted economistic productivism which underhandedly elevates the productive forces and their technical-industrial perfection (in the sense of being competitive under capitalist conditions) to the characteristic of “development” in general. This also includes the presumption of a “natural” need for the constant development of productive forces, which is only an unavoidable necessity under prevailing social conditions. In the framework of this logic, some countries are “more developed” than others, but the resulting hierarchization of the world acquires the status of dogma and continues to function even among critics of the capitalist mode of production. In a certain sense, Eurocentrism is more problematic on the Left than in conservative theory. For conservatives, Eurocentrism emerges necessarily from their uncritical reflection on power relations; on the Left, however, it can only be explained as an ideological remnant of cultural chauvinism.20 Secondly, the passage cited from Echeverría contains an implicit response to Martin Heidegger, whose work kept the former occupied during many years of his youth. When Echeverría insists that Marx does not constitute an integral part of “Western” thought, but that the concept of use value “necessarily moves beyond Western metaphysics,”21 he unequivocally rejects Heidegger’s assertion that Marx is the ultimate representative of Western metaphysics.

discourse for the requirements of the new historical form of the revolution.” Echeverría is referring to Karl Korsch, “10 Thesen über Marxismus Heute,” Alternative: Zeitschrift für Literatur und Diskussion, 8, no. 41 (1965), 89–90. 20 In this Echeverría can be distinguished—despite all the similarities—from Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. Thus, for example, while the critique and analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment admittedly mentions “European civilization” (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. G. Schmid Noerr, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, 9) as the central object of the investigation, its ethnocentric character is not taken as a theme. 21 Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 35 n. 4.

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Marx and Saussure Returning to the question of how we can understand the relationship between subject and object as determinate (according to the laws of physics, for example), and at the same time marked by human freedom, we can now approach the question in Echeverría’s terms. As indicated, it is possible to trace parallels between the processes of reproduction and communication without de-materializing the former or reinterpreting it idealistically. But in the process of communication, we find both freedom and new creation in each speech act and the simultaneous determination by the language in which the act of communication occurs. It is only because a certain degree of freedom exists in the act of speech that constellations of meaning can be expressed. But at the same time, a speaker only can make themselves understood when they move within a predefined language and accept its rules. Something similar can be said of the production and consumption of use values. The producer cannot simply fabricate anything whatsoever if they want it to be recognized by others as having use value, which is to say, to be purchased. Here, it is not merely humans’ biological capacity for consumption that is decisive; it is precisely here that the decisive difference between humans and animals lies. In the human being, the process of distinguishing between a useful and a useless thing, which is to say between use value and its absence, is influenced by historical factors— while animals lack this historical dimension—. Marx already indicates as much in the passage: “The discovery … of the manifold uses of things is the work of history.”22 In Echeverría’s exposition of Marx’s theory of use value, the concept of history includes “geographical asynchronies” (in the sense that place, and not only time, factors into historical analysis). In the comparison of reproduction with communication, it is of great importance to identify instances in both processes of what Saussure terms “signified” and “signifier,” objects whose unity is represented by a sign. In language, the former represents the “concept” and the latter the “acoustic image.” The pure concept, however, is just as empty as the pure image; neither is imaginable as isolated from the other. Saussure suggests that the presumption of a pure concept, without an image, contains the thought

22 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 125.

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that there can exist mature ideas prior to their linguistic expression,23 a view that he clearly rejects. Before returning to the comparison of communication with the production of use values, we must keep in mind the fact that Echeverría, in referring to Walter Benjamin, takes as his point of departure the fact that human beings express themselves and make themselves understood not only through languages but also in them. In this sense, languages are not fixed systems which are merely employed as means of communication but are created anew and modified with each communicative act.24 Echeverría interprets Benjamin’s claim as valid for all sign systems,25 but just as every speech act (“parole” for Saussure) calls into question language as a totality (“langue” in Saussure), the same occurs in the production and consumption of use values. Echeverría understands the unity of the production and consumption of use values in the same way that semiotics understands speech (langage) as the capacity to make oneself understood in a way that is not chaotic but is nevertheless free. Not “free” in the sense that completely new signs 23 Echeverría, l “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 97. 24 Echeverría, 44, n31. Echeverría refers here to Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache über-

haupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” in Angelus Novus : Ausgewählte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), 10–11. 25 Echeverría, 44–45f “Like the instrumental field to which it pertains, the code has a history because the process of communication/interpretation is not only fulfilled with it but also in it; because in serving on the evident level, it is itself modified on the profound level. In principle, every time the code is used in the production/consumption of meanings, its project of meaning is put into play and can be at risk of ceasing to be what it is. The project of meaning, which is the establishment of a horizon of possible meanings, can be transcended by another project and move on to constitute the substantial stratum of a new establishment of semiotic possibilities [posibilidades sémicas ]. In truth the history of the code takes place as a succession of layers of patterns for meaning, resulting from the refunctionalization—more or less deep and more or less broad—of earlier projects for new meaning-granting impulses.” In this regard, see moreover a similar reference to the same text by Benjamin elsewhere: “In Benjamin’s essay “On Language in General and Human Language in Particular” an idea predominates which has been central to the history of twentieth century thought … human beings do not only speak with a language, using it as an instrument, but, above all, speak in that language … In principle, in all singular speaking it is the language that is expressed. But also—and with an equal hierarchy—all singular speaking involves that language as a totality. The entire speech [lenguaje] is in play in every individual act of expression; what each of those acts does or ceases to do alters that language in an essential way. The specific language is nothing less than the totalization of all of these speakings” (Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” in Las Ilusiones de la Modernidad, Mexico: UNAM/El Equilibrista, 1995, 60).

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can be invented at any moment out of nothing,26 but free enough not to communicate merely as animals, according to forms of stimulus and reaction which are fixed by the biological in the instincts.27 Echeverría does not tell the reader in a totally unambiguous way which is the signifier and which is the signified in the production and consumption of use values. In one place, he observes that raw materials tend to come nearer to the signified, and the used instruments of labor nearer to the signifier, but does not pigeonhole them definitively.28 Rather, it would seem that both raw materials and instruments of labor can function as both signified and signifier, but that labor plays a predominant position in the generation of signs in general.29 But the instruments of labor are distinguished in their use value because their effectiveness, in 26 Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 78. Saussure says in this regard: “Language is no longer free, for time will allow the social forces at work on it to carry out their effects. This brings us back to the principle of continuity, which cancels freedom. But continuity necessarily implies change, varying degrees of shifts in the relationship between the signified and the signifier.” But the moment of the absence of freedom, which Saussure emphasizes, only applies to the specific language, the langue, and not to the ability of speaking in its totality (langage or faculté de langage in Saussure’s original text in French, speech or faculty of speech in the English translation of Saussure’s text, lenguaje or facultad de lenguaje in the Spanish translation of Saussure’s text and in Echeverría’s article), which was, as we will see below, of significant importance for Echeverría’s reflections. 27 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284: “A spider conducts operations which resemble those of the weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.” 28 See Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 40–41: “Among the means that intervene in productive consumption there are some that only offer it an indication of form for themselves: raw materials or objects of labor; there are others, by contrast, that open up before labor itself an entire set of possibilities for giving form, between which labor can choose for transforming raw materials: these are instruments ” [emphasis added]. 29 Echeverría, 41: “The most completed form of the social object is without a doubt that of the instrument. In it, the two tensions that determine all objective forms—the pretension of a form for the subject and his disposition to adopt it—remain in a state of confrontation, in an unstable equilibrium that can be decided differently in each case. The proposition of a formative action on raw materials, inscribed in the instrumental form as a technical structure, not only allows—as in all social objects—but also demands, to be effective, a formative will to action that takes it up and makes it concrete. The general transformative dynamic that the instrument entails must be completed and singularized by labor.” Echeverría refers to the following passage in Capital: “Living labor must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into

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most cases, is not exhausted in a single combined act of production and consumption, as occurs with objects of consumption such as food. This tendency toward durability in the means of labor draws us much closer to identifying signifiers and signified within the production process, since here the parallel with other sign systems becomes clearer. Just as we do not speak through language but rather in it, we do not produce only through the means of labor, but rather in them. On the one hand, the means of production are often durable, but on the other hand, they are open to the possibility of constant transformation. In mentioning this, we are not referring only to the wearing out of instruments, but to the constantly emerging need (and the desire arising in the subject) to transform the productive process. As a result, we can broaden the parallel to Saussure’s semiotics in the sense that every singular act of production (and of consumption) of a use value is a parole, or speaking, but the totality of these acts in a particular society,30 under particular conditions, and in a particular historical epoch, can be understood as langue, as language. The problem in the previous reflections (on the question of “signified” and “signifier,” which has not been completely resolved) regarding the relationship between the means of labor and the objects of labor31 points to Marx’s “theory of the tool.”32 For Marx, all that which humans find pre-existing on Earth and on which they can work can be considered an “object of labor.” Therefore, the Earth in its totality constitutes an “object of labor” for the human beings who inhabit it.33 Here, Marx distinguishes between “objects of labor spontaneously provided by nature,” which humans merely “separate from immediate connection

real [wirklich] and effective [wirkend] use-values” (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 289). 30 Echeverría, “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” 192–193. This concept should be clarified precisely, since within a single society there can exist various codes at the same moment. Echeverría speaks elsewhere of “a subjective-objective being, provided with a particular historic-cultural identity… the historic-concrete existence of the productive and consumptive forces, that is … the substance of the nation.”. 31 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284: “The simple elements of the labor process are (1) purposeful activity, that is work itself, (2) the object on which that work is performed, and (3) the instruments of that work.”. 32 Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. B. Fowkes, (London: NLB, 1971 [1962]), 103. 33 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 284.

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with their environment,” and “raw material.”34 The “raw material” is differentiated from the “object of labor” in that the former has already undergone a treatment which goes beyond mere detachment from nature as a whole. “For example,” Marx writes, “ore already extracted and ready for washing,” which has thus already been “filtered through previous labor.”35 Hence, the concept of the object of labor is broader than that of raw materials.36 Evidently, for Marx something analogous happens with the conceptual pairing of “instrument of labor” [means of labor] and “tool”: An instrument of labor is a thing, or a complex of things, which the worker interposes between himself and the object of his labor and which serves as a conductor, directing his activity onto that object. He makes use of the mechanical, physical, and chemical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes.37

Marx understands the instruments of labor, which have already been transformed by human labor, as “tools.”38 This concept of tools as already-produced means of labor can also be found in Benjamin Franklin’s definition of the human being as a “tool-making animal.”39 But Marx does not make the distinction between instruments of labor in general and those which are produced (tools) as unequivocally as the previously mentioned distinction between objects of labor in general and those which have been worked, which is to say, raw materials. Marx repeatedly observes the particularity which characterizes the “instruments [of labor] [Arbeitsmittel ] … which have already been mediated through past labor from those pre-existing instruments of labor which are used just

34 Marx, 284. 35 Marx, 284. 36 Marx, 284–285: “All raw material is an object of labor [Arbeitsgegenstand], but not every object of labor is raw material; the object of labor counts as raw material only when it has already undergone some alteration by means of labor.”. 37 Marx, 285. 38 Marx, 285: “As soon as the labor process has undergone the slightest development, it

requires specially prepared instruments. Thus, we find stone tools [Werkzeug ] and weapons in the oldest caves.”. 39 Marx 286.

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as they were found.”40 According to Alfred Schmidt, Marx’s theory of the tool in Capital is that of “the existing, the materialized mediator between the laborer and the object of labor [Arbeitsgegenstand].”41 In saying this, he stresses the importance of tool-making for the entirety of human development, and above all the development of human intellectual capacities: “There can be hardly any doubt that the most basic abstractions have arisen in the context of labor-processes, i.e. in the context of tool-making.”42 In this sense, Echeverría’s attempt to see a parallel between the processes of production and communication stands in the non-dogmatic Marxist tradition, above all if we bear in mind the fact that after the “linguistic turn” in idealist and related philosophies, the concept of spirit or reason was generally supplanted by that of communication or discourse. To the question of whether Echeverría’s attempt makes him an idealist philosopher, we could respond that in such matters a separation cannot always be established with the kind of clarity we find in the textbooks of dogmatic Marxism. In this context, it is worth emphasizing the close consistency between Hegel and Marx regarding the theory of the tool. In this respect, Schmidt underlines Hegel’s contribution to understanding the tight relationship between the development of tools and the human capacity for communication: Hegel, as well as Marx, was aware of the historical interpenetration of intelligence, language and the tool. The tool connects man’s purposes with the object of his labor. It brings the conceptual element, logical unity, into the human mode of life. Hegel wrote in the Jenenser Realphilosophie [the Jena manuscripts]: “The tool is the existent rational mean, the existent universality of the practical process; it appears on the side of the active

40 Marx, 286–287. Among other things, Marx distinguishes between means of labor “in general” and those “already mediated by labor,” referring to the subcategory of those which, without intervening directly in the labor process, are nevertheless its unconditional premise: “Once again, the earth itself is a universal instrument of this kind, for it provides the worker with the ground beneath his feet and a ‘field of employment’ for his own particular process. Instruments of this kind, which have already been mediated through past labor, include workshops, canals, roads, etc.”. 41 Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 103. 42 Schmidt, 102.

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against the passive, is itself passive in relation to the laborer, and active in relation to the object of labor.”43

It is precisely in Hegel’s linking of the processes of production and communication in his formulations of the tool that Schmidt sees Hegel’s importance for historical materialism.44 Incidentally, the importance of Hegel for the Marxian theory of the tool is recognized by Marx himself. In his discussion of the tool in Capital, Marx cites Hegel’s understanding of the “cunning of reason” in an effort to understand the “cunning of man” in the use of tools.45 The human being, Marx writes, “makes use of the mechanical, physical and chemical properties of some substances in order to set them to work on other substances as instruments of his power, and in accordance with his purposes.”46 In a footnote, Marx immediately quotes the following well-known phrase from Hegel’s Logic: Reason is as cunning as it is powerful. Cunning may be said to lie in the intermediative action which, while it permits the objects to follow their own bent and act upon one another till they waste away, and does not itself directly interfere in the process, is nevertheless only working out its own aims.47

43 Schmidt, 102. Here Schmidt cites George W.F. Hegel, Jenenser Realphilosophie ( Leipzig, 1932), 221. 44 Schmidt, 105. Schmidt notes: “Lenin stated correctly that Hegel was a precursor of historical materialism because he emphasized the role played by the tool both in the labor-process and in the process of cognition” 45 Schmidt, 105. 46 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 285. 47 Georg W.F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Erster Teil. Die

Wissenschaft der Logik, Vol. 8 of Werke, in 20 volumes, compiled on the basis of his works from 1832 to 1845, eds. E. Moldenhauer and K.M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), §209, appendix, 365. Cited according to Marx, A Critique of Political Economy, 285 n2. Compare, moreover, Hegel’s observations which precede his reflections on tools in the Logic: “That the end relates itself immediately to an object and makes it a means … may be regarded as violence … But that the end posits itself in a mediate relation with the object and interposes another object between itself and it, may be regarded as the cunning of reason.” See Georg W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, (London: Routledge, 2002), 746.

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Use Values and Signs At this point, we can return to Bolívar Echeverría’s studies on the role of use value in the process of reproduction and on the possible application of the semiotic categories of “signifier” and “signified” to this process and its objects. At first glance, the response to the above-mentioned vagueness as to whether the tool constitutes the signifier and the raw material the signified would be the following: the tool is the signifier, the raw material the signified. But with this we would come too close to Hegel’s concept of the tool, not only in his tendency to establish a hierarchy between tool and raw material, but moreover the danger of favoring a static assignment (which we just criticized) of specific components of the process of reproduction to some pre-given role. Certainly, we could say that the Hegelian conception could grasp these components again at any moment of production, and that insofar as his philosophy is dialectical, he ought to be able to understand conceptually the double form of objects. However, Hegel’s emphatic discourse on the tool as “more honorable” and his valorization of consumption indicate a static element in his theory. The concept of “productive consumption,”48 which is central for Marx and indicates precisely the difficulty of fixing determinate elements of reproduction on one factor and in one static form, as does Hegel, is unfamiliar to the great dialectician, who, in his turn, gave Marx important indications for his theory of the tool. The fact that Echeverría scarcely touches on the question of signifier and signified in social reproduction (and in the end, leaves this question unresolved) could, therefore, be interpreted as follows: Echeverría perceives the concomitant danger of an idealist reduction of the Marxian theory of the tool and of reproduction. He wants to enrich or make more comprehensible the Marxian theory of use value through the semiotic approach, while simultaneously avoiding the possibility of an idealistic softening of the Marxian critique.

Materialist Turn for Semiotics At this point, the reader might be asking, “what is all this good for? What does this semiotic analysis of the production and consumption of use values clarify that could not be clarified in some other manner?” To such 48 Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 290.

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a question, we see two possible responses: on the one hand, Echeverría’s recourse to the semiotic approach should be understood as polemical. In understanding the production and consumption of use values as the most fundamental of semiotic systems, he is taking the wind out of the sails of those theoretical currents which, without the least consideration, declare spoken language to be the most important of human sign systems. We must, then, liberate semiotics from the slavery into which it has fallen, after Ferdinand de Saussure, in the hands of linguistics, and as the mere supplier of the latter. Echeverría was outspokenly critical of the linguistic turn, and when asked if he “saw it like these ‘radical’ discourse theorists, for whom the only thing that exists is discourse?” he responded “No, to the contrary; precisely against this tendency of the most radical structuralism, I tried to disconnect semiotics from structuralism as far as possible and integrate it into Marx’s conceptual apparatus.”49 On the other hand, we could give the following answer to the same question: through the combination of Marxian theory with Saussurian semiotics, Echeverría seeks to oppose a specific interpretation of the former. According to this interpretation, what is decisive in the relations of production is the value side of production; based on this, we can explain and evaluate everything else, which is to say, including the use value side of production. This view results in the fact that the use values produced in the framework of a society in which there exists a relatively high degree of industrialization will lead these societies to be automatically conceived as “more developed” than others. And, moreover, since it is known that use values are in every case connected with the cultural constitution of a country, one can draw the conclusion that particular cultural forms are “more developed” than others merely because they are found in a region in which a higher degree of industrialization reigns than in other regions. Even if there are ever fewer theories explicitly defending such a view in an aggressive manner, this is, nevertheless, implicitly the prevailing view in everyday life as in the sciences. The fact that it is not proclaimed all the time does not for a moment undermine its almost absolute omnipresence between the lines. One example from everyday life in Mexico would be the predilection of the urban middle class for white bread, above all sliced bread for toasting (pan bimbo). From a medical and nutritional perspective, such

49 Interview with Bolívar Echeverría, cassette I, side A, pos. 258–265.

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bread has an incomparably inferior use value to corn tortillas, which are more common among the poor population in fulfilling the same function of accompanying meals. But as white bread is identified with a culture that has become predominant due to a more powerful development of productive forces (and with these, weaponry as well), the middle class set out from the idea that nothing beats white bread. Even though the motives that are explicitly formulated for this choice may be different on any given occasion, that does not in the slightest degree alter the foundation of this preference. The importance of referring to this foundation resides in the similitude that the argument has with the fetishism and its role in the petrification of consciousness: the preference for a certain use value comes from a perceived difference and not from a real difference, the production, again, depends on its own capacity to hide the real characteristics of its products in order to favor surplus and profit. But we can also observe the same mechanism—the preference of the so perceived more industrialized—on the theoretical and political planes. Since the term “underdeveloped countries” has come under critique, it has been replaced with “developing countries,” or more fashionably “emerging countries.” However, it remains clear in which direction their aspiration points and to what they are aspiring, namely the threshold that must be crossed with the utmost haste: that leading to the “first world,” which also implies subordination to the cultural forms that prevail there. All of this terminology is not typically Marxist, although it also appears frequently at the heart of Marxist debates. In this form—lightly concealed—what prevails is the idea that sooner or later all human beings should live as the inhabitants of Europe and the United States live today, and that this will represent “true development.” A fixation on the production and consumption of values, alongside a naïve progressivism, forms an ideological breeding ground in which Eurocentrism is unlikely to cease to flourish. The way Saussure places the many existing languages side-by-side, without undertaking the effort to establish hierarchies between them, is without a doubt what Echeverría appreciates in his work. And Echeverría imagines something similar for use values: a sort of analysis which does not begin by considering some better than others merely on account of having emerged within the framework of a more industrialized form of value creation. In this context, it would also be interesting to study, without establishing hierarchies, the various existing regional forms of living and moving about intellectually in daily life under capitalism.

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The application of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics to the theory of use value therefore has the following facet: alongside langue (language in English, idioma in Spanish), that is to say, the totality of multiple productions and consumptions of use values in a particular historical constellation, there exists moreover the general langage or faculté de langage (speech or faculty of speech in English, lenguaje, or capacidad de hablar in Spanish). What is specifically human—that is the question in Echeverría’s article “La ‘Forma Natural’ de la Reproducción Social,” and it is not langue but rather langage, the faculty of speech in and of itself. What distinguishes human beings and their self-creation is not the specific forms of use values that are made and used, but the very capacity to do so at all; in the same manner, the multiple subjectivities arise not as better and worst ways of concretizing praxis, but just as merely different ways. With the distinction of language from speech (faculty of speech) and the application of this distinction to the sphere of production, we can no longer arrive so easily at the conclusion that a determinate constellation of use values exists in a state of “superior” or “inferior” development. Similarly, if we compare, for example, French to German, we cannot reasonably say that one is “superior” to the other. For Saussure, there is no possibility of discussing whether a language is more valuable than another, or something of the like. Such questions do not exist for him. This is what Saussure’s semiotics and linguistics can teach us: what unifies humans is not a common language, but rather the common faculty of speech they share. Or, better put, their capacity to understand one another through signs, and in this speech is but one of many forms, the fundamental form being the production and consumption of use values. Echeverría’s interest in Saussurean semiotics can be understood as a theoretical auxiliary for combating “false universalism,” which is nothing more than the self-elevation of one existing particularity to the status of “general” (for example, the self-elevation of European culture to the status of human culture in general). This is not to say that no universal exists, as many tend to argue today; a universal factor that unites human beings does, indeed, exist, but it is one which allows within itself many diverse forms. This is the faculty of speech in its broadest sense, as discussed above, with the possibility that this entails (and realizes) the formation of the most diverse sign systems, which is to say, the most diverse ways of organizing everyday life and assuring reproduction. Elsewhere, in the article “La identidad evanescente” (The Evanescent Identity) Echeverría formulates a similar idea with regard to the

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non-Eurocentric approaches of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of comparative philology, in the sense that beyond false and abstract Eurocentric universalism there can also exist a “concrete universalism” in which subjects—individual as well as collective—are fully conscious of the need for the “other,” be it inside or outside themselves. What Echeverría calls the “concrete universalism of a humanity which is at the same time unitary and unconditionally plural,”50 is possible in principle in modernity, but has never been realized due to the previous and present capitalist form of modernity and the “artificial scarcity” which it necessarily produces.51 This concrete universalism is already delineated in the history of European theory, but only in the “self-critical dimension of European culture.” Echeverría writes: “Humboldt’s Sprachphilosophie … sought the general human [lo humano] more in the very capacity for symbolization or “codification” … than in a specific result of certain particular symbolizations.”52 Here, the vast gulf separating Bolívar Echeverría from the central tendencies of so-called postmodern theories becomes obvious. He is not interested in a simple condemnation of the concept of universalism, but rather a critique of the prevailing false universalism, which is abstract in nature, in favor of a “concrete universalism” that takes as its point of departure that which all humans hold in common and which thus represents the possibility of their coexistence, while recognizing at the same time the various different cultures and forms of life, without falsely (which is to say, abstractly) establishing hierarchies in that universalism in the sense of less or more developed forms of some general human culture—which is always, of course, that of the conquerors. In this context, Bolívar Echeverría can be distinguished—despite all the similarities—from Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. Thus, for example, while the critique and analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment admittedly mentions “European civilization” as the central object of the 50 Bolívar Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” 59. 51 Echeverría, “La Identidad Evanescente,” 59. Echeverría refers explicitly to Marx,

here, and writes: “from an instrument of abundance, the technical revolution becomes, in the hands of capitalism, a generator of scarcity” (59). This is necessary to maintain the capitalist mode of production, which functions only on the basis of exploiting the labor of others and, in turn, requires a general scarcity that, according to Marx, and followed on this point by Echeverría and other serious economists, under current technical conditions can only be guaranteed artificially. In this respect, Capital Vol. I, Chapter 15, “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry:” Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 492 ff. 52 Echeverría, 57. [“Sprachphilosophie” means “philosophy of language”].

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investigation, its ethnocentric character is not taken as a theme.53 Neither in its scientific behavior or its interests has the Frankfurt School been able to remove itself from common Eurocentric prejudice, and it has largely ignored authors from the so-called Third World.

Final Reflections In the present work, two central ideas of the Mexican-Ecuadorian thinker have been discussed: the inclusion of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics to the critical study of production and the task to seek out a possible concrete content for praxis. The possible link between the political economy approach to semiotics and the true concretion of universality as a way to de-Europeanize production can be found in two different aspects. First of all, this interpretation, in which the mere process of production and consumption of objects is, at the same time, the production and consumption of meanings, shows the antagonistic contradiction between value and use value inherent to capitalism giving some indication of a possible way out. And, in second place, as a consequence of the prior, the critical and radical reconstruction of use value becomes a way of overcoming the naïve ideas—typical of the occident interpretation of capitalism—of Western productivism, economist progressivism, and bourgeois statism. The philosophical contributions of Bolívar Echeverría for Critical Cultural Studies, discussed in this chapter, as well as his other contributions, which should be discussed widely, could help in a special way to overcome the problematic practical and theoretical limitation for the imperative emancipation of the human beings from exploitation, exclusion, and repression from other human beings.

53 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment , 9. Horkheimer and Adorno note in this paragraph the trajectory of European civilization as a trajectory of attempting to break or liquidate nature and falling again into what it intends to break; nonetheless, they fail to the ethnocentric character of the European civilization toward other human groups.

CHAPTER 9

Crisis and Critique: Receptions of Herbert Marcuse in Telos and Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser Haggag Ali

The late 1960s revealed a deep crisis in advanced industrial societies as well as a rigorous critique of both orthodox Marxism and advanced capitalism. Even the radical activities of the New Left were submitted to critique. The ramifications of the crisis and the import of the critique, however, were not confined to advanced industrial societies, and almost all of Herbert Marcuse’s writings were translated into Arabic in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Crisis and critique became recurrent terms in the receptions of Marcuse’s critical theory in the successive issues of the American journal Telos and the Egyptian journal Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser between 1968 and 1971. Both journals underlined the significance of Marcuse’s critique in understanding the crisis and the proposed answers. Both, however, submitted Marcuse’s critical theory to critique with varying degrees and from different perspectives.

H. Ali (B) Academy of Arts, Giza, Egypt e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_9

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Introduction Telos appeared in 1968 amidst revolutionary praxis as a bi-yearly publication of the Graduate Philosophy Association of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Its contributors were mainly graduate students who aimed to introduce an American critical theory. The editorial board members expressed commitment to philosophical synthesis and an appreciation of critical contributions from graduate students everywhere (almost all of whom later became prominent figures and university professors). They aspired to re-examine Marxism and its relevance to a better understanding of advanced capitalist societies. The Cairo-based monthly journal Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser appeared in 1965, and it was sponsored and supervised directly by the Ministry of Culture and National Guidance within the Egyptian socialist project during the presidency of Gamal Abdel Nasser. It rigorously attempted to convince Egyptian and Arab readers of the urgency of an Arab socialist project and the aspiration for a synthesis of materialism and idealism, materiality, and spirituality.1 The idea of a synthesis, or a third way, was common in the receptions of Marcuse’s critical theory in Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser and Telos . The editorial board members of Telos included Paul Piccone, an American-Italian founder and long-time editor of Telos until his death. Piccone underlined the socio-political importance of the student movements, seeing them as different from the small and passive groups of beatniks and the bohemians of the 1950s. The latter, according to Piccone, showed a tendency toward “narcotic trips,” a “hedonistic mixture of mysticism, nihilism, and pop-art,” thus withdrawing from society and reinforcing the existing reality of alienation.2 Piccone argued that the traditional industrial proletariat was integrated into a society of abundance rather than engaged in the class struggle of a society of scarcity. College students, on the other hand, remained de facto the only progressive elements, and the hope to attain a universal goal including the Third World.3 The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, according to Piccone, had no influential role in the 1 Zaki Naguid Mahmoud, “Editor’s Note,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 1 (March 1965): 7. 2 Paul Piccone, “Students’ Protest, Class structure and Ideology,” Telos, 2, no. 1 (Spring

1969) (3), 106. 3 Piccone, “Students’ Protest”, 109–110 and 122.

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United States until the mid-1960s, when the New Left revived it from its academic tomb. Unlike German philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, who returned to Germany after a long stay in the United States, Herbert Marcuse remained philosophically and politically committed to the youthful past of critical theory.4 Unlike French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty who had less impact in the United States, Marcuse related precisely to the American experience, though his predecessors were Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, Karl Marx, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud.5 Unlike Piccone, the first editor of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser Zaki Naguib Mahmoud was an old man in his sixties and an advocate of logical positivism, though he did not shy from exploring mysticism, intuitionism, and a.ser appeared in 1965 existentialism.6 The first issue of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ before Marcuse became a well-known figure. It was Sartre who was well received then in Egypt and the Arab world, especially after declining the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 and later accepting an invitation to visit Egypt in 1967. Though the editor was open to existentialism, he was keen on keeping the optimism of the Arab socialist project; and therefore, he rejected a key philosophical statement in Sartre’s 1944 existentialist play No Exit, namely, “Hell is other people,” dismissing it as a sign of defeatist pessimism.7 It can be argued that Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser advocated the necessity of the socialist answer to the problem of economic and social backwardness, yet Arab socialism distanced itself from Marxist philosophy, historical materialism, dialectic materialism, and class struggle, thus reformulating Marxism as a counterculture to foreign privileges, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism.8 Unlike Piccone’s enthusiasm for the youth

4 Paul Piccone, “Review: Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Co., 1973),” Telos, no. 16 (Summer 1973): 149. 5 Paul Piccone and Alexander Delfini, “Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” Telos, 6 (Fall 1970): 39. 6 Zaki Naguid Mahmoud, “The Spirit of the Age,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 1 (March 1965): 15–16. 7 Zaki Naguid Mahmoud, “The Hell is Other People,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser,” 1 (March 1965): 99. 8 Hussein Fawzi Al Naggar, “Arab socialism and the Interpretation of History,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 16 (June 1966): 10–17.

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movement, the first editor of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser cautioned Arab youth against their anarchist tendencies.9 He also saw Marxism as a method and Egyptian socialism as a product of national resistance to imperialism rather than a Marxist historical prophecy of class struggle and the revolutionary role of the proletariat.10 Egyptian writer Mahmoud Mahmoud, who translated Aldous Huxely’s literary works into Arabic, translated Eric Fromm’s The Sane Society in 1960 and wrote a review of it in 1965 to support his critique of capitalism and the call for communitarian socialism, which he represented as the only cure to the crisis of capitalism.11 Eric Fromm’s humanist communitarian socialism was represented as non-Marxian socialism and as a guarantee of a sane society without commodification of labor and human relations.12 Egyptian scholar of political science Hamid Rabi’ referred to Adorno as the first philosopher to trace the common characteristics of being leftist in The Authoritarian Personality (1950): negation, progress, anarchy, and skepticism, as opposed to affirmation, commitment to traditions, and certainty. Rabi’, however, pointed out that leftist ideology, in Arab and Muslim countries, had been seen as an expression of contempt and skepticism as it had always been associated with the rejection of religion and the appeal to Westernization.13 Marcuse’s leftist critical odyssey can be seen as a negation of domination in its various forms. According to Richard Bernstein, negation or critique of existing reality is “the deepest, most persistent, and most pervasive theme in Marcuse’s work.”14 This view is also shared by Fredric Jameson who associated Marcuse’s utopian impulse with the negation of

9 Zaki Naguib Mahmoud, “Generation Struggle,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 37 (March 1968): 1. 10 Zaki Naguid Mahmoud, “Marxism as Method,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, April, 3 (May 1965): 8–13. 11 Mahmoud Mahmoud, “The Alienation of Modern Man,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 3 (May 1965): 15–23. 12 Mahmoud Mamoud, “The New Socialism,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 5 (July 1965): 26–36. 13 Hamid Rabi’, “The Right and the Left Reconsidered,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 15 (May 1966): 26–31. 14 Richard Bernstein, “Negativity: Theme and Variations,” Praxis International, 1 (1981): 87–100.

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all that is.15 And it can be argued that the receptions of Marcuse’s critical theory in Telos and Al Fekr Al Mo’¯as.er were critical explorations of this theme and its variations.

The Reception of Marcuse’s Early Works The reception of Marcuse’s early works in Telos revolved around the crisis of both Marxism and capitalism, proposing phenomenological Marxism as an answer. While Telos dealt with a wide range of Marcuse’s early essays and books, Al Fekr Al Mo’¯as.er paid particular attention to Reason and Revolution (1941). The latter was translated into Arabic in 1970 by Fouad Zakaryyia (1927–2010), the second editor of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser from September 1968 till its shutdown in December 1971, after the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the eventual Egyptian transition from the socialist project to capitalism and free market economy. Toward a Critical Phenomenological Marxism in Telos In 1969, Marcuse’s name appeared in the fourth issue of Telos , which was almost entirely devoted to the relevance of phenomenology to a better understanding of Marxism and its role in advanced industrial societies. Telos republished in English his 1928 article “Contributions to a Phenomenology of Historical Materialism,”16 which underlined the significance of the existential ontology of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927). Marcuse saw Heidegger’s existential phenomenology as consistent with Marxism, arguing that the historical society constituted itself by taking care of its existential needs and of its living space, thus becoming a historical unity and agency of historical movement.17 Piccone, however, argued that overcoming alienation (Verfallenheit ) in Heidegger’s philosophy was to be achieved through a care for oneself (Sorge), a questioning of one’s situation, and a realization of oneself as a 15 Fredric Jameson, “Herbert Marcuse: Towards a Marxist Hermeneutic,” Salmagundi,

no. 20, Psychological Man: Approaches to an Emergent Social Type, (Summer-Fall 1972), 126–33. 16 Herbert Marcuse, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des historischen Materialismus”, Philosophische Hefte, No. 1, (July 1928), 45–68.The essay first appeared in German—it was later published in English in the fourth issue of Telos, (Fall 1969): 3–34. 17 Marcuse, “Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie des historischen Materialismus”, 30.

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subject. This Heideggerian salvation from alienation (the return to Sein) could be achieved within capitalism or within any system only by the elect who have the inner strength to make this existential choice. Marcuse’s phenomenology of historical materialism, according to Piccone, turned Marxism into another abstract ideology, and this was Marcuse’s Achilles’ heel, especially after Heidegger’s Nazification.18 Piccone cited Jürgen Habermas, especially his book Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (1968), in which Habermas argued that Marcuse’s phenomenological Marxism presented a forced synthesis of the two irreconcilable frameworks, one that leads either to the dissolution of phenomenology in the dialectic or to the freezing of the dialectic in the phenomenological foundation.19 Piccone, however, defended the possibility of a phenomenological Marxism, which he defined as a theoretical self-consciousness of the crisis of Marxism and an attempt to explain this crisis and overcome it. In his defense of this possibility, Piccone drew on Edmund Husserl, especially The Crisis of European Sciences (Die Krisis, 1933), arguing that Marx materialized Hegel, and it was time for phenomenological Marxism to materialize Husserl by interpreting the base as the life-world (Lebenswelt ) and the worker as transcendental subjectivity. Piccone argued that Husserl was unable to draw revolutionary conclusions because of the identification of the crisis as a philosophical one resolvable through a philosophical solution.20 Phenomenological Marxism, according to Piccone, could be the beginning of a theoretical critique that could reassess the very foundations of Marxism and the Old Left.21 Piccone was not alone in this endeavor, and Italian contributor to Telos Pier Aldo Rovatti paid attention to Marcuse’s interest in Husserl, especially the Krisis. The Husserlian life world was interpreted as the structure of the intersubjective constitution, and it was described by Husserl through the metaphors of the beggar and the prisoner, both of which represented the complete fetishization of the subject. Marcuse,

18 Paul Piccone and Alexander Delfini, “Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” Telos, 6 (Fall 1970): 40–42. 19 Paul Piccone, “Phenomenological Marxism,” Telos, 9 (Fall 1971): 9–11. 20 Piccone, “Phenomenological Marxism,” 24–25. 21 Piccone, 31.

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according to Rovatti, found in these two metaphors the problem of liberation, of a new human who was neither a powerless prisoner nor a hopeless beggar. It was in this sense that Husserlian phenomenology uncovered Marxist themes, possibilities of fulfillment, and horizons of truth within the return of the human subject to its own possibilities.22 According to Rovatti, the concept of critique plunged into the crisis, i.e., into an inability of theoretical development. Phenomenology seemed to be capable of providing thin theoretical content to respond to this crisis. Critique seemed to represent a simple negative function of ethicalutopian reason that presented itself as “irrationality” in front of the dominant instrumental reason of the enlightenment. The outcome of the critique of the crisis was a consciousness of possibilities in the form of a thrust toward utopia or hope.23 Husserl, according to Rovatti, mitigated the dualism of ideas and matter and of subject and object through such critical concepts as intentionality and life world. The meaning was constituted through the crisis of the naturalistic world, of the objectified sciences, and of objectified practical life. Rovatti even argued that the center of all theorizations of the youthful past of the Frankfurt School, especially since Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason (1947), was that the sciences were in crisis to the extent that they were reduced to ideologies detached from the social totality.24 Rovatti attributed the failure of Marcuse’s project of phenomenology of historical materialism not to the irreconcilability of phenomenology and Marxism, but to Marcuse’s inability to separate the phenomenological element from the Heideggerian context, keeping concrete existence an ontological given apart from any consideration of subjective or intersubjective operations.25 Rovatti argued that all of Marcuse’s critical efforts remained within the ontological horizon, in trying to pass from an abstract to a concrete, material ontology based on needs, labor, the factuality of the social, and on life as a real movement. In the 1933

22 Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Phenomenological Analysis of Marxism: The Return to the Subject and the Dialectic of Totality,” Telos, 5 (Spring 1970), 161. 23 Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Critical Theory and Phenomenology,” Telos, 15 (Spring 1973), 27–29. 24 Rovatti, “Critical Theory and Phenomenology,” 29–31. 25 Rovatti, 34–36.

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essay on labor,26 Marcuse was believed to have worked out the connection between the phenomenological existential notion and the Marxian concept of labor through the mediation of the 1844 manuscripts.27 Central to this debate was an essay written in 1973 by Douglas Kellner as a critical introduction to his English translation of Marcuse’s essay on labor. From a Marxist perspective, Kellner enumerated the deficiencies of the Heideggerian influence on Marcuse: (1) a lack of the dimension of history, social critique, and praxis; (2) a tendency to overemphasize the subjective moment of labor in self-constitution rather than the constitution of the human social world; (3) a reduction of the realm of material production to mere Hegelian categories of bondage, submission, necessity, domination, servitude, and an ontological burden. According to Kellner, it was only in the 1967 Berlin Lecture, “The end of Utopia,” that Marcuse denied the absolute cleavage between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, and to allow the possibility of liberating labor in the realm of necessity.28 According to Russell Jacoby, Marcuse’s early attempts at Hegelianization of Marxism through Heidegger’s philosophy were futile attempts to supplement Marxism with an existential ontology. Jacoby, however, pointed out that Marcuse’s interest in Hegel, especially in Reason and Revolution (1941), was meant to mitigate positivist sociology and philosophy, which tended to equate the study of society with the study of nature to the extent that natural science, particularly biology, became the archetype of social theory. Progress in industrialization, as Marcuse argued in Soviet Marxism (1958), was also progress in domination.29

26 Herbert Marcuse, “Über die Philosophischen Grundlagen des wirtschaftswissenschaftischen Arbeits-Begreiffs, “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 69:3, 1933, 257–292. The essay was originally published in German, then translated by Douglas Kellner as “On the Philosophical Foundations of the Concept of Labor in Economics,” Telos, 16 (Summer 1973): 9–37. 27 Rovatti, “Critical Theory and Phenomenology,” 36–38. 28 See Douglas Kellner’s introduction to Marcuse’s essay, Telos, 16 (Summer 1973):

3–8. 29 Russell Jacoby, “A Critique of Automatic Marxism: The Politics of Philosophy from Lukács to the Frankfurt School,” Telos, 10 (Winter 1971): 142–44.

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Toward Phenomenological Marxism in Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser In one of his earliest contributions to Al Fekr Al Mo’¯as.er, Fouad Zakariyya expressed an awareness of the dominance of logical positivism and assumed that it reflected the spiritual fragility of modern age in which art, myth, poetry, and metaphysics were reduced to mere passions and desires outside the realm of meaning. Zakariyya expressed an aspiration for a synthesis and the need for a comprehensive vision that could mitigate the crisis of modern man and the cleavage between materiality and spirituality. He described the crisis as spiritual and civilizational due to the dominance of industrialization and the subsequent separation of man and nature, and man and his labor. Philosophy was expected to open itself a new horizon to use modern industrial civilization in enriching the life of man, giving him hope, and opening itself to all poetic and artistic experiences that transcend the closed world of scientific knowledge.30 This vision was also shared by Egyptian intellectual Zakariyya Ibrahim in an article on Marxism and phenomenology. Ibrahim pointed out the importance of differentiating between philosophy and natural sciences. The former examined the foundations of knowledge. Husserl, according to Ibrahim, saw the task of philosophy as the exploration of the phenomena of thought and knowledge in a purely descriptive way. On the other hand, realists and idealists assumed metaphysical assumptions whose outcomes might contradict reality. Ibrahim saw phenomenology to rebuild certainty and promote awareness of responsibility, thus replacing causal relations with dialectic relations between subject and object. Neither materialism nor idealism was seen as an answer to the crisis of capitalism.31 Reviewing Zakariyya’s Arabic translation of Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Imam Abdel Fattah Imam underlined the revolutionary role of negation in Hegel’s philosophy, namely, the rejection of the existing contradictions and the permanent critique of established reality. Marcuse’s critical theory, according to Imam, revealed a reversal of a dominant belief in contemporary Arab thought that empiricism was the way to progress. Thanks to Marcuse,

30 Fouad Zakariyya, “A New Horizon for Philosophy,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 1 (March 1965): 17–22. 31 Zakariyya Ibrahim, “Marxism and Phenomenology,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 4 (June 1965): 19–26.

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Arab intellectuals started to see empiricism as a conservative and regressive worldview confined to the certainty of a given reality. German idealism saw in empiricism a surrender of reason to an incomplete given reality. Imam defended the revolutionary character of Hegelian idealism, and he also defended Marcuse’s understanding of Hegel against two objections the translator raised in his introduction to the Arabic translation: (1) Hegel’s revolutionary impulse was related to abstract logic and pure reason, and it did not move to the realm of the social and the political; and (2) Hegel’s perception of the Prussian State as the peak of the dialectic. Imam argued that the move from pure reason to society, history, and politics was legitimate, and the idea of the state was achieved gradually through a permanent and unstoppable struggle (the ideal state existed everywhere and nowhere at the same time). Marxism was in this sense an extension of Hegelian negation. Imam also stressed that the state was not the ultimate telos in Hegel’s philosophy since political life was not the peak of spiritual activity, which manifested itself in other spheres, including in art, religion, and philosophy.32 Egyptian phenomenologist Hasan Hanafi underlined the significance of phenomenology in relation to the crisis of European sciences, stressing that it aspired for a third way beyond rationalism and empiricism by adding a human aspect to sciences and the understanding of human phenomena. Hegel’s idealism promised such a comprehensive project that would unify rationalism and empiricism by restoring the unity of spirit and a.ser matter, reason and existence, the ideal and the real.33 Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ devoted a special issue to Hegel, where Hanafi defended Hegel’s philosophy and Marcuse’s understanding of it. Sense experience was seen as one-dimensional and non-sufficient. Hanafi argued that Hegel’s dialectic was not a mechanical movement but a dynamic one emerging from reality itself, and its conceptions were not prior logical constructs as in traditional German idealism but non-nihilistic existential moments in which time and place converged. It was a movement that underlined ontological freedom, namely, individual and collective liberation that mitigated the sense of alienation. Hanafi argued that everything was an expression of Reason, even when it seemed irrational and meaningless. The emergence 32 Imam Abdel Fattah Imam, “The Revolution of Negation,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 68 (October 1970): 49–50. 33 Hasan Hanafi, “Phenomenology and The Crisis of European Sciences,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 59 (January 1970): 38–50.

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of the irrational and absurd in art and literature was a protest against the consequences of capitalist and imperialist rationalization rather than against reason itself.34 Elsewhere Hanafi argued that Marcuse presented Arab readers with a dialectical relation between reason and revolution. The movement from Marx to Marcuse is a movement from the revolution against the liberal society of the French Revolution to the revolution against present advanced industrial societies that exploit the rights of young people. It is a permanent revolution in the form of negation which is the spirit of dialectic as it uncovers the contradictions within advanced industrial societies. The process of negation itself is seen as a form of liberation since it presupposes the dominance of new forms of servitude. The ultimate task of critical theory is negation rather than affirmation. Hanafi admired Marcuse for defending Hegel against the charges of justification of the State as the ultimate end of the dialectic.35 Abdel Fattah Al Didi (1925– 2000), however, argued that in spite of Marcuse’s efforts to appear as a revolutionary philosopher, he left out the people from his philosophical account, and deviated from the Hegelian spirit of the people.36

Receptions of Marcuse’s Later Works Piccone argued that there was continuity in Marcuse’s critical project, and he established a direct line from the 1928 essay to One-Dimensional Man (1964). The latter was said to reflect Marcuse’s Heiddegerian heritage, i.e., the reformulation of Marxist theory of liberation as the existential act of the Great Refusal, one which Piccone described as anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist since it put an end to the dialectic.37

34 Hasan Hanafi, “Hegel and Contemporary Thought,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 67 (September 1970): 28–43. 35 Hasan Hanafi, “Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution,” Al K¯ ateb, 110 (May 1970). Republished in his book On Contemporary Western Thought, Beirut: al-Muassasah al-J¯ amiiyah lil-Diras¯ at wa-al-Nashr wa-al-Tawzi, (1990): 389–417. 36 Abdel Fattah Al Didi, “Hegel’s Rumours in England and the US,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 67 (September 1970): 91–97. 37 Al Didi, “Hegel’s Rumours in England and the US,” 44.

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A Critique of the Great Refusal Russell Jacoby agreed with almost all critiques of Marcuse that the Hegelianization of Marxism led to the final analysis of its dehistorization. Jacoby cited Adorno’s critique of Marcuse’s attempts as a regression to idealism that killed history by locating it in a timeless being. Jacoby, however, pointed out that the later Marcuse revised his position and presented a critique of capitalism within the model of materialist dialectic in an essay entitled “The Struggle against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State,” originally published in German in 1934 and in English in Negations (1969). Marcuse’s essay closed with Heidegger’s remarks that doctrines and ideas are not expected to rule being, but only the Führer.38 Rovatti explored Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) as a Freudian-Marxist synthesis that could negate advanced capitalism. Drawing on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Marcuse presented a critique that sought a qualitative difference in American society, arguing that liberation must involve all of human life and nature.39 Piccone underlined Marcuse’s notions of the conquest of the unhappy consciousness and repressive desublimation in One-Dimensional Man (1964). The reduction of life into a one-dimensional reality in advanced industrial societies was attributed to the manipulation of the instincts of the subjects who had been reduced into happy one-dimensional slaves (the naturalistic dimension or the dimension of things) through the repressive satisfaction of instincts. This existing reality signaled the loss of actual beings and the total reification of historical man. However, Piccone saw Marcuse’s resort to Freudian negation as a fallback upon non-historical solutions to the contradictions of modern imperialism.40 Mitchell Franklin attributed the perception of Marcuse as a revolutionary figure to his negations and critiques of existing reality, yet he argued that these negations remained at the level of criticism and

38 Jacoby, “A Critique of Automatic Marxism,” 136–39. 39 Rovatti, “Critical Theory and Phenomenology,” 38–39. 40 Piccone and Delfini, “Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism,” 45-46.

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concealed a new bourgeois trap and enchantment.41 In 1969, Marcuse’s man was often a consumer rather than a worker subjected to the exploitation of surplus value, though Western modernity witnessed the rise of other types of man: the conservative, the racist, the imperialist, and the Nietzschean.42 Franklin referred to Marcuse’s 1966 paper “On the Concept of Negation in the Dialectic,” arguing that there was a direct line between Marcuse of 1928 and the Marcuse of 1966, who sought a solution in external mediation, i.e., aesthetic taste. Marcuse’s negations were interpreted by Franklin as a new/old attempt to achieve subjective/objective idealism-aestheticism within Kantian-Heideggerian productive imagination, rather than an inner process of the self-movement of historical materialism, especially in view of Marcuse’s convergence theory of capitalism and socialism. With the termination of class struggle, external dialectic was justified, monadic global forces were proposed, and an aesthetic idealism of a new sensibility was suggested.43 This mediation, as Alexander Delfini (1944–) pointed out, existed outside the theoretical framework of orthodox Marxism, and it required a new subject other than the working class: the outsiders and outcasts of capitalism of the system loosely referred to as the New Left.44 According to Franklin, the aesthetic character of Marcuse’s idealism explained his deep interest in imagination, utopia, hope, and pleasure, all of which were seen as categories that deepened the irrationalism of his earlier thought. Yet Franklin agreed with Marcuse that while Reason illuminated and created the world we lived in, it also sustained injustice, toil, and suffering.45 Habermas rejected the notion of the great refusal and saw his own distinction between work and interaction as the rational way of reaching the possibilities of liberation.46 He criticized infantile anarchisms and 41 Mitchell Franklin, “The Irony of the Beautiful Soul of Herbert Marcuse,” Telos, 6 (Fall 1970): 5. The paper was originally delivered at the meeting of the society for the study of dialectical materialism held in New York City, December 28, 1969. 42 Franklin, “The Irony of the Beautiful Soul of Herbert Marcuse,” 12. 43 Franklin, 19–24. 44 Alexander Delfini, “Review of Herbert Marcuse’s Counter-Revolution and Revolt, Beacon Press, 1972,” Telos, 13 (Fall 1972): 150. 45 Franklin, “The Irony of the Beautiful soul of Herbert Marcuse,” 3–35. 46 Andrew Tymowski, “Review of Jürgen Harbermas, Toward a Rational Society

(Boston: Beacon, 1970),” Telos, 8 (Summer 1971): 138–41.

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mindless student actionism (1968–1969) that created a global imperialist bogeyman to justify the existential abstraction of a Great Refusal. He also saw Marcuse’s desire for a liberating technology as an illusion because technology had already probed into bio–technical regulation.47 Jacoby, too, was critical, not so much of Marcuse, but of radical anarchist activities. According to Jacoby, the glorification of the rights of homosexuals, control over one’s own body, group relations, and masturbation confused equality under alienation with liberation. The saddest irony was that radical subjectivity resisted reification by intensifying it. It was precisely for this reason that Jacoby criticized the Weather Underground Organization for its Smash Monogamy campaign in the United States in the late 1960 and 1970s.48 Like Jacoby, Delfini showed that instinctive rebellion represented a cultural opposition to late capitalism, though it tended to denigrate into such apolitical recipes for personal liberation as organic food communes and escapes in hard drugs.49 Delfini placed emphasis on Marcuse’s two remarkable contributions to critical theory, namely, the new sensibility and the negative character of art. From a Freudian perspective, modern civilization was based on the performance principle, the repression of our instinctual forces, and their sublimation into socially useful activities. It was in this sense that Eros was confined to the sphere of labor, reproduction, aggression, warfare, and domination of nature. Marcuse’s call for revolt against modern civilization in advanced industrial societies was a call for a new sensibility or the pleasure principle, i.e., a new sensuous relationship to human and objective nature, as well as a new recognition of nature as a subject in the construction of a new order based on the liberation of the life forces (Eros). This revolt, however, could be seen as an idealistic romanticism that contradicted both historical materialism and orthodox Marxism that saw man’s real relationship to nature as fundamentally appropriative.50 Delfini listed two major reasons behind Marcuse’s reliance on Freud’s instinctual apparatus for an understanding of advanced industrial societies. First, there was no class analysis of late capitalism that could fully 47 Maxy Beml, “Review of Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, Beacon Press, 1970),” Telos, 8 (Summer 1971): 142–45. 48 Russell Jacoby, “The Politics of Subjectivity: Notes on Marxism: The Movement, and Bourgeois Society,” Telos, 9 (Fall 1971): 120–25. 49 Delfini, “Review of Herbert Marcuse’s Counter-Revolution and Revolt,” 147–51. 50 Delfini, 152.

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account for the outbreak of opposition in the 1960s. Second, the subjective moment of this opposition defied the traditional analysis of material needs, and the cultural revolution seemed to govern the political and the economic. Delfini argued that Marcuse continued to pursue the problem of his earliest writings, and his ultimate interest had always been the subjective moment of revolutionary praxis.51 As for the negative character of art, Delfini pointed out that Marcuse’s aesthetic theory was based on the belief that the form of the work of art expressed a transcendental truth beyond its specific historical content. Orthodox Marxism, on the other hand, construed realism as the only progressive form and tied it to an immediate political end. Marcuse distanced himself from Orthodox Marxism and argued that art conveyed an antagonistic dimension to the existing reality, even the immediate economic and political struggles against exploitation and oppression. Not surprisingly, Marcuse was critical of the activities traditionally of the higher culture (such as living theatre) and also the popular culture of white rock music. He saw in the production and collective reception of this music an expression and release of aggression, an act that intensified frustration and alienation rather than achieving genuine liberation.52 Piccone reviewed a book on Marcuse by Jean Michael Palmier, and he criticized Palmier’s evaluation of the Living Theatre as one of the most radical forces of aesthetic challenge. To refute this assumption, Piccone referred to Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation (1969), in which Marcuse explicitly spoke of the failure of the living theatre to the degree to which people immediately identified themselves with the actors, experience their familiar sympathies, empathies, and antipathies. The living theatre did not transcend this familiarity, this déjà vu, or the feeling that one had lived through the present situation before.53 Appreciation and Critique of the Great Refusal in Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser Fouad Zakariyya, the second editor of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯as.er, described the student protests in the United States as a revolt, a cultural revolution and

51 Delfini, 156. 52 Delfini, 154–55. 53 Paul Piccone, “Review of Presentation d’Herbert Marcuse, Union General d’Editions, Paris: 1959,” Telos, 2, no. 1 (Spring 1969) (3): 152.

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a desire for radical change and salvation for the whole world. He regarded the protests as revelations of the contradictions of American society, especially between the triumph of science, technology, abundance, material prosperity, luxury, and consumerism on the one hand, and discontent and protest against the university system, consumerism, and imperialism on the other.54 The contributors to Al Fekr Al Mo’¯as.er appreciated young people and their revolutionary contributions. They even saw their anarchist tendencies as normal immature activities reminiscent of those of the Luddites and argued that such radical activities could be fixed by the spread of scientific Socialism.55 Charges of anarchy were even dismissed, stressing instead the students’ sense of responsibility and mature refusal of a consumerist and imperialist society.56 The crisis, in other words, did not lie in the student activities, but in the monopolistic capitalism that had tried to turn them into tools serving its unjust wars and crimes.57 It is worthy to note that the first article on Marcuse in the Arab world did not appear in Al Fekr Mo’¯ a.ser, but in the Beirut-based journal Al Ad¯ ab in August 1969. The article was written by Syrian writer Georges Tarabishi as an introduction to his Arabic translation of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Tarabishi argued that it was the student movement that discovered Marcuse, and that student protests should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as an anarchist phenomenon. Tarabishi compared Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Erath (1961) to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). Whereas Fanon addressed the Third World and man of the economically backward societies, Marcuse addressed the United States, Western Europe, and the man of advanced industrial societies. Whereas Fanon argued for the necessity, inevitability, and possibility of revolution without an industrial working class, Marcuse argued for the unlikelihood and even the impossibility of revolution despite the existence of the working class. Marcuse’s critique, however, 54 Fouad Zakariyya, “American Youth and the Philosophy of Revolt,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 58 (December 1969), 6–11. 55 As’ad Haleem, “Student Movements: A New Revolutionary Force,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 44 (October 1968): 50–59. 56 Ahmed Fayeq, “Psychological Lights on the Youth Movements,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 44 (October 1968): 60–68. 57 Mohamed Atef al Ghamri, “The New American Left,” Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 49 (March 1969): 67–70.

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was seen as a philosophical cul de sac, and Tarabishi hesitated to fully accept the convergence theory of capitalism and Soviet Marxism, argued instead that socialist societies were heading toward bi-dimensionality. It seems to me that the Arab socialist project could not abandon the distinction between capitalism and socialism as the way to real independence and resistance to imperialism.58 Tarabishi’s first Arab article on Marcuse coincided with a promotion made by Al Ad¯ ab journal, on the same pages, for the publication of Mahmoud Darwish’s third collection of poems, A Lover from Palestine (1966). The first article on Marcuse in Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser in December 1969 as a response to the Arabic translation of One-Dimensional Man. Literary scholar Ahmed al Sadani also argued that students discovered Marcuse and sought in his writings an answer to the intellectual crisis of contemporary civilization and their protest against fragmented reality, deep despair, discontent, and revolt. Marcuse’s critical theory, however, was not seen as optimistic, not because Marcuse was by nature pessimistic, but because of the limited possibilities within a capitalist world of injustice and war. Al Sadani described the domination of technology in terms of masters (technology) and slaves (human beings), a crisis that required a radical change, though not feasible under current conditions. This situation signaled a slim hope within the new servitude in which human beings were reduced to instruments and objects. The choice of goods and commodities neither revealed genuine freedom of choice nor mitigated the slave–master relation. The process of commodification was so comprehensive that it dominated the cultural spheres of art, politics, religion, and philosophy. Art turned into a commodity in the name of mass culture, and sexual freedom in advanced industrial society led to more suppression and reification rather than gratification and liberation. Al Sadani invited the Arab readers to compare the role of sex in classic literature and its role in contemporary literature. In the former, it was deeply sublimated and endowed with human values (Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Racine’s Phaedra, and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal ), as opposed to such characters in contemporary literature as O’Neill’s drug addicts, Faulkner’s discontented heroes, Tennessee Williams’ characters in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It might be true that sex in contemporary literature represented itself more 58 Georges Tarabishi, “On Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man,” Al Ad¯ ab, 8 (August 1969): 34–39.

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passionately and less suppressed, yet it appeared as a main element of the industrial society rather than a negation of it. Al Sadani referred to the plays of Samuel Becket and Eugène Ionesco as pieces that underlined a sense of incommunicability within the world of domination and false freedom of choice. Language was no longer seen as a viable means of communication, expressing instead a false reality and self-deception of submissive human beings. The internal mediation of liberation with the help of the working class under such circumstances seemed nonfeasible, and only external mediation might be achieved through the outcasts, the unemployed, the oppressed, the exploited, and the victims of neo-colonialism.59 Mujahed Abdul Monem Mujahed, who translated Marcuse’s Negations into Arabic in 1970, drew on Alasdair Macintyre’s Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic (1970). He focused on how clichés and contemporary expressions in late capitalism distorted meanings and falsified them. Marcuse, however, was seen as un-dialectic in his proposal of the convergence theory of capitalism and socialism. According to Mujahed, it was true that capitalist societies used language to extinguish revolutionary energy, but emerging socialist societies could correct themselves through critique and self-critique rather than through radical change. Marcuse was seen as unfaithful to the dialectic and the Hegelian negation he advocated in Reason and Revolution (1941). The essence of dialectic, according to Mujahed, lied in the differentiation between reality and possibility, but Marcuse did not differentiate between capitalist and socialist societies, thus unconsciously embracing the positivistic thought he rejected in his early writings, and turning his critique into a contemplation of existing reality.60 This view was shared by other contributors to Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser who believed that Marcuse’s critical theory did not reflect complex and multi-dimensional reality, introducing instead a simple negation and ignoring the internal development of sociological, historical, economic, and psychological research. Marcuse’s critique did not identify possible alternatives and was unable to move from the Is to the Ought. Rather, the Ought was reduced to an automatic and total negation of the 59 Ahmed al Sadani, “Herbert Marcuse and the One-Dimensional Man,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 58 (December 1969): 24–31. 60 Mujahed Abdul Monem Mujahed, “Herbert Marcuse: From the Dialectic of Language to the Language of Dialectic,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 80 (October 1971): 56–59.

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Is. According to this line of argumentation, Marcuse could be hardly conceived of as a socialist since his writings lacked a program for socialist transitions, but only utopian abstract categories such as freedom, beauty, and happiness. Thus, Marcuse’s critical theory could not be expected to inspire trust and hope in the hearts of those who aspire to establish a revolutionary socialist society, a socialist democracy, or a humanist socialism.61 The editor of Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, Fouad Zakariyya, devoted a special issue to the crisis of reason. The very suggestion of such an issue was met with strong objections from contributors, arguing that it was not possible or advisable to speak of a crisis of reason in the twentieth century. Even if there was a crisis, it was a crisis in the West, whereas Eastern societies were in a dire need of reason. The crisis of reason was seen as a rupture from a normal healthy state, causing disorder, anxiety, and pain; and therefore, it was seen as a sign of its vitality, strength, and readiness for change, adaptation, and transcendence. Reason was also contrasted with passion, religious revelation, myth, and the unconscious. Zakariyya argued that the crisis of reason in the West was not an abandonment of reason, rather it was a quest for a new horizon out of its contradictions. He also argued that even the spread of Freudianism, surrealism, absurd theatre, and the irrational in art and literature reflected a deep longing for the promises of reason.62 Hasan Hanafi as well dismissed the discourse on the crisis of reason. Referring to Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, Hanafi argued that reason could represent both affirmation and negation, i.e., both a justification of the status quo and revolution against it. The notion of the crisis of reason only reflected a quest for a third way between the rationalist trend of subjective idealist philosophies and the empirical trend of objective, scientific, and materialist philosophies. Third ways included existentialism and Freudianism, especially Marcuse’s attempt to weave a HeideggerianMarxist synthesis and a Freud-Marxist synthesis. The crisis was not a crisis of reason itself but a crisis of the age, a search for a third way. It was an

61 Ahmed Fouad Baleegh, “Herbert Marcuse and the critical theory of society,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser,” 58 (December 1969): 38–41. 62 Fouad Zakariyya, “One Crisis or Two,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 79 ( September 1971): 2–12.

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epistemological, social, and political crisis related to the consequences of industrialization, rationalization, and imperialism.63 Though the contributors to Al Fikr Al Mo’¯ a.ser did not explicitly refer to Marcuse’s views on art, it could be argued that the contributors to Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser were faithful to social realism, even when numerous articles discussed surrealism, absurd theatre, and existentialist literature. It attempted to tie the individual to the collective and the universally human. This tendency was consistent with the Arab socialist project, and art itself was seen as a social reality that should mitigate alienation, dehumanization, and fragmentation. Therefore, there was a rejection of Beckett and Camus for their presentation of the isolated individual and the celebration of nothingness and even nihilism, thus divorcing man from society, and de-socializing art and literature. Contributors stressed that socialist realism, on the other hand, anticipates the future, and the classless society. As’ad Haleem, known for Arabic translation of Ernst Fischer’s The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach (1966), argued that revolutionary movements, including the youth movement, were heading toward one ultimate goal: socialism. The latter was expected to put an end to the threats of capitalism, imperialism, and the feeling of suppression that dominated all spheres of life, including art.64 Literary scholar Amin Al Ayouti (d. 2017) argued that theatre of the Absurd had nothing to do with youth movements, and he cited the prominent socialist critic Georg Lukács who described it as anti-movement. Absurd theatre and literature underlined man’s relation to oneself as a non-historical being, along with a deep sense of loss of hope, alienation, and meaninglessness.65

Marcuse’s Views on the Arab–Israeli Conflict Marcuse expressed his political views on the Arab–Israeli conflict before and after his visit to Israel in December 1971. The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute invited Marcuse to Israel to deliver academic lectures on art and aesthetics, later known as “The Jerusalem Lectures.” Telos paid attention 63 Hasan Hanafi, “Crisis of Reason or Triumph of Reason,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 79 (September 1971): 24–40. 64 As’ad Haleem, “Student Movements: A New Revolutionary Force,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 44 (October 1968): 50–59. 65 Amin Al Ayouti, “Absurdism: Absurdity of Self or Absurdity of Reality,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 37 (March 1968): 93–99.

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then neither to his lectures on aesthetics and art nor to his opinions on the Arab–Israeli conflict. It was only in 2012 that Zvi Tauber uncovered for the first time Marcuse’s unpublicized meeting with Israel’s Minister of Defence Moshe Dayan, whom he called the hero of the Israeli occupation of 1967, the representative of Israel’s policy of aggression and militarism, and the general who in 1966, as a reporter journalist, accompanied the American troops in Vietnam. Tauber pointed out that the import of the protocol revolved around the prospects of negotiations between Israel and the Arabs, especially the Egyptians, as well as the possibilities of Israeli demilitarization and withdrawal from the entire Sinai and all the territories occupied in 1967. Dayan dismissed these suggestions and stressed the Jewishness of Israel and Jerusalem, as well as the impossibility of the return of the uprooted Palestinians. Marcuse justified the existence of the State of Israel and its right to defend itself. But he was opposed to Zionist ideology.66 Fouad Zakariyya, in his capacity as editor of Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, published a complete section on Marcuse in 1971, and it included a short critical introduction to a 1968 interview in which Marcuse expressed his opinion on the Arab-Isreali conflict. Zakariyya claimed that though Marcuse’s critical theory was highly ambivalent, his political views on this conflict were clearly obvious and biased to his own Jewish people to the detriment of the Arabs and the truth. Zakariyya argued that the dilemma lied in the fact that the left supported Israel but could not ignore that the Arab world was part of the revolution against imperialism. This situation led to a schizophrenic stance of intellectual solidarity with Arabs and emotional solidarity with Israel.67 In fact, Marcuse’s position was more complex than Zakariyya presented. Marcuse sympathized with the Jews in view of their oppression during Nazism, yet he condemned the practices of political Zionism and the notion of the Jews as the chosen people. This could have been traced in many newspapers that published Marcuse’s views after his visit to

66 Zvi Tauber, “Herbert Marcuse on the Arab-Israeli Conflict: His Conversation with Moshe Dayan,” Telos, 158 (Spring 2012): 171–84. 67 Fouad Zakariyya, “Marcuse and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser, 80 (October 1971): 42–48.

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Israel, all of which stressed that Israel was then strong enough to concede and accept the existence of a Palestinian State.68 More importantly, after the lectures Marcuse delivered on art and aesthetics during his visit to Israel, he met Arabs from the West Bank to seek the truth about the Arab–Israeli conflict. Marcuse and his wife had coffee with an Arab woman who told Marcuse about the Arabic translation of his books. Marcuse was surprised and fascinated to know that Arabs had a good command of foreign languages and a deep interest in critical theory. He also mentioned that he received an invitation to visit Cairo and Beirut, both of which he accepted before receiving an invitation to visit Israel. During the conversation, Marcuse learned about Israeli practices, the demolition of houses, torture in prisons, deportations, erased villages, and settlements. He suggested Israeli demilitarization and preparing for mutual understanding and trust. When told that Israel is a client state to American imperialism, he replied that there are also Arab states that are also client states to American imperialism.69

Conclusion As a journal of radical thought and philosophical synthesis, Telos addressed the crisis of capitalism in advanced capitalist societies and paid attention to Marcuse’s critical theory to revive Marxism and graft into it phenomenological, existential, and psychological moments. Though Marcuse’s critical theory was relevant to a better understanding of the cultural revolution of the 1960s, Marcuse’s syntheses were submitted to critique as non-historical and aesthetic answers that celebrated the subjective moment in revolutionary praxis. Though dismissing historical materialism and class struggle, Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser presented Marxism as a counterculture to foreign privileges, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism. Marcuse’s convergence theory was rejected as inconsistent with the aspirations of Arab Socialism in the 1960s. Unlike Marcuse who appreciated surrealism and the theatre of the Absurd as protests against the irrationality of a seemingly rational world, the contributors of Al Fekr al Mo’¯ a.ser tended to defend social realism,

68 For a complete list of interviews and articles on this topic, see Zvi Tauber’s article in Telos, 158 (Spring 2012): 171–84. 69 Mohamed Belhassan,“ Marcuse in Nablus,” Al Ad¯ ab, 3 (March 1972): 94.

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and even saw the irrational in art and literature as an aspiration for the restoration of unfulfilled promises of reason. The crisis was not attributed to reason, but to the consequences of capitalism and imperialism. Though Marcuse and Telos referred to the significance of the Third World in the expected negation of capitalism and imperialism, the Third World seemed to be absent in the receptions of Marcuse’s critical theory in Telos .

CHAPTER 10

Towards a Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Settler-Colonialism Within the Affluence of Canadian Society Wes Furlotte

The Dene scholar Glen Sean Coulthard has characterized the colonial structure of a modern state like Canada as one rooted in processes of economic, political, and cultural domination. The grounding role that

For elaboration on “the affluent society” consider, Herbert Marcuse, “Aggressiveness in Advanced in Industrial Societies,” in Negations. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (London: Mayfly, 2009), 187–202. Concerning “the affluent society,” Marcuse writes: Its main characteristics are: (1) and abundant industrial and technical capacity which is to a great extent spent in the production and distribution of In what follows I use “modern society” to denote these characteristics.

W. Furlotte (B) Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_10

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Coulthard assigns to domination in understanding the ongoing processes of colonialism strikes a fundamental affinity with Herbert Marcuse’s critical analysis of “advanced industrial civilization” where, “a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails,” and issues of domination remain entirely active despite historically unprecedented levels of material and intellectual prosperity. The present study explores both this affinity and the hypothesis suggesting that Coulthard’s critical Indigenous framework and Marcuse’s critical theory might be reciprocally1 coordinated in an attempt to generate a comprehensive critique of domination in modern society. “Reciprocity” here is important: it attempts to eliminate the possibility that one theory might dominate and so distort the other resulting in a sort of vile ventriloquism. Instead, it suggests a form of reciprocal determinacy between the two standpoints where both are active and passive in relation to the other, identified and differentiate from the activity of the other, so that they are freely coordinated in the analysis of domination in modern society. “Critique” is also important: it connects directly to the Kantian tradition yet here signifies rational inquiry’s attempt to discover “the sources and boundaries” of domination in modern society.2 The promise of this study consists in part

luxury goods, gadgets, waste, planned obsolescence, military or semi-military equipment—in short, in what economists and sociologists used to call ‘unproductive’ goods and services; (2) a rising standard of living, which also extends to previously underprivileged parts of the population; (3) a high degree of concentration of economic and political power, combined with a high degree of organization and government intervention in the economy; (4) scientific and pseudoscientific investigation, control, and manipulation of private and group behavior, both at work and at leisure (including the behavior of the psyche, the soul, the unconscious, and the subconscious) for commercial and political purposes. All these tendencies are interrelated…(187). 1 Consider “C. Reciprocity of Action,” in G. W. F. Hegel The Science of Logic, ed. and trans. George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 503–505. This important section of Hegel’s Logic examines the transformation of finite causality, where cause and effect remain external to one another, into an internal self-relation, where the two are identified with each other, and so introduces the spheres of the concept, subjectivity, and freedom. 2 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Consider the “Preface ” (A xii), and “Introduction ” (A11; B25) where Kant characterizes the “critique of pure

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in the unique conceptualization of domination that results where the ongoing problem of colonial domination figures prominently and coherently in the configuration of modern society. Moreover, such an attempt serves to broaden the ideational scope of both critical standpoints while proposing unique and perhaps unexpected lines of coordination not only in the conceptualization of domination but also in terms of possibilities of emancipation. Lastly, it allows for the coordinated application of the critical standpoints of Coulthard and Marcuse to problems stemming from colonial domination within the historical specificity of a settlercolonial state such as Canada: such awareness is necessary for any and every kind of amelioration of the interconnected problems of domination and colonialism in the contemporary world. Section In what follows, the first section,”One-Dimensional Society: Conceptualizing Emancipatory Possibilities and the Actuality of Domination reconstructs the two hypotheses propelling Marcuse’s analysis of modern society.3 The reconstruction emphasizes tendencies, contradictions, and tensions permeating modern society more generally: tendencies toward domination, on the one hand, and emancipation and liberation, on the other. I attempt to substantiate Marcuse’s idea that this unresolved contradiction permeates the entirety of the modern nationstate. The second section, “Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation: Territorial Dispossession and Self-Determination,” appeals to Coulthard’s conceptualization of colonial domination in order to add complexity and concreteness to the critical analysis of domination in modern society— the section pays careful attention to how colonial domination entails an ongoing process of primitive accumulation that sees Indigenous populations dispossessed of their traditional territories, their respective grounds of self-determination undercut. The section also coordinates Coulthard and Marcuse by way of what is common to their systematic critiques of affluent colonial society, i.e., their normative challenges to conceptions of land and material nature that frame it strictly as an inert resource for instrumental and technological domination. The third section, “The Obliteration of Two-Dimensionality: The Culture Industry and Repressive Desublimation,” recaps Marcuse’s analysis of the cultural spheres of modern society and assigns particular

reason” as reason’s self-assessment in accordance with its “own eternal and unchangeable laws” (A xii). 3 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).

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importance to his concept of repressive desublimation. Repressive desublimation is significant for a study of domination in modern society because it offers conceptual resources for thinking about the ways in which various cultural products might provide forms of gratification which nevertheless serve ultimately in the reproduction and even intensification of processes of domination. The subsequent section, entitled “From the Violence of Assimilation to the Administration of Recognition: The State, Indigenous Territory, and Indigenous Self-Determination,” then shifts to a consideration of the political sphere in modern society, specifically the political register of Canada and state policy concerning colonialism as it has evolved over roughly the last half century, with the objective of isolating and examining aspects of political discourse and policy which might also display progressive and regressive tendencies simultaneously. The section, therefore, considers how the state and industry have increasingly framed issues of Indigenous identity and self-determination, as Coulthard demonstrates, “in the language of recognition.” Following Coulthard’s work the section attempts a concise yet accurate rendering of the ways in which recognition-based theory and policy have been uniquely configured with the historical specificity of Canada by the state apparatus with the professed objective of decolonization, i.e., real Indigenous subject formation and self-determination. The penultimate section, “The Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Marcuse in Reciprocal Critical Coordination with Coulthard,” coordinates Coulthard’s sustained critique of recognition as developed and deployed by the Canadian state apparatus with Marcuse’s dialectical method as deployed within his Repressive Tolerance.4 The section wagers that Marcuse’s dialectical method can be effectively deployed to further explore and critique the intrinsic limitations of recognition-based policy and praxis concerning the problem of colonialism more generally and in the Canadian context in particular. Doing so offers us a precise sense of the comprehensive transformations that are necessary if the category of decolonization is to have meaningful purchase in settler-colonial Canada. The study concludes with general reflections concerning the possibilities of decolonization in the Canadian context.

4 Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff, Barrington Moore Jr., and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 95–137.

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One-Dimensional Society: Conceptualizing Emancipatory Possibilities and the Actuality of Domination Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man analyzes modern society, its historically unprecedented technological productivity, its systems of productionconsumption, its administrative-political institutions, its intricate cultural and intellectual spheres, with the objective of conceptualizing specific tendencies and possibilities which permeate it in its totality.5 In effect the text hypothesizes that “advanced industrial civilization” is one that has actually established the material preconditions for the negation of toil, hunger, poverty and disease on a historically unprecedented level.6 Modern society, as Marcuse also argues “…has attained a level of productivity at which the social demands upon instinctual energy to be spent in alienated labor could be considerably reduced.”7 One of the important takeaways is that modern society’s current capabilities require completely new forms of life for their actualization. The corresponding new forms of life would be categorically incompatible with the necessities modern society currently perpetuates whether in terms of labor, scarcity, poverty, or sickness. Marcuse is careful to characterize these new modes of life negatively. He writes: … economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy-from being controlled by economic forces and relationships; freedom from the daily struggle for existence, from earning a living. Political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control. Similarly, intellectual freedom would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination, abolition of “public opinion” together with its makers.8

5 Consider Bruce Baugh, “From Serial Impotence to Effective Negation: Sartre and Marcuse on the Conditions of the Possibility of Revolution,” Symposium: The Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy 22, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 197–209. 6 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 1. 7 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New

York: Vintage Books, 1962), 117–118. 8 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 4.

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The alternatives constitute freedom from the demands of commodity capital, as well as its corresponding political, social, and cultural manifestations. Such qualitative transformation of the individual, and by extension society, receives systematic treatment in Eros and Civilization: it conceptualizes a complete reconfiguration of the subject’s instinctual-sensual dimension, prioritizes imagination and play in terms of a unique rereading of Schiller, Kant, and Baumgarten. New subject formations and social relations would realize, at least in part, society’s current capabilities. Yet, alongside Marcuse’s hypothesis concerning the emancipatory possibilities of modern society, we find a contradictory hypothesis. Marcuse writes “…advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future…”9 and elsewhere states that, “This containment of social change is perhaps the most singular achievement of advanced industrial society.”10 Despite the real possibility of the qualitative transformation of society, due its technological productivity, it nevertheless blocks such progressive possibilities. Instead, the technological-productive “…apparatus imposes its economic and political requirements for defense and expansion on labor time and free time, on the material and intellectual culture.”11 The organization of modern society’s technological base, in other words, imposes its requirements of reproduction and expansion. It determines not only all the socially necessary “occupations, skills, and attitudes” but also all allowable specific needs and aspirations for individuals. In an important sense, people are comprehensively determined by the production process itself, and its corresponding socio-politico-cultural spheres. Marcuse writes: The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, goods and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole.12

9 Marcuse, xv. 10 Marcuse, xii. 11 Marcuse, 2–3. 12 Marcuse, 12.

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Elsewhere Marcuse characterizes this process in terms of “introjection”— mimesis, “an immediate identification of the individual with his society and, through it, with the society as a whole.”13 One takes pleasure in satisfying their needs via their car, stereo, and kitchen. The quantitative increase in the production and distribution of goods and services throughout society results in qualitative transformation to the degree that such processes become the “way of life.”14 In such a configuration, “a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behaviour,” arises, “in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe.”15 There are three important upshots to emphasize. First, it is the contradictory tension between tendencies of emancipation and containment that constitutes the central focus of Marcuse’s analysis of modern society. It is the concrete manifestations of this contradiction that we will pursue in what follows. Second, Marcuse’s concept of one-dimensionality denotes a comprehensive way of life, and organization of society, that is unique to our contemporary world such that anything resistant to it is either obliterated or assimilated. It is the interlocking processes of suppression and leveling that denote modern society’s one-dimensional nature. Third, Marcuse understands modern society as structured around a series of impositions that are unnecessary when considered from within the scope of its own material and intellectual potential. In blocking such possibilities society’s productive and technological capabilities generate goods, services, and consumptive practices which reinforce now unnecessary relations of production, and their corresponding socio-politico-cultural arrangements. The satisfaction of such “needs” is false, however, because it stems from a society that suppresses the most potent possibilities of its members thereby perpetuating unnecessary toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. The unnecessary impositions of modern society are why Marcuse characterizes it as one premised on domination.

13 Marcuse, 10. 14 Marcuse, 12. 15 Marcuse, 12.

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Colonialism and Primitive Accumulation: Territorial Dispossession and Self-Determination If Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man makes significant contributions to conceptualizing the dynamic ways domination permeates modern society it is also true that the analysis is sparse on the specifics concerning colonialism. While One Dimensional Man does ask to what degree if any colonized and/or pre-industrial societies might constitute a “third force” between the polarities of capital and communism the analysis is extremely brief, weighing in at approximately three pages.16 To this effect, Marcuse asks, “is there any evidence that the former colonial or semi-colonial areas might adopt a way of industrialization essentially different from capitalism and present-day communism? Is there anything in the Indigenous culture and tradition of these areas which might indicate such an alternative?”17 The concise answers are, respectively, no, and; yes, but no—in the sense that colonial powers show zero signs of allowing for such possibilities. While critical analysis will always require a high degree of abstraction from the “actual organization and utilization of society’s resources” it must nevertheless also remain closely coordinated with that very same social reality if, in accordance with one of its primary objectives, it is to gauge society’s actual “used and unused or abused capabilities for improving the human condition.”18 Colonialism needs to be understood not in reference to a pre-industrial past, nor as a power independent of the configurations of modern society but as an ongoing dimension of it, one with unique configurations of domination as well as countertendencies of emancipation. A critical theory of modern society, in this sense, demands a sophisticated concept of the social reality of colonialism. In addressing this demand, we will reconstruct important features of the critical Indigenous theory of Glen Sean Coulthard.19 In doing so not only do we gain a critical concept of colonialism but we also explore the degree to which first-generation critical theory and contemporary critical Indigenous theory may be reciprocally coordinated in a dynamic critique

16 Marcuse, 45–48. 17 Marcuse, 45. 18 Marcuse, x. 19 Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of

Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

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of structures of domination in modern society. Such a reciprocal coordination might serve to broaden the ideational scope of both modes of critical theory, and generate unexpected insights into the problem of domination, and real possibilities concerning lines of advance. Coulthard specifies colonialism’s structural processes as they affect Indigenous subjectivities in the context of settler-colonial Canada. Nonetheless, his concept also lays bare the colonial dynamic more generally and so it is of value in the attempt to comprehensively conceptualize the problem of domination in modern society. Coulthard writes: “A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of domination; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority.”20 Continuing, Coulthard states, “…colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain –through force, fraud, and most recently, so-called ‘negotiations’– ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capital development on the other.”21 Colonialism, in other words, involves complex modes of domination that instantiate hierarchical social relations which enforce and maintain (1) the ongoing territorial dispossession of various Indigenous communities; (2) continue to undercut their status as free self-determining communities. (3) Grounding this entire dynamic, is the contradictory status of the land, as a source of Indigenous power on the one hand, and a site of capital development with its necessary correlates, on the other. Analyzing the present reality of colonialism, Coulthard constructs a transformed version of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation.22 Coulthard writes:

20 Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, 7. 21 Coulthard, 7. 22 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Capital; A Critique of Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967).

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Marx’s chapter on primitive accumulation highlight the gruesomely violent nature of the transition from feudal to capital social relations in western Europe…Marx’s historical excavation of the birth of the capitalist mode of production identifies a host of colonial-like state practices that served to violently strip–through “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder”– noncapitalist producers, communities, and societies from their means of production and subsistence…these formative acts of violent dispossession set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood–the land.23

Marx’s formulation of the concept of primitive accumulation states that it was primarily a destructive-generative process of land dispossession that led to two important results that were necessary to the establishment of the capital relation itself. First, it opened large areas of previously collectively held lands to privatization (enclosure) and eventual industrial development. Second, it generated a class of workers that were forced into the ebb and flow of the free market to fend for the basics crucial to their survival (proletarianization). Broadly construed, primitive accumulation denotes the violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones. While Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation is a powerful critical lens, Coulthard argues that it needs to be put in constructive dialogue with strands of Indigenous critical theory and resistance to order strip it of its racist Eurocentric biases specifically in his attempts to accurately track the structures of colonial domination. Coulthard argues that Marx’s rigid temporal framing of primitive accumulation as something past and complete requires modification. The contemporary reality of colonial structures means that dispossession is an ongoing process that is maintained through various cultural, political, and economic interventions operative simultaneously. Breaking with problematic Eurocentric biases crucial to Marx’s analysis, where capital’s assimilation of Indigenous life forms will “redeem” itself by bringing progress to “backward” cultures, Coulthard proposes to contextually shift the investigation “…from an emphasis on the capital

23 Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, 7.

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relation to the colonial relation.”24 This shift displaces much of Marxism and critical theory’s emphasis on the wage-labor dynamic in commodity production, distribution, and consumption and instead draws into focus the subject position of “the colonized vis-à-vis the effects of colonial dispossession.”25 This contextual shift and reorientation of the analytic focus accurately reflects the concrete historical experiences of Indigenous peoples within settler-colonial configurations such as Canada’s where territorial dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the orienting relationship between Indigenous peoples and the (Canadian) state. The problematization of land, and by extension nature, is common to both Coulthard and Marcuse’s critical analysis of modern society. Resembling Coulthard’s critical standpoint, Marcuse26 states that the modes of domination essential to modern society also signify “…a specific experience, transformation, and organization of nature….”27 Modern science’s “organization of nature” facilitates domination to the degree that its basic concepts and procedures consist in the “mathematical de-substantiation of nature,” i.e., they frame it as valueless, inert matter. Marcuse writes: “When science provided the exact mathematical concepts of matter and motion, it defined a purely theoretical object of neutral knowledge…The very absence of final ends left nature as a system of universal, hypothetical instrumentalities for theoretical and practical domination.”28 The universal quantification of nature (e.g., mechanics, chemistry, physics) exponentially expands the ways in which natural materials might be technologically transformed in terms of the preservation, enlargement, and refinement of human society.29 Nevertheless, because the broader forces of industrial society function, as it were, as the a priori (transcendental) backdrop of modern science those forces themselves determine the telos of the materials, the preservation and enlargement of a society grounded in domination. Science, to the extent that it is determined by centripetal

24 Coulthard, 10. 25 Coulthard, 11. 26 Herbert Marcuse, “The Problem of Social Change in the Technological Society,” in Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume Two, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2001), 35–58. 27 Marcuse, The Problem of Social Change, 44. 28 Marcuse, 44. 29 Marcuse, 45.

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forces of modern society, therefore, must be understood to facilitate the domination of the natural world. There are two important takeaways at hand: one, though not explicitly stated, modern society’s conceptions of nature, including our current scientific-technological one, are inherently historical and therefore malleable; two, industrial society’s historically determined orientation toward nature must be transcended if a transition to nondominant social organization is to be achieved. It is this very possibility, however, that advanced industrial society systemically blocks. Marcuse30 writes: “I submit that advanced industrial society is not defined by technological rationality, but rather by the opposite. Namely, by the blocking, by the arrest, and by the perversion of technological rationality—or, in one word, by the use of technology as an instrument of repression, an instrument of domination.”31 Social living premised on liberation must therefore critique and break with current structures of domination, and this includes not only liberating technological rationality from the fetters of its origins but theory and praxis premised on the non-domination of the natural world, our own internal natures and, by extension, other humans. These points must be thought of and actualized in simultaneous critical coordination. In this sense, if there would be a new historical project of social liberation it would necessarily start, quite literally, from the ground up. Coulthard’s analysis of colonial processes of dispossession marks an advance beyond Marcuse’s consideration of the sciences’ “mathematical de-substantiation of nature,” and analyzes the precise ways in which this process affects not only the land but also the very identities grounded in those locations. It is from within the sites of conflicting tendencies of domination and affirming agency that Coulthard theorizes resistance and anticolonial practice. Specifying the latter, Coulthard writes: “the theory and practice of Indigenous anticolonialism, including Indigenous anticapitalism, is best understood as a struggle primarily inspired by and oriented around the question of land….”32 While there are important socio-political, and cultural movements affirming Indigenous identities, e.g., Idle No More, Coulthard insists that land plays a fundamental role 30 Herbert Marcuse, “The Containment of Social Change in Industrial Society,” in Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse Volume Two, ed. Douglas Kellner (London: Routledge, 2001), 81–93. 31 Marcuse, The Containment of Social Change, 84. 32 Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, 13.

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in Indigenous resistance to colonial domination. Land as conceptualized and lived from within Indigenous anticolonial theory and praxis marks a fundamental rupture that destabilizes instrumental and technological senses of material nature which frame it as an inert mathematical abstraction to be transformed and utilized within the ever-expanding matrices of advanced industrial society’s commodity form. In other words, Indigenous conceptions of land and their corresponding forms of praxis challenge the economic, socio-politico-cultural structures, and theoretical frameworks that posit it as an inert site of material domination. This challenge is ongoing. The Indigenous critical conception of land which Coulthard formulates therefore denotes the sites from which various shapes of Indigenous subjectivity emerge in terms of real (free) self-determination and actualization. Coulthard writes that land is a: “…system of reciprocal relations and obligations …” where one learns to, “…live in relation to one another and the natural world in non-dominating and non-exploitative terms.”33 Land in this sense functions as the site of real Indigenous thought and practice that is not framed or lived in the oppressive terms of domination characteristic of modern colonial society. “Grounded normativity,” for Coulthard, signifies, “land-connected practices and longstanding experiential knowledge that inform and structure our ethical engagements with the world and our relationships with human and nonhuman others over time.”34 There are two upshots that should be repeated with the reconstruction of Coulthard’s conception of colonial domination. First, Coulthard places a transformed concept of primitive accumulation in the foreground of the analysis that offers conceptual insight into settler-colonialism’s primary– but not only–configuration of domination: territorial dispossession which violently violates the free self-determination of Indigenous subject formation. That foregrounding reveals competing realities concerning land, Indigenous, or other. That foregrounding also makes explicit a lacuna within Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man: the absence of a thorough analysis of the modes of domination unique to colonialism within the current configurations of modern society, i.e., ongoing processes of Indigenous territorial dispossession and colonial subject formations. Second, one of

33 Coulthard, 13. 34 Coulthard, 13.

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the real advantages of putting Coulthard and Marcuse in reciprocal critical and constructive dialogue on the question of domination in modern society, and its ongoing processes of colonialism, is that it allows us to think with conceptual precision about the logic of capital (wage labor, commodity production, distribution, and consumption) and the logic of territorial dispossession simultaneously—especially what is at stake in the ongoing process of dispossession. One of the resultant promises of this move is that we are better positioned to deploy Marcuse’s dialectical method in an attempt to critique the political discourse surrounding colonialism within modern society in such a way that complements and reinforces Coulthard’s critique of the distinct colonial policies realized within the historical specificity of Canada. To do so, we will first reconstruct Marcuse’s analysis of the cultural and political spheres of modern society in an attempt to discern how issues of power and domination permeate them in toto.

The Obliteration of Two-Dimensionality: The Culture Industry and Repressive Desublimation35 The production and reproduction of modern society bring with it a series of corresponding developments within the sphere of culture. One of the defining characteristics within the everyday functioning of modern society consists in, “the flattening out of the antagonism between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in the higher culture by virtue of which it constituted another dimension of reality.”36 The experiences embedded within the flattening characteristic of the cultural sphere in modern society is what Marcuse conceptualizes by the concept of repressive desublimation. We will seek to characterize it presently. Analysis of the history of Western cultural artifacts from literature, painting, music, and philosophy reveals a series of images, values, and modes of discourse and life that are—in key ways—antithetical to

35 Jeffrey Renaud, “Rethinking the Repressive Hypothesis: Foucault’s Critique of Marcuse,” Symposium: The Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy 17, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 76–93. Reference for a convincing account of the productivity entailed by repression. 36 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, 57.

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modern society’s technological productivity, reproduction, and expansion. Surveying the history of cultural artifacts, one discovers moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values prioritizing humanity, the struggles of the individual and their fulfillment, liberty, and autonomy. These are values that, at least on the face of it, modern society still professes to maintain. Nevertheless, in an important sense, these ideals stem from a world that has since been displaced by the productive capacities and corresponding social structures characterizing modern society. Marcuse writes that these works originate in a “…pre-technological culture in a functional as well as chronological sense” and were “derived from the experience of world which no longer exists and which cannot be recaptured because it is in a strict sense invalidated by technological society.”37 Feudal society, for instance, maintained a critical space for the articulation of images, symbols, and values which expressed a “methodical alienation” from the infinitesimal calculus of profit. “Artistic alienation” constituted the space through which “higher culture” found its expression and it underwent reconfiguration in the transition from the feudal to bourgeois orders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.38 In place of feudalism’s spiritual heroes of the church, for example, we find personas that are irreversibly antagonistic to the established social reality of the early bourgeoisie, “indicting it and denying it.”39 The characters of the artist, the prostitute, “…the adulteress, the great criminal and outcast, the warrior, the rebel-poet, the devil, the fool—those who don’t earn a living” indict the status quo.40 It is this artistic expression which denotes, “the conscious transcendence of the alienated existence” and by the same token the articulation of possibilities that negate the social reality in terms of a different order of intelligibility and sensibility.41 The antithetical relationship between power and social stratification on the one hand, and

37 Marcuse, 58. 38 Marcuse, 71. 39 Marcuse, 58. 40 Marcuse, 59. 41 Marcuse, 60.

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moral, aesthetic, and intellectual values which constitute “another dimension of reality” on the other, instantiates the dynamic depth of the feudal and bourgeois worlds—signifying their inherent “two-dimensionality.”42 Nevertheless, feudal and bourgeois “high cultures” were domains accessible by the few and reserved for the powerful, and were contradicted by social realities of mass toil, scarcity, suffering, and unfreedom. In this sense, “high culture” functioned within the coordinates of repressive and unjust social orders. However, within the sphere of cultural privilege, the hypocrisies of the social reality were indicted and exposed. In doing so, such cultural artifacts transcended their immediate social realities and functioned as the validation, even if abstract, of ideals of freedom, solidarity, and love despite being separated from the very same world they critiqued. This separation of intellectual forms from material reality nevertheless also “provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity—remote from the society which suppressed them.”43 Another configuration holds, however, within the cultural spheres of contemporary society where the “classics” of literature, music, painting, and philosophy are widely available—at a historically unprecedented scale. Bach, Wollstonecraft, Hegel, and Fanon are regularly accessible from a variety of outlets. Yet, in an important sense, their comprehensive 42 Marcuse, 57. There is an important sense in which the liberating character of art persists despite modern society’s “one-dimensionality” in the realm of culture. Without gaps immanent within the cultural realm the negative standpoints of art and critical theory would be practically impossible. Marcuse’s The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (1977) speaks directly to this point. Art and aesthetic experience continue to have an important role to play to the precise degree that they continue to have the ability to significantly alter individual consciousness in terms of unfreedom but also liberation and so also speak meaningfully to the possibility of progressive social change. Coulthard makes a related yet different point concerning “Indigenous resurgence” that likely has implications for distinctly Indigenous art forms. Referencing the Anishinaabe feminist Leanne Simpson, Coulthard argues that Indigenous communities should redirect their collective labor inward in efforts to reactivate and augment a flourishing Indigenous interiority (Coulthard, 154). This process of resurgence via radical self-affirmation would entail an active artistic-aesthetic dimension. The objective, however, at this point in the present essay is different. It aims to specify the features of the concept of “repressive desublimation” and highlight how the ubiquity of the commodity form in the cultural realm substantively counteracts the emancipatory potential of various types of art and aesthetic experience. This is a long way from suggesting that art and aesthetic experience are entirely impossible. 43 Marcuse, 65.

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availability simultaneously works against their antagonistic, contradictory status. Mass communication and production, “blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion and philosophy.”44 The seamless interconnection of various important cultural artifacts operates monolithically by way of its determining logic: the commodity form. Marcuse writes: “Exchange value, not truth value counts. On it centers the rationality of the status quo, and all alien rationality is bent to it.”45 Consequently, the contradictory and antagonistic character of “artistic alienation” dissolves. These works, “become commercials—they sell, comfort, or excite.”46 In an important sense, the universal order of exchange absorbs the transcendent. The ubiquitous penetration of the established social reality into all aspects of life, including therefore all cultural productivity and language, means that the articulation of transcending content becomes almost impossible. Therefore, “the Great Refusal [of art] is in turn refused.”47 Yet the “…refusal [of high culture] cannot be blocked without a compensation which seems more satisfying than the refusal.”48 Compensation, then, operates in terms of a broad quantitative increase in material satisfactions and pleasures which take the place of the sensual, intellectual, and aesthetic affirmations once provided and realized within the registers of feudal and bourgeois culture. The various and ubiquitous satisfaction of cultural and leisure commodities constitute a “good life.” This false equivalency Marcuse denotes, at least in part, by way of “repressive desublimation.” “Artistic alienation is sublimation,” says Marcuse. In other words, historically considered, the images and symbols of art were generated through the repressive “deflection” of instinctual resources—the sublimation of drives and instincts.49 Despite stemming from the suppression of the instincts, such artworks also served to contradict the established social order and so possessed a high degree of freedom and social value. There was a high degree of mediation in the genesis and experiences 44 Marcuse, 57. 45 Marcuse, 57. 46 Marcuse, 64. 47 Marcuse, 64. 48 Marcuse, 71. 49 Marcuse, 72.

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of those artworks and again, such mediation actualized a qualitatively distinct order of freedom that resisted the social realities of oppression and unfreedom from which they originated. The processes of desublimation embedded in the experience of contemporary cultural products, by contrast, work in the opposite direction. In the process of desublimation, one also enjoys various objects: music, entertainment, travel, and home decor. They release various sensual-instinctual energies. Yet, Marcuse is careful to distinguish between these two experiences. In consuming the cultural product gratification is “immediate” and holds across a wide expanse of day-to-day experiences. This expansive “liberalization” of gratification and pleasure is significant in two ways. First, in satisfaction one realizes their desires and aims which nonetheless also function as the “introjected” dictates of technological society: it unfolds primarily in terms of the demands imposed by the productive forces, those of distribution and consumption. Second, such gratifying pleasure has social utility: it relaxes and stimulates in a variety of ways, conjoining people to the existing order—the “established reality principle” which “delivers the goods.” In these precise senses, modern society can “tolerate” and even promote desublimation’s permissive tendencies. At first glance desublimation’s “emancipation” of the senses and instincts is progressive to the exact degree that it subverts repression. Nonetheless, Marcuse writes that: “…there are repressive modes of desublimation, compared with which the sublimated drives and objectives contain more deviation, more freedom, and more refusal to heed the status quo.”50 There is a twofold consequence here. On the one hand, Marcuse posits that despite the fact that various art objects stem from sublimation, i.e., social processes of repression, those same objects still expressed a resistance to domination, and therefore (abstractly) realized a high degree of human freedom and value. On the other hand, the “emancipation” of the senses and the instincts in product consumption can nevertheless also function in the service of repression—what we might call a higher order of repression— to the exact extent that they leave the social structures that generate and perpetuate domination untouched: seemingly dynamic extensions of gratifying liberty across a range of social phenomena in people’s everyday lives nonetheless simultaneously perpetuate and even intensify processes of

50 Marcuse, 72.

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domination. The complex ways in which liberty oppresses is what Marcuse denotes by way of “repressive desublimation.” Indeed, such gratification is crucial to the stifling displacement of tendencies that might serve to undo various configurations of domination within modern society. This dialectical interplay of domination and liberty permeates the entirety of modern society, its various cultural realms, and products, and entails a range of correspondences within the political register. To analyze the ways in which dynamics of domination, specifically colonial domination, permeates political discourse and policy within modern society we will pay careful attention to how the problem of colonialism has been addressed within the political discourse and policy of a modern society such as Canada.

From the Violence of Assimilation to the Administration of Recognition: The State, Indigenous Territory, and Indigenous Self-Determination Coulthard demonstrates that in the two centuries that preceded fundamental policy shifts in 1969, the state of Canada’s response to Indigenous claims to land and self-determination was primarily coercive, exclusionary, assimilationist, and violent.51 Various policies and practices, perhaps most infamously in the residential school system, sought the systematic elimination of the unique identities of aboriginal peoples. Since the late 1960s, in response to Indigenous active resistance to assimilation policy, “…state violence no longer constitutes the regulative norm governing the process of colonial dispossession….” Increasingly, but not exclusively, in place of overt violence, recognition has emerged as the means by which the complex problems of colonial domination are to be overcome. For instance, the federal government’s 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People (RCAP), which sought to investigate the social, cultural, political, and economic impact of the colonial relationship on Indigenous communities and the state in Canada, outlines core principles for the process of decolonization, prioritizing the category of recognition. The report states that the government must recognize the nation-to-nation relationship between First Nations and the Crown; 51 Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, 4.

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recognize the equal right of First Nations to self-determination; recognize the Crown’s fiduciary obligation to protect aboriginal treaty rights; recognize First Nation’s inherent right to self-government; recognize the right of First Nations to economically benefit from the use and development of their lands and resources.52 Therefore, what Coulthard calls a “politics of recognition” has emerged within various state institutions of settler-colonial Canada as the means by which it proposes to undo the problems of territorial dispossession and Indigenous self-determination, the power asymmetries crucial to settler-colonial domination. While a systematic development of the concept of recognition dates at least as far back as Hegel, it has been redeployed by various contemporary political theorists over the last three decades. Charles Taylor considers how recognition-based praxis might overcome the forms of marginalization various unique cultural identities face–whether in terms of their gendered, racial, cultural, or class identities–within the context of a democratic, multicultural nation like Canada.53 To this end, Taylor argues that identity formation is fundamentally dialogical.54 Identity is formed through our linguistically mediated relationships with others. Recognition is therefore essential to identity: only in recognition by another is one’s identity affirmed as such (and vice versa). A crucial corollary of recognition’s role in identity formation is that it might fail. Identity, in other words, can be formed in terms of misrecognition. Taylor writes: “…our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence [emphasis added], often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.”55 For Taylor, misrecognition undermines my self-determining capabilities to the exact degree that I act from within the confines of mis-identification, instead of from a site of my own authentically formed possibilities. This failure characterizes the history of Indigenous-state relations in settler-colonial Canada.

52 Coulthard, 1, 181, note 4. 53 Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (Princeton University

Press, 1994). 54 Taylor, Politics of Recognition, 32. 55 Taylor, 25.

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Taylor’s proposed line of response to colonial misrecognition, and the Canadian state’s insofar as it realizes corresponding policy and social configurations, is for state institutions to properly recognize Indigenous identities. Taylor argues that the state’s recognition of Indigenous communities entails the delegation of political and cultural autonomy through self-government. Policies based on such a conception of recognition have the upshot of prioritizing self-governance and so too Indigenous autonomy. In Coulthard’s view, this means “…allowing for a new form of jurisdiction in Canada, perhaps weaker than the provinces, but, unlike municipalities.”56 Institutional initiatives aimed at recognizing Indigenous identities signifies, in turn, affirming traditional land treaties, increasing Indigenous self-governance, and rehabilitating linguistic and cultural traditions. Such initiatives activate Indigenous self-determination and so counteract the centuries-old legacy of territorial dispossession, and colonial subject formation—all from within the matrices of the settler-colonial socio-politico-economic order. Nevertheless, Coulthard refuses the Canadian state’s configuration of recognition, i.e., one where its hegemonic majority “grants” and “enables” Indigenous minority groups with heightened rights and land claims. First, such policy and practice risks paternalism to the exact degree that it is the state apparatus that grants rights and land and by the same token threatens to duplicate the very colonial subject formation it seeks to dismantle. Second, operating within the established economic, political, and cultural frameworks of the Canadian state, the paradigm of recognition also risks leaving untouched the power asymmetries that the colonial social structure realizes. Insofar as the paradigm of recognition proves itself inadequate to dissolving colonial domination, Coulthard maintains that Indigenous communities have good grounds upon which to reject it.

The Dialectical Critique of Pure Recognition: Marcuse in Reciprocal Critical Coordination with Coulthard Consistent with its policy of recognition wherever possible the Canadian state has, in the last few decades, increasingly opted for negotiation and mediation on questions of Indigenous title–i.e., land claims and 56 Coulthard, Red Skin White Masks, 30.

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sovereignty. When possible, it has effectively attempted to dissolve Indigenous titles in order to treat traditional territories as municipalities, their cultures protected like other minorities (e.g., Quebec as a distinct society and thus afforded special rights as such) within Canadian society. In renunciation of title one “gains” the full rights of Canadian citizens. This relatively recent shift in rhetoric and tactic on the part of the Canadian state has resulted in a particular difficulty where the state’s prioritization of its own claims to sovereignty and totality as a nation-state simultaneously reveals itself as porous and ambiguous in a way that is not always readily apparent—as in the case of the state’s approach to Indigenous claims to land and sovereignty. While Coulthard’s analysis clinically demonstrates the problems permeating Canada’s “politics of recognition,” it is advantageous to test the degree to which we might coordinate Marcuse’s framework with Coulthard’s as it generates a comprehensive account of domination in modern society, colonial and otherwise, and so also serve to conceptualize alternate tendencies. Moreover, the intrinsic limitations and shortcomings of the political register in modern society is a problem that lends itself well to dialectical analysis and critique and so we will here deploy methods found not only in One Dimensional Man but also in Repressive Tolerance to that very end.57 In RT, for example, Marcuse traces the historical origins of the modern concept of tolerance with the objective of analyzing its use within the politics of modern society. J. S. Mill’s On Liberty (1859) assigns tolerance the express objective of enlarging “…the range and content of freedom….”58 Tolerance, in the emergent liberal democracies of the nineteenth century, makes room for the articulation of extreme positions provided one does not make the “transition from word to deed, speech to action.”59 Consequently, tolerance in its very origins involves a partisan orientation constituting the dialectical depth of the category: it pushes back against the “tyranny of the majority” carving out a discursive space for various marginal positions, religious, scientific, political or otherwise. The priority tolerance assigns to discursive inclusion of the marginal indicates its emancipatory quality.

57 Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 81–117. 58 Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 85. 59 Marcuse, 85–86.

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However, in Marcuse’s view, tolerance as exercised within modern society, including within its political realm, takes on a distinct signification. Modern society is inherently technological and administrative such that there is a concentration of political and economic power that insists on the integration of opposing standpoints within static “onedimensional” constellations of discourse. Monopolistic media generates wholesale definitions of right and wrong, truth and falsity, and facilitates the mass indoctrination of the public insulating the vital interests of the established social order from meaningful critique and qualitative structural transformation. Preformed categories evaluate “alternative” viewpoints and reconfigure them within the established discourse thereby disarming them. Tolerance as exercised under such conditions, writes Marcuse, is then: …of two kinds: (1) the passive toleration of entrenched and established attitudes and ideas even if their damaging effect on man and nature is evident; and (2) the active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.60

This is what Marcuse calls “pure tolerance” and as “repressive tolerance” it “…protects the already established machinery of discrimination.”61 In other words, if tolerance uncritically operates within society’s “onedimensional” discourse it affirms the status quo majority and–in turn–a social totality primarily oriented toward domination. Consequently, tolerance’s emancipatory concern with the marginal, the expansion of public discourse, and the creation of a polis premised on individual and collective liberty dialectically transform into reactionary practices which prioritize the preservation and expansion of the current society. To pierce the static discourse in the articulation of real dissent pure tolerance would need to be challenged. Concrete emancipatory tolerance, of the type originally conceptualized by Mill, “…involves the rational development of meaning and precludes the closing of meaning.”62 Such “closure” on Marcuse’s view constitutes much of the cultural and political registers of one-dimensional society. 60 Marcuse, 85. 61 Marcuse, 85. 62 Marcuse, 96.

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The wager I would like to explore here maintains that a corresponding dialectical critique might be developed concerning “pure recognition” in relation to the project of decolonization in modern society but with a view to Canadian political discourse and policy in particular. Doing so within the historical specificity of modern society such as Canada would mean situating the abstractions concerning recognition as framed in Canada’s legal history, political discourse, and institutional policies in direct coordination with the concrete conditions on the ground of various Indigenous identities across the country. Such a critical coordination of abstract policy and concrete facts might speak to the ultimate effectiveness of the latter in addressing the ongoing problem of colonial domination. For instance, Section 35 of the Constitutional Act (1982), says explicitly that the state must “recognize and affirm” existing aboriginal treaty rights. Similarly, several important supreme court rulings over the last 50 years, as recently as 2014s highly significant Tsilhquot’in Nation vs. British Columbia, have ruled that Indigenous title pre-existed crown claims to sovereignty. Hailing from the unceded territory of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc—within settler-colonial British Columbia—activist and theorist Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson write in Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call (2015)63 that the Tsilhquot’in ruling explicitly recognizes Aboriginal title on the ground in the western province of British Columbia to “almost two thousand square kilometers of Tsilhqot’in territory,”64 “the right to determine…the uses to which the land is put and to enjoy its economic fruits.”65 The ruling maintains that the territory in question is collectively held by the nations native to the region. Actualizing the principled thrust of the decision would—in a very important sense—mean implementing Indigenous governance based on Indigenous laws and not “…on processes funded and directed by the [Canadian] government.”66 Despite these seemingly progressive rulings in terms of legal precedent, part of the difficulty here resides in the fact that at the same

63 Arthur Manuel and Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015). 64 Arthur Manuel and Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada, 169. 65 Manuel and Derrickson, 171. 66 Manuel and Derrickson, 169.

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time those decisions also unquestioningly—perhaps even by definition— maintain the priority of Crown (state) sovereignty. This, despite the fact that the priority of crown sovereignty in this context has its roots in the dubious concept of terra nullis and the equally problematic “doctrine of discovery.” Despite multiple supreme court rulings that increasingly recognize the Indigenous title and the inherent rights to selfdetermination that follow from it—coupled with its enshrinement in the constitution—actual results on the ground have fallen well short of the ultimate objective of real recognition, namely, decolonization. Manuel’s abstract rendering of the situation tells the tale. He writes, “…Indigenous peoples [control] 0.2 percent of the [total] land [area in Canada] and the settler’s 99.8 percent.”67 The problem hinges in part on the state’s attempts to render competing claims to sovereignty consistent within a framework that prioritizes, unsurprisingly, its own sovereignty claim, and which has traditionally ignored and violently undercut Indigenous claims to the contrary. The reality of the land disparity speaks to the shortcomings of such policies and procedures to this point in Canadian history. This tension constitutes an unresolved contradiction between the state and Indigenous communities in the Canadian context. Not only does it speak to the ongoing process of colonialism; but it also reveals how institutional matrices of the state reveal themselves as much more porous and tension-ridden than first inspection and popular opinion might have it. The ongoing presence of Indigenous identities and agencies speaks as much. It is from within the coordinates of this contradiction that we discover the intrinsic limitations of Canada’s adoption of a politics of recognition. Set within this context, we return to the crucial importance Coulthard’s analysis assigns to land and its contradictory status within the current configuration of the settler-colonial Canadian state. In Coulthard’s view, land grounds nondominating and reciprocal social relations—constitutive of Indigenous subject formations—their corresponding socio-culturalpolitical-economic arrangements. Land, at the same time, predominantly functions as the material site of resources, capital development, and unprecedented wealth for the current arrangement of the Canadian social order. Actualizing the abstractions of recognition enshrined in the constitution and other important supreme court rulings concerning

67 Manuel and Derrickson, 19.

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aboriginal title by the Canadian state would require that the Canadian state relinquish the priority of its sovereignty claim in a myriad of contexts which—to this point—has proved itself reticent to do. The consequences through which the paradigm of recognition cannot comprehensively address Indigenous title and by extension, Indigenous sovereignty denotes the precise degree that it risks transgressing its emancipatory objective of Indigenous self-determination and instead becomes a means of reactionary containment which affirms and reinforces the status quo—in this context the colonial structure of domination. The Marcusean takeaway here serves to reinforce Coulthard’s critique of the colonial dynamic: emancipatory movements within the institutions of an affluent society like Canada risk becoming regressive to the precise degree that they “accept the rules of the game.”68 The “rules of the game” means nothing other than leaving the ongoing structural processes of territorial dispossession and colonial subject formation intact and fully operative. Dialectical critique uncovers the intrinsic limitations of “pure recognition” while simultaneously complimenting and reinforcing the legitimate reasons by which Coulthard, Indigenous communities, and the public more generally might also form a nexus of refusal concerning the state’s “colonial politics of recognition.”

Concluding Remarks on Modern Society: Settler-Colonialism, Containment, and Blocked Possibilities Arthur Manuel offers a historical analysis and critique of colonialism in settler-colonial Canada. Concerning territorial dispossession and its ongoing effects, he writes: …Indigenous peoples [control] 0.2 percent of the [total] land [area in Canada] and the settler’s 99.8 percent [Emphasis added]. With this distribution of the land, you don’t have to have a doctorate in economics to understand who will be poor and who will be rich. And our poverty is crushing…our lives are seven years shorter than the lives of non-Indigenous Canadians. Our unemployment rates are four times higher. The resources to educate our children are only a third of what is spent on non-Indigenous Canadian children. Our youth commit suicide at a rate more than five times 68 Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 83.

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higher. We are living the effects of this dispossession every day of our lives, and we have been living this misery in Canada for almost 150 years.69

This statistic and its devastating correlates make clear the extent to which real decolonization based on land redistribution remains a blocked possibility within the Canadian context. In addition to the progressive tendencies implicated in Canada’s constitutional act (1982) and the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), both of which to varying degrees demand the recognition of Indigenous rights concerning land and self-determination, the Supreme Court of Canada’s Tsilhqot’in decision (2014) explicitly recognizes Aboriginal title on the ground in the western province of British Columbia to “almost two thousand square kilometers of Tsilhqot’in territory,”70 “the right to determine…the uses to which the land is put and to enjoy its economic fruits.”71 As we have seen, actualizing the principled thrust of the decision will therefore mean implementing Indigenous governance, based on Indigenous laws, and not, “…on processes funded and directed by the government.”72 While these developments might suggest a potential sea change concerning comprehensive decolonization in the Canadian context, historical precedent and the continued coordination of state and industry for the development of lands—rich in resources like gold, base metals, silver, tungsten, uranium, rare earth elements, iron ore, zinc, copper, oil, and gas—give critical analysis cause for pause. Some estimates suggest as much as $650 billion in capital investment revolves around questions of land in the Canadian context.73 The degree to which such development demands the continued dispossession of Indigenous communities will shape one’s conclusions concerning the prospect of decolonization via the current configuration of recognition-based policy. The extent to which the concept and politics of recognition remain unable to comprehensively engage concerns of Indigenous title, and therefore self-determination, reveals the degree to which it betrays its emancipatory significations—capitulating to the colonial status quo. Here again

69 Manuel and Derrickson, Unsettling Canada, 19. 70 Manuel and Derrickson, 169. 71 Manuel and Derrickson, 171. 72 Manuel and Derrickson, 169. 73 Manuel and Derrickson, 170.

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we witness a crucial point of contact between Coulthard and Marcuse: their critical inquiries into the problem of domination lead them to operate negatively. Their respective analyses entail the rejection of those processes in modern society which perpetuate unnecessary toil, misery, illness, suffering, and injustice. The reciprocal coordination of Coulthard and Marcuse broadens the ideational and practical scope of both critical standpoints on the interconnected problems of domination and colonialism in modern society. It offers a more comprehensive, concrete, account of dynamics of domination in modern society. Such coordination might yet contribute to unexpected lines of advance concerning blockages that currently contain possibilities of emancipation. The reciprocal coordination of Coulthard and Marcuse ultimately implicates the power of negative thinking which is, “…essentially the negation of that which is immediately before us.”74 “The negation of what is immediately before us” means the principled rejection of those methods and procedures which serve to obscure unresolved contradictions permeating modern society, those between domination and liberation. Negative thinking insists on conceptualizing contradictions constitutive of modern life: those between unreason and reason, war and peace, servitude, and freedom. This negation resides at the center of Coulthard’s decolonial theory and praxis, constituting its supreme merit.

74 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).

CHAPTER 11

Colorblind Racism and One-Dimensionality: Imagining Marcusean Conditions of Freedom Through the Black Radical Tradition Nicole K. Mayberry

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. —James Baldwin

In his 1964 One-Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse asks, “…how can the people who have been the object of effective and productive domination by themselves create the conditions of freedom?”1 This question feels incredibly timely given the current political and social moment in 1 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Street Press, 1991), 4.

N. K. Mayberry (B) Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_11

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the United States. A moment wherein far-right ideology is embraced with open arms, the murder and lynching of Black and African Americans seems to be caught on video daily, and the United States Capitol can be overtaken by a violent mob of domestic terrorists with little accountability. All of this of course, while in the middle of a global pandemic. Considering the current circumstances, the question of how to move beyond these conditions or change the status quo seems even more cumbersome than it was some fifty years ago. In One-Dimensional Man Marcuse contends that society has become one-dimensional. If critical, or “two-dimensional,” thinking compels social change, then one-dimensional thinking is absent of criticism and therefore does not demand change or question the conditions of domination in society.2 Domination, according to Marcuse, in this form does not require one single authoritative figure or political party in order to influence and control society. Instead, domination subtly, and perhaps more nefariously, results in the erosion of two-dimensional consciousness so that people do not question or interrogate the ordinary systems, politics, ways of thinking, or technologies that ultimately rule their lives. Marcuse argues that where previously dialectical thinking or negative thinking revealed social contradictions, one-dimensional thinking flattens contradictions rendering them invisible. What follows from this is that people consolidate their ideology into one homogenous identity which aligns with their oppressor. For example: if the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same places…if they all read the same newspapers, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.3

In other words, conformist and laudatory acceptance of one-dimensional thinking aligns the oppressed with their oppressor thereby further fortifying the power of the oppressor. This false sense of unity or common identity is then taken up in politics using seemingly united, but hollow phrases such as the age-old idea of The American Dream or, more recently evoked with slogans like “Make America Great Again” which try to hide 2 Andrew Feenberg et al., The Essential Marcuse (Boston: Beacon Street Press, 2007). 3 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 8.

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the very different ways people navigate their experiences in the United States of America; for Marcuse, this difference is most apparent in the disparities between the workers and the capitalists. Marcuse’s interrogation of one-dimensional thinking follows, as noted by Doug Kellner, the tradition of the Frankfurt School which historically focused on reform through the lenses of philosophy, social theory, and politics.4 Building on Hegel’s dialectic, Marcuse proposes negative thinking as a way to combat one-dimensional thinking and as a means of refusal.5 Negative thinking exposes society for what it is and exposes the “contradictory elements” and hollowness in otherwise socially accepted “facts.”6 Implementing negative thinking, to a phrase like “All Lives Matter” for example, exposes a fatal contradiction in the rhetoric that suggests life is sacred—and the reality of police brutality.7 It is thinking the negative, or recognizing contradictions that then creates the conditions for refusal. Just as a false sense of unity is created through the use of thin phrases such as “Make America Great Again” colorblind or post-racial expressions such as “I don’t see color I see people” or “All Lives Matter” diminish the important idiosyncrasies and cultural differences that contribute to different racialized experience. Differently worded, “colorblind” or “postracial” framing, I argue are contemporary expressions of one-dimensional thinking that demand interrogation in light of recent social and political events. If the project of one-dimensional thinking is to produce a onedimensional society by eroding two-dimensional consciousness, then so too is the function of colorblind or post-racial framing whose project is to produce a one-dimensional understanding of race and racism by denying racial distinctions. The effect of this homogenization sustains whiteness and white supremacy. The dream of freedom in One-Dimensional Man is only accomplished when the status quo is opposed. But in order for the status quo to be fully challenged, the foundations from which it operates must be exposed. The recent momentum in racial social justice movements in the United States

4 Doug Kellner, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” in One-Dimensional Man, xxi. 5 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 133. 6 Marcuse, 141–142. 7 Gabriel L. Schwartz et. al. “Mapping Fatal Police Violence Across U.S. Metropolitan

Areas: Overall Rates and Racial/Ethnic Inequities, 2013–2017,” Plos One, no. 6 (2020).

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and contemporary politics necessitates One-Dimensional Man be revisited from a racial perspective. I do this by first introducing colorblind and post-racial framing. Then I explore how these framings (used in contemporary US-American politics) are forms of one-dimensional thinking that lead to a lack of critical consciousness concerning race and racism. Finally, I return to Marcuses’ call to create “conditions of freedom” by briefly offering the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) as a conceptual tool that can better help Marcuse’s critical theory combat one-dimensional oppression.

Colorblindness as the Proverbial “Mountaintop” After Barack Obama was elected as the forty-fourth President of the United States, many US-Americans began to argue that the country’s history of racism was a thing of the past; after all, if a Black man could be elected to the highest political office of the land, then surely racial inequity had been solved and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “mountaintop” had been reached.8 More recently, this same thinking has reemerged with the election of the nation’s first Black, South Asian, female Vice President, Kamala Harris. However, long before Obama’s historic election, there was a push to insist that America had moved beyond its own racial and racist identity. Directly following the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, Annette Harris Powell notes that there was an immediate attempt to diminish the gains made by the movement by embracing a colorblind politics.9 Colorblind or post-racial thinking suggests that historical racial divisions have been smoothed in the decades following the Civil Rights Movement: The social movements of the 1960’s and 1970’s, we are told, have bridged historical divides, bringing us closer than ever to the multicultural promised land of equal opportunity and racial equity…we now inhibit a post-racial America marked crucially by the declining significance of race, these voices

8 Martin Luther King Jr., I’ve Been to the Mountaintop (San Francisco: Harper, 1994). 9 Annette Harris Powell, “Postracial,” in Critical Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial

Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, ed. Tammie M. Kennedy et al. (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), 20.

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read ongoing disarticulations within racial categories as suggestive of the “end of race” itself.10

In other words, as Black and African Americans began to see more tangible expressions of social and political equality through voting rights, working conditions, access to elite institutions of education, and economic opportunities, the assertion followed that racial divisions had ended. Rhetorical scholars (Lacey and Ono 2011)11 have demonstrated how this post-racial framing has been taken up by white supremacist groups in order to avoid blame for racist political actions, appropriation, and erasure of racial identity, to shift the blame of oppressive social and political conditions from racism to class, and to deny individual racism under the logic that in a post-racial society, “everyone is racist.”12 Colorblind or post-racial thinking, like one-dimensional thinking, unites people under a false sense of common identity that is absent of historical recognition. Post-racial identity whittles down critical consciousness about race and racism by falsely proclaiming that the United States is, and continues to be, a place where people are not judged by their skin color but by the “content of their character.”13 But like onedimensional thinking, this type of discourse not only limits the ability to critically interrogate and engage with whiteness as both a historical and continued organizing system of oppression, but it delegitimizes critique of whiteness as an oppressive force that endures in the United States. If, “remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights..” then this colorblind and post-racial framing denies any and all sense of historical consciousness by proclaiming triumph over historical racism.14 Further, colorblind and post-racial thinking compel us to believe that we are all the same and that the color of our skin does not matter or that our cultural, ancestral, and history do not matter. In this uncritical way of thinking, 10 Roopali Mukherjee “Bling Fling: Commodity Consumption and the Politics of the ‘Post Racial’,” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, ed. Michael G. Lacey and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 178–179. 11 See also notes 8, 9. 12 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield

Publishers, 2006). 13 Martin Luther King Jr., 1929–1968—I Have a Dream; The Quotations of Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Grosset, 1968). 14 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 98.

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the personal is no longer political. As Leda Cooks writes, “…to not name the processes through which inequities among groups have been solidified (and embodied) psychologically, socially, culturally, economically, and politically is to ignore, and thus, to exacerbate the problem.”15

A More Perfect Union? Marcuse contends that domination in one-dimensional society does not require the management of authority figures to maintain despotic forms of control. Likewise, domination by way of colorblind and post-racial thinking is not obliged solely to any one political ideology, self-proclaimed racist figure, or overtly racist organization. Both one-dimensional and colorblind/post-racial thinking can rely on abstract concepts to maintain larger systems of oppression. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse outlines the way that two-dimensional consciousness is whittled down; first, citizens are folded into the illusion that they are freer than they really are.16 Second, citizens conform to belief in what Marcuse describes as “happy consciousness.”17 A belief that the current system is rational and therefore rejects any connection to oppression or atrocity; for example the belief that peace reigns despite involvement in the ongoing war. Third, and perhaps most importantly, contradiction or antithetical discourse must be closed so that the “ritualized concept is made immune against contradiction.”18 Strengthened over time, one-dimensional thinking therefore removed critical and necessary dialogue until the public generally accepts the lies and both public and private opinions that dissent are silenced.19 Marcuse writes that, “under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination.”20 Engrained in colorblind/post-racial thinking is the idea of accomplishment and triumph. It promotes a false idea that racism in society is an issue that 15 Leda Cooks, “On the Cover of the Rolling Stone: Deconstructing Monsters and Terrorism in an Era of Postracial Whiteness,” in Critical Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, ed. Tammie M. Kennedy et. al. (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), 215. 16 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7. 17 Marcuse, 84. 18 Marcuse, 88. 19 Marcuse, 89. 20 Marcuse, 7.

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is finished and looks to the success of Black people in order to dispute any counterclaims, “…iconic figures like Oprah Winfrey, Magic Johnson, and Colin Powell take shape as rich cultural metonyms for generational transformations within the racial order.”21 The success of a select few individuals therefore translates, according the colorblind/post-racial thinking, to the freedom of every Black person in the United States as Marcuse writes, Relatively new is the general acceptance of these lies by public and private opinion, the suppression of their monstrous content. The spread and effectiveness of this language testify to the triumph over the contradictions it contains...22

It therefore does not matter then that counterexamples to these success stories exist, so long as they can be overwhelmed by the achievements or positive improvements by the few. Marcuse describes this rhetorical success as, “the result of constant repetition, and of the skillfully managed popular directness of the communication.”23 So yes, Black US-Americans might be twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than white US-Americans.24 And yes, Black US-Americans continue to face economic inequalities along with other minority groups. But the Vice President, a Black, South Asian woman has ascended to the secondhighest office of the land, and poverty rates are at the lowest reported rate since 1959.25 It is in this way the logic of the mountaintop, however few have “reached it,” unseats any evidence or data that would attempt to bring up enduring racial and social inequities.26 Colorblind/post-racial thinking handily creates the rhetoric and therefore the conditions for the 21 Mukherjee, 179. 22 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 89. 23 Marcuse, 92. 24 Scott Nueman, “COVID-19 Death Rate for Black Americans Twice That for Whites, New Report Says.” NPR, August 13, 2020, https://www.npr.org/sections/ coronavirus-live-updates/2020/08/13/902261618/covid-19-death-rate-for-black-americ ans-twice-that-for-whites-new-report-says, accessed March 1, 2021. 25 John Creamer, “Inequalities Persist Despite Decline in Poverty for All Major Race and Hispanic Origin Groups,” United States Census Bureau, September 15, 2020, https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/poverty-rates-for-blacks-and-his panics-reached-historic-lows-in-2019.html, accessed March 1, 2021, 26 Mukherjee, “Bling Fling,” 179–180.

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oppressed (Black and African Americans) to not question their oppressors (whiteness and white supremacy); this is exceedingly important in contemporary politics. One such example, as Kristi McDuffie points out is President Barack Obama’s, then Senator Obama, “A More Perfect Union” speech delivered at the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Obama addressed the subjects of racial tension, white privilege, and the grievances that Black Americans and white Americans felt toward one another and pleaded to the audience for America to move forward and work toward shared goals. McDuffie, following the framework laid out to examine colorblind/post-racial framing of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, contends that Obama’s speech appealed to American ideas of liberalism, individualism/ neo-liberalism, and linguistic maneuvering in order to confront race while still appealing to colorblind/post-racial ideologies.27 As a result of this rhetorical strategy, Obama’s speech preserves a one-dimensional way of thinking about race and racism (a false anti-racism) because it is not critical about racism, but instead distributes the issue onto everyone in the United States—not those who are responsible for maintaining oppressive and systemic despotic conditions. This is destructive to a multi-dimensional understanding of race and racism as McDuffie notes: Minimizing the impact of race and racial whiteness on social outcomes in the United States adheres to the minimization of racism frame of colorblind racial ideology, one that appeals to whiteness by denying white participation in racism and reproduces whiteness.28

Further, this is destructive to any type of reflexivity or critical consciousness about race and racism because the framing purposefully places and distributes the blame of poverty, inequity, or division among everyone in the United States, Black or white. Put differently, issues Black USAmericans face are not actually a result of racism, but instead are remedied by pulling oneself up by the “bootstraps,” working harder, and being more agreeable with those they disagree with.

27 Kristi McDuffie, “Color-Blind Rhetoric in Obama’s 2008 “Race Speech”: The Appeal to Whiteness and the Displacing of Racial Rhetorical Studies,” in Critical Rhetorics of Whiteness: Postracial Hauntings in Popular Culture, Social Media, and Education, ed. Tammie M. Kennedy et al. (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), 79–80. 28 McDuffie, “Color-Blind Rhetoric,” 81.

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The recent insurrection at the United States Capitol incited by a former sitting US President, and an election resulting in a not so “peaceful” transition, but transition nonetheless of power from Republican Democratic control in the House, Senate, and White House provide an important moment to reflect on how colorblind thinking is again present in political discourse. According to Marcuse, political discourse cannot survive in a one-dimensional society: The society bars a whole type of oppositional operations and behavior; consequently, the concepts pertaining to them are rendered illusory or meaningless…When this point is reached, domination—in the guise of affluence and liberty—extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives.29

The ways that colorblind/post-racial framing have adopted the tenets of one-dimensional thinking are key to recognize because of the way that they maintain racialized forms of oppression in the United States. Failing to recognize how race and racism also maintain one-dimensional society is an impediment to refusing and reimaging the status quo. Whereas the forty-fifth President and his administration were overt and at times unabashedly proud of their racism and support of white supremacist groups, the newly elected Biden administration might not be as easily noticed.30 The Biden administration, following the footsteps of former President Barack Obama, is also appealing to colorblind and post-racial ideologies; under the labels of liberty and unification. If Barack Obama was lauded as reaching Dr. King’s mountaintop when he won the US Presidential election in 2008, so too does Vice President Kamala Harris fall into the same rhetorical and political gambit as the first female, the first Black female, the first South Asian female to hold the office. Being the first, Harris’ success is another example of Black mobility that can defy claims of lingering structural or systemic racism meant to keep Black people in “place.”31

29 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 15–18. 30 Leila Fadel, “Trump Appears to Engage Far-Right Group During Debate Answer,”

NPR, September 30, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/09/30/918572904/trump-app ears-to-engage-far-right-group-during-debate-answer, accessed March 12, 2021. 31 George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place: Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2011).

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The political victory of Harris therefore is a perceived racial victory other Black and African Americans can find, and are expected to find, in themselves as Marcuse writes, “It makes little difference whether or not the individuals addressed believe it. Its success indicates that it promotes the self-identification of the individuals with the functions which they and others perform.”32 Biden also sustains colorblind thinking by way of his Presidential campaign slogan and victory speech following the results of the 2020 election. Whereas Barack Obama encouraged people in his speech to work harder and unite with one another, Biden called for national healing in the aftermath of a lengthy and contested election. What was previously a campaign slogan to “Return the Soul of America” Biden’s speech, similar to Obama’s, urged Americans to unite, not as enemies or opponents, but as Americans first and foremost. Biden’s campaign slogan and speech appeal to the idea of return; that the Lockean wheel can somehow, with determination, revolve back to a non-precise period in US-American history that was more prosperous, less divisive, and unified. This rhetorical use of the return is colorblind and therefore one-dimensional because it fails to acknowledge the contradiction in the statement. Getting back to or restoring the soul of the nation implies that the nation was, at some point, truly unified and fails to acknowledge that said soul never existed in such a way. Put differently, accepting this possible return denies the historical and current reality of racial and economic injustice in the United States and the reality that America has always been, and continues to be, a nation predicated on discrimination, racial and economic caste, and systemic racism toward Black Americans. The forty-fifth Presidential slogan “Make America Great Again” functioned in the same way.33 By promising a historical restoration to greatness, the former President also promised a reality that no longer existed or might not have ever existed. The key difference is the undisguised endorsement of white supremacy by one President and the subtle, more quotidian of the next. While it is important to note that in the same speech (and throughout his Presidential campaign) Biden calls out racial injustice and systemic racism, his overall 32 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 92. 33 This racist contradiction was perhaps easier to detect because of the President’s

political views on race and endorsement of policies that promoted white supremacist ideas.

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message that is repeated is one that renders the dialectical contradiction invisible and is therefore in service of whiteness and the reproduction of whiteness.

How We Get Conditions of Freedom This chapter has outlined the ways in which one-dimensionality and one-dimensional society is not only, as Marcuse noted, linked to conditions of class and capitalism, but also how lack of critical consciousness concerning race and racism aids projects of domination of whiteness and white supremacy. In 1964 Marcuse, concerned with such entrenched forms of oppression, asked how, “… [do they] liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious cycle be broken?”34 Some fifty years later, where pervasive neo-liberal, capitalist, and racist one-dimensional conditions prevail, the question about changing the status quo seems unworkable. One-Dimensional Man offered the concept of “refusal” through negative thinking as a way for the oppressed to fracture from their oppressors and therefore unfetter themselves from the uncritical limitations of onedimensional thinking. Refusal’s genesis, for Marcuse, began with those individuals in society who were considered to be the outcasts or outsiders; the people who could never, because of their race, ability, sexuality, or gender find themselves in commodities or identify themselves in their oppressors.35 Marginalized, like that of a lower caste, these individuals were not permitted in the first place.36 The opposition then became a way to outplay or outmaneuver those playing the “game.”37 The logic was that since these individuals were not part of the system/game from the start, their refusal could not be deflected by the system:

34 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 251. 35 It is important to note that while this was a spatial consideration for Marcuse

concerned with the “others” being on the periphery outside of the United States, this approach is also helpful in a US context when considering the groups of people who continue to be marginalized or remain at the periphery domestically because of caste, race, ability, and gender. 36 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 256 [emphasis added]. 37 Marcuse, 257.

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…it is an elementary force which violates the rules of the game and, in doing so, reveals it as a rigged game…The fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.38

Marcuse himself understood the importance of the necessary refusal that would have to come from the outsiders or those on the periphery. It is precisely in this political moment where Marcuse’s praxis needs revitalized attention because of the way that negative thinking exposes the contradiction, and therefore absurdity, of one-dimensional thinking. Colorblindness is a tool of the oppressor which is taken up and domesticated to the point where racism is perceived as no longer an issue or is something that can be sanitized as I have argued by adopting liberal, political perspectives which shift blame from systems to personal responsibility.39 In the wake of recent political strategies which have adopted this colorblind/post-racial framing, I argue Marcuse’s refusal in OneDimensional Man is strengthened by the addition of the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) which provides conceptual tools to recognize otherwise quotidian, normalized endorsements of whiteness; many of which go otherwise unrecognized in contemporary politics. The Black Radical Tradition is defined as, “the continuing development of a collective consciousness informed by the historical struggles for liberation and motivated by the shared sense of obligation to preserve the collective being, the ontological totality.”40 In other words, it is an insurgency against oppression in all forms. BRT allies with all who are oppressed because of class, gender, race, or capitalism in order to commit to the project of social justice for all. As noted by scholars Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, the Black Radical Tradition is the articulation of freedom by all Black activists, artists, and intellectuals on behalf of everyone’s freedom: “Black freedom is freedom for all.”41 The BRT dares to

38 Marcuse, 257. 39 See Obama’s 2008 A More Perfect Union speech. 40 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

(University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 171. 41 Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, Futures of Black Radicalism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2017), 13.

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make history on its own terms with an understanding that Black radicalism itself is situated outside of a Western/Eurocentric/capitalist core.42 The BRT is committed to refusal. In this regard the project is directly aligned with Marcuse’s refusal. The BRT and with that, the Black radical imagination is a relentless critique of oppression. As noted by Geographer George Lipsitz, “The “Black” in the Black Radical Tradition is a politics rather than a pigment, a culture rather than a color. Yet this Blackness does not presume a unified homogenous community with only one set of interests, needs, and desires.”43 It is in this way that the BRT not only speaks for the “outsiders” but for any human interest who experiences domination. It is because of the capaciousness of the BRT that, when put in concert and conversation with Marcuse’s refusal, the refusal is more complete. The commitment of the Black Radical Tradition therefore provides a toolkit with which people, not just outsiders, can join to create the conditions of freedom. The BRT uses a multidisciplinary approach which includes critical race analysis, critical rhetorical analysis, and Black feminism (to name a few) which offer a more critical, critical theory to root out and contradict otherwise normalized whiteness. Systems of oppression are interlocking. None of us get free if some of us are still not free.44 This proposition is not new. The Combahee River Collective Statement of 1977, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, calls for solidarity in order for everyone to liberate themselves from their struggles: Solidarity did not mean subsuming your struggles to help someone else; it was intended to strengthen political commitments from other groups by getting them to recognize how the different struggles were related to each other and connected to capitalism.45

42 Johnson and Lubin, Black Marxism, 11. 43 George Lipsitz, “What Is This Black in the Black Radical Tradition?” Verso Books

Online, June 24, 2020, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4766-what-is-this-black-inthe-black-radical-tradition, accessed September 28, 2020. 44 Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (Penguin Books, 2018). 45 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 11.

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I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter the importance of recognizing how colorblind and post-racial thinking in contemporary politics has eroded a critical, two-dimensional consciousness about race and racism; the result of which has only strengthened the oppressive force of whiteness. I have also briefly attempted to show how the Black Radical Tradition is critical for Marcuse’s refusal to recruit beyond the “outsiders” in a political and social moment in the United States that demands the attention of a more critical, critical theory. I do this in order to try to revitalize Marcuse’s groundbreaking work in One-Dimensional Man which needs a present-day consideration in order to contradict the United States’ current and racist status quo.

CHAPTER 12

Artificial Reverie and Administered Negativity Taylor Hines

Introduction Herbert Marcuse famously critiques advanced industrial society as “onedimensional”—blind to its political alternatives and lacking the negativity required for imagining what such alternatives would look like. Since Marcuse first published his critique, other theorists have continued to develop it apace with changing material conditions.1 With the disappearance of state socialism as a meaningful contender to US and European capitalism, for instance, and the emergence of neoliberal hegemony, the forces of one-dimensional society find new ways of rechanneling and conscripting discontent into their own service. As Robert Kirsch and 1 C.f. (United Politics, (United

One-dimensional Man 50 Years on: The Struggle Continues, ed. Terry Maley States: Fernwood Publishing, 2017); Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century: Radical Critical Theory, and Revolutionary Praxis, ed. Robert Kirsch and Sarah Surak Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2018).

T. Hines (B) Honors College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_12

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Sarah Surak describe, “Not only does one-dimensional society preclude the negativity necessary to show the gap between how society claims to function and how it actually works, limiting a vision for how things might be otherwise, but the same society produces its own resistance, but only in a way that reinforces the system it purports to resist.”2 This phenomenon, wherein refusal of the status quo is co-opted by the very forces against which refusal is directed, was termed “artificial negativity” by Paul Piccone, Tim Luke, and others. Taking the artificial negativity thesis as a jumping-off point, this chapter seeks to further develop the onedimensionality critique of contemporary society by understanding the way subjectivity is administered to neoliberal subjects through ever-evolving culture industry institutions. More specifically, this chapter complements the Frankfurt School’s Freudian analysis of capitalist subjectivity—and the culture industry thesis in particular—with the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. Wilfred Bion, in Learning from Experience, describes a process he terms “maternal reverie”—loosely speaking, a dynamic wherein a mother helps her infant process feelings of fear and dread by providing comfort, a warm embrace, soothing talk, and physical nourishment. For Bion, reverie is a pseudo-metabolic process that occurs at the biological level as well as at the level of thought. Before consciousness is fully developed, that is, thoughts and emotions that are too intense to bear are “metabolized” with the help of one’s caregiver. This dialectical process between an infant and its maternal environment prefigures and helps explain, I argue, contemporary capitalist subjects’ experience with immersive cultural forms such as social media. Bringing Klein and Bion’s theory of psychological development into conversation with Marcuse’s one-dimensionality critique, I explore the function that our hyper-engineered culture industry serves in developing and administering one-dimensional rationality. In particular, this chapter argues, neoliberal subjectification emulates the process of maternal reverie, with the culture industry delivering “schemata for coping with reality”3 in a perverted form of pseudo-maternal care and compassion. This chapter attempts to shed light on this dynamic, 2 Kirsch, Robert, and Sarah Surak, “Introduction,” New Political Science: Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century: Radical Politics, Critical Theory, and Revolutionary Praxis 38, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 458. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” Telos 1993, no. 95 (March 1993): 34.

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which I call “artificial reverie,” and illustrates how the culture industry eagerly accepts our anxiety about precarity and exploitation and returns a thin, predigested gruel which keeps us minimally effective as producers of surplus value without providing avenues for autonomous development.

Artificial Negativity Herbert Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis describes a transformation of subjectivity that occurs as a result of particular historical developments within capitalist society under the conditions of modernity. In brief, technological development—in service to the demands of capitalist production—renders possible a society of “total administration.” As Marcuse argues, “The world has been rationalized to such an extent, and this rationality has become such a social power that the individual could do no better than adjust himself without reservation.”4 In a totally administered society, thought is “flattened”: reduced to the acceptance of modern science and technology as the prevailing rationality in light of their ability to provide for the needs (and even modest luxuries) of many workers. To accede to total administration, Marcuse argues, appears “not only perfectly rational but also perfectly reasonable. All protest is senseless, and the individual who would insist on his freedom of action would become a crank.”5 Here, Marcuse is particularly concerned with the loss of negativity: the ability to hold in one’s mind both the promise of bourgeois science and its failure to deliver on these promises simultaneously, and refers to the collapse of such dialectical thinking as one-dimensionality. In a series of response essays published in 1978, Paul Piccone and Tim Luke accept the basic commitments of the one-dimensionality thesis but argue that Marcuse’s conclusions appear—only a short decade later— almost obsolete. Piccone and Luke level two primary critiques: first, that as monopoly capitalism achieves complete hegemony, the integrative forces of one-dimensional society undergo qualitative changes unaccounted for in Marcuse’s thesis. Second, an “ontologization” of traditional Marxist theory commits Marcuse and other Frankfurt School 4 Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982): 142. 5 Ibid., 143.

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theorists to a dehistoricized (and hence simply a rationalizing) analytical “prison.”6 Although the Fordist-Taylorist model of production requires a homogenized workforce, this critique goes, the continued smooth functioning of capital in the advanced technological era requires a certain amount of negativity to maintain itself. In Piccone’s words, “the process of homogenization and fragmentation has been too successful, with the result that it has destroyed that otherness which made homogenization work.”7 That is to say, the complete reduction of public opinion to the standardized terms of technological efficiency has succeeded to the point that it necessitates the artificial reconstruction of enough friction to keep the products designed to facilitate smooth integration in demand. In other words, a workforce of supremely efficient, emotionless automatons would be as much a nightmare for capital as it would be for capitalist subjects since no one would need to buy all the commodities designed to make life in capitalist society bearable. Piccone terms this process, whereby capital rechannels the discontent it creates back into its own service, “artificial negativity.” Tim Luke further describes how specific historical contradictions emerged in one-dimensional society and led to artificial negativity supplanting one-dimensionality. “Once the pre-rational aspects of American society submitted to the rational imperatives of purposive-rational management,” Luke writes, “the instruments of social administration lost their original purpose.”8 To illustrate how the purposive-rational administrative mode overshot its own practical horizon, Luke gives the example of midcentury US foreign policy and the corresponding transformations within multinational corporations that achieved global hegemony during that time. “Recalcitrant peoples and maverick nation-states no longer are forced into submission at the end of a Marine’s bayonet nor do they need to be covertly controlled under an agricultural scheme set up by AID planners,” he observes, “Instead, they submit willingly to their own self-control with each new commodity purchase to satisfy each new corporate-defined need as transnational corporations deliver

6 Paul Piccone, “The Crisis of One-Dimensionality,” Telos 35 (March 1978): 45. 7 Ibid. 8 Tim Luke, “Culture and Politics in the Age of Artificial Negativity,” Telos 1978, no. 35 (March 1978): 72.

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the material goods and cultural services of the ‘modern,’ or American way of life.”9 Now, multinationals are no longer required to coercively homogenize workers with the help of state authority—in fact, corporations rely on some measure of individuality and countercultural identity, which are leveraged to market mass-produced wares to a workforce that is oversaturated with cheap, useless commodities. Together, Piccone and Luke argue that the shift from expansive entrepreneurial capitalism to intensive monopoly capitalism brings with it a different rationality and, consequently, a different set of demands on character structure. One-dimensional society was predicated on the rationalization of pre-technological social structures but once this rationality had achieved complete hegemony, further social engineering began to run counter to the demands of concentrated capital. It was the forces of one-dimensionality that, exercised through the culture industry, “fostered ‘consumption communities’ in which workers as consumers disciplined and repressed themselves to gain access to Woolworth’s, Model T’s, the movies, and suburban living.”10 However, the continued steamrolling of individuality by instrumental rationality threatens to explode a onedimensional society from within. Piccone and Luke describe a tension at the heart of character formation under the regime of fully monopolized capital: The smooth functioning of industrial capital requires a certain degree of homogenization among workers, yet consumer society relies on the individuality that keeps its products in demand. They hypothesize artificial negativity as capital’s response to this contradiction. This chapter reconsiders the demands on subjectivity—and the corresponding changes in character structure—that have emerged in the era of collapsing one-dimensional neoliberalism. Here, I argue that artificial negativity itself has become standardized and in its place, we find an “administered negativity” that continues to provide the structural needs which Luke and Piccone describe. The key distinction, in the argument that follows, is that artificial negativity—while not “authentically” negative in the sense that it is capable of driving systemic change—is nevertheless a spontaneous expression of discontent that capitalism must find ways of metabolizing and conscripting into its own service. But

9 Ibid., 63. 10 Ibid., 58.

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because a totalized neoliberalism does not render possible the subjective conditions for any spontaneous negativity whatsoever (at least not any form that can find political expression) the structural demand for negativity must be administered by capital itself. In what follows, I will maintain the central commitments of Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis, hoping to show that under conditions of totalized neoliberalism the same attacks on subjectivity continue.11 With this framing in mind, my goal is to show that Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis—when complemented by psychoanalytic theory, particularly of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion—continues to explain the developments in late capitalist character structure, including the emergence of artificial negativity and it’s vicissitudes. Within this framing, I believe, we can understand artificial negativity as a direct continuation of onedimensionality, rather than a periodizing break in the history of late capitalism, and that administered negativity is the next step in this continual process. In so doing, I hope to show that post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory can provide more than just an explanatory function in the critique of one-dimensionality (as Piccone might contend) but that it explains social dynamics, refines materialist analysis, and gestures toward the kind of negative critique that remains possible under a dominant regime of flattened subjectivity.

Dialectical Subjectivity, Philosophical and Psychoanalytic In Herbert Marcue’s formulation, it is in the tension between actual and potential that negative thinking emerges. Marcuse expresses this tension in the dimension of thought through his theorization of conception; that concepts can be abstract and universal (positioned within a larger constellation of meaning) or concrete and operational (identified with an immediate social function). If these two dimensions are collapsed then abstract thought loses its critical function, but by maintaining the

11 Indeed, it was in One-Dimensional Man that Marcuse writes “continuity is preserved

through rupture: quantitative development becomes qualitative change if it attains the very structure of an established system; the established rationality becomes irrational when, in the course of its internal development, the potentialities of the system have outgrown its institutions.” Marcuse, no doubt, would be unsurprised that one-dimensional society is continually torn apart by its internal contradictions.

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space between universal and concrete, negative thought maintains the capacity to distinguish essence from immediate appearance. In comparison to classical Greek philosophy, Marcuse identifies intuition as the faculty by which we are capable of registering this difference, describing it as “a form of cognition in which the object of thought appears clearly as that which it really is (in its essential qualities), and in antagonistic relation to its contingent, immediate situation.”12 It is important to note here that Marcuse does not consider intuition an innate or ahistorical mental faculty, but the slow process of deliberate, careful reflection. In the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein, the capacity for such negative intuition is a landmark achievement in cognitive development and a faculty at the heart of subjectivity itself. As opposed to the traditional Freudian theory of psychological stages, Klein theorizes a dialectical process of development whereby the ego is formed in the tension between two psychological positions characterized by distinct patterns of thought. Like Marcuse, Klein visualizes this as a dialectic between instinctual and reflective thought wherein subjectivity is developed only through the capacity to abstract from immediate experience. For Klein, this ability— which I argue is the psychoanalytic equivalent of Marcuse’s formulation of negative thinking—represents the most fundamental inner comportment required for developed consciousness. To better understand the comparison with Marcuse, a brief digression into Kleinian theory is necessary. Klein theorizes a process of psychic development wherein ego and superego are constructed through a process of mediation between an infant’s external and internal worlds. In early consciousness, Klein argues, thoughts and feelings are identical to reality itself. The primary axis around which consciousness is oriented is that of good versus bad thoughts, feelings, and sensations— identical in primitive modes of association with good and bad objects. Here, overwhelming feelings of love and hatred are processed instinctually by omnipotently rejecting bad feelings and retaining good. Klein terms this the paranoid-schizoid position because, as Kleinian analyst Beth Kita concisely describes, “in this developmental position, good and bad have

12 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 125–126.

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to be split apart (schizoid) so that the bad doesn’t destroy the good (paranoid).”13 Psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden further describes this position as follows: The paranoid-schizoid position is a mode of generating experience that is impersonal and automatic. Danger and safety are managed by means of rendering experience discontinuous (by means of splitting) and by ejecting into another person unacceptable or endangered aspects of self (by means of projective identification). The paranoid-schizoid position involves a nonreflective state of being; one’s thoughts and feelings are events that merely happen.14

Ideally, the paranoid-schizoid position will eventually give way to a more nuanced capacity for understanding objects as complete; with simultaneously good and bad qualities. Klein uses the experience of breastfeeding as the prototypical example of this process: because its mother provides comfort, security and nourishment, an infant identifies this constellation of emotions as the prototypical “good” object, which Klein terms the “good breast.” However, the infant also experiences moments of hunger, cold, and fear, and Klein theorizes that these painful feelings comprise—in the infant’s mind—a bad or withholding object which Klein terms the “bad breast.” As Kleinian psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion describes, “Both good and bad breasts are felt as possessing the same degree of concreteness and reality as milk.”15 As the infant develops, it comes to recognize that its maternal environment (both good and bad) is in fact a single, complete entity—Mom— that provides it with nourishment and upon whom it is dependent, but who is not subject to its omnipotent control. Klein terms this the “depressive position,” so-called because an infant must renounce its omnipotence, learn to tolerate its good and bad objects intermixing, experience the guilt of having hated the bad mother which is now identified with the good, and process the fear that its hateful thoughts might have destroyed

13 Elizabeth Kita, “‘They Hate Me Now But Where Was Everyone When I Needed Them?’: Mass Incarceration, Projective Identification, and Social Work Praxis,” Psychoanalytic Social Work 26, no. 1 (April 2019): 16. 14 Thomas Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 68. 15 W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London: Karnac, 1984), 34.

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what it loves most. It is only by overcoming this depression and guilt that experience is integrated and objects can be recognized as other individuals. It is in this dialectic between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions that subjectivity is developed: a sense of self emerges from the process of integrating immediate perceptions into nuanced, whole objects. Ogden describes this process as follows: In the paranoid-schizoid position, the symbol and the symbolized were emotionally interchangeable, leading to an immediacy of experience manifested in extreme concreteness of thought, entrapment in the manifest, and delusional quality of experience (including transference experience). The symbol is what it represents. At the threshold of the depressive position, the maturity of the infant’s psychological organization has reached the point where a structural shift becomes possible. When symbol and symbolized become distinguishable, a sense of ‘I-ness’ fills the space between symbol and symbolized. This ‘I’ is the interpreter of one’s symbols, the mediator between one’s thoughts and that which one is thinking about, the intermediary between the self and one’s lived sensory experience.16

In the mediation between “internal” and “external,” there must be sufficient “space”—separation or distinction between inside and outside—for ego to develop. If thought is reduced to an immediate identification with lived reality, this process breaks down. That is, Klein’s framing aligns with Marcuse’s argument that “Introjection suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the ‘outer’ into the ‘inner.’ Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies—an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behavior. The idea of ‘inner freedom’ here has its reality: it designates the private space in which man [sic] may become and remain ‘himself.’”17 We might understand Marcuse’s description of intuition and negativity, then, as the manifestation in adult life of faculties developed in childhood through the successful navigation of Klein’s paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. Both Marcuse and Klein agree that a robust psyche, capable

16 Ogden, The Matrix of the Mind, 72. 17 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10.

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of tolerating the negation of one’s lived reality, is developed through a dialectical process of identification with and separation from one’s immediate environment. However, as both argue, this dialectic is not automatic and is always in danger of interruption.

One-Dimensional Subjectivity, Philosophical, and Psychoanalytic Marcuse’s one-dimensionality thesis describes a collapse of subjectivity— “institutionalized desublimation”18 —wherein the conveniences of industrial society lead to the willing acceptance of the repression demanded by capitalist production. Through this process, society rewires the libidinal economy of its citizens in terms that ensure its continued dominance over their lives. “The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered.” Marcuse writes, “Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression.”19 This flattened mode of subjectivity hollows out the traditional concept of social agency, replacing it instead with a false choice between unconscious acceptance or “irrational” rejection of the status quo. Framed in Kleinian psychoanalytic terms, we can understand the reduction of consciousness to its one-dimensional form as a collapse of the dialectic between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. In this framework, one-dimensional thinking mirrors a regression to conditions like those found in infancy, where subjectivity is diminished and thought is reduced to an immediate identification of a symbol with symbolized. Here, it is important to reiterate Klein’s assertion that the depressive position is never “achieved,” but can be navigated more (or less) stably throughout adult life. The potential of resorting to early psychic defense mechanisms remains a danger throughout one’s life, and might even be necessary when the ego experiences intense persecution. As Klein writes, “If persecutory fear [is] too strong, the ego is not capable of working through the depressive position. This in turn forces the ego to regress to the schizoid position and reinforces the earlier persecutory fears and 18 Ibid., 74. 19 Ibid., 74.

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schizoid phenomena.”20 In such circumstances, when one must resort to the primitive defense mechanisms characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position, one’s outer world risks collapsing on the inner world—the result being psychosis. In different terminology, Marcuse argues that the kind of subjective developments demanded by one-dimensional society leverage these primitive psychological mechanisms. He conjectures that This immediate, automatic identification (which may have been characteristic of primitive forms of association) reappears in high industrial civilization; its new ‘immediacy,’ however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organization. In this process, the ‘inner’ dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled down. The loss of this dimension, in which the power of negative thinking—the critical power of Reason—is at home, is the ideological counterpart to the very material process in which advanced industrial society silences and reconciles the opposition.21

Here, a crucial piece of the one-dimensionality thesis comes into focus, namely, that this regression is engineered so as to perpetuate existing modes of domination. The more-or-less stable continuation of onedimensional society requires that people come to identify directly with their own instrumentality, “to identify the ‘thing’ (including their own person, mind, feeling) with its functions.”22 It is through this overidentification, in “speaking their own language,” Marcuse writes, that “people also speak the language of their masters, benefactors, advertisers.”23

Structural Demands on Subjectivity Equipped with this understanding of one-dimensionality as a collapse in the dialectical process of subjectivity formation, the artificial negativity thesis as formulated by Piccone and Luke can be concisely described as 20 Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 27 (1946): 99–110. 21 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 10–11. 22 Ibid., 193. 23 Ibid.

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a mechanism whereby the forces of capital modulate this dialectic in its structurally necessary but most anemic form. As Joel Kovel describes, “Bureaucratic rationalization may then be read as the more or less continuous attempt to manage the interrelationship between the subjectivity and the objectification required by capital.”24 Here, Kovel echoes the tension at the center of the artificial negativity dynamic: the negativity inherent in human consciousness represents a danger to capital’s complete domination but is nevertheless necessary in order for society to function. Kovel goes on to describe this contradiction as follows: In order to turn labor into a commodity, the worker must be objectified so that his activity can be placed into a calculable set of relations out of which surplus value can be extracted. At the same time, some modicum of subjectivity must thrive in order for value to exist at all. In concrete terms, workers must retain enough of a mind so that they may sell labor-power on the market as well as exercise some degree of choice in the consumption of commodities. Without these two ends of the economic process, capital would cease to circulate.25

The one-dimensionality thesis describes the first half of this process: a collapse of subjectivity wherein positive scientific and technological rationality is internalized, social relationships are redefined in objective terms, and people come to relate to one another “as units of abstract labor power, calculable in units of time.”26 The second half—in which “some modicum of subjectivity must thrive”—is how I interpret Piccone and Luke’s theory of “artificial negativity.” Within this framing, “administered negativity” occurs when this dialectic is flattened and the necessary modicum of subjectivity is administered in a way that maintains the smooth functioning of technological rationality. The corresponding character structure is studied by David Riesman and C. Wright Mills, which they term (respectively) “other-directed”27 24 Joel Kovel, “Rationalization and the Family,” in Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), 207–226. 25 Ibid., 209–210. 26 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced

Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), 157. 27 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

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and “personality-market driven,”28 because the structural demands of capital are (or perhaps, must be) incorporated into one’s personality in a seemingly spontaneous way. Mills expresses this in the context of a white-collar salesperson: She cannot form her character by buying cheaply and selling wisely. Experts fix the market price; specialists buy the commodities which she is to sell. … There is only one area of her occupational life in which she is ‘free to act.’ That is the area of her own personality. She must make of her personality an alert, obsequious instrument whereby goods are distributed. The white collar worker, like the wage worker in a modern factory, is alienated from the tools and products of her labor; indeed, she does not even mix labor with raw stuff to produce things. The white collar worker on a personality market must not only sell her time and energy; she must also ‘sell herself.’ In the normal course of her work, she becomes self-alienated. For, in the personality market, the personality itself, along with advertising, becomes the instrument of an alien purpose. … In this market the human expressions are no longer expressions of private aspirations. For all the features of the character, especially the familial ones—the kindly gesture, tact, courtesy, the smile—now become expressions of the company’s aspirations.29

One-dimensional society streamlines the internalization of alienated forces—the over-identification with the demands of monopoly capital— and what emerges is the particular mode of alienation under conditions of modernity: a kind of socially reinforced psychosis wherein an historically particular social reality (that humans are abstract, objectified instruments of capital) inheres in one’s own lived reality (in the spontaneous adoption of these instrumental needs as one’s own). However, no matter how successful the forces of one-dimensionality may be at achieving such internalization of market demands, there are structural barriers—as Piccone, Luke, and Kovel point out—to the complete restructuring of personality. Such complete redefinition would defeat its own purpose. “Psychotic people are a fearsome threat to public order,” Kovel writes, “virtually unproductive as workers (i.e., unable to generate surplus value) and useless as consumers.”30 Here, Kovel describes 28 C. Wright Mills, “The Competitive Personality,” Partisan Review 13, no. 4 (September–October 1946): 433–441. 29 Ibid., 440–441. 30 Kovel, The Age of Desire, 128.

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in psychoanalytic terminology the contradiction that Piccone and Luke develop in the critique of one-dimensionality: that a certain amount of negativity is necessary for the system to function. Subjectivity must be administered according to the demands of capital, but it must be administered in a way that preserves a modicum of tension between negation and total identification—an “artificially dialectical” process. In the following sections, I attempt to complicate this thesis by laying out the mechanisms whereby subjectivity is administered in late capitalist society and argue that the resulting demand for artificial negativity in the neoliberal era provokes a return to primitive defense mechanisms for maintaining ego structure. I argue that, in the language of Kleinian psychoanalysis, it is the paranoid-schizoid defense mechanisms that are leveraged against subjects of neoliberal capitalism. It is these defenses, I try to show, that account for the emergence of artificial negativity in conditions of one-dimensionality, and that as these conditions become total, lead to the total administration of negativity in a form that suits the needs of neoliberal capitalism.

A Developmental Theory of Transcendental Schematism In his seminal 1962 text Learning from Experience, Bion lays out his theory of the development of conscious thought in early life. In large part, this theory is motivated by the question of how an infant learns to process raw emotions and sense perceptions into coherent, intelligible conceptions. Bion illustrates this process with the example of an infant learning the word “Daddy”: Let us suppose the infant repeats an emotional experience in which the following elements are constantly conjoined; the sight of a man, a sense of being loved by the man, a sense of wanting the man, an awareness of the repetition of a phrase, by the mother, of “That’s Daddy.” “Da, da, da” says the child. “That’s right; Daddy” says the mother. From the emotional experience the infant abstracts certain elements, what they are depending partly on the infant; these abstracted elements are given a name “Daddy”

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in other situations in which the same elements appear to be conjoined; thus a vocabulary is established.31

This vocabulary enables the infant to consolidate discontinuous, schizoid experience (what in Kantian terms we might call the “unstructured manifold” flux of sensations) by attaching continuous concepts to emotionaland sense experiences which constantly appear conjoined. By forming conceptions, that is, the infant develops the ability to abstract from their immediate, discontinuous experiences and “hypothesize” a continuity to existence. These conceptions, (“chair,” “Daddy,” “dog,” etc.) Bion argues, are not only linguistic signifiers attached to objects of everyday life—they represent an entire constellation of emotional experiences; they function to structure and integrate experience itself, rendering psychological life coherent. As Bion points out, “chair” is: (1) the name given to a thing in itself, as it is supposed to exist in actuality; this, following Kant, cannot be known to us. (2) the name given to the selected fact. (3) the name given to a selection of feelings, impressions, etc., that are felt, by virtue of the selected fact, to be related and coherent. (4) the name of the definitory hypothesis that states that these elements are constantly conjoined.32

As Bion notes, this theory of thinking is grounded in Kantian transcendental idealism. Indeed, we might read Bion’s theory as a developmental complement to Kant’s schematism; locating it in early childhood and including an emotional dimension. Recall that Kant develops the theory of transcendental schematism to resolve the apparent disconnect between “sensible intuitions” and “pure concepts of understanding.”33 Since raw sense data are purely empirical, he argues, and concepts purely ideal, there must be some faculty that mediates between the two—enabling the subsumption of the former under the latter and allowing humans to integrate perceptions into categories. No collection of empirical images (of dogs, Dads, chairs, etc.), he observes, could ever be adequate to represent a pure conception with 31 W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience (London and New York: Karnac, 1962), 66–67. 32 Ibid., 67. 33 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A.138/B.177, 180.

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complete generality. As Kant illustrates, “The concept ‘dog’,” therefore, “signifies a rule according to which my imagination can delineate the figure of a four-footed animal in a general manner, without limitation to any single determinate figure such as experience, or any possible image that I can represent in concreto, actually presents.”34 “These images can be connected with the concept,” he goes on to say, “only by means of the schema to which they belong.”35 “Indeed it is schemata, not images of objects,” Kant concludes, “which underlie our pure sensible concepts.”36 Kant’s theory stops short, however, of describing how schemata are acquired, and he expresses doubt that this process can ever be fully understood. “This schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul,” he writes, “whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover, and to have open to our gaze.”37 Bion’s theory of thinking, in part, concretizes this process whereby Kant’s schemata are developed and employed. It is in early childhood development, Bion argues, that thoughts are first distinguished from reality at all. Bion uses the paradigmatic Kleinian example of the “bad” and “good” breast to illustrate the first psychic division of thought reality from physical reality: We can see that the bad, that is to say wanted but absent, breast is much more likely to become recognized as an idea than the good breast which is associated with what a philosopher would call a thing-in-itself or a thingin-actuality, in that the sense of a good breast depends on the existence of milk the infant has in fact taken. The good breast and the bad breast, the one being associated with the actual milk that satisfies hunger and the other with the non-existence of that milk, must have a difference in psychical quality.38

As Bion points out, the sensations of hunger and satiation, while both immediate emotional experiences for the infant, have a categorically different relationship to reality. “[B]y virtue of the fact that there is ‘no 34 Ibid., A.141/B.180, 182–183. 35 Ibid., A.142/B.181, 183. 36 Ibid., A.141/B.180, 182. 37 Ibid., A.141–142/B.180–181, 183. 38 Bion, Learning from Experience, 34–35.

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thing,’” Bion clarifies, “one recognizes that ‘it’ must be thought.”39 Drawing from Melanie Klein, Bion argues that the process whereby thought (and subjectivity itself) is formed is fundamentally intersubjective: it is through the link with its mother (or, more generally, it’s maternal environment) that a child builds an emotional and conceptual vocabulary and thereby gains the schemata for organizing experience. As Bion describes, The relationship between mother and infant described by Melanie Klein as projective identification is internalized to form an apparatus for regulation of a preconception with the sense data of the appropriate realization. This apparatus is represented by a model: the mating of pre-conception with sense-impressions to produce a conception.40

It is precisely this process of “mating”—whereby sense impressions are connected to conceptions—that corresponds to Kant’s schematism. The following section looks more closely at how this schematizing faculty is developed, and goes on to argue that this faculty is supplanted in a onedimensional society—primarily by the culture industry.

Artificial Reverie Kleinian and Bionian vocabulary helps express the psychological mechanisms whereby schematization is developed, and in turn how subjectivity is administered. We can theorize one-dimensional subjectivity as a breakdown of the dialectic between the paranoid/schizoid and depressive positions, which results, in Marcuse’s formulation, in a lack of negativity. This section looks deeper into the mechanism whereby a successful attainment of the depressive position is foreclosed, and the way this foreclosure is leveraged in service of one-dimensional capitalism. It is the continual saturation of life by culture industry products—through the process described in psychoanalytic terms as “reverie”—that administers a minimally negative form of subjectivity. In so doing, those in a one-dimensional society are subjected to a life of perpetual infantilism—powerless consumers objectively and subjectively dependent on a withholding material environment. 39 Ibid., 34–35. 40 Ibid., 91.

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In their intersubjective theory of development, Both Klein and Bion argue that an infant learns to process their thoughts and emotions— to categorize and integrate experience—by “projecting” them into their mother and receiving a “metabolized” version of the emotions in return, in a process prefigured by the physical process of digestion. “[P]rojective identification,” in Bion’s terms, “is an early form of that which later is called a capacity for thinking.”41 An infant metabolizes physical and emotional sensations (cold, hunger) with the help of its mother, who accepts these needs and returns them in comforting form (holding, breastfeeding). In the same way, by holding, caring for, protecting and comforting her infant, a mother serves to mediate and structure her infant’s inchoate experience, enabling the infant to develop schemata for coping with reality. Bion refers to the process of psychological metabolization whereby a mother helps her infant integrate and process its experiences as “maternal reverie.”42 For Bion, maternal reverie is not only the expression of a mother’s love for her child, it is the process whereby she helps her child metabolize emotions. … [maternal] reverie is that state of mind which is open to the reception of any “objects” from the [infant] and is therefore capable of reception of the infant’s projective identifications whether they are felt by the infant to be good or bad.43

In healthy childhood development, this metabolizing and schematizing function is internalized as the child finds the ability to integrate and learn from their experiences without over-reliance on their mother’s psychological interpretation. However, as Bion cautions, if this process is foreclosed, it “leads to a destruction of the link between infant and breast and consequently to a severe disorder of the impulse to be curious on which all learning depends. The way is therefore prepared for a severe arrest of development.”44 What the culture industry provides is an artificial and engineered form of psychological “metabolization” that performs the analogue of maternal 41 Ibid., 37. 42 Ibid., 36. 43 Ibid. 44 W. R. Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 40 (1959):

308–315.

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reverie. To be clear, I am not arguing that material reverie is coterminous with administered negativity—nor indeed that maternal reverie prefigures any particular character structure at all. In Klein and Bion’s formulation, maternal reverie is a central element of infantile development independent of historically specific social organization. Nevertheless, the psychoanalytic concept of reverie provides a useful tool for understanding our subjective experience of the culture industry—particularly in its most insidious and intimate iterations, best illustrated in contemporary cultural forms like social media. By serving up predigested cultural morsels, the culture industry helps contemporary subjects process and bear painful emotions. Adorno describes such culture industry products as “psychotic ready-mades,” writing that “Such systems furnish whoever is deprived of the continuity of judgment and experience with schemata for coping with reality … [which] compensate for the anxiety about what cannot be grasped. Consumers of psychotic ready-mades feel sheltered by all those similarly isolated, who are bound together in their solitude by a common delusion under conditions of radical social alienation.”45 This process is illustrated in the comparison of the liquidation of tragedy (in the culture industry critique) with the processing of “nameless dread” in Bion’s terminology. For Bion, an infant’s unbearable emotions are, at root, the terror of annihilation—what he calls “nameless dread.” Through her reverie, a mother comforts her infant and returns this dread in nameable, thinkable, and thus bearable form. At this phase of development, the stakes are not simply the ability to cope (or not) with an unaccommodating reality, but existence itself. In reverie, a mother helps her child cope with the fear of non-existence, and in so doing helps her infant construct its self in the process. For Adorno and Horkheimer, tragedy was once the medium in which human despair—the terror borne of an unbearable situation—was once expressed. The heroes of classical tragedy were thus expressions of human individuality and autonomy, since they dared to stand against the forces that would destroy them. But in the culture industry, this despair—and the autonomy expressed in its defiance—has been “digested” and returned in tolerable and even mildly entertaining form.

45 Theodor W. Adorno, “Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959),” Telos 1993, no. 95 (March 1993): 34.

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Everyone knows that he is now helpless in the system, and ideology has to take this into account. … Mass culture deals with it, in the same way as centralized society does not abolish the suffering of its members but records and plans it. … Tragedy made into a carefully calculated and accepted aspect of the world is a blessing. … It comforts all with the thought that a tough, genuine human fate is still possible.46

In providing this “sheltering” and “compensating” function, the culture industry reduces us to an infantile, paranoid-schizoid state of immediate identification with the information imparted from our surrounding environment. As Benjamin Fong writes, Though they didn’t always put it in this way, I think what the Frankfurt School was trying to say was that the culture industry turns neurotic subjects into properly psychotic ones. Rather than drives and emotions pressing forth from the inside, drives and emotions are cut off from oneself and participate in the construction of a claustrophobic and paranoid reality surrounding us, so that emotional life and reality become so fused as to become indistinguishable.47

In other words, by subsuming the function of maternal reverie for capitalist subjects, the culture industry has the tools for the administration of subjectivity. More generally, as Adorno and Horkheimer write in their culture industry critique, the expropriation of schematization is a defining feature of the culture industry. As Rodrigo Duarte describes, “the ‘expropriation of schematism’ referred to by Horkheimer and Adorno means that this powerful subjective element which is, according to the ‘classic’ Kantian conception, required for knowledge to sustain a personal position, is replaced by an activity not quite proper, but ‘suggested’—as a matter of fact, almost imposed—by the agencies of the culture industry.”48 As Adorno and Horkheimer themselves describe,

46 Ibid., 151. 47 Benjamin Y Fong, “What Does America Believe?” Damage, June 3, 2019, https://

damagemag.com/2019/06/03/what-does-america-believe/. 48 Rodrigo Duarte, “The Culture Industry in Brazil,” Chapter 4 in Culture Industry Today, ed. Fabio Akcelrud Durão (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 96.

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Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the senses to fundamental concepts; but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him. Kant said that there was a secret mechanism in the soul which prepared direct intuitions in such a way that they could be fitted into the system of pure reason. But today that secret has been deciphered. While the mechanism is to all appearances planned by those who serve up the data of experience, that is, by the culture industry, it is in fact forced upon the latter by the power of society, which remains irrational, however we may try to rationalize it; and this inescapable force is processed by commercial agencies so that they give an artificial impression of being in command. There is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him.49

Phrased in Kleinian and Bionian terminology, it is the faculty of maternal reverie that the culture provides, albeit in technological and administrative form. In this formulation, the culture industry, beyond providing a simply distracting function—or even a mechanism for categorizing and marketing to consumers—plays a vital role in constructing and administering subjectivity itself. It is by consuming culture industry products that subjects are able to make sense of their inchoate experience, devoid of stable traditions or objective symbols that once anchored lived reality. One is able to process thoughts and feelings by identifying with (or, projecting onto) culture industry objects and identities, and receiving fully digested and socially appropriate thoughts and emotions in return. The metabolic process that might traditionally be experienced in the arms of one’s mother, when administered by the forces of capital, interrupts the process whereby one learns to come to terms with reality. The one-dimensional subject experiences a link with the apparatus of state bureaucracy and administration that is prefigured by the early relationship of an infant with its mother. With this terminology in place, I argue that there are no qualitative breaks in the evolution from one-dimensionality to artificial negativity to “administered negativity”. Instead, these theses express a gradual and continual development in the way subjectivity is formed and experienced in late capitalist society. Together, these ideas articulate different iterations

49 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. John Cumming, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1996), 124–125.

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of the same process: how we—the subjects of late capitalist society— are placed in a position of absolute dependence on a vaguely defined ensemble of objects which provide (or withhold) the resources necessary for life.

Administered Negativity Artificial reverie, this final section argues, helps describe how the culture industry administers schematism to neoliberal subjects. In this way, the culture industry balances the need for homogeneity and subservience to capital with the countervailing need for negativity by administering a “schizoid” form of subjectivity in which the kind of negativity that is necessary for capital to circulate can be maintained from the outside rather than pressing forth from the inside. In this way, I draw a distinction between “artificial” and “administered” negativity: in my reading of Luke and Piccone, negativity is rendered artificial when the forces of capital co-opt organic expressions of discontent into their own service. But negativity is also “administered” when discontent is directly imparted in a stale, inorganic form that seems engineered to encourage consumption in the name of empty protest. In other words, one-dimensionality, artificial negativity, and what I call “administered negativity” are all developments of the same basic thesis; they articulate the continued hollowing out of subjectivity under late capitalism, and their distinctions roughly parallel the increasing individualization and refinement of culture industry products. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could describe this parallel as follows: if one-dimensionality corresponds to the homogenization of subjectivity reflected in mass entertainment forms such as radio and network television, then artificial negativity formulates the way niche markets are built and expressed in targeted consumer marketing, and administered negativity articulates the continuation of this trend with the kind of hyper-specific advertising made possible by the surveillance and data collection at the level of the individual. With the development of social media and algorithmically generated content feeds, our experience of cultural media is more intimate and individualized than ever. What the theory of artificial reverie provides is a new vocabulary for describing our subjective experience with these new social forms. While certainly not a comprehensive description, I contend that social media functions in part as a kind of “metabolizer of thoughts.” Chris Crawford has described this process as “dosing culture,” and argues

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along similar lines that contemporary digital media “now comes at us in an endless stream. Our task is not interpretation, but simply to prepare ourselves to consume more without digesting anything.”50 Here, I might add, it is the cultural forms that do the digestion for us, thus foreclosing the possibility of autonomy. Crawford continues, “To aid this effortless internalization, content becomes smooth, rigid and textureless, and it just keeps coming. The process of consumption, ceaseless as it is, must be made so habitual and frictionless that nothing can possibly stick. Culture no longer cultivates. It is not meant to.” This kind of culture—textureless, personalized, predigested—functions to comfort us from and to inure us to economic demands, which are so often felt at the most intimate levels of consciousness. Moreover, in this mode of consumption we have never been more aware of the degradation of neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, as Borealis writes, contemporary culture assures the consumer that “‘I am aware, and in being aware, have done my part.’”51 But the moral superiority of merely recognizing the illness of society is an administration of a supremely anemic form of subjectivity. In countless culture industry commodities, counterculture identity is formed, administered, and immediately cashed in, bypassing anything that could be labeled organic expressions of discontent. Administered negativity emerges, then, as a particular form of psychosis—one in which a form of subjectivity is maintained that is conducive to both individual expression and purposive-rational administration. The fact that retail outlets themselves market wares by haranguing consumers about their “ethical” and “moral” duties to purchase from certain producers, certain locations, or certain products reflects the fact that the schema organizing political action has been directly reduced to the sphere of consumption. Consumers need no longer seek out alternative modes of consumption— these alternatives are directly marketed along with the moral imperatives that sustain them. The political expression of discontent or negativity in this situation, no matter how hollow, in fact, runs counter to the psychological needs of neoliberal subjects. Because society is no longer a harsh, dominating “father” representing the traditional target of rebellion, but instead a 50 Chris Crawford, “Dosing Culture, Part One,” Damage, September 3, 2020, https:/ /damagemag.com/2020/09/03/dosing-culture-part-one/. 51 Aurora Borealis, “On the Persistence of Left Hegelianism,” Damage, October 29, 2018, https://damagemag.com/2018/10/29/on-the-persistence-of-left-hegelianism/.

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cold, uncaring “mother” upon whom one nevertheless depends utterly, the appropriate developmental response is not rebellion but rather a cry for help. The fact that it is the mother that directly administers the categories in which this cry can be expressed only reinforces her position of totality. From a paranoid-schizoid position, the contradictory nature of these demands does not deter their effectiveness. From this developmental position, the discontinuous nature of experience only makes subjects all the more dependent on their maternal environment and the direct mediation of reality it provides. This administration of negativity moreover expresses a chiding moral superiority illustrative of a neoliberal status quo that takes on the role of a punitive, uncaring, and overbearing mother. As Joel Kovel writes, “The essential mode of relation between individuals and the bureaucracy is that of the self toward an undifferentiated other—i.e., it is a relation desired from early infancy, of the self with its primary caretaking object.”52 Characteristic of this pseudo-maternal relationship, consumers—in the psychological position of helpless infants—are compelled to identify directly with the forces of administration.

Conclusion The goal of this chapter is to introduce new psychoanalytic vocabulary to the culture industry critique, and to bring this critique into conversation with the one-dimensionality thesis and its later development, particularly the theory of “artificial negativity.” More specifically, I attempt to complement the Frankfurt School’s Freudian analysis of capitalist subjectivity with Kleinian psychoanalytic theory and put particular emphasis on Melanie Klein’s theory of early development and Wilfred Bion’s theory of maternal reverie. In my reading, reverie describes how subjectivity is developed and experienced. Within this framing, I go on to argue, we can better understand how the culture industry functions to administer one-dimensional subjectivity to neoliberal subjects. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to Marcuse’s onedimensionality thesis and its further development with Luke and Piccone’s theory of “artificial negativity”. I interpret the artificial negativity thesis 52 Joel Kovel, “Rationalization and the Family,” in Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed, Jr (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), 220.

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as situating one-dimensionality in a specific historical period of capitalist development, and as arguing that cultural and subjective homogenization outgrows its usefulness as monopoly capitalism achieves complete hegemony in the neoliberal era. While I adopt Luke and Piccone’s framing, I go on to argue that as the cultural institutions of monopoly capitalism continue to develop, so does the way subjectivity is administered to capitalist subjects. Next, I draw connections between Marcuse’s theorization of subjective development (“negativity” in particular) and Melanie Klein’s theorization of early childhood development. In brief, I draw parallels between Marcuse’s understanding of the tension between “actual” and “potential” as key to negativity, and Klein’s idea of the tension between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions as the dynamic motivating early psychological growth. Just as Marcuse argues that negativity emerges in the ability to distinguish appearance from essence, I contend, Klein’s theory of subjective development (the ability to integrate sense perceptions into coherent thoughts) is a process of distinguishing symbol from symbolized. In brief, I argue that both Marcuse and Klein understand subjective development as a dialectical process, and these dialectical processes operate in similar ways. Within this framing, I go on to argue, we can draw further parallels between the two in how they understand the breakdown of this dialectic. For Marcuse, one-dimensionality is the loss of the capacity for negativity. In Kleinian terms, we can understand this as a collapse of the dialectic between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions. If we accept this parallel, it provides new tools to understand how one-dimensionality is engineered and administered in late capitalist society. Using Piccone and Luke’s artificial negativity critique as a jumping-off point, I next consider the structural demands on subjectivity in a late capitalist society, bringing Piccone and Luke’s developments on the one-dimensionality thesis into conversation with sociological studies of character like those of David Riesman and C Wright Mills. The goal here is to illustrate how one-dimensionality and artificial negativity fit the demands on character mandated by late capitalism. Once the structural demands on character are laid out, in the final three sections of this chapter I speculate on how character is engineered, approaching this question both from the philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives. Here, I adopt the Frankfurt School’s thesis that the culture industry is the institution that caters to society’s demands for a

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particular character structure. In particular, I introduce Wilfred Bion’s theory of “maternal reverie” as the mechanism whereby thinking is developed, and argue that the culture industry in part subsumes this function for neoliberal subjects. To strengthen the parallels between the culture industry thesis and Bion’s theory of maternal reverie, I attempt to illustrate both theories’ underpinnings in Kantian schematism. Just as Adorno and Horkheimer use the language of transcendental schematism to describe the subjective effects of the culture industry—namely, that the culture industry functions to provide subjects with “schemata for coping with reality”—we can see Bion’s theory of reverie as making sense of how schemata for making sense of reality are acquired in infancy. In other words, the culture industry engenders a kind of “artificial reverie” which mediates the demands for one-dimensionality (or artificial negativity) with the subjective needs of individuals. In these terms, I argue that one-dimensionality, artificial negativity, and “administered negativity” all articulate different stages of the same process: the continued hollowing out of subjectivity under late capitalism. If we understand the culture industry as the primary mediator of this process, then we might trace this continued development alongside the continued individualization and refinement of culture industry products. The totalization of neoliberalism, that is, brings with it the totalization of one-dimensional subjectivity. No longer is the dominant need to process and redirect discontent, but in order to sustain the structural need for a modicum of negativity, onedimensional society must administer that resistance directly. It has the tools to do so at its disposal, in the form of pseudo-reverie which administers schemata through a kind of reverie that helps us cope with our confusing reality.

CHAPTER 13

Reigniting Racket Theory: Horkheimer’s Unfinished Project and Marcuse’s Engagement with American Institutionalism Robert E. Kirsch

Introduction In a letter to Max Horkheimer in 1942, Herbert Marcuse wrote, “I have looked up several books for concrete material on the problem of rackets, but the available sources here are utterly insufficient. The theoretical thesis we want to expound is so daring that it seems to me not enough to quote some more or less well-known books, and I wonder whether you should not ask Kirchheimer or Gurland to collect the material in New York. However, I shall do my best and gather whatever I can find.”1 While Horkheimer did develop the theory somewhat, it was mostly as fragments in various sections within his and Adorno’s 1 Herbert Marcuse, Marxism, Revolution and Utopia: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 6, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge, 2014), 300–301.

R. E. Kirsch (B) Leadership and Integrative Studies, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_13

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Dialectic of Enlightenment . Racket theory found its most cohesive outlets in Marcuse and Kirchheimer. Through the fragmentary sketches from Horkheimer and the development of the concept from Marcuse and Kirchheimer, racket theory promised to give a new conceptual framework to the contemporary situation of totalizing social domination, not only in the current context of state capitalism but also in a transhistorical sense of the evolution of institutions of domination themselves. This totality of the evolution of institutional structures of domination across time and space obviously means that racket theory would be just as sweeping and audacious as Marcuse warned Horkheimer. Yet, the idea behind racket theory—the insight that organized crime is business, and business is organized crime, to the point that the two are indistinguishable—seems to have a heightened valence in the current regime of authoritarian neoliberalism as well as the twin contexts of monopoly capitalism and fascism in which these first-generation Frankfurt School critical theorists were analyzing the concept.2 This chapter picks up the fragments of racket theory not only to see the differences in deployment between Horkheimer and Adorno on one hand, and Kirchheimer and Marcuse on the other, but also to argue that Marcuse’s insights into racket theory are especially promising because he synthesizes the theoretical insights of rackets with the insights of the political-economic contributions of American Institutionalism. This synthesis allows him to build a perspective from which racket theory can find new valence.

The Fits and Starts of Racket Theory While Marcuse and Horkheimer shared some correspondence over some general components of racket theory, including Marcuse providing feedback on an essay that Horkheimer never published, neither of the two developed a systematic theory of rackets.3 Still, between the snippets in Horkheimer’s writing as well as Marcuse’s references to the concept in some of his own essays, some fragments of what might be called a theory emerged, ultimately finding its most comprehensive expression in an 2 Edward Granter, “Strictly Business: Critical Theory and the Society of Rackets,” Competition & Change 21, no. 2 (April 1, 2017): 94–113, https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1024529417690716. 3 Herbert Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 1, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).

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article Otto Kirchheimer wrote on sovereignty in 1944. As noted above, Horkheimer tasked Marcuse with researching rackets and looping in other members of the Institute for Social Research, by that time at Columbia University, to write on the topic. Marcuse not only had limited success researching the topic himself, but also recruiting other members of the institute to write on it—Henryk Grossman and Friedrich Pollock refused, and only Otto Kirchheimer accepted.4 Before analyzing Kirchheimer’s contribution and its relevance in the current context, it is important to see the groundwork from Horkheimer and Marcuse’s deployment of the concept. Horkheimer mentions rackets very briefly in his 1941 Zeitschrift article, “The End of Reason.” Here, Horkheimer does not give a definition of a racket per se but refers to the “true nature” of social domination as “gangster rule.”5 What is more interesting than the strict definition, however, is the transhistorical aspect of the argument. Horkheimer suggests that rackets are protection (plausibly understood in a contemporary Mafioso register), and that protection rackets predate capitalism as “the archetype of domination.”6 Instead of emerging alongside rackets, capitalism intensifies the existing racketeering behavior through technological development, cartelization, monopolization, cooperation between cliques, and their full integration into the politico-juridical system, which adds the dynamic of some rackets claiming legitimacy via state power and simultaneously rendering others illegitimate.7 The result is that government and rackets become not only indistinguishable from each other but also shape production and consumption in a totality of “comprehensive planning… an attack on mankind as such.”8 The totality of this unity of government and rackets spreads in a capitalistic register to everyday life, and into thought itself. Horkheimer develops this insight later in Dialectic of Enlightenment with Theodor Adorno where they write, “the tangled

4 Marcuse, Technology, War, and Fascism. 5 Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX,

no. 3 (1941): 374. 6 Horkheimer, 374. 7 Horkheimer, 375. Horkheimer suggests that “modern” rackets begin with “the

Inquisitioners,” which assumes that there are premodern rackets as well. 8 Horkheimer, 375.

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mass of cliques and institutions which ensures the indefinite continuation of the status quo is impenetrable to each individual.”9 This insight already shows how rackets shape and obfuscate at the level of thought, but also how they become ubiquitous in all aspects of social life as well and are unable to be distinguished by law or legitimacy. This register is important to keep in mind because when Horkheimer and Adorno say, “The present society, in which primitive religious feelings, new cults, and the legacy of revolutions are peddled in the market, in which the fascist leaders barter the land and lives of nations behind locked doors while the public lulled by their radio sets calculate the cost; this society in which even the word which unmasks it doubles as an invitation to join a political racket; in which no longer is politics merely business but business is the whole of politics…” they do not simply mean that illegitimate activities have penetrated the legitimate business of business, but that there is no distinction at all—they are not separate spheres. Perhaps this is why rackets are so hard to define; they seem to represent almost the entirety of social activity, and perhaps even more so when predicated on a commodity exchange, and to the extent they can be historicized, the lines drawn between rackets and legitimate activity are arbitrary and inscrutable. Of course, this makes analyzing rackets as discrete social phenomena difficult, and perhaps impossible from this theoretical vantage point. Yet, given the totality of their diagnosis, these insights from Horkheimer and later with Adorno are rather piecemeal and fragmentary. Marcuse also makes reference to the concept in various places, such as referring to National Socialism as a fascist expansion of the state that was essentially a racket of protection for its insiders as it expanded into broader economic spheres.10 In that sense, Marcuse seems to be using the term as loosely as Horkheimer did; rackets as an organizational mode of domination via protection. Perhaps more illuminating, however, are the exchanges between Horkheimer and Marcuse on Horkheimer’s unpublished manuscript, “On the Sociology of Class Relations,” where Marcuse seems to be pushing back against the totalizing vision of rackets that would eventually emerge in Dialectic of Enlightenment . In somewhat typical fashion for him, Marcuse looks for the outside edges of structures

9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 30. 10 Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism, 170.

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where domination can never be fully complete. He warns Horkheimer that his discussion of labor rackets represented an analysis of sclerotic labor bureaucracies that had been fully integrated and rationalized into racket logic, but that this does not represent the entirety or class potential of organized labor itself.11 Indeed, Marcuse pushes Horkheimer to investigate the current dimensions of old categories like “labor aristocracy” to reflect the changing aspects of “monopolistic and technological rationalization; increased efficiency and increased dependency” to find differences between old and new forms of labor organizing and the emancipatory potentials therein.12 Emphasizing the role of technological dynamism in organizations and society is unique to Marcuse among first-generation Frankfurt School scholars, for reasons that will be explored below.13 For now, it is enough to establish that as racket theory emerged, Horkheimer (and then Adorno) developed the theory in a way that stressed its totality and permeation into all spheres of life, and Marcuse accepted the looseness of the racket notion, and then looked for ways to puncture holes in the totality, and had this vision when recruiting other institute members to contribute to the project. Simply put, Marcuse saw an analysis of rackets as a question of institutional arrangement that is historically contingent, and not a matter of fascist “special ability or ingenuity,” or as a transhistorical totality of domination as such where everything is always racket behavior.14 This is not to suggest that Horkheimer and Adorno are incorrect that racket rationality permeates all spheres of life, but Marcuse thus provides a lens to find differentiation in the totality of racket analysis. While it is not stated firsthand if Kirchheimer understood the project of racket theory in the same way as Horkheimer and Adorno or if he was more in line with Marcuse, it is not a stretch to suppose he was aware of these diverging yet complementary emphases within theorizing rackets. This chapter argues that he comes down on the Marcusean, institutional side. In his 1944 essay, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” Kirchheimer deploys rackets to make sense of the monopolistic tendencies of business organizations as well as the legislative/administrative apparatus sustaining

11 Marcuse, 246. 12 Marcuse, 246. 13 Robert Kirsch, “The ‘Digital Revolution’ Reconsidered,” New Political Science 38, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 100–115, https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2015.1125635. 14 Marcuse, Technology, War and Fascism, 170.

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monopolization, and the unique role of labor within and between these two forces.15 When Kirchheimer does introduce rackets, his definition is continuous with the way it was used by Horkheimer and Marcuse if slightly scaled-back; rackets are an “establishment of domination over a segment of the process of production or distribution.”16 Kirchheimer extends the analysis from Horkheimer and Marcuse and includes the psychological motivations for racket formation, as well as establishes the state as the entity that manages rackets, given its sovereign capacity for decision-making and its ability to regulate certain rackets as legitimate or illegitimate ex nihilo. The psychological motivation for participating in rackets, for Kirchheimer, is based on an internalized understanding of society whereby a person’s social position and life chances are not determined by effort, merit, or intrinsic worth, but rather, “a combination of luck, chance, and good connections, a combination systematically exploited and fortified with all available expedients inherent in the notion of private property.”17 That is, the exclusionary regime of private property reifies notions of inside and outside that extend to social organizations writ large, with the state maintaining them and sustaining distinctions between inside and outside, and are thus not transhistorical. Kirchheimer also incorporates a role of the state in his racket theory that certainly has echoes of his Doktorvater, Carl Schmitt, where he argues that the legitimacy of rackets has nothing to do with any fundamental character of organizations, but rather is a function of sovereign decisionism, where the state (which can perhaps be understood as the racket that manages rackets) confers legitimacy to certain rackets, cartels, and cliques, and thereby delegitimizes the ones outside of that demarcation.18 There is 15 Kirchheimer suggests, briefly, that organized labor, if exclusionary and guild-like,

takes on characteristics of a racket, and therefore abets monopolization. On the other hand, if labor’s ultima ratio, the strike, is deployed generally, then it can break the rackets through sheer overwhelming force. Notably, he assumes labor is organized in the first place, which invites further theorizing in the current context, especially in the United States where union density is at historic lows. 16 Otto Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” The Journal of Politics 6, no. 2 (1944):

160, https://doi.org/10.2307/2125270. 17 Kirchheimer, 160. 18 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty”; Karsten Olson, “Historical-Sociology vs.

Ontology: The Role of Economy in Otto Kirchheimer and Carl Schmitt’s Essays ‘Legality and Legitimacy,’” History of the Human Sciences 29, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 96–112, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116637295.

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nothing inherently legitimate or illegitimate about a given racket but that the state decides it so. This agrees with Marcuse’s sentiment above that the political problem of rackets is one of institutional organization, not the content of the racket itself. This state-centered analysis is a clarifying lens to the racket theory of Adorno and Horkheimer because it provides a material basis for how and why rackets flourish and some are legitimated, and more fully fleshes out the evolution of a totalizing theory of the racketization of everything. Kirchheimer extends some of the fragmentary analyses of Horkheimer and Marcuse; there is an encompassing constellation of rackets (though not one general racket that runs everything) regulated via the existential decisionism function of the state, and these rackets produce an institutional framework that reify rackets and racket behavior in psychological and everyday life. With this institutional focus in mind, this chapter valorizes Marcuse’s theorization of rackets that is underutilized and different from the way Horkheimer developed the concept with Adorno. This is best seen through the more developed lens of Kirchheimer’s use of racket theory, as shown through the way that Kirchheimer pays attention to technological development as well as institutional theory to avoid the claustrophobic totality of the notion of rackets alluded to in Dialectic of Enlightenment . Focusing on technology and institutions will then allow racket theory to take on new life, which will be posited below as a complement to a more general theory of state capitalism via institutional analysis. This is possible because Marcuse and Kirchheimer (though especially Marcuse) took the insights of American institutionalism seriously, and it provides a way to theorize monopolistic, but not necessarily totalizing tendencies in rackets. Thus, with Horkheimer & Adorno on one side with a transhistorical totalizing conception of rackets that has no outside, and Marcuse and Kirchheimer on the other with an analysis of rackets based on institutions and technological development, the rest of this section seeks to resolve this tension and set the stage for racket theory’s relevance in current modes of theorizing state capitalism. Without getting too far afield into the philosophy of totality, suffice it to say that, especially coming from Lukács, totality indicates that social facts cannot, contrary to the ideas of Enlightenment empiricist rationality, be understood in isolation, and must be illuminated in their social

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totality.19 Indeed, as opposed to an empiricist totality that is the mere sum of its parts, dialectical totality is “an ontogenetic process aiming at the creation of both a new world and a new man [sic].”20 The transhistorical all-encompassing notion of rackets as the unit of domination for society makes it difficult to sustain that dialectical notion of totality for two reasons: first, lacking a constitutive “outside” of rackets quickly becomes tautological (where then everything is racketized and synonymous with reality itself), and thus second, it makes it difficult to distinguish the concrete formation, behavior, and evolution of rackets in their various iterations. That is, not only can one just simply say everything is a racket and be done with it, but this approach also ironically lapses into conspiracy thinking that Horkheimer and Adorno so diligently sought to avoid. This is not to suggest that there are no conspiracies, but some disaggregation is in order. Horkheimer and Adorno use the term racket in a conspiratorial register, as a “synonym for cliques, gangs and other established groups that act protectively towards their own members, while externally they attempt to circumvent the market process by misappropriating economic income and by deceiving the public.”21 The suspicion of racket activity, being what Horkheimer called the “basic form of rule,” is itself based on a paranoid subjectivity that sees rackets everywhere, and compels individuals to engage in racket-like behavior themselves.22 Rackets are thus posited as almost a preexisting social reality, and one will necessarily find rackets lurking behind any social organizational formation if one simply looks hard enough. Indeed, Horkheimer believed, “in all seriousness that Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s successor as President of the United States, had played some kind of sinister ‘role’ in [Kennedy’s assassination].”23 However idle such musings may have been, it delivers 19 Andrew Feenberg, The Philosophy of Praxis: Marx, Lukács and the Frankfurt School, revised ed. (Brooklyn: Verso, 2014). 20 Paul Piccone, “Dialectical Logic Today,” Telos 1968, no. 2 (September 21, 1968): 59, https://doi.org/10.3817/0968002038. 21 Volker Heins, “From Factions to Rackets: The Traps of Conspiracy Thinking,” in Beyond Friend and Foe: The Politics of Critical Theory, ed. Volker Heins, 1st ed., vol. 9, Social and Critical Theory (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011): 62, https://doi.org/10. 1163/ej.9789004188006.i-259.17. 22 Heins, “From Factions to Rackets.” Compare this with Kirchheimer and Marcuse’s view of rackets as a matter of institutional and technological organization that, admittedly, engenders certain kinds of behaviors among individuals. 23 Heins, 64.

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a serious blow to the admittedly underdeveloped version of racket society proffered by Horkheimer and Adorno. It is simply undialectical, and therefore unable to be subjected to Horkheimer’s own critical theory of society.24 Heins thus suggests that both Horkheimer and Adorno have fallen prey to the paranoid subjectivities they hoped to remedy with their critical theory when trying to distinguish rackets from conspiracies. This leaves the Marcuse-Kirchheimer conception of rackets. Above, when Marcuse cautions Horkheimer to pay attention to the historical contingency of rackets and their formation and proliferation based on the institutional arrangements and technological development of a given society, these comments might now be read as Marcuse warning Horkheimer to develop the theory in such a way that it could itself be subjected to critical analysis. Kirchheimer takes this ball and runs with it, expertly laying out the historical, technological, and psychological conditions of racket development within monopoly/state capitalism. That is, both Marcuse and Kirchheimer accept that rackets exist and that they coordinate production and consumption to benefit their members, and that this has a diffuse manifestation within the individual psychologies of people to mimic racket-like behavior in their everyday lives. The difference is that Marcuse and Kirchheimer materially ground their analysis of rackets; Marcuse in the post-war cultural development of German culture, and Kirchheimer in bureaucracies such as the state, organized labor, and private enterprises. In what may perhaps be understood as a direct rebuttal to the paranoid style of Horkheimer and Adorno, Kirchheimer avers, “No general cartel [i.e., racket] dominates our society.”25 Rather, rackets are a coordinated network of cartels that have influence in proportion to the amount of market control they have, the technological and bureaucratic capacity needed to expand their markets, and the amount of state legitimacy they curry to keep other rackets from entering the “legitimate” sphere.26 This conception of rackets, contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno, is material and subject to critical analysis and therefore avoids the falsification problem. The following section establishes that Marcuse’s and

24 Heins, “From Factions to Rackets”; Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell, 1st ed. (New York: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1975). 25 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 161. 26 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty.”

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Kirchheimer’s engagement with institutionalism provided this theoretical outlet and sets the stage for stronger theorizations of racket theory.

State Capitalism and Institutionalism It was established above that one element that Kirchheimer extended in his racket theory is the emphasis on the state. This emphasis, while missing explicitly from the fragments in Horkheimer and Adorno, as well as Marcuse’s references to rackets, is nevertheless in keeping with the general outlook of the Frankfurt School on how rackets functioned as the economic fundament in political economy. “The pessimism regarding the possibility of socialist politics dominant in Horkheimer’s thought since the early 1940s has its economic foundations in the theory of state capitalism, its political foundation in the connected theory of ‘rackets’ as a ‘basic form of domination.’”27 Given such a formulation of political economy, it seems apparent that a focus on the state is necessary, and in particular state capitalism, as racket theory continues to come into focus as an exercise in state legitimacy-making among a certain coterie of groups. In this section, Kirchheimer’s Left-Schmittian perspective will be used to theorize the role of the state in its function of sovereign decisionism. This lens is best able to focus on the state in state capitalism, and also helps make sense of racket theory in the current context; Kirchheimer’s theorization has been the focus of how racket theory has been received in the disciplines of business and organizational studies. It will also set the foundation for understanding Marcuse’s use of American institutional theory. True to his position that there is no general cartel pulling the strings of all the other rackets, Kirchheimer begins the seminal “In Quest of Sovereignty” with a surprisingly orthodox-sounding question for the field of political science; namely, how do competing groups interact to get what they want? Of course, given Kirchheimer’s critical perspective, his answer is not weighed down by the politesse of liberal pluralistic theory. While it might sound odd to liberal theorists, for Kirchheimer, competing groups attempt to cozy up to the state to secure monopolistic power as well as the conferred legitimacy of legal operations, defined against those who do not have that legitimacy. The liberal insistence that all groups 27 Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment ,

233.

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have equal potential for winning peoples’ affiliations and preferences as a means of achieving their ends and that the state is simply one among them makes one unable to see the landscape as it is for Kirchheimer and lapses into a romanticization of industrial life.28 Kirchheimer admits that there is a multitude of voluntary organizations, but he notes that they are only tolerated or accepted inasmuch as they, “are made to fit into the accepted pattern of society” where “The primary political function of such organizations is the advancement of general patterns of life deemed desirable by the groups that dominate them.”29 The groups that dominate them are the rackets, and they are sustained by the state—the only entity able to grant them legitimacy and in whose realm different groups face each other.30 State capitalism is thus not only a theory of whether the state directly produces goods (though it can also be that), but rather, “maintains the primacy of the economy has transitioned into the primacy of the state, so that social control takes place directly rather than indirectly through the market….”31 The state is the organizer of rackets, and plans production and consumption, taking over the economic function of the market through technological administration as well as juridical decision-making, with Kirchheimer noting that among the rackets, “If legal battles actually do occur, even a clear cut victory won in court by one of the contending parties will have no lasting impact on the existing institutional framework if there is no adequate machinery to enforce and policy conformity.”32 Insisting on the primacy of the state is vital because the state remains the decisionist body of racket management, and just because individuals or other voluntary groups exhibit racket behavior does not necessarily translate into a pluralist vision of consumer sovereignty.33 While it is true for Kirchheimer that the state occupies a unique position vis-à-vis rackets, it would be a mistake to conceptualize this relationship as a clearly distinguishable matter of hierarchy. After all, rackets are invested 28 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 140. 29 Kirchheimer, 141. 30 Kirchheimer, 162. 31 Manfred Gangl, “The Controversy over Friedrich Pollock’s State Capitalism,” History

of the Human Sciences 29, no. 2 (April 1, 2016): 32, https://doi.org/10.1177/095269 5116637296. 32 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 165. 33 As Kirchheimer says, the state conferring legitimacy ex nihilo is something of a

miracle; the kind of intervention that makes voluntary associations possible.

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in propping up the existing order because they benefit from it, and individuals move freely between state function and private enterprise, taking advantage of formal and informal relationships to maintain their privileged position and steer state action to protect that position, as well.34 The state’s management of rackets is not the Leviathan, hovering over and visibly distinct. Rather, it is a foamy churn of individual agents moving in and out, sneaking behind and around, to maintain their grip on social control. This reinforces the state’s ability to grant legitimacy, and it reinforces the rackets’ ability to keep that legitimacy conferred on themselves. This churn is precisely why Kirchheimer stressed the role of the state as the organizing principle of the nexus of rackets, where a liberal analysis might look at this churn and see a pluralistic society of voluntary associations. The vision of state capitalism laid out by Kirchheimer is empirically visible, too. Granter concretizes Kirchheimer’s theory of rackets in the ruling class, which he defines as the network of rackets in the state nexus, and “simply the most powerful of society’s competing gangs.”35 They operate in a mode of protection, coercion, and monopoly power, and informal connections to facilitate the state nexus.36 Granter’s concretization via Kirchheimer also helps distinguish different kinds of racket behavior that can be looked at somewhat systematically in order to draw lines of distinction and demarcation.37 Granter provides three concrete cases of racket society: Financial deregulation in the U.S.,38 economic restructuring by wealthy states, and policy initiatives to convert public goods to private spoils. Looking at Enron as an example of the harms of financial deregulation, Granter makes the case that the firm and the public officials responsible for state oversight each had an interest in enabling the unsustainable debt leveraging via deregulation that led to its collapse because government 34 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty,” 167. 35 Granter, “Strictly Business,” 101. 36 Granter, 100. 37 Here, Granter makes a direct rebuttal to Heins that Horkheimer and Adorno were

too totalizing, making rackets impossible to analyze and lapsing into conspiracy, noted above. This still fits in with this chapter’s aims of rescuing racket theory from such abstraction by emphasizing an institutional analysis of the state-corporate nexus. 38 For instance, in the United States, members of congress are exempted from rules against insider trading.

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representatives were getting rich on the arrangement. “As is typical in such cases, the correlation between personal enrichment of the patron, and the execution of the will of the client - the corporation enriching them - is not conceived of in legal terms as corrupt. Unlike cases of racketeering in organized crime, corporations and politicians tend to be given the benefit of the doubt and indeed, while conflicts of interests are easy to portray, they are harder to prove conclusively.”39 There is present here both the idea of the churn of the state-corporate nexus making it difficult to prove things conclusively, as well as the state’s ability to grant legitimacy to certain institutions. The chummy relationship between the patron and the corporation is legitimate because of its proximity to the state, but in other frameworks, may well be illegal. The second case Granter looks at is structural adjustment policies. Structural adjustment has been used as a disciplining instrument by agencies such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The result is forced underdevelopment and resource extraction, slummifying certain parts of the globe.40 This extraction and underdevelopment is an enriching prospect for rackets in the state-corporate nexus. The U.S. coalition-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 enriched countless contractors via resource extraction, perhaps none more so (or at least more notably) than Halliburton, an oil company that was once headed up by Dick Cheney, prior to him becoming Vice President of the United States during the Iraq invasion.41 The rationale for enriching private contractors in militaristic adventurism highlights two components of rackets. First, they set the regulatory framework for doing business, not only for themselves but as market gatekeepers for other would-be rackets. Second, these contractors use the corporate/state nexus as its own rationale for action; that militarism is a risky business and only certain organizations have the analytic, logistic, and fiscal capacity to carry out the state’s aims.42 Why the state does not simply do this itself is a background question, but this points up the revolving door between government and contractor and the tightness 39 Granter, “Strictly Business,” 104. 40 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Reprint (Verso, 2007). 41 Edward Granter, “Strictly Business: Critical Theory and the Society of Rackets,”

Competition & Change 21, no. 2 (April 1, 2017): 105, https://doi.org/10.1177/102 4529417690716. Cheney had moved between government and industry for decades by this point. 42 Granter, “Strictly Business,” 105.

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of the nexus of rackets and the state that reinforces that relationship and posits its simple existence as its justification. Rumors of wrongdoing are just that, and improprieties are covered up, chalked up to the speed of war, or otherwise relegated to the realm of conspiracy. The final case that Granter analyzes is the business/government revolving door. Much in the way that contractors use their size, speed, and relationships to enrich themselves via the state abroad, consultants and their management firms coordinate with the state at home to buttress the interconnectedness of the state and rackets. Granter lays out that the revolving door between business and government goes beyond the mere unseemliness of such arrangements, such as former elected officials going to work for policy advocacy firms, lobbies, or businesses with legislative interests. Indeed such a revolving door facilitates making “channels” from business interests to the machinery of governance, again highlighting that in a society of rackets, there is no distinction between governance and doing business.43 These channels of policymaking are sustained by the racket/state nexus itself and blur the line between the component parts. Again, as mentioned above, nothing about this arrangement is necessarily illegal (setting aside the rare and often toothless rules about waiting a certain amount of time to become a lobbyist after leaving government), in fact, it is usually legitimated by the state, even if untasteful. Considering the illegitimate version makes this distinction all the clearer. Using insider information to pressure representatives to vote a certain way, or to have the executive enforce the law in a certain way, looks a lot like intimidation tactics of Mafioso organizations, without the sheen of legitimacy. These three case studies that Granter presents represent the vital point of Kirchheimer’s analysis and Marcuse’s response to Horkheimer’s essay. Namely, Kirchheimer’s point that rackets are granted legitimacy based on their closeness and interconnectedness to the state in a mutually constructive, self-sustaining way that belies the false equality of the liberal pluralist perspective; and that there are degrees of racket-ness, as Marcuse notes, that help shape the pursuit. It is not an all-or-nothing proposition, but rather one in which the proximity to the state/racket nexus and the degree of interconnectedness facilitates gangster rule as a form of social domination. Taking an institutional approach highlights this kind of domination.

43 Granter, 106.

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Marcuse and American Institutionalism: A Way Forward Between the two strands of racket theorists—Adorno and Horkheimer on one side, with Kirchheimer and Marcuse on the other, this essay emphasizes the latter and its ability to shade the contours of racket theory without describing the phenomenon as a totalizing monolith. Without criticizing Kirchheimer, this section argues that there is something uniquely valuable about Marcuse’s sparse insights into racket theory specifically, due to his serious engagement with American institutional theory. It will set the stage for understanding rackets not only as a matter of the state but also as an institutional arrangement that completes the story and points toward new directions for racket theory. For purposes of this essay, Marcuse’s interaction with American institutionalism can be understood as his analysis of Thorstein Veblen and John Kenneth Galbraith. While this may seem artificially limiting, this choice is justified for two reasons. First, it highlights a very specific version of institutionalism that is germane to this essay as a diagnostic tool of racket society and consumer culture.44 There are other traditions of economic thought that tack onto the “institutionalist” moniker but are too wide of the mark to analyze rackets. Second, I bring in these two and their lineage because the Frankfurt School critical theorists engaged with them directly. Focusing on these two thinkers thus clears away the brush to stay at the heart of the matter. Veblen Without ranging too far into the entire oeuvre of Veblen’s writings, it is felicitous that Galbraith himself has summarized Veblen’s institutionalism succinctly as a, “… timeless comment on the behavior of people who possess or are in pursuit of wealth and who, looking beyond their wealth, want the eminence that, or so they believe, wealth was meant to buy.”45

44 J. L. Simich and Rick Tilman, “Critical Theory and Institutional Economics: Frankfurt’s Encounter with Veblen,” Journal of Economic Issues 14, no. 3 (September 1, 1980): 631–648. 45 John Kenneth Galbraith, “A New Theory of Thorstein Veblen,” American Heritage, 1973, https://www.americanheritage.com/new-theory-thorstein-veblen.

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This desire leads to “conspicuous consumption,”46 to the industrial sabotage that happens in the struggle between businessmen who wanted to turn a profit and “engineers” who wanted to make useful ends of life,47 and hoarding private property as a way to excuse oneself from the labor process entirely.48 Veblen’s institutionalism is thus the arrangement of institutions to facilitate these invidious behaviors that explain the emergence of consumer culture. Institutions are therefore not neutral conduits of human behavior, but they co-constitute each other. Pecuniary emulation, for instance, is a behavior that attempts to purchase status, and institutions reward those who exhibit that behavior, and reifies social institutions (rackets) which reinforce the money/status nexus. The critique of opulence and consumer culture for Veblen is therefore not an ethical objection. Rather, it is a critique of an institutional arrangement that rewards waste and the ersatz prestige of displaying one’s ability to take themselves out of the labor process. Meanwhile, in that labor process, workers’ habits of mind are being shaped by the machining process in general ways that might provide the material and cultural basis for a class consciousness through understanding production more generally.49 In a way that highlights the divergent strands of racket theorists, Adorno and Horkheimer critique Veblen; especially Adorno who argued that Veblen displayed a pragmatist bent that disallowed him from seeing anything beyond utilitarian production of basic needs as wasteful and useless: “He explains culture through the trash, not vice versa.”50 Adorno, in other words, charges Veblen with being too totalizing, that he is unable to distinguish between kinds of culture, and therefore lumps it all together as wasteful emulation, or conspicuous consumption, and tries to throw all culture away. Marcuse, on the other hand, saw the potential for a dialectic of technology in Veblen’s writing, whereby technological development rationalized the world to such an extent that human labor served it, rather than used it. The negative result of this is domination in 46 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, ed. Martha Banta, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 47 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise (C. Scribner’s Sons, 1915). 48 Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times—The Case

of America (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1996). 49 Veblen, The Theory of Business Enterprise. 50 Theodor W. Adorno, “Veblen’s Attack on Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social

Science 9, no. 3 (1941): 408.

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the hands of a capitalist class, but Marcuse notes that Veblen also sees with it a matter-of-fact approach to labor that can be a uniting catalyst for the working class, as they are able to see the labor process more in its totality, rather than as distinct component parts from their various trades or craft guilds.51 This would allow them to take control of the labor process in its entirety, not simply in certain pockets. Veblen referred to this possibility as a “Soviet of Engineers.” A remote possibility, he thought, but still present. This is where there is a clear link between Veblen’s institutionalism and the way that Kirchheimer and Marcuse understand racket society. Institutions, Veblen notes, often become “imbecilic,” in that they cease having a useful function and instead subordinate life and culture to their own perpetuation.52 That is, they become rackets, and in the register that Kirchheimer provides, in their imbecilic way, blindly maintain the nexus of state/corporate relationships in the ways that Granter outlines above. What Marcuse sees specifically in Veblen, however, is a way for the working class to take control of the labor process and challenge those institutional arrangements. This addresses one of Kirchheimer’s concerns that labor unions, focused on their own place in the state/corporate nexus, often exhibit racket-like behavior, foregoing, as a result, its most powerful tool, the general strike.53 That is, Marcuse sees in Veblen the possibility that organized labor—that is, generally organized labor—can overcome the morass of imbecilic rackets. Now, the question of how that is to happen and what this morass gets replaced with is open. Yet, Marcuse, in tune with his comments to Horkheimer, is looking for the way out, understanding that domination is not transhistorical, final, and inescapable. Veblen’s theory of institutional evolution as co-constitutive with habits of mind offers such a break from the transhistorical and overly totalizing notion of rackets.

51 Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 1 (1941): 414–439. 52 Philip Klein, “Ayres on Institutions—A Reconsideration,” Journal of Economic Issues 29, no. 4 (1995): 1189–1196. 53 Kirchheimer, “In Quest of Sovereignty.”

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Galbraith Of course, Veblen’s Soviet of Engineers, who, given their mastery of the general labor process generally, swept away the rat king of imbecile institutions to reorganize society to produce the ends of life for all, did not come to pass. While not often considered as a critical theorist, American institutional economist John Kenneth Galbraith might shed some light on the individual consequences of institutional structures that cement rackets. While Galbraith may not often be grouped with critical theorists, his contribution to American institutional theory will help illuminate the inroads of racket theory. This is accomplished in two distinct registers. First, Galbraith provides a corrective for Veblen’s perhaps overreliance on the emancipatory potential of massification in the labor process. Second, Galbraith is invoked in Marcuse’s seminal One-Dimensional Man, in particular the way Marcuse deploys Galbraith’s notion of the “Affluent Society” to the ends of critical theory. At the core of Galbraith’s The Affluent Society is the notion that the United States, and other advanced industrial societies, produce for the sake of production, and that abundance—not scarcity—is the primary economic problem.54 In his The New Industrial State, Galbraith advances that a consequence of the production of abundance is the standardization and massification of life: “Thus, as the system delivers the goods in its homogenized and massified forms the individual is atomized and privatized.”55 Doug Brown argues that in the Affluent Society, technological rationality is in part a matter of economic planning necessitated by the size and complexity of the production apparatus. Unlike Veblen’s Soviet of Engineers, massified populations find themselves in the “hell” of the Affluent Society. As Marcuse puts it: For the other, less underprivileged people, society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production itself. Under its impact, the laboring classes in the advanced 54 Philip Walsh, “Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Theory: Beyond the Consumer Society,” No Social Science Without Critical Theory 25 (2008): 235–260, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(08)00007-8. 55 Doug Brown, “Institutionalism, Critical Theory, and the Administered Society,” Journal of Economic Issues 19, no. 2 (1985): 562, https://doi.org/10.1080/00213624. 1985.11504395.

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areas of industrial civilization are undergoing a decisive transformation, which has become the subject of a vast sociological research.56

That is, not a society of engineers taking the reins of the generalized labor process, but a society of atomized consumers, whose only vector of action, consumption, perpetuates “moronization… toil, and the promotion of frustration.”57 A racket theory of society should thus take account of the need for administering a totalized consumer society as an ideological project. However, it should do so in a way that is not cabalistic, secretive, or monolithic, but rather in the register of social control based on (imbecilic) institutional interests in maintaining the state/corporate nexus. The consumer society of affluence requires an institutional apparatus to deliver the goods: an apt analogy is that rackets are recipients of no-bid contracts by virtue of their relationship to the state-corporate nexus. The mass consumption of affluence perpetuates the “attack on mankind as such” in that it perpetuates the status quo at all costs, as mentioned by Horkheimer and Adorno above. What a Marcusean critical theory with its institutional additions from Kirchhiemer, Veblen, and Galbratih adds to this institutionalist view is a deep skepticism of benevolent technocracy, instead focusing on the elements of class domination through the cooperation and cooptation of the state apparatus.58 Here Galbraith’s notion of “the bezzle” is instructive. The bezzle is a theoretical abstraction of the amount of money that is undiscovered that businesses and banks absorb during boom times.59 As part of an ideological project to keep the status quo and maintain the corporate-state nexus, rackets jockey for their chunk of the bezzle. Marcuse’s engagement with American Institutional theory provides a fruitful way to dialectically engage the institutional arrangements of racket society with the massifying tendencies of advanced industrial society, without assuming that massification equates to democracy.

56 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Beacon, 1968), 23–24. 57 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 242. 58 Brown, “Institutionalism, Critical Theory, and the Administered Society.” 59 James K. Galbraith, “The Abiding Economics of John Kenneth Galbraith,” Review

of Political Economy 20, no. 4 (October 2008): 491–499.

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Conclusion Kirchheimer set the stage to best analyze racket society: a non-pluralistic, non-liberal theory of institutions and the state forming a nexus of power that is mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing. He also noted that this translated into the everyday lives of citizens a loss of agency, as rackets give lie to myths of meritocracy and fairness. Marcuse’s engagement with American institutionalists like Veblen and Galbraith provides a lens for critical theory to think through questions of technology, automation, and standardization in ways that could point to political possibilities of qualitative change. That is to say, while many institutions are rackets, aspire to be rackets, or exhibit racket-like behavior, it is difficult to theorize beyond the totality if we posit, as Horkheimer and Adorno did, that all organizations are rackets, and all rule is gangster rule.60 Instead, taking up questions of organized labor in its trade union sense should give pause to consider Veblen’s notion of generalizing the labor process to strengthen working class power; it is less potent to simply assume that all trade unions are rackets. As well, when considering automation, luxury, and notions of use value, a critical theory infused with Galbraith is a reminder that the overproduction of commodities due to standardization leads to privatization, not democracy. In the same vein, American institutionalism is well served by an engagement with a critical theory of rackets; general knowledge in Veblen’s scheme may not yield a general working-class politics but rather insulated institutions trying to solidify power from the state/corporate nexus. Similarly, those in the affluent society may take themselves to be well-sated and liberated from want, even as the system creates false needs, essentially volunteering to remain in thrall of rackets that overproduce this overabundance. This dialectical engagement is strengthened with strong visibility of the institutional arrangements of racket society.

60 Martin Jay, “Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society,” Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/trump-scorsese-andthe-frankfurt-schools-theory-of-racket-society/, accessed May 5, 2020

PART III

Aspects of Liberation

CHAPTER 14

Human Rights: A Concrete Utopian Concept Peter-Erwin Jansen

The appeal to Human Rights eroded by the indignation of the insulted about the violation of their human dignity. (Jürgen Habermas)1

It seems that things are not looking all that bad when it comes to the Human Rights cause today. Today powerful protagonists who speak out on behalf of Human Rights, and Hannah Arendt’s complaint that the idea human rights has made so little progress because its champions failed to get beyond the status of a society for the protection of animals, seems long dated. Hardly anyone today would say they are not concerned with the protection of Human Rights. The media call for compliance. Politicians act—mostly instrumentally—in the name of Human Rights. Left-wing 1 Jürgen Habermas, “Das utopische Gefälle. Das Konzept der Menschenwürde und die realistische Utopie der Menschenrechte,” Journal of German and International Politics (August 2010): 44.

P.-E. Jansen (B) Social Science, Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, Koblenz, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_14

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critics of capitalist society use them more and more to criticize the injustices of global capitalism or use them to defend measures that protect refugees. Non-governmental Human Rights organizations all around the world coordinate to ensure professional monitoring of the global Human Rights situation and can in no way be seen as unrealistic philanthropists. Pressured by public opinion, transnational corporations seek to formulate social and employment standards with the intention of applying them to production centers located in the developing or underdeveloped world. Permanent parliamentary committees investigate Human Rights-centered codes of conduct for the regulation of international relations. Control commissions watch over the export of arms, linked in turn to compliance with Human Rights. And by setting up the International Criminal Court , the community of nations has also made it possible to pursue crimes against humanity beyond national borders, and was deployed, for instance, in the crimes against humanity trials after the war in Yugoslavia. In the future, it may even be that the UN assembles military units that intervene in its name in cases of extreme human rights violations and civil wars. There is no question about it: moral concern for our fellow peoples’ opportunities and afflictions is no longer merely the hobby horse of wellmeaning idealists. But it is not just public preoccupation with Human Rights that has increased; violations of Human Rights have done so too. Today, more than 3.4 billion people live below the poverty line.2 The World Bank Report from 2015 defines the poverty line as a daily income that is less than $3.20 US dollars. Further, more than 734 million people live on less than $1.90 US dollars, the cutoff for what the UN calls the “extremely poor.” Although the world economy has grown seven-fold since 1950, fewer and fewer people benefit from the wealth that is created worldwide. Most notably, in the Global South, economic breakdown and social marginalization are gaining ground. The structural disintegration of the rule of law encourages the informalization of violence and the tyranny of warlords. In 2013 more than 30 million people worldwide were still living as slaves.3 Minorities are persecuted, children and 2 Of the world’s 736 million extreme poor in 2015, 368 million—half of the total— lived in just five countries. The five countries with the highest number of extreme poor are (in descending order): India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh. http://www.migazin.de/2018/10/18/weltbank-bericht-milliarden-men schen-armutsgrenze/. 3 https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/2013-10/studie-sklaverei-weltweit.

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women are exploited, and freedom of the press is treated with contempt. According to Reporters Without Borders, in 2017 sixty-five journalists and bloggers were killed for their critical reporting, for researching policies in their countries, while other journalists were censored by authoritarian governments.4 A third of the world’s population does not even have access to essential medicine and drugs. Poverty and cutbacks in social services are everywhere. Even in countries with long democratic traditions, such as the US or Germany, the total prevailing ban on torture is now called into question. The reintroduction of state-sanctioned torture is up for discussion. Security, health, jobs, and environmental protection, so it is said, can only be guaranteed through the restriction of civil rights. Does this mean that the Human Rights debate as cultivated in the rich Global North is no more than a cynical reflex response to an opposite development in reality? Indeed, does the ubiquitous emphasis on the humanitarian challenges in the world actually conceal the ideological purpose of denying the catastrophic course of history and distracting from our own involvement in continuous violations of Human Rights around the world?

Legal Norms or Legal Requirements---The Political Content of Human Rights Such questions are discussed since the Declaration of Human Rights as a key principle of the United Nations. There has always been an enormous gap between the promises of Human Rights and the reality. Although it served as the basis for the American Declaration of Independence and laid down a marker for all subsequent declarations of Human Rights, even the Virginia Bill of Rights of 1776 proved to be incompatible with a state whose wealth and existence were founded on slavery and the dispossession and extermination of the original native inhabitants. “All men are born equal,” wrote Thomas Jefferson—and he quite literally meant only men, but not women, to whom he denied the right to vote. That is one of the significant gaps in equality from the beginning of the American Republic. For hundreds of years, even after centuries of enlightenment, the term “men” means only men, and mostly “white

4 http://www.zeit.de/politik/2017-12/reporter-ohne-grenzen-inhaftierte-journalist.

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men.” It was Olympe de Gouche who sharply criticized the French Jacobins, including Robespierre, when he said: Woman, awake; the storm bell of reason is heard throughout the world; recognize your rights. The powerful rule of nature is no longer surrounded by prejudice, fanaticism, superstition and lies. The torch of truth has dissolved all the clouds of stupidity and arrogance. The enslaved man has multiplied his powers and has needed recourse to yours to destroy his chains. When he has become free, he has become unfair to his companion.5

The notion that all human beings are endowed by birth with inalienable rights and that Human Rights are sacred legal norms was emphatically and particularly rejected by Hannah Arendt, when she wrote shortly after the end of the Second World War that we, “are not all born equal, we become equal only as members of a group and by virtue of our decision to mutually guarantee ourselves equal rights.”6 Not least due to her own experience of statelessness, Arendt recognized that only then are rights of any significance in everyday life; they must be politically enforced and safeguarded. As Arendt said, Human Rights are not attributes of human nature of whatever kind, but qualities of a world created by human beings. Arendt added what she thought was the only basis of Human Rights: the right to have rights !7 It is only as part of a legally constituted community, such as a state, that people can secure for themselves the right to liberty and equality. Social exclusion, on the other hand, always leads to a lack of rights. Without the right to be a member of a political community with the acceptance and the possibilities—or as Martha Nussbaum called it, capabilities—of being equal, all other rights are null and void. Hannah Arendt was doubtless aware of the dilemma involved in linking Human Rights to citizenship. She also viewed statehood as extremely double-edged. On one hand, states not only offer their citizens protection but also represent in themselves the concentration of the conditions of rule and the uses of power. But on the other hand, if the ideal of an egalitarian society of stateless world citizens is not realized concretely, the conditions of a state under the rule of law unquestionably provide for 5 http://olympe-de-gouges.info/frauenrechte/. 6 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace,

Jovanovich, 1973), 301. 7 Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal 31, no. 1 (1943): 69–77.

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greater protection of Human Rights than is possible in circumstances of statelessness. This means that the right to have rights precedes all other rights. With the increasing exclusion of large sections of the world’s population from well-formed and effective institutional protections, the right to have rights is under threat now more than ever. Although the world has moved closer together with economic globalization, it has never been as divided as it is today. On the one side, there is the rich Global North with its economic, technological, and cultural supremacy. On the other, the Global South, with zones of poverty, economic exclusion, and constant humiliation and wars.

The Human Right to Private Property---The Nature of the Bourgeois Concept of Human Rights The diminishment of the principle of equality comes precisely at the historical moment in which the supremacy of the capitalist economy and social model has become global. This stands in curious contradiction to the fact that it was precisely in the context of developing capitalism that the notion that all people have equal rights became so socially contagious. At that time, the emerging bourgeoisie opposed the prevailing feudal order, which was based on the idea of an innate inequality of rights and linked the enjoyment of individual rights to membership in particular social classes. The call for equal rights that accompanied anti-feudal rebellions and bourgeois revolutions contributed to the bourgeoisie’s process of self-discovery and, at the same time, necessitated a radical change in the existing social order. The first comprehensive listing of Human Rights is in the abovementioned Virginia Bill of Rights and was followed a few years later by that declaration of Human Rights which, from a historical perspective, achieved no doubt the most significant impact: the Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen produced by the French Revolution in 1789. The “natural, inalienable and sacred rights of mankind” brought together in the French Declaration of Human Rights including the right to liberty, life and private property, the right to equality in the eyes of the law, the right to sovereignty of the people, the right to resist oppression, the separation of powers, and equality of taxation. The bourgeois character of this declaration is reflected in the concern to identify the right to private property as natural and, therefore, as

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the generalization of historically and ideologically particular bourgeois interest. It is revealing to note that the right to work (in the sense of securing a livelihood) and the right to education were not included at first. Both rights were added years later, admittedly without achieving any particular significance. The mystic quality attributed to the individual’s material interests became the foundation of all further capitalist socialization. It is one of the contradictions of the system of laws arising in this process that while formally propagating equality, the continued existence of capitalist society was based on class differences and exploitation. Whenever the noble ideas of equal rights came into conflict with the dominant material interests, the concept of Human Rights proved to be a mockery. The humanist content of bourgeois constitutions was incapable of stopping colonialism, slavery, or other forms of securing domination that denied the poor and dispossessed the exercise of their rights in the same way as the propertied and the rich. Nevertheless, “bourgeois” Human Rights are more than just a sham. The promise that something should be given to all, having previously been reserved for the few, does contain a glimmer of hope for change. Without a doubt, Human Rights are part of the most progressive element in capitalist societies, not least in sowing the seed for an immanent criticism of the prevailing circumstances. During tough and at times bloody clashes, members of the working class, women, and groups of minorities agitating for civil rights have succeeded in asserting a certain degree of equal treatment, having been initially excluded from the benefit of Human Rights. To this day, the demand for the realization of Human Rights is still both a motor and measure of historic development. Human Rights are thus not abstract rights but are subject to the dynamics of their social and historical context. The struggle for gains in social and political rights occupies a social territory that is contested to this day. There is still reason enough to extend the reach of Human Rights achieved in society and, at the same time, to prevent rights already realized from being undermined. To a great extent, it is, in fact, the latter that applies today. Everywhere in the world, the liberalization of markets has led to cuts in social services, linked to the step-by-step sacrifice of social Human Rights as well. The wipe-out in social policies can be seen in virtually entire countries in the Global South; in particular, where national budgets suffer from exorbitant debt servicing. When human existence is reduced to the level of naked survival because traditionally

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established economic cycles and social structures are collapsing, conditions of violence develop with a negative impact on all aspects of life. The attempt to stem the spread of violence using primarily military and police measures, as is currently the case in the so-called “war on terror,” leads for its part to the dismantling of important political and Human Rights. With institutions now tending to do no more than secure existing rule and powerful business interests, civic authority’s deregulation inevitably goes hand in hand with the deregulation of Human Rights conceived as universal.

Political and Social Rights---The Indivisibility of Human Rights Still feeling the effects of the appalling devastation of two World Wars, in 1948, the United Nations adopted the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” Based on the conviction that global peace could not be secured in the future without full respect for the rights of all human beings, the UN Declaration of Human Rights laid the foundations for the international protection of Human Rights. Its authors defined the program of aims and intentions that later UN conventions incorporated into binding international law. The most important conventions added to the Human Rights Declaration include the two covenants of 1966: the “Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights” and the “Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.” While the latter is concerned above all with the limitation of the power of the state in relation to the individual citizen, in other words, civil rights and liberties, the economic and social covenant primarily defines the obligations of the body politic toward its members, in short: social rights. Both treaties came into force in 1976 and have been ratified in the meantime by 196 nation-states. Since then, in all the signatory countries, the right to work and social security, the right to form and join trade unions, the right to healthcare and an adequate standard of living, the right to education, and to take part in cultural life are no longer just a concept that ought to come into law at some future date but are already the law of the land. Emphasizing the indivisibility of Human Rights, both treaties are preceded by the same preamble:

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the ideal of free human beings enjoying freedom from fear and want can only be achieved if conditions are created whereby everyone may enjoy his economic, social and cultural rights, as well as his civil and political rights.8

Despite the existing interdependence between civil rights, liberties and social rights, the economic, and social pact is overshadowed by the civil covenant. Above all, the neoliberal reordering of the world has had an impact on narrowing the debate on the protection of Human Rights to the complex of civil rights and liberties instead of the guarantee of the right to have rights. In contrast, the social rights that reflect the ideas of equality and social justice have been increasingly pushed into the background. The countries of the rich Global North are particularly inclined to regard the latter as mere declarations of intent rather than prevailing rights to which the individual citizen is legally entitled. Instead of taking the necessary steps to achieve the maximum provision of education, health, and cultural life, as required of states by the economic and social covenant, most governments in the world have initiated the opposite development. They are cutting back the relevant public expenditure, citing a lack of funds, and the alleged superiority of private providers. But the privatization of public services only accelerated the process of social division—for example, encouraging a multi-tiered health system rather than a public system that gives equal care to everyone. It also leads to an increasing tendency to forget that access to libraries, medication, theaters, and cultural events and participation is an expression of elementary Human Rights. Today we may also add that access to worldwide information via the Internet is also a human right. It is not even the case that adequate protection of such rights needs to be expensive. In the case of economic rights, appropriate steps could include, for example, the rigorous fight against corruption, measures against exploitative working conditions, the prevention of monopolies, or the implementation of a just tax system, including taxation of the international financial markets. The dismantling of agricultural subsidies in the Global North would not only save money but, above all, would make the agricultural economies of the South competitive again and safeguard the lives and livelihood of the people living there. But even the scarcest of public resources could be distributed fairly and free from state interference if people had the 8 United Nations, “International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,” Treaty Series 993 (1976): 3.

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right to directly have their say and make decisions, as has been the case right now in local communities, in communities, and indigenous tribes in the Brazilian Amazon. Finally, water protection and climate protection need the status of Human Rights. This example and the now well-known and scientifically proven aspects show dramatically that the protection of the environment and nature is a fight for Human Rights because it is equivalent to the right to live.

Universality or Eurocentrism? Both the content and the foundations of human rights doctrine have become flashpoints of scholarly controversy across many disciplines. Not only political philosophers, legal scholars, and moral theorists but also economists, sociologists, and scholars of human ecology have been raising questions concerning Human Rights theory. Ethical issues and human rights questions have been at the heart of worldwide conversations within the social work profession since the very beginning, with new perspectives on specialized topics such as “Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples,” and “Human Rights and Environmental Justice.” The issue of the indivisibility of Human Rights and their international protection is linked to a question that, in a very particular way, has long dominated the international debate on Human Rights: the question is whether Human Rights are universally valid. Even if this debate is not conducted quite as furiously as a few years ago, it has lost none of its explosive force. It is true that for many countries in the Global South, Human Rights are considered Eurocentric ideas forced upon them from outside and offend against their own traditions and values. Societies shaped by Islamic or Confucian thought, for example, view the individual liberties of the civil covenant as an unacceptable elevation of the individual that conflicts with the duties of the individual toward the collective. As justifiable and necessary as a critical examination of European individualism may be, it is equally vital to mistrust sweeping references to cultural peculiarities. Often, it is not a different tradition that stands in the way of Human Rights, but once again, the spread of capitalist conditions of production. This is particularly apparent when looking at aspiring Asian economies that seek to justify flagrant violations of civil rights by claiming to be in a state of economic development that is still catching up. It is alleged that the realization of individual civil rights and liberties must be postponed

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until these countries have succeeded in joining international markets. First economic growth, then democratization is the maxim, expressing the same contradictions that accompanied the phase of the original accumulation of European capital. This time, however, it is not material interests that are endowed with a mystic quality but are disguised by the emphasis on alleged social obligations. After passionate debate, the UN Human Rights Conference that met in 1993 in Vienna agreed on two points: first, the universality of Human Rights could not be dismissed by claims of cultural differences, and second, Article I of the Economic and Social Convention continued to have unrestricted legal force in granting to all peoples the sovereign right to pursue their economic, social and cultural development freely. The protection of Human Rights was indeed a legitimate matter for the community of nations, which is why there could be an intervention in the internal affairs of a state in cases of serious Human Rights violations: the sovereignty of all peoples was, as it were, a human right unto itself. This focuses on a group of Human Rights that is sometimes described as the third generation of Human Rights: so-called collective rights. Alongside the right to sovereignty, they also include the right to develop, the right to free disposal of a person’s own natural wealth and resources, and the right to an environment fit for human beings to live in. As indisputable as these concerns may be in principle, they are nevertheless extremely difficult to translate into law. In the context of prevailing systems of law, it is near impossible to explicitly define the subject of such collective rights, let alone clearly determine who is responsible for their implementation. Shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes was already warning that the idea of liberty might degenerate into neoliberal liberation from any social responsibility and that only trade, investment, and circulation of capital, not people, might still be the subject of civil rights and liberties. Since there was no longer any political opponent with whom to argue about what a better social system would look like, the now undisputed neoliberal model could gradually be detached from the idea of social justice. The development of recent years shows how right Carlos Fuentes was with his warning. It is indeed the case that Human Rights threaten to be wholly separated from their social groundings and are now serving primarily to legitimize capitalist hegemony. It is striking to note that the demand made of countries in the Global South that they should at long last respect

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Human Rights is almost always linked to the demand for greater orientation to the market economy. The neo-conservatives, as we see right now in nearly all politicians in the United States, up to and including Donald Trump, have perfected the equation of civil rights and democracy with controlled markets guided by national interests to such an extent that this has become the only all-embracing moral principle, virtually unshakeable from crises outside. But if Human Rights serve no more than as justification of global economic liberalism, they have lost their protective, critical, and emancipatory content for good. Under such circumstances, there is no minor hypocrisy in demanding respect for Human Rights from warlords and informal armed troops who, after all, are merely serving to ensure that politically and legally excluded regions of the world can be exploited for a profit—as we see right now with all brutalities in the Amazon. Most of the current war economies that dominate the trade in tropical wood, drugs, diamonds, oil, or coltan, turn out to be the henchmen for corporations in the industrialized North. As Seyla Benahbib has described: With globalization and fragmentation proceeding apace, human rights and sovereignty claims are coming into increasing conflict with each other. On the one hand, a world-wide consciousness about universal principles of human rights is growing; on the other hand, particularist identities of nationality, ethnicity, religion, race, and language, in virtue of which one is said to belong to a sovereign people, are asserted with increasing ferocity.9

The Globalization of the Protection of Human Rights In the face of advanced globalization, human rights protection can only be approached nowadays in global terms. Remembering Hannah Arendt’s statement regarding the impossibility of human rights outside the status of citizenship, expectations should not be raised too high. There is neither a world state nor an institutionalized world civil rights regime that directly guarantees all people their political and social rights. Nor is there any foreseeable prospect of an international civil court that, unlike the recently

9 Seyla Benhabib, “Hannah Arendt and ‘The Right to Have Rights,’” HannahArendt.net 2, no. 1.

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established International Criminal Court, could be called on by individuals and give every person direct access to their rights. Only those Europeans whose countries have signed up to the European Convention on Human Rights can lodge a complaint directly to an international court, the European Court of Justice. As much as the European model shows a way forward, it has remained an exception. For the majority of the world’s population, globalization has not brought them more security under the law, but rather the opposite: a kind of re-feudalization of their social context. They are less and less able to appeal to the institutions of a democratically legitimated statehood, while the enforcement of their Human Rights increasingly depends on the philanthropic commitment and goodwill of international aid organizations. Thus it seems that Human Rights can only hope to have any chance in the future if their development and their protection are renewed from the bottom up as it were, that also means a public protest against the injustice of living conditions, against racism and sexism, and against the inhumanity of new populist, far-right governments. The realization of Human Rights is not given by the mercy of anyone or by the belief of any religion. The development of Human Rights principles and the fulfillment of Human Rights guarantees remains an ongoing political and historical task. It is an effort to realize freedom, justice, and human empowerment. New global movements, like “Fridays for Future,” or the refugee movement, or the “Movimento dos Sem Terra” [Landless Workers’ Movement] (MST in Brazil), or the fight against gun violence “March for Our Lives” (MfOL) in the United States, have a dual responsibility at this time. On the one hand, they must increasingly take Human Rights as the baseline for their own activities on behalf of new ways of living and communicating and, in so doing, fighting actively for the reconstruction of social welfare and the scope for democracy and participation against state violence. On the other hand, they must be vigilant in ensuring that the public debate on Human Rights does not serve to conceal particularist power interests but demonstrates that they are about efforts to achieve a society in which, as Marx put it, “the free development of each individual is the precondition for the free development of all.”10 This work can no longer be development assistance, but a new kind of cooperation, politically, economically, and socially. Human Rights must be taken 10 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: International Publishers Co, 2014), 72.

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as a political and concrete utopian project. Concrete utopian in the sense of Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, who adopted Bloch’s idea: “Concrete Utopia: Utopia, because such a society still does not exist anywhere; (concrete) specifically, because such a society is a real possibility.”11 Without the standards and criteria furnished by the philosophy of Human Rights, it is very difficult to challenge the tyranny and unfreedom, starvation and poverty, the exploitation and destruction of natural resources, racism, and other forms of oppression, which manifold forms of domination accept as natural and normal. The establishment, protection, and enforcement of Human Rights worldwide is an ongoing political project that can confront the oppressiveness of dictatorial systems and the dehumanizing economic and political impacts unleashed by neoliberal capitalism. Given that the latter consequences are global phenomena endangering the entire planet, it is more important than ever to have a universally valid and applicable alternative. Human rights must be enforced in political conflicts and defended again and again. The fighting will not be easy, but that can only mean taking a clear position in this fight.

11 Herbert Marcuse, Ökologie und Gesellschaftskritik. 6. Bd. der nachgelassenen Schriften. Herausgegeben und mit einem Vorwort von P.-E. Jansen. Einleitung Iring Fetscher (Springe, 2009), S. 170.

CHAPTER 15

Revolutionary Ecological Liberation: EarthCommonWealth Charles Reitz

The Call to Revolutionary Ecological Liberation A militant defense of the earth and its people occupied much of Herbert Marcuse’s final year of life. His late-period writing featured a “green turn,” not otherwise undertaken in Frankfurt School critical theory.1 With his essays “Ecology and Revolution (1972)” and “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society (1979),” he recognized the importance of ecology to the revolutionary movement and the importance of the revolutionary movement for ecology.

1 Herbert Marcuse, Ecology and the Critique of Society Today, eds. Sarah Surak, PeterErwin Jansen, and Charles Reitz (Philadelphia: The International Herbert Marcuse Society, 2019).

C. Reitz (B) Kansas City Kansas Community College (Ret.), Kansas City, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_15

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Herbert Marcuse calls upon us to fight for the radical rather than the minimal goals of socialism.2 The “minimal” goals of socialism would negate at every turn the profitable production of waste and pollution, and introduce such substantial economic changes as the decommodification of health care, childcare, education, food, transportation, housing, and work. Yet these are transitional goals to system change. Revolutionary goals reach beyond these initial socialist concerns and envisage system change flowing from a more encompassing view of liberation and human flourishing rooted in a radical transvaluation of values attuned to the “potential forms of a non-aggressive, non-exploitative world.”3 Marcuse’s work stresses that we have it within our power today, despite the obstacles put in our path by the political and economic forces of capitalism, to attain racial equality, women’s equality, the liberation of labor, the restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace. In “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society” Marcuse addresses “the destruction of nature in the context of the general destructiveness which characterizes our society.”4 Under the conditions of advanced industrial society, satisfaction is always tied to destruction. The domination of nature is tied to the violation of nature. The search for new sources of energy is tied to the poisoning of the life environment.5

Marcuse’s essay here additionally frames a discussion of destructive and authoritarian personality structures within “the concerted power of big capital.”6 For him there is no separation between individual psychology and social psychology: “[T]he potential forces of social change are there.

2 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). 3 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 6. 4 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” Philosophy, Psycho-

analysis, Emancipation, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, vol. 5, eds. Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce (New York and London: Routledge, 2011). 5 Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” 209. 6 Marcuse, 212.

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Those forces present the potential for emergence of a character structure in which emancipatory drives gain ascendency over compensatory ones.”7 Can we now speculate, against Freud, that the striving for a state of freedom from pain pertains to Eros, to the life instincts, rather than to the death instinct? If so, this wish for fulfillment would attain its goal not in the beginning of life, but in the flowering and maturity of life. It would serve, not as a wish to return, but as a wish to progress. It would serve to protect and enhance life itself. The drive for painlessness, for the pacification of existence, would then seek fulfillment in protective care for living things. It would find fulfillment in the recapture and restoration of our life environment, and in the restoration of nature, both external and within human beings. This is just the way in which I view today’s environmental movement, today’s ecology movement. The ecology movement reveals itself in the last analysis as a political and psychological movement of liberation. It is political because it confronts the concerted power of big capital, whose vital interests the movement threatens. It is psychological because (and this is a most important point) the pacification of external nature, the protection of the life-environment, will also pacify nature within men and women. A successful environmentalism will, within individuals, subordinate destructive energy to erotic energy.8

Marcuse’s essay, “Ecology and Revolution,” noted the revival of the women’s movement and student anti-war protest in 1972.9 The ecology movement joined these in protesting against the capitalist “violation of the Earth.”10 The revolt of youth (students, workers, women), undertaken in the name of the values of freedom and happiness, is an attack on all the values which govern the capitalist system. And this revolt is oriented toward the pursuit of a radically different natural and technical environment; this perspective has become the basis for subversive experiments such as the attempts by American “communes” to establish non-alienated relations between the

7 Marcuse, 210. 8 Marcuse, 212. 9 Herbert Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” in The New Left and the 1960s, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). 10 Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” 174.

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sexes, between generations, between man and nature—attempts to sustain the consciousness of refusal and of renovation.11

Marcuse is emphatic that it is the internal logic of advanced capitalism that is at war against nature: Increasingly, the ecological struggle comes into conflict with the laws which govern the capitalist system: the law of increased accumulation of capital, of the creation of sufficient surplus value, of profit, of the necessity of perpetuating alienated labor and exploitation… the ecological logic is purely and simply the negation of capitalist logic; the earth can’t be saved within the framework of capitalism, the Third World [or Global South] can’t be developed according to the model of capitalism.12 [W]hat is at stake in the socialist revolution is not merely the extension of satisfaction within the existing universe of needs, nor the shift of satisfaction from one (lower) level to a higher one, but the rupture with this universe, the qualitative leap. The revolution involves a radical transformation of the needs and aspirations themselves, cultural as well as material; of consciousness and sensibility; of the work process as well as leisure. The transformation appears in the fight against the fragmentation of work, the necessity and productivity of stupid performances and stupid merchandise, against the acquisitive bourgeois individual, against the servitude in the guise of technology, deprivation in the guise of the good life, against pollution as a way of life. Moral and aesthetic needs become basic, vital needs and drive toward new relationships between the sexes, between the generations, between men and women and nature. Freedom is understood as rooted in these needs, which are sensuous, ethical, and rational in one.13 [M]onopoly capitalism is waging a war against nature—human nature as well as external nature. For the demands on ever more intense exploitation come into conflict with nature itself … and the demands of exploitation progressively reduce and exhaust resources: the more capitalist productivity increases, the more destructive it becomes. This is on sign of the internal contradictions of capitalism.14

11 Marcuse, 174. 12 Marcuse, 175. 13 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 16–17. 14 Marcuse, “Ecology and Revolution,” 174.

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So, for Marcuse, “the issue is not the purification of the existing society but its replacement.”15 In a 1975 essay on issues of socialism he maintains: [C]apitalism destroys itself as it progresses! Therefore no reforms make sense. The notion that the society, as a whole is sick, destructive, hopelessly outdated, has found popular expression: “loss of faith” in the system; decline in the work ethic, refusal to work, etc. … The general form of the internal contradictions of capitalism has never been more blatant, more cruel, more costly of human lives and happiness. And—this is the significance of the Sixties—this blatant irrationality has not only penetrated the consciousness of a large part of the population, it has also caused, mainly among the young people, a radical transformation of needs and values which may prove to be incompatible with the capitalist system, its hierarchy, priorities, morality, symbols (the counter-culture, ecology).16

I came across the above 1975 typescript “Why Talk on Socialism?” in the Frankfurt Marcuse Archive and published it for the first time in 2013.17 Marcuse’s philosophy, practically from the beginning, addressed the deep roots of the capitalist system’s functioning and its crisis: the commodification of labor, burgeoning inequality, wasted abundance (especially in war), lives without meaningful purpose. The inadequacy of one-dimensional American liberalism was its obliviousness to the problematic nature of prevailing social and economic relations and its suffocation and repression of life’s internal inconsistencies and contradictions. Yet pockets of protest emerged within it, and created what he called a “New Sensibility”18 comprising an oppositional philosophy and politics: [Changed] needs are present, here and now. They permeate the lives of individuals … . First the need for drastically reducing socially necessary alienated labor and replacing it with creative work. Second, the need for autonomous free time instead of directed leisure. Third, the need for an end of role playing. Fourth, the need for receptivity, tranquility and abounding joy, instead of the constant noise of production… . The 15 Marcuse, 175. 16 Herbert Marcuse, “Why Talk on Socialism?” in Crisis and Commonwealth: Marcuse,

Marx, McLaren, ed. Charles Reitz (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 304–307. 17 Marcuse in Reitz (2015). 18 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 23.

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specter which haunts advanced industrial society today is the obsolescence of full-time alienation.19

Marcuse is thus proposing that revolutionary socialism operate on a new Reality Principle in keeping with the transvaluation of values represented in his Eros and Civilization.20 It is in this context, that I develop EarthCommonWealth as the telos of revolutionary ecological liberation with core features of racial equality, women’s equality, liberation of labor, restoration of nature, leisure, abundance, and peace.

EarthCommonWealth: The Appeal of a New General Interest Marcuse’s critical social theory sharpens radical ecology—seeing the damage as being done by capitalism’s fetish with production for profitable commodity exchange and the attendant dehumanization of social life. Marcuse regarded the environmental movement as the embodiment of a life-affirming energy directed toward the protection of Earth and the pacification of our human existence. It reflected the vernal spirit of “The First of May,” while embodying also the combative spirit of the “May Day” of the revolutionary international labor force. May Day means protesting particular wrongs—Yes! “Fighting for reforms is part of the struggle for system change.”21 But this is a fight also at a higher level of engagement, protesting a political-economic wrong in general. The so-called free market economy means universal commodity dependency, that is: universal unfreedom, a system of covert and overt control. A commercialized and commodified existence is not natural; it is contrived. It is built upon production for exchange value rather than use value, upon profitable waste and environmental degradation. Capitalism is not concerned with freeing mankind from the need to toil, it is concerned only with developing means to maintain a sufficient rate of profit. It represents the irrational perfection of waste; simultaneously also earth degradation—profitable plastic litter, air pollution, trash (planned obsolescence), 19 Marcuse, “Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society,” 211. 20 Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (Berkeley, CA:

University of California Press, 1984), 338. 21 Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams, Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transformation (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 321.

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toxic dumping, pollution of air and water, resource depletion, etc. If economics is (as Aristotle held) the study and practice of improving the human material condition enabling the human community to flourish, the capitalist system is obviously wasteful in its excessive immiseration, limitations on quality of life, and undemocratic monopolization of power—not to mention excessive military spending. All of this makes the system actually dis economic. Production according to profit and exchange value, rather than use value, has given us the twisted diseconomics of planned obsolescence and advertising. Marcuse’s political-economic critique is an ecological critique of “growth.” Ostensibly durable goods, like automobiles, washing machines, etc., are engineered with the pre-mature break-down built-in. Advertising adds to the waste by further boosting sales and the exchange value of a “new” product despite its diminished quality and use value. We get disposable consumer goods and a society in which lives become disposable too (as described decades ago by Vance Packard in The Waste Makers ). Today, such corporate practices underlie the full spectrum of sales, from single use plastics clogging landfills, rivers, and oceans—to such contemporary innovations as Monsanto’s seeds that produce crops artificially made sterile, such that the seeds are under monopoly control and must always be purchased anew. The military budget is far greater than needed already, and in fact could be reduced if the sole goal were national defense. In the present US economy, however, the military budget does more than provide for defense, it is a major mechanism to subsidize owners of the military industrial complex and thus keep the profits flowing. Military spending is one of the most wasteful projects in the US, and it could be reduced, and public welfare would not be impaired. Capitalist productive relations are driving global labor to its knees. Under commodity dependency necessities of life are available to the public exclusively as commodities through market mechanisms based upon profitability for the producers and the consumers’ ability to pay. Only the abolition of wage labor and commodity fetishism in the economy can restore satisfaction and dignity to an uncommodified labor process. In accordance with the logic of critical political economy and revolutionary socialism utilized by Marcuse to spell out a utopian vision of a new world order, I stress our need for a new communal mode of common work—and a communal mode of holding property. I have called it GreenCommonWealth—a concept developed in my book, Ecology and

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Revolution.22 Green because it opposes planned obsolescence and wasted abundance as profitable misuses of limited natural resources. Commonwealth because it denotes an ecosocialist system-alternative requiring the elimination of the capitalist economy’s core fetish of exchange value, and the return ethics to its original foundation in partnership labor. As I write today, I feel the need to revise and expand my concept of GreenCommonWealth to that of EarthCommonWealth, stressing thereby its appeal as a new general interest redressing several global social injuries at once. Building a revolutionary mass movement requires overcoming our fragmentation. The strategic relevance of Marcuse’s view of radical socialism is its usefulness as a clear alternative to global capitalism’s intensifying destruction of the natural and social world. His radical socialism offers a constellation of feasible (i.e., not utopian) goals that can hold together a global alliance of transformative forces. Advanced industrial society, functioning at the highest levels of technology and productivity, blocks Marcuse’s utopian vision, yet its very accomplishments show that a new intercultural architecture of commonwealth production, ownership, and stewardship can bring to fruition, within the realm of necessity, Marcuse’s revolutionary goals of rehumanization (disalienation), economic and political equality, labor freedom, ecological balance, leisure, abundance, and peace. Key to an emancipatory universalization of resistance is the revolt of youth as a global phenomenon: today against guns, war, and weaponry, women’s oppression, racial animosity, labor force precarity and exploitation, LGBTQ stigmatization, and the devastation of the earth—and increasingly for solidarity with immigrants and for socialism. A convergence of these forces forms the core of my proposal for a CommonWealth Counter-Offensive to unleash the latent powers of the Left.23

22 Charles Reitz, Ecology and Revolution: Herbert Marcuse and the Challenge of a New World System Today (New York and London: Routledge, 2019). 23 Reitz, Ecology and Revolution.

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The Foundation of Ethics in Commonwealth Labor Marcuse and Marx argued that labor is ontologically significant —it is the human mode of being in the world.24 Labor in this sense is not to be reduced to any form of class circumstance. Sensuous living labor is the substrate of our being as humans. It is the foundation of our affective and intellectual capacities (and vulnerabilities), bio-ecologically developed within history. As a species we have endured because of our sensuous appreciation of our emergent powers: the power to subsist cooperatively; to create, to communicate, and to care communally within that form of society that I call a commonwealth. Humanity’s first teachings on ethics are to be found in ancient African philosophy: “The cotton thread says that it is only as a team that you can carry a stone.” “Many hands make light work.” “It takes a whole village to raise a child.”25 These constitute universalizable humanist, i.e., not narrowly tribal, teachings for the guidance of practical life, and can in no way to be confused with purely religious teachings. Not gods, but communally laboring humanity can be seen as the source of ethics here. Humanity’s earliest proverbs, fables, and riddles teach the survival power of partnership and cooperation and the categorical ethical advantages empathy, reciprocity, hospitality, and respect for the good in common, gravitating toward the humanism of a communally laboring commonwealth. The right of the commonwealth to govern itself, and humanity’s earliest ethic of holding property in common, derive only secondarily from factual individual contributions to production; they are rooted primarily in our essentially shared species life and our being as humans, as sensuous living labor. Humanity’s rights to a commonwealth economy, politics, and culture reside in our commonworks. I propose that commonwealth labor is not only a social and productive force but that there is a primordial form of ethics in commonwealth labor. Humanity’s earliest history is that of a commonwealth economy, politics, and culture belonging to our commonwork. Our earliest proverbs, fables, and riddles from the oldest African cultures teach the survival power of partnership and cooperation and the categorical ethical advantages of empathy, reciprocity, hospitality, and respect for the good in common. Humanity experiences the satisfactions/dissatisfactions derived 24 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). 25 Reitz, Ecology and Revolution, 100.

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from our bio-ecologically generated economic, aesthetic, intellectual, and moral standards gravitating toward the humanism of a communally laboring commonwealth. Humanity’s first explicitly ethical maxims emerged as the proverbs that in a general way regulated life in the earliest African partnership cultures. These cultures centered on the customary sense of ubuntu or showing “humanity toward others,” through empathy and principles of reciprocity and solidarity in communal life, teamwork, modesty, and mutuality. We work for the good in common because it is through our community that we each flourish.26 As Marcuse emphasizes, human beings are not only the ensemble of our social relations, we are sensuous living labor.27 Labor here is not to be reduced to any form of class circumstance. Sensuous living labor is the substrate of our being as humans. It is the foundation of our affective and intellectual capacities (and vulnerabilities), bio-ecologically developed within history. As a species we have endured because of our sensuous appreciation of our emergent powers: the power to subsist cooperatively; to create, communicate, and care communally within what Marx called a Gemeinwesen and that I call a commonwealth. Because social labor is the source of all socially created wealth, only the labor force, as a group, has a legitimate right to the ownership of this wealth. Only the labor force, as a broadly conceived group, has a legitimate right to the political leadership of the commonwealth system of governance upon which it is built. Human labor has the irreplaceable power to build the commonwealth, past and future. Our current conditions of insecurity and risk make it imperative that we undertake a deeper understanding of the necessity of a humanist commonwealth alternative: an egalitarian, abundant, and green political economy, through which humanity may govern itself honorably and beautifully in terms of our fullest potentials, mindful of the care and gratitude we owe to planet Earth. We live in a [massively] BUILT-environment: this built-environment constitutes an ecology of commonwealth [a human community’s social labor exteriorized in curbs, pavement—every square inch around us, including gardens, parks, etc.—worked by human hands, yet we are largely oblivious of this circumstance. Production through human labor—this is the

26 See Dorothy R. Jolley, Ubuntu: A Person is a Person Through Other Persons (Master’s thesis: Southern Utah University, 2011). 27 Reitz, Ecology and Revolution.

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process of human making (Marx: human objectification) by which new tangible value is produced, new tangible value is added. Wealth derives from this collective production process. Collective effort makes us prosperous, not primarily the contributions of investors or entrepreneurs, which becomes more and more marginal over time. Included in this collective process is collective product: our common human heritage of language, science, technology, math, etc., which develop primarily within the context of commonwealth labor. When this combines with our common earthly heritage of land, sea, air, etc., there emerges humanity’s CommonWealth. This is a supply side economic theory explaining how wealth develops, grows. It shows what social living labor accomplishes (and can accomplish even better) in terms of real tangible value. Recognition of the commonwealth nature of labor as the validation of socialism—and the promise of abundance and leisure—can and must mobilize a global movement for economic understanding and transformation. At the same time, the high productivity of modern technology allows tremendous output with a small amount of labor time. Production of a sufficient quantity of goods need not therefore be a function of the quantity of labor employed. Automated technology provides the potential for an abundant leisure without the need for excessive toil. Yet, the tremendous productivity of modern technology does not allow the citizenry of the US, or the globe for that matter, to reduce their toil and enjoy abundant leisure. Socialism’s minimal standards require the provision of adequate social needs-oriented programs and services such as housing, health care, childcare, and education, to everyone, as well as government policy, law enforcement, and public media ensuring the optimization of the human material condition. To be radical, socialism must ensure the ecological well-being of humanity, the biosphere, and the earth. A humanist ecosocialism must be free of the familiar discriminatory patterns of the past and eliminate the infamous (if unacknowledged) caste status of racial minorities as well as gender-based abuse and violence. It must deconstruct all customary obstacles to human actualization and lead to a better future condition for all humans.

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The Path to EarthCommonWealth The “Green New Deal” is about climate change and much more too; higher education for all; affordable housing; high quality health care; clean manufacturing with creation of union jobs; supports for family farming, repair damages to native lands. This is a necessary part of a radical electoral strategy. It tries to tame a bestial and destructive capitalist oligarchy. Zero CO2 emissions in ten years, “all power clean power,” no fossil fuels; not nuclear power, clean up earth, restore nature. Moving Dems to the left is part of a transformational/transitional program away from oligarchic capitalism toward democratic socialism. The Green New Deal proposes that the public receive ownership stakes when the public invests in renewable power generation for example. All of this is good—as far as it goes. Revolutionary ecological liberation in Marcuse’s sense requires more: EarthCommonWealth is a vision transcending capitalist oligarchy, as such, not simply its most bestial and destructive components. Revolutionary ecological liberation decouples income from individual labor activity/ property ownership altogether, with an ecosocialist form of Universal Guaranteed Income. We must expose capitalism’s “Capital/Labor Split” and “Jobs Shell Game.” I have shown, that in the US manufacturing sector, “job creating” investors create no jobs unless on average each of these returns three times as much income to the holders of capital as is returned in total to the laborforce (including even the topmost echelons of managerial labor).28 Therefore, policies must do more than “tax the rich,”—we must “expropriate the expropriators;” forgive debt; redistribute property/land; eliminate universal commodity dependency through the decommodification/socialization of the economy, one sector at a time. System transformation is the goal: implementing new forms of communal democracy to govern economic production, consumption, exchange, and distribution as an EarthCommonWealth. A commonwealth worthy of the name requires new institutional relationships of ownership, production, distribution—a new way of holding property in which resources would be held and controlled and conserved publicly, rent-seeking and the for-profit financial industry eliminated as

28 Charles Reitz, “Accounting for Inequality: Questioning Piketty on the National Income Accounts and the Capital/Labor Split,” Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 48, no. 2 (June 2016).

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modes of privilege, and incomes distributed without reference to individual productivity according to need and as equally as feasible, hours of labor substantially reduced, and the well-rounded scientific and philosophical development of the young made possible through a public system of multicultural general education privileging no single culture or language. Without an adamant ideology of EarthCommonWealth, there is no sufficient negation, and there will be no sufficient program away from the capitalist political oligarchy. EarthCommonWealth liberates labor’s aesthetic and ethical form, society as a work of art. The strategic relevance of Marcuse’s view of radical socialism is its usefulness as a clear alternative to global capitalism’s intensifying destruction of the natural and social world. An egalitarian and ecological prosperity is not an “unattainable” utopia, it is possible now. Our task is to contribute as best we can to help future generations make EarthCommonWealth the universal material human condition.

CHAPTER 16

2020: Nature Said “Stop” Imaculada Kangussu

Unless the recognition of what is being done and what is being prevented subverts the consciousness and the behavior, not even a catastrophe will bring about the change. —Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

First of all, we would like to highlight the fact that the coronavirus has shaken one of the most powerful instruments of socio-economicpolitical control: commodity fetishism. Dominated by the desire to survive, humanity seems to be paying less attention to the hitherto tantalizing merchandise. And what does this mean that human beings can escape from its enchantment? This essay discusses fetishization to think about how to traverse it not to restore the old normal but to free the future from the past that produced the pandemic. Marcuse’s philosophical emphasis on subjective factors can illuminate existent connections between the objective social reality itself and the way in which subjects dominated by fetishes construct, maintain, and perceive it. This chapter

I. Kangussu (B) Belo Horizonte, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_16

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illustrates the possibilities from another perspective and from other ways of living—presenting briefly the Yanomami cultures, which have an anecdotal view of the merchandise love. Marcuse offers a method to analyze, decipher, and interpret the complex, diverse, and conflicting perspectives surrounding us.

The Enigma of the Plague and the Fetishism of the Commodity In 2020 a virus made humanity stop. An invisible and contagious biological agent with a lethal power to stay alive in particles suspended in the air we breathe forced human beings to keep a distance from each other. The pandemic split us into private little worlds but at the same time, it also put us together into a global community fighting for life. At the time of this writing in the fourth month of the pandemic, the coronavirus has killed more than half a million people. On one hand, the catastrophe was announced. A system based on the violent exploitation of human beings and unlimited exploitation of the limited resources of nature is condemned to ruin. On the other hand, the new organism brought an enigma. Humanity is now inside a tunnel with no bright light at the end. Coronavirus inflicted farreaching consequences on the economy, politics, scientific and social structures—all over the world, life really has changed. Now we know transformations are possible. One of the most evident changes has been the decrease in production and consumption. Facing COVID-19, the commodity fetishism—despite its “metaphysical subtleties” and “theological niceties”1 —lost much of its charm. Will we be able to escape commodity fetishism? Will humanity free itself from this spell? Commodities are fetishes because the hierarchy of values has always been obscure. When products of human labor are thrown on the market and transformed into exchange values, they appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own. Marx considers commodities both sensual and suprasensual. In Capital, comparing the act of seeing, which is a physical relation between physical things—when we perceive impressions made by a thing on the optic nerve not as a subjective excitation but

1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, ed. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 164.

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as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. Marx adverts that “as against this, the commodity-form has absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material (dinglich) relations arising out of this.”2 Commodity fetishism signals beliefs that an inanimate object has the power to gratify desire—it is “the religion of sensuous appetites.”3 In the book of the Passages, Benjamin refers to this pseudo capacity as the “sex appeal of the inorganic.”4 The first objects to be named “fetish” were made by native people in Africa to protect them from the power of nature. The word “fetish” originated from the Portuguese “fetisso” (currently “feitiço”), which came from the Latin factitius, an adjective that means fabricated, artificial, unnatural, i.e., not natural, not divine, not sacred. Fascination, charm, seduction, spell, bewitchment, and witchcraft, today linked to fetishism, emerged when the Portuguese navigators used the term pejoratively to name the objects of worship of North African tribes. In 1760, in Du culte des dieux fétiches. Parallèle de L´ancienne religion de l´Egypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie,5 Charles de Brosses connects fetishism with ignorance. Marcel Mauss considers that this notion of fetish “corresponds to an immense misunderstanding between two cultures, the African and the European, it has no foundation other than the blind obedience to colonial customs.”6 From a critical perspective, it is a paradigmatic example of the colonial ideology of a fetishization of the European culture. The obscure relationship between the word fetish and its symbolic referents is proof of the human capacity for delusion and self-deception: The fetish represents a material object made by human labor which was more powerful than themselves. When it did not fulfill the wish as it was supposed to, the creators just threw it away and made another one… The fetish is the index of a lack and of the desire to overcome it. It is a phenomenon of false consciousness—according to Marx—created by 2 Marx, Capital, 165. 3 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982), 22. 4 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk: Gesammelte Schriften Band, vol. 1 (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1991). 5 See Pierre Assoun, Le Fétichisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994) and Ulrich Erckenbrecht, Des Geheimnis des Fetischismus (Frankfurt: Europäisches Verlagsanstalt, 1976). “Nigritia” was the name Europeans called North Africa. 6 Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres II (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 244–245.

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reflections that produce in the consciousness a representation of reality that does not correspond to reality. Freud considers that fetishism’s origin is the refusal to take notice of a lack, whose perception would cause unbearable pain and suffering. The fetish is the thing that helps someone pretend that the lack does not exist, that there is no lack. The psyche is then split between the perception of an unwanted lack and the intensity of a negative desire, of the desire that the lack did not exist, which makes the psyche to deny the perceived fact, i.e., the undesirable lack. The fetishism splits the psyche between an intolerable reality and an illusion that helps to overcome it. To protect itself from a truly painful void, the psyche shelters in an illusion. The fetish is the materialization of what is not. Taken as a way to overcome it, the fetish testifies an absence. The fetish can be replaced ad libitum because the desire it is supposed to overcome is an existing lack that did not exist, and thus this desire cannot be fulfilled by it. The fetishism effect finds place in the opposition between an effective presentation of an object and a radical lack. The fetish object embodies a refusal to acknowledge a perceived void; it incorporates the denial of knowledge and the unknown, at the same time. Since Freudian theory, fetishism can be considered one of the best examples of denegation (Verleugnung ), i.e., the denigration of an unpleasant perception: the subject represses an unpleasant perception, denies it, and, at the same time, expresses this refusal through a deceptive narrative. Denegation means disavowal, a form of negation based on contradictory movements: the perception of a void and its imaginary fulfillment, which brings to the narrative what was supposed to be hidden. Fetishization, the process of imbuing something with a power that it did not have before this action, describes illusions that make it possible for the individual to accept a difficult situation without paying its psychological price. With the help of the fetishization, the subject pretends things are not the way they are in order to endure things as they are. The fetish is a border between the conscious and the unconscious, between the rational and the irrational. Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism (Warenfetischismus ), which determines the form that supports the capitalist social link puts the entire subject, with its inwardness, sensations, and imagination, in the center of the objective world. Throughout One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse stresses the role of commodity fetishism in the forms of social control in capitalism. “The more the rulers are capable of delivering the goods of

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consumption, the more firmly will the underlying population be tied to the various ruling bureaucracies.”7 The production of commodities is the production of needs. One-dimensional society tends to reduce, and even absorb, any opposition not only in the political sphere but also in the cultural realm of individual drives, since “the established system, in spite of everything, delivers the goods.”8 Marcuse considers that “the preservation of misery in the face of unprecedented wealth constitutes the most impartial indictment” of the one-dimensional society. “The fact that the vast majority of the population accepts, and is made to accept, this society does not render it less irrational and less reprehensible.”9 Its sweeping rationality is itself irrational. Therefore, the distinction between immediate and real interest, between false and true consciousness, must be perceived. Marcuse considers that people can do so “only if they live in need of changing their way of life, of denying the positive, of refusing. It is precisely this need that the established society manages to repress to the degree to which it is capable of ‘delivering the goods’ on an increasingly large scale.”10 The one-dimensional capitalist economy has created a second nature that ties human beings, libidinally, to the commodity form. The need for consuming, which is a stabilizing and conservative need, has become a biological need. Since the establishment’s values became people’s own values, and mass media adjusts the rational and emotional faculties to the market, changes must reach these patterns—this second nature—or political and social transformations will remain self-defeating. When needs and desires reproduce a life in servitude, liberation presupposes changes in this inner dimension in the drives that affect the mind as well as the body.

Free the Future Marcuse observes that “the growing domination of nature, the extension and refinement of the production of commodities,” have created new possibilities of enjoyment. The problem is that

7 Mauss, Oeuvres II , 43. 8 Mauss, 79. 9 Mauss, xlv. 10 Mauss, xlvi.

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for the great majority of humanity, only the very cheapest portion of these commodities is available. They become objects of enjoyment as commodities, and their very origin is preserved within them – even enjoyment has a class character. The cheap is not as good as the dear. For the majority, one’s partner in pleasure will also be one’s partner in the poverty of the same class. These conditions of life are a paltry showplace for happiness. The continual pressure under which the great masses must be kept for the reproduction of this society has only be augmented by the monopolistic accumulation of wealth.11

In Eros & Civilization, Marcuse shows that technological development and an increase in productivity can relieve the “eternal primordial struggle for existence” (in a well-known Freudian expression) and make real the possibility of a better life for all. Achievements of the repressive civilization itself, the scientific and technical achievements of existing societies, could end world hunger and poverty. The still prevailing misery is due chiefly to the manner of employing and distributing natural and technical resources. Scarcity can be objectively eliminated; the problem now is on the subject. Even though objective technical capacities outgrow the framework of exploitation within which they are confined, nature, people, and cultures are still being destroyed at an unprecedented scale. Growth is no longer due to necessity but to the love of enchanted merchandise. Beyond the biological level, human needs and their intensity and satisfaction have always been preconditioned by social institutions and interests. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse emphasizes the historical character of human needs. “Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control; the development and satisfaction of these needs are heteronomous.”12 The concept of alienation, which may seem to be improper since the individual identifies himself with the existence that is imposed upon him, is appropriate when the reality is an instance of alienation. Marcuse’s words are still true and valid:

11 Herbert Marcuse, Negations , trans. Jeremy Shapiro (London: Penguin Books, 1968), 183–184. 12 Marcuse, Negations , 5.

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In the contemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small areas of advanced industrial society. Their prosperity covers up the Inferno inside and outside their borders; it also spreads a repressive productivity and “false needs.” It is repressive precisely to the degree to which it promotes the satisfaction of needs which require continuing rat race of catching up with one’s peers and with planned obsolescence, enjoying freedom from using the brain, working with and for the means of destruction.13

When reason is swallowed up by instrumental reason, and transformed into means to achieve profit, logic becomes the logic of domination. Symbolic structures, defined by a capitalist framework, rule the social reality. Commodity fetishism colonizes the psyche apparatus and alienated human beings are enslaved by a structure whose powers are beyond one’s perceptions of control and comprehension. Consequently, fear mobilizes the lowest instincts of self-preservation. “Repression from without has been supported by repression from within: the unfree individual induces his masters and their commands into his own mental apparatus. The struggle against freedom reproduces itself in the psyche, as the self-repression of the repressed individual.”14 Introducing an illusionary form of alienation in a very aggressive world, commodity fetishism helps to heal individual narcissistic wounds. Therefore, the intention to dissolve the subjectivity, consciousness, and unconsciousness of individuals into a class consciousness, is a task condemned to fail. The interpretation—and consequent devaluation—of subjectivity as a bourgeois notion minimizes that which is a prerequisite for a radical socio-political transformation. In The Aesthetic Dimension, Marcuse highlights “the fact that the need for radical change must be rooted in the subjectivity of individuals themselves, in their intelligence and their passions, in their drives and their goals.”15 In “Cultural Revolution” (ca 1970), he considers that—after Capital, in the writings of 1844—Marx himself could perceive individual roots of alienation and exploitation not only in the human consciousness but also in its senses. In these writings, Marx, “with passionate single-mindednesss, centers his conception 13 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge, 1991), 241. 14 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston:

Beacon Press, 1966), 16. 15 Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 3.

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of man [sic] as ‘sensuous being’ on the ‘emancipation of the senses’, on the aesthetic capability.”16 The emancipated senses could bridge humans and nature, with a new sensibility, and develop a human appropriation of nature: nature would not appear as a mere stuff but as a life force with a metabolism similar to that of human beings. According to Marcuse, Marx emphatically states “that the relation between man and nature, between subject and the objective world presupposes a qualitatively different sensibility: new modes of seeing, hearing, feeling. For the institution of private property has blunted, brutalized, and perverted human’s sensibility.”17 In Counter-Revolution and Revolt, we read that “nature is not a manifestation of ‘spirit’, but rather its essential limit ” (coronavirus has made this clear).18 Human action against nature “offends against certain objective qualities of nature – qualities which are essential to the enhancement and fulfillment of life.”19 According to Marcuse, the emancipation of human beings involves the recognition of a truth that is distorted and denied in the established reality, and therefore the senses must experiment not only the given but also the hidden qualities of things and nature. In the light of a truth which had been denied in them, empirical facts themselves appear false. In a society constructed by alienated labor and captive of commodity fetishism, sensibility is blunted: men perceived things only in the forms and functions in which they are given, made, used by the existing society; and they perceived only the possibilities of transformation as defined by, and confined to, the existing society. Thus, the existing society is reproduced not only in the mind, the consciousness of men, but also in their senses; and no persuasion, no theory, no reasoning can break this prison, unless

16 Herbert Marcuse, “Cultural Revolution,” in Towards a Critical Theory of Society: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed Douglas Kellner, vol. 2 (London: Routledge, 2001), 128. 17 Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 129. “Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man [sic]) either cultivated or brought into being.” 18 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscript of 1844, ed Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), p.141; apud Herbert Marcuse Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 64–65. 19 Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 69.

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the fixed, petrified sensibility is “dissolved,” opened to a new dimension of history, until the oppressive familiarity with the given objective world is broken – broken in a second alienation: that from the alienated society.20

And even though the current situation is more critical than at Marcuse’s time, the alternative he presented seems to be the only possibility of hope until now: the advent of a new form of social organization requires a radical qualitative change in the infrastructure of individuals, which is in itself a dimension of society’s infrastructure. Even if the subject has been more and more swallowed up by totalitarian society, Marcuse still considers the hypothesis of a possibility for a less repressive libidinal development. In An Essay on Liberation, the emergence of different goals, dreams, desires, aspirations—“in the men and women who resist and deny the massive exploitative power of corporate capitalism”21 —is pointed to as the condition sine qua non for this to happen. In Marcuse’s words: The new direction, the new institutions and relationships of production, must express the ascent of needs and satisfactions very different from and even antagonist to those prevalent in the exploitative societies. Such a change would constitute the instinctual basis, which the long history of class society has blocked […] The rebellion would then have taken root in the very nature, the “biology” of the individual; and on these new grounds, the rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of the political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined.22

A radical, political struggle must have roots in individual organisms that are no longer capable of tolerating the brutality and aggressiveness required for the competition under capitalist domination. The emphasis on subjective factors, “the development of awareness,” assumes primary importance. Awareness must replace alienation. The construction of a different society presupposes a type of human being with new rationality as well as new sensibility: human beings “who have developed an instinctual barrier against cruelty, brutality, ugliness. Such an instinctual transformation is conceivable as a factor of social change only if it enters 20 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 71–72. 21 Marcuse, vii. 22 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 4–5.

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the social division of labor, the production relations themselves.”23 That is an awakening of individual consciousness and unconsciousness. Radical changes in the realm of values are the first step in changing social existence. The emergence of a new subjectivity is the beginning, it carries out the transformation of the symbolic order. It is a condition sine qua non for material transformations in the so-called real world.

The Yanomami Perspective To understand the current moment, it is paramount to remember that way back in history, some societies established a division between “nature” and “culture.” Later, these same societies established a second distinction between themselves and the societies that had not made the first division, henceforth called “primitive.” The first big division, nature vs. culture, is internal whereas the second division, “civilized” vs “savage,” is external, according to Bruno Latour in Nous n´avons jamais été modernes. The establishment of an aesthetic dimension in the philosophical tradition seeks to compensate for the first division between reason and sensibility—the internal one—and somehow brings them back together, again summoning the truth inherent to the senses. This movement rescues the total meaning of the Greek aesthesis in its original sense concerning sensibility and the senses. “It is not just passing in and out of exuberance that Marx speaks of the formation of the object world ‘in accordance with the laws of beauty’ as a feature of free human practice. Aesthetic qualities are essentially nonviolent.”24 Reading Marx’s Manuscript of 1844, it is easy to notice that the abstract enmity, which links sense and spirit, signals both the human sense of nature and the nature sense of humans. In the Yanomami philosophy, the function of reason can be interwoven with the function of art: as it happens, for example, in the art of well living—that is, art in the original meaning of tekhné, recalling the former identification between arts and crafts. The Yanomami occupy an area of the Amazon Forest, located in northern Brazil. They constitute an isolated cultural group of slightly more than 33,000 people, half of them living in the legally recognized

23 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 21. 24 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 74.

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territory Terra Indigena Yanomami, which extends over almost 100,000 km2 . The Yanomami live according to symbolic coordinates that structure an “aesthetic” dimension, where “thoughts,” “reason,” and “mind,” are linked with “sensibility,” physical and bodily “sensations.” “Art” is not something apart from but is rather a part of prosaic life. Beauty is important not only in music, dance, ornaments, and adornments, but also in daily use objects, in body movements, in the spatial layouts of houses and tribes, and so on. The so-called “wild thought” overcomes the “civilized” alienation of humans and nature, it has not done the first division. To give voice to this interpretation of Yanomami wisdom we would like to present the words spoken by Davi Kopenawa to the French anthropologist, written by Bruce Albert, “as a life story, autoethnography, and Cosmo-ecological manifesto.”25 “I entrusted you with my words and I ask you to carry them far away to let them be heard by the white people, who know nothing about us.” This is one of the opening sentences of The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman.26 According to the Yanomami mythology told by Davi Kopenawa, the world has both a visible and an invisible dimension that is comparable to what white people call “spiritual dimension.” Kopenawa has already explained that “spirit is not a word in my language. I have learned this word “spirit” (espírito) and use it in the mixed language I invented (to speak to white people about these things).”27 The invisible dimension is inhabited by the xapiri, “spirit-like beings,” who have the highest knowledge about nature. The xapiri accept to come to visit human beings whenever they drink or sniff the yãkoana, a powder prepared with the leaves of yãkoana hi tree mixed with “the odorous maxara hana leaves and the bark of the ama hi and amat a hi trees.”28

25 Bruce Albert, Trans Nicholas Elliot and Alison Dundy, “Setting the Scene,” in The Falling Sky. Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1. 26 Albert and Kopenawa’s book was first published in France, with the title La chute de ciel: paroles d´un chaman Yanomami (Ed. Plon, 2010), then translated into English (2013), and only published in Brazil in 2015 (A queda do céu. Palavras de um xamã yanomami). Professor Bruce Albert lives part of the year with the Yanomami. He is married to Kopenawa’s daughter, who refuses to live in Paris. 27 Terence Turner and Davi Kopenawa, “I Fight Because I Am Alive: An Interview with Davi Kopenawa Yanomami,” Cultural Survival Quarterly, n. 91, 63. 28 Kopenawa and Albert, The Falling Sky, 31.

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The yãkoana provokes different states of consciousness, which affects the corporeal image and the vital essence, too. Under the yãkoana effects, the shaman becomes other and enters into a ghost state; he can listen to the music and watch the dance of the spirits, of the xapiri, which— like insights—are pleasurable and produce knowledge. To “act in/enter a ghost state (poremuu)” and “to become other (ne aipei)” are both expressions that “refer to states of altered consciousness induced by hallucinogens, pain, or sickness in which the ghost (pore), enclosed in each living being (similar to our unconscious) takes precedence over consciousness (pihi).”29 Maybe pore can be compared to the old Greek daemon. The xapiri are immortal and look like human beings. They sleep when the sun rises and wake up when it comes down in the evening. Therefore, while humans sleep, the xapiri are awake, dancing and playing in the forest. “They are tiny, like luminous flecks of dust, and invisible to ordinary people who have only ghost eyes. Only shamans can truly see them.”30 The xapiri see humans as “small ghosts,” that is, already ghosts, because, unlike them, human beings die easily and are said to have “ghost’s eyes,” which cannot see the spirits—except the shamans. The xapiri hate dust and dirt, they visit only the houses that are clean, literally and metaphorically—both in concrete and in moral meaning. The house where the spirits come in is a metaphor for, and of, the human body. In a highly poetic language, the spirit house corresponds to the initiate’s body. This correspondence is expresses by the word nõreme, which denotes analogy, appearance or simulation. The posts of the spirit house look like the interior of the shaman’s chest, in the Kopenawa’s description, “the collarbones in his torso are the beams that support the roof ring. His hips are the stakes’ bass in the ground. His mouth and throat are the main entrance. His arms and legs are the paths that lead there. His elbows and knees are mirror-clearing where the spirits stop before they come in.”31 This description of the spiritual dimension is closer to feelings and sensations than the so-called “reason.” This proximity to the aesthetic

29 Kopenawa and Albert, 495. 30 Kopenawa and Albert, 56. 31 Kopenawa and Albert, 104–105.

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dimension is also present in how the xapiri establishes a relationship with a human being. They come to visit the shaman (when he is “dead” by the effect of Yãkoana) singing and dancing. In the Yanomami perspective, the xapiri are capable of communicating the spiritual meaning of every phenomenon. Singing and dancing, they express what the material phenomenon does not and cannot say immediately. The xapiri’s image is bright. Their bodies “are always covered in fresh vermilion annatto dye and decorated with shiny black waves, lines, and spots. They are heavily scented,” Kopenawa writes, “the xapiri dye is one of their own precious goods. It comes from the mixed odors of things of the forest and does not have the acrid, dangerous scent of alcohol.”32 When the xapiri arrive in a new spirit house (the shaman body), it is the xapiri woman, the yaroriyoma who leads the male spirits to dance. The female spirits prepare love charms and attract the male in their dance, even when they are tired or grumpy. Just as it happens with the human beings, according to Kopenawa: If the women are enthusiastic, the men eventually follow suit, no matter how indolent or sullen they are! The same is true with the xapiri! As I said, they only feel exalted when they follow the women spirits. This is why the elder initiating a young shaman own the women spirits with their love charms and intoxicating perfumes. As soon as they pass the male xapiri, the latter fall in love with them and go after them in a fervent dance.33

It is through dancing that the spirits come down to their houses fixed in the shaman’s chest. A Yanomami shaman must know their tunes. “Getting to know the spirits well takes as much time as it takes white students to learn in their books,” Kopenawa tells. Moreover, to further the comparison, he says that the xapiri “come down to us dancing like television images. They take paths invisible to ordinary people, fragile and luminous like what people call electricity. These innumerable spirit paths come from very far but get close in an instant, like words in a telephone talk.”34

32 Kopenawa and Albert, 56–57. 33 Kopenawa and Albert, 100. 34 Kopenawa and Albert, 111.

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Merchandise Love, a Critique in Factis White people go to the forest—that the Yanomamis depend on to eat and live—cut the trees, tear up the floor, soil the rivers, killing living creatures. “We simply want to continue living there as we wish, as our ancestors did before us. We do not want our forest to die, covered in wounds and white people’s waste” Kopenawa declares, “we do not want them to come work in our forest because they cannot return the value that they destroy […] It is not gold or merchandise that makes the plants grow or feeds and fattens the game we hunt!”35 Nothing can restore the forest value. Kopenawa asserted that the white people cleared their forest, and made plantations and gardens. Then they desired metals that are hidden under the waters and the ground. “They began greedily tearing minerals out of the ground. They built factories to melt them and make great quantities of merchandise. Then their thoughts set on these trade goods, and they became as enamored with them as if they were beautiful women.”36 Kopenawa observes that “white people treat their merchandise like women with whom they are in love. They only want to lock them up and keep them jealously under their gaze.”37 He describes white’s merchandise love (“Merchandise Love” is Chapter 19 of the book): This merchandise is truly a fiancée (namorada) to them! Their thought is so attached to it that if they damage it while it is still shiny, they get so enraged that they cry! They are really in love with it! They go to sleep thinking about it like you doze off with nostalgia of a beautiful woman. It occupies their thoughts even after they fall asleep. So they dream of their house, their car, their money, and all their goods – of those they already possess and those they desire again and again. It is so. Merchandise makes them euphoric and obscures all the rest of their mind. We are not like them.38

The fetishism of merchandise is a complex, difficult to understand, phenomenon. It refers to a kind of magical quality of the merchandise, which appears at first sight as a trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that

35 Kopenawa and Albert, 280. 36 Kopenawa and Albert, 327. 37 Kopenawa and Albert, 338. 38 Kopenawa and Albert, 333.

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it is full of (abounding in) metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.39 In Marx’s famous words: The mysterious character of the form of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s labor as objective characteristics of the product of labor themselves, as the social-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the total sum of labor as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labor become commodities, sensuous things […]

Marx describes the products that appear in the market as if they were endowed with a life of their own with the gods created by human mind and appearing to it as its masters, in the realm of religion. As a devotee of the merchandise, humanity cannot perceive another form of rationality but this one—where the merchandise is the subject and humanity their object—that transforms everything into a commodity. The expression (xi toai)—used by Kopenawa to describe the relation of white people with merchandise also has a sensuous accent: it refers both to euphoric avidity and sexual climax. By wanting to possess all this merchandise, they [white people] were seized by a limitless desire (xi toai). Their thought was filled with smoke and invaded by night. It closed itself to other things. It was with these words of merchandise that the white people start cutting all the trees, mistreating the land, and soiling the water-courses. First they started all over their own forest. Now there are few trees left on their sick land, and they can no longer drink water from their rivers. This is why they want to do the same thing again where we live.40

White people run into the forest to tear jaguar skins, latex, gold, and other goods out of it, but the forest is most precious for Yanomamis. Kopenawa presents the distinction between them and white people:

39 Karl Marx, Capital. See Chapter 1, Section 4, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” 40 Kopenawa and Albert, 327.

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The white people are other people than us. They probably find themselves very clever to be able to constantly produce a multitude of goods. They were tired of walking and wanted to go faster, so they invented the bicycle. Then eventually they found it still too slow. Next they built motorcycles, then cars. Then they found that all that was still not fast enough, and they created airplanes. Now they possess a great number of machines and factories. Yet that still isn’t enough for them. Their thought remains constantly attached to their merchandise. They are relentless and always desire new goods. But they are probably not as wise as they think they are. I fear that this euphoria of merchandise will have no end and that they will entangle themselves with it to the point of chaos. They are already constantly killing each other for money in their cities and fighting other people for minerals and oil they take from the ground. But they do not seem concerned that they are making us all perish with the epidemic fumes that escape from all these things. They do not think that they are spoiling the earth and the sky and that they will never be able to recreate new ones.41

The white people are other people, Kopenawa observes: “we, Yanomami, do not keep the objects that we make or receive even if it leaves us impoverished. We soon offer them to those who ask for them. This is why we do not truly possess any goods of our own.”42 While whites accumulate vast quantities of commodities, keep these locked up, carry many keys, and live in constant fear of being stolen, the Yanomami consider that their unique indispensable good is the forest: its waters, mountains, sky, fish, trees, fruits, which were more abundant before the white invasion. Yanomami people do not fetishize wealthy nations as the subject supposed to possess knowledge that produces wealth. The survival of the Yanomami is the survival of the Amazon rainforest. They resist all attempts by the governments to take away their land, many of them at the expense of their own lives. They refuse the demarcation of their lands that followed the urban thoughts of the whites. They expelled the Catholic missionaries who tried to catechize them, for their words were constantly threatening to throw people into an inferno. The Yanomamis grew tired of the North-American missionaries, who discriminated all the time. They seemed to be all about sins. “Do not desire married women!” How is this possible to control the desire? One can

41 Kopenawa and Albert, 338. 42 Kopenawa and Albert, 331.

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pray: “Chase Satanasi 43 far away from me when he makes me look at another man’s woman. Prevent me from listening to him when he tells me: ‘Look at that young woman, she is so beautiful, eat her vulva!’ Make me copulate only with my wife.”44 The Yanomami perceived that it is possible to resist it, but it is impossible to prevent the desire to appear… Here we can see Eros’ arrows protecting the Yanomami. They have also considered the Christian burial ritual “a revolting practice in that it prevents putting in oblivion the deceased’s bone ashes, which is the only way to put an end to the mourning process, by permitting the dead ghost’s final separation from the world of the living.”45 The survival of Native people—in a world that seems too focused on extinguishing them—shows us that many other forms of life are, or at least should be, possible. These ways need to be created with the possibilities at hand. Different perspectives can illuminate what is in darkness in the familiar one. In Marcuse’s words: No return to pre-capitalist, pre-industrial artisanship, but, on the contrary, perfection of the new mutilated and distorted science and technology in the formation of the objective world in accordance with the ‘laws of beauty’. And ‘beauty’ here defines an ontological condition - not of an oeuvre d’art isolated from real existence, not of some people and some places, but that harmony between man and his world which would shape the form of society.46

Brief Conclusion The gap between different perspectives is related to the symbolic structure that sustains the social body and has its origin in the already mentioned old division realized by the Western classical philosophy between Body and Mind, Sensibility and Reason, and Nature and Culture. According to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (inspired by Bruno Latour’s theory of the “Big Divisions”), “the distinction between nature/culture must be

43 The Yanomami word for the English Satan. 44 Kopenawa and Albert, 327. 45 Kopenawa and Albert, 525. 46 Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 138–139.

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criticized but not to conclude that it does not exist.”47 In Marcuse’s words: There can be no such thing as a total abolition of alienation. Dialectical materialism recognizes the inexorable objectivity of nature, of matter, the inexorable struggle of man with nature confronting the human subject and limiting its freedom no matter in what form of society. It is not the question of abolishing alienation altogether but abolishing what I might call surplus alienation, namely the alienation exacted by the existing society in the interest of maintaining and enlarging the status quo. This surplus alienation has been the soil on which quantitative progress has taken place: it has sustained the separation of intellectual from manual labor, the need and the growing need for dehumanizing, parasitarian and destructive work; it has wasted and polluted the available resources – technical, natural and human.48

What is at stake are the human values, desires, and needs themselves. Value is a form of cultural commodity: as the material product becomes independent of its producers as a commodity, in cultural practice a work congeals into valid values, and “individuals must subordinate themselves to cultural values.” According to Marcuse, “‘Civilization’ is animated and inspired by ‘culture.’”49 Culture is the anima, the soul of civilization. Marcuse stated that values mean “norms and aspirations which motivate the behavior of social groups in the process of satisfying their needs, material as well as cultural, and in defining their needs.” And more than this, values are not a matter of personal preference, they express “the established pattern of consumption. However, and this is decisive, values express the possibilities inherent but repressed by the productivity of the established society.”50 A new mode of life could free the potentialities of nature and humans by negating the values of the current system of exploitation. These reflections on Yanomami culture can carry out a perception about the interweaving between “sensibility” and “reason,” “body” and

47 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A inconstância da alma selvagem – e outros ensaios de antropologia (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002), 349. 48 Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 197. 49 Marcuse, Negations , 94. 50 Marcuse, Towards a Critical Theory of Society, 195.

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“spirit,” which characterizes most of the Native people’s traditions. Furthermore, it makes visible the place of the “aesthetic dimension” within the Yanomami tradition’s cognitive process and in the same movement, the possibility of overcoming the existent alienation between body and mind. Other forms of living are possible: transvaluation of values that strikes at the material and intellectual culture. It is paramount to notice that “returning to normal” means accepting the old norms that brought us to the current situation. Now, while we count the dead, it is time to change. To survive the coronavirus menace, masked humanity has to face a life reduced to basic actions and interactions. This new situation, the quarantine imposed by the pandemic has revealed it is possible to transform the old ways of living. The fastest change has been the slowdown in the pace of life, which made visible the multiplicity of connections that keep daily life going on. If humanity is to survive, radical changes are essential: political organizations must care about vulnerable people, human and natural exploitation must be reduced, new control of the banks, ecological patterns, universal health care and education, and workers’ rights. Taxes on big fortunes must replace the determinations now exerted by global capitalist economy. Billions, as we know them, are blood. The current system acts against humanity and Earth itself. Both are condemned to disappearing in a visible future. To avoid the announced and already visible final catastrophe, the only hope is the creation of a new paradigm for the symbolic order. We need a new narrative illuminating what is distorted in the way things are given, in the mutilated perception, and what is missing in prosaic daily experience. If things are to change, first of all, it is necessary, in the framework of values, to consider life before profit. A virus shook and cracked the former narrative that was underway. A new one can be created. A radical change is needed. Are we ready to live?

CHAPTER 17

Marcusean Pathways for Queer Agency Through Sonic Conceptions of Noise in the Twenty-First Century Casey Robertson

Introduction In our contemporary socio-political climate, there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. Such influence has spanned across a broad spectrum of disciplines, especially against the backdrop of contemporary far-right populist movements, not only within the United States, but also internationally. While such related analyses of Marcuse have been a useful avenue for a multiplicity of scholarship fields, his discourse has most often been curiously absent or only utilized through passing mention in much of the recent scholarship in the emergent field of sound studies. As a current of interdisciplinary research

C. Robertson (B) York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_17

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only coming into conscious articulation during the early 2000s,1 sound studies as a concept has sometimes caused confusion due to its overlapping contexts with topics in musicology. Artist and researcher Kyle Devine has perhaps best articulated the field as: The study of sound and listening as functions of history and culture. In its broadest sense sound studies aims to understand precepts and practices of sound as part of an auditory ecology that consists of cultural, industrial, scientific, and technological relations between music, speech, noise, and silence. Sound studies thus adopts a broader perspective than the usual music disciplines, and examines music as simply one aspect (albeit a significant aspect) of larger “listening formations.”2

While the conception of sound studies essentially materialized after Marcuse’s death, a re-examination of his body of work has the potential to lend much insight which is especially relevant in today’s socio-political context. Though Marcuse himself once claimed that he was not qualified to speak on music,3 he was not without notable insights on this medium, especially from an aesthetic standpoint. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the ability of Marcuse to engage the notion of radical sensibility beyond dominant ocularcentric discourses shared by influential theorists. A move beyond ocularcentric practice toward a more holistic practice is perhaps best exemplified in Counterrevolution and Revolt when Marcuse argued: Our world emerges not only in the pure forms of time and space, but also, and simultaneously, as a totality of sensuous qualities-object not only of the eye (synopsis) but of all human senses (hearing, smelling, touching, tasting). It is this qualitative, elementary, unconscious, or rather preconscious, constitution of the world of experience, it is this primary experience itself which must change radically if social change is to be radical, qualitative change.4 1 Kyle Devine, “Sound Studies,” Grove Music Online (2014): https://doi.org/10. 1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2258177. 2 Devine, “Sound Studies.” 3 Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics

(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), x. 4 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979),

63.

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Through a re-examination of Marcuse’s later aesthetic theory, this chapter undertakes the initial task of interrogating and synthesizing Marcuse’s thought as an interlocutor with recent theoretical work in sound studies, and then proceeds to explore potential pathways which could provide avenues of agency for LGBTQ2S artists. Through such action, the overarching goal is to begin a discussion to explore how Marcuseaninformed pathways of sonic practice could potentially be useful for the contemporary work of transgender and queer artists of color.

Marcuse and Queer Activism: Past and Present Prior to examining how Marcuse’s work is relevant to developments in sound studies, it is important to briefly restate his relevance to recent scholarship in contemporary queer activism. With this stated, it is difficult to underestimate the influence of Marcuse in the New Left and its many related spheres of political organization and action, yet his situatedness to the LGBT2S movement is an area typically less solidified. With an ongoing tension between the notions of resistance and liberation among queer activists, some have simply relegated Marcuse with the former. Still, in today’s context, one can argue that Marcuse still holds significant relevance. From the “surplus repression” of Eros and Civilization, to the “repressive desublimation” of One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse has consistently offered means for those working within anti-normative frameworks. Such concepts are also perhaps as relevant today as ever as strong currents of homonormativity and homonationalism currently distort the anti-normative initiatives of queer movements resisting assimilation into the machinery of the capitalist order. As we witness contemporary re-examinations of predominantly apolitical Pride celebrations and the corresponding overlooked intersectional struggles related to race, class, and (dis)ability, such political activism in need of a renewed political consciousness can undoubtedly draw from Marcuse’s timely discourse once again. As such, recent scholars have generated a number of useful discourses for queer activism through Marcusean frameworks. Authors such as Heather Love, who has pointed out that despite the ongoing assimilation of lesbian and gay individuals, there are many ongoing exclusions such as poor queers, queers of color, undocumented queers, disabled

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queers, nonmonogamous queers, and transgender people.5 For Love, Marcuse’s concept of the great refusal can be positioned with the marginalization of gender and sexual outsiders as a political resource to articulate a foundation for a project of difference without limits.6 Roderick Ferguson has also re-visited Marcuse’s contemporary relevance in his recent book-length study, One-Dimensional Queer, which draws on Marcuse’s one-dimensionality to reveal an alternative historical account of multi-dimensional activism in the Stonewall riots. Through such research, Ferguson also exposes a historical narrative responsible for a flattening of difference; one that has not only relegated the intersectional struggles of race, class, and gender to the sidelines for a one-dimensional identity, but additionally has embodied a politics of fragmentation leading to narratives in a more comfortable alignment with modern states of neoliberal capitalism.7 While often overlooked, queer scholarship and activism employ a critical interplay with sound scholarship. As scholars such as Annette Schlichter have noted, even influential theorists such as Judith Butler have historically relied on a logic of the visual which has enacted the unintended effect of essentially muting bodies’ corresponding voices.8 Musical Forms and One-Dimensionality As mentioned previously, Marcuse once stated that he was not qualified to speak on music, however, as someone situated outside musical practice, he was able to recognize a number of problematic trends becoming observable during his lifetime. Marcuse was quick to observe the oftenshort-lived possibilities of sonic disruption from the rock music of the 1960s. He also recognized not only the related limitations of what he saw as poorly developed “pubertarian revolts,” but also the frequently overlooked nuisances often stunting any residual sonic potential, from the cult mentality of the rock genre which was already very much absorbed into capitalism during his lifetime, to the co-opting of black music toward 5 Heather Love, “Queer Critique, Queer Refusal,” in The Great Refusal: Herbert Marcuse and Contemporary Social Movements, eds. Andrew T. Lamas, Todd Wolfson, and Peter N. Funke (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2017), 122. 6 Love, “Queer Critique, Queer Refusal,” 122. 7 Roderick Ferguson, One Dimensional Queer (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019), 3. 8 Annette Schlichter, “Do Voices Matter? Vocality, Materiality, Gender Performativity,”

Body & Society 17, no. 1 (2011): 33.

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white commercialism and commodification. It is true that this has been discussed at length in the realm of popular rock music, however, the whitewashing of other genres such as drum and bass, for example, has only more recently come into limited public discussion.9 While one might cite overtly blatant examples of the commodification of rock music such as when memorabilia from the 2016 Republican National Convention could be found throughout the gift shop of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, evidence of such commodification has seeped into many other areas of contemporary culture. While numerous artists (or their estates) have filed cease and desist motions against various rightwing political figures that have used their music in political campaigns, the fact that their work has been utilized at such rallies is evidence that such a form of expression has already been anesthetized to a point of absorption into the neoliberal capitalist order, regardless of the artist’s original intentions. Relatedly, in a 2014 study, physicists Gamaliel Percino, Peter Klimek, and Stefan Thurner studied the correlation between instrumental complexity and the correlated record sales in popular music, concluding that once a form of commercial success sets in, the related music becomes increasingly formulaic.10 Similar problems are also in play with the realm of classical music. As Marianna Ritchey has recently argued, neoliberal capitalism has profoundly shaped ideas about classical music in the contemporary United States.11 If such forms of musical expression have largely succumbed to one-dimensionality, one is led to question what sonic avenues of resistance are still relevant in today’s context. The study of music and political economy is not a new phenomenon and many are familiar with the sonic superstructure argument from economist Jacques Attali’s influential work Bruits (translated as Noise), which articulates a possibility to anticipate historical developments, essentially foreshadowing new social formations through music in a prophetic

9 Samantha Riedel, “Gen(d)erations: This Trans Drum & Bass Musician Was a Pioneer

in the 90s. Why Isn’t She Getting Her Due?” Them, October 31, 2019, https://www. them.us/story/genderations-jordana-lesesne. 10 Gamaliel Percino, Peter Klimek, and Stefan Thurner, “Instrumental Complexity of Music Genres and Why Simplicity Sells,” PLos ONE 9, no. 12 (2014): 13. 11 Marianna Ritchey, Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era (Chicago: IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 1.

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and annunciatory way.12 While Attali’s bold thesis of an overarching superstructure has had mixed reactions since its initial 1977 publication, it is difficult to dismiss that we engage in a profound sonic level in day-to-day existence; one most often unexamined due to its subordination from the overbearing nature of the visual. While differing in articulation from Attali, Marcuse also argued in a more comprehensive fashion that while overarching social structures and political expressions seem to remain basically unchanged, forms such as music and communication exhibit changes which suggest a new experience, and a radical transformation of values moving beyond such lagging institutions.13 It is this task of locating this new experience and the radical transformation of values that brings this chapter’s re-examination of Marcuse into focus with conceptions of noise. Re-visiting Conceptions of Noise Marcuse frequently discussed the ever-increasing advent of technological rationalism seeping into day-to-day existence during his lifetime, a phenomenon that is just as relevant today as during its first mention during 1941. As Marcuse discussed how this problem has essentially flattened artistic forms into one dimension, we are led to explore means to resist against this problem in our contemporary context. It has now been two decades since Kim Cascone’s “Aesthetics of Failure” articulated not only the illusion of control in creative technology, but also revealed the possibilities of the glitch in relation to music production.14 In this current of thought, a renewed interest in this realm of possibility has recently emerged. Notably, this notion of the glitch has reappeared in the scholarship of queer theorists such as Jacob Gaboury, who has discussed the socio-political optics of the glitch, stating: Glitches are unexpected, but importantly they do not shut down a system entirely. They temporarily transform a technical object by producing an unintended result or error, and in the process lay bare its material function. 12 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xi. 13 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 80. 14 Kim Cascone, “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contempo-

rary Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal 24, no. 4 (2000): 13.

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A glitch is an outlier, an aberration. As such, it should be no surprise that it has been for decades an extremely productive site for artistic and critical investigation into the aesthetics and politics of digital media.15

While often overlooked or dismissed as extraneous and/or worthy of suppression, Gaboury has outlined the stakes at play, arguing "This normalization of the terms of engagement can have wide-reaching effects, particularly on minority populations whose needs, desires, and bodies are often excluded from the norms that structure protocological assumptions.”16 If we are to explore the glitch’s related counterpoint of noise, we encounter the challenges of its often broadly defined characteristics. With this stated, while a definition of noise has never been universal across time and geographic space, one could argue that musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez has produced a flexible framework which can effectively articulate such a phenomenon: Just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both. The border between music and noise is always culturally defined – which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus.17

Despite such inherent challenges in articulation, it is possible to situate connective circuitry here most commonly within tenets of disruption and resistance toward the prevailing aesthetics, authority, and enforced social order. Examining these commonalities, I have recently argued elsewhere that such sonic tenets of noise elide significantly with cultural structures of normativity in manners very much reflective of one another, particularly in relation to hegemonic structures of gender constructions.18 Thus, whether we are examining sonic expression itself or alongside the 15 Jacob Gaboury, “Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation,” The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), 485. 16 Gaboury, “Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation,” 486. 17 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans.

Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 48. 18 Casey Robertson, “Resisting Hegemony through Noise,” Assuming Gender 7, no. 1 (2019): 50.

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biopolitics of modernity, such discourses exhibit convergent pathways to articulate sound as an embedded structure of cultural normativity in a smooth state of democratic unfreedom. Through such recognition we can move forward and consider conceptions of noise as intertwined with the experiences of those pushed to the margins, and in this particular case, trans and queer people of color. By doing so, we can observe that such a phenomenon also has the ability to bind with the tenets of negative thinking from Marcuse to initiate a dialectical rupture in the sonic frameworks of contemporary neoliberalism. When bringing such dynamics into focus, however, we must not only be cognizant of the concept of noise itself, but perhaps more crucially, of the listening and interpretative practices through which our engagement is shaped. Relatedly, it is important here to differentiate a contrast between a conceptual paradigm of noise and sonic acts of sheer volume amplitude. It is not uncommon for discourses to use these two phenomena interchangeably, and Marcuse has critiqued such acts, perhaps most notably when he cited a comment from vocalist Grace Slick, who once proclaimed an eternal goal in life to simply “get louder.”19 In his influential work Noise/Music: A History, Paul Hegarty has similarly pointed out the importance of recognizing the complexity of noise here when he states “Although it can be loud, it is much more about what is deemed to disturb…”20 As noted throughout this discussion, the concept of noise has been a controversial phenomenon, and at times, also one derided on by scholars. Perhaps the most notable example being from soundscape pioneer R. Murray Shafer, whose 1977 treatise, The Tuning of the World remains an influential work for many in the sound studies field. While Schafer has undoubtedly brought forth notable valuable ecological concerns through such discourse, recent scholars to revisit his work have also noted that his desire to return to a more tranquil state of silence is not only relational to information theory’s virtues of stasis, clarity, and fidelity, but also problematically very much indebted to strains of liberalism and a conservative politics of sound that values a singular quietude over a perceived cacophony of the many.21

19 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 115. 20 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2007). 21 Marie Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism

(New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017), 101.

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Seeking alternatives for a more holistic approach to the phenomena of noise, musicologist Marie Thompson has recently illuminated a potential pathway to re-examine notions of noise by engaging such phenomena through engagement with a Deleuzian-Spinoza notion of affect and the relational philosophy of Michel Serres. Rather than focusing on what noise is, Thompson reorients listeners to interrogate what noise actually does. Noting that “noise is often felt as well as heard, and known through feeling,”22 she evokes a turn toward the non-representational, which can also be non and/or extra-anthropocentric in nature. Through such an affective approach, Thompson argues for “a relational approach [that] prioritizes open endedness, fluidity, transformation and plurality,”23 situating bodies as neither autonomous or fixed formally. They are instead articulated via means of engagement with other bodies; constantly exchanging traces throughout the process.24 Such a discourse is significant to this discussion as it draws no such division between organic and inorganic entities; essentially portraying a matrix of an infinite, all-encompassing, and ever-changing field of bodies, relations, and interactions implicated in and encompassing all entities. Thus, for Thompson these include the natural and the cultural, the organic and the artificial, the human and the machine. She best summarizes such a positioning by stating that a clay statue belongs to the realm of Nature as much as a cactus, the city as much as the forest, the loudspeaker as much as the voice.25

Toward Marcusean-Informed Sonic Pathways of Queer Agency Noting the political potential of the arts, Marcuse situated a realization of possibility grounded upon locating aesthetic forms to communicate the possibilities of a liberating transformation of the technical and natural environment. Very much in step with current modes of LGBT2S resistance, Marcuse argued for the need of a communication of the radically nonconformist with a corresponding language to break oppressive rule. 22 Thompson, Beyond Unwanted Sound, 11. 23 Thompson, 45. 24 Thompson, 46. 25 Thompson, 115.

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The conceptions of noise discussed here are particularly relevant as Marcuse noted that for such a related language to be political, it would emerge not from invention, but rather through subversion.26 Thus, for Marcuse, desublimation would entail a return to an “immediate” art, engaging not only intellect and a refined, “distilled,” restricted sensibility, but also, and primarily, a “natural” sense experience freed from the requirements of an obsolescent exploitative society.27 Such a means would express the experience of the body (and the “soul”), not as vehicles of labor power and resignation, but as vehicles of liberation.28 If we utilize such subversion and apply an ethico-affective approach of noise alongside the work of Marcuse, we begin to engage with such a notion in a holistic sense, and ultimately begin to see certain parallels of emergent possibility, particularly when Marcuse stated that nature is both a part and an object of history, and as such, a “liberation of nature” cannot mean returning to a pre-technological stage: Nature is a part of history, an object of history; therefore, “liberation of nature" cannot mean returning to a pretechnological stage, but advancing to the use of the achievements of technological civilization for freeing man and nature from the destructive abuse of science and technology in the service of exploitation. Then, certain lost qualities of artisan work may well reappear on the new technological base.29

If we move beyond a commonly engrained sonic nostalgia in much of modern culture that embodies a longing for constructions of past era of silence, we can embrace such a holistic discourse on noise through a Marcusean lens. It is through such a re-interpretation that possibilities emerge which could re-reinvigorate his call for a new technological base to revive certain lost qualities of artisan work. Further, through such a proposition, we can begin to engage with and possibly even enhance Marcuse’s notion of “radical sensibility” to engage the active, constitutive role of the senses in shaping reason.30 As earlier noted, such senses are

26 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 80. 27 Marcuse, 82. 28 Marcuse, 82. 29 Marcuse, 60. 30 Marcuse, 63.

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not merely passive for Marcuse, but receptive: they have their own “syntheses” to which they subject the primary data of experience, allowing a world to emerge as a totality of sensuous qualities-object not only of the eye but of all human senses. It is through this engagement with primary experience itself for Marcuse which must change radically if social change is to be indeed radical, qualitative change capable of leading to an “emancipation of the senses” to generate new (socialist) relationships between man and man, man and things, and man and nature.31 For Marcuse, it is through such a transformation of nature into an environment (medium) for the human being as “species being” that there would be a freedom to develop the specifically human faculties: the creative, aesthetic faculties.32 By employing such Marcusean pathways of sonic practice, we can begin to draw practical parallels with sound theorist Brandon LaBelle who has stated noise is the force of the marginal and the different: a strange sound from a strange body which threatens the social order with a force of desire and festivity, usurping the non-native patterns and tonalities by which society performs.33 Notably, we can draw parallels with LaBelle’s negative aesthetics; a notion which he argues can undo repression and recapture aesthetic needs as a subversive force, capable of counteracting the dominating aggressiveness which has shaped the social and natural universe.34 Through combining these efforts, we can potentially re-engage lost notions of alienation through artistic applications of what LaBelle has described as “unlikely publics,” a cohesive circuitry of dissent and mutuality.35 In particular, LaBelle’s adaptation of the acousmatic can be applied to Marcuse’s notion of the great refusal here. For LaBelle, such acousmatic practice allows one to exercise a function to undo much of the embedded or reactive impulses that mostly support normalizing structures and return us to what we know, while additionally working toward de-familiarizing our perceptions.36 Through such efforts, the overarching theme is most often to articulate the invisible as finally

31 Marcuse, 64. 32 Marcuse, 64. 33 Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (London: Goldsmiths, 2018), 69. 34 LaBelle, Sonic Agency, 56. 35 LaBelle, 15. 36 LaBelle, 35.

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visible, thus illuminating the unseen realities at play. Could such a practice break the prison of which Marcuse spoke? The prison of society reproduced not only in the mind, and consciousness, but also in the senses; one only escapable if the fixed, petrified sensibility of the individuals is "dissolved," and opened to a new dimension of history.37 Through such practice, the possibility emerges to break the oppressive familiarity with the given object world, one broken in a second alienation: that from the alienated society.38 Such potentialities are promising, especially for the LGBTQ2S movement provided they do not succumb to the methods of coaptation mentioned throughout this discussion. Potential Applications With one-dimensionality recurring as a dominant theme across the prevailing musical forms of our era, we are led to question how to actually put such a Marcusean-informed circuitry of sonic agency into practice for trans and queer artists of color. It is perhaps through a closer examination of these communities and their juxtaposition outside of the modern neoliberal state that we can begin to explore putting such theory into practice, particularly as Marcuse stated in One-Dimensional Man: … underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions. Thus their opposition is revolutionary even if their consciousness is not.39

Such commentary may be connected to those artists exercising sonic practice at such margins. One is reminded in this instance of a recent comment from Jordana LeSense, a trans woman of color who regarded her early pioneering work in the drum and bass genre as a “web of interconnected consciousness.”40 While LeSesne experienced both discrimination 37 Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt , 72. 38 Marcuse, 72. 39 Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 260. 40 Riedel, “Gen(d)erations.”

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and physical violence during the height of her performing career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we may bear witness to practices of covert opposition through her sonic formations and coded messages of identity which transcended the surrounding hegemonic institutions of this era. As trans musician and artistic collaborator of collective Ultra-red, Terre Thaemlitz has suggested “… certain subgenres of what has come to be known as Contemporary Ambient music propose a complication of cultural processes by subverting the spectacle of melody and questioning the social functions of active and passive listening techniques.”41 For Thaemlitz, despite an overwhelming domination by male producers against a backdrop of heterosexism and gender biases, discourses begin to emerge which involve the active disclosure, inversion, and convolution of sonic and experiential relationships. And thus, it is through such a phenomenon, that we begin to bear witness to the layered contents and contradictions that extend to the very manner allowing for the generation of multiple political discourses against forums of reception which are largely apolitical and Humanist in tone.42 A notable example of such practice may be exemplified in Thaemlitz’s Couture Cosmetique which utilizes residual noises produced through digital synthesis techniques. Such examples include granular synthesis, pitch/time convolution, and heterodyn filter analysis. For Thaemlitz, such elements bring into focus sounds which currently exist in a repressed state at the periphery of popular contemporary music production. Thaemlitz, states, “The limitations of such audio technologies are used to intimate new functionalities which remain excluded or omitted from popular development—a metaphor which may be applied to the construction and utilization of post-Industrial technologies in general.”43 Within a contemporary context, perhaps some of the most promising collective action comes from participatory groups which explore such issues while also embodying the type of autonomous local bases which Marcuse described. By exploring such localized communal activities of a sonic nature, we may find emergent examples of such phenomena. In one of his final interviews before his death, Marcuse argued that aesthetic

41 Terre Thaemlitz, Nuisance: Writings on Identity Jamming & Digital Audio Production (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2017), 46. 42 Thaemlitz, Nuisance, 47. 43 Thaemlitz, 47.

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liberation is best suited to begin with individuals and small groups.44 It is through these instances that such possibilities may best be realized. One such example which holds particular promise in its methods is the Los Angeles-based collective Ultra-red, which is a group of artists, researchers, and organizers from different social movements that explore contemporary issues such as struggles of migration, anti-racism, participatory community development, and the politics of HIV/AIDS. Sharing similar concerns to Marcuse, Ultra-red argues: … there exists a counter-discourse of improvised listening linked to collective practice. As creative musician George E. Lewis reminds us, that practice invokes the histories of the struggles for freedom. Bending our ear to those histories, what protocols for listening might be composed within an accountability to struggle whether it is the constitutive processes of anti-racism, gender or sexual liberation, anti-capitalist autonomy, or the preferential option for the poor? Those struggles already involve their own practices wherein listening enacts solidarity and dialogue. The protocols for such listening produce not only consensus but also dissonance; the multivalence of subjectivities. Learning to listen is the intentional task of solidarity; listening in tension.45

While Ultra-red manages to cover a number of the tenets thus far, they also do so while embodying acousmatic practices, a process which sound theorist Brandon LaBelle has perhaps best articulated: The acousmatic, from my perspective, situates us within a complex space by which recognition is shaped less through visual identification and face-toface relation, but rather a concentrated appeal to the listening sense. Who am I then within this space of listening, and what is my relation to others? In what way do sonic objects redefine these relationships, and how might they inform our understandings of appearance and subjectivity? Might we consider the acousmatic as the basis for a type of ethics, and even politics, one that may engage a condition I would characterize as being beyond the face? …The acousmatic functions as a generative tool, a condition or operation by which to undo much of the embedded or reactive impulses that mostly support normalizing structures and that return us to what we

44 “Interview with R. Kearney,” in Crane Bag, no. 1(1977): 79. 45 Ultra-red, Five Protocols for Organized Listening (2012), http://www.ultrared.org/

uploads/2012-Five_Protocols.pdf.

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know. Defamiliarizing our perceptions, veiling the relation between signifier and signified, asking us to listen again, acousmatic listening becomes a base from which to build anew relations to the social and political realities that surround particular communities.46

LaBelle draws parallels between acousmatic practices and commentary from the anthropologist David Graeber, who proclaims that “It’s precisely from these invisible spaces – invisible, most of all, to power – when the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments, actually comes.”47 It is through a synthesis of such concepts and practices that small collectives such as Ultra-red begin to reveal the socially reempowered aesthetic action of which Marcuse spoke. Through such autonomous bases of sonic practice we may begin to witness an emergence of small-scale kernels of possibility which have the potential to emerge into larger scales of community-based artist activism. Through such practice, Ultra-red engages a shift in sonic interrogation from individualistic to collective procedures. With a realization of such action, for Ultra-red there is not only a questioning what sound represents, but what it indicates or means; illuminating the collective organizing benefits from a rigorous understanding of how we articulate our attention and how we listen.48 This move beyond the walls of institutions and the structures of popular music commodification has been articulated in various lexicons and consistently challenges our connected vocabularies. Relatedly, Christoph Cox has recently commented that practitioners such as Ultra-red have managed to extend parameters of even those who practice “sound art,” marking out an ontology that embodies the inclusion of noise in juxtaposition to the more commonly denoted fixtures such as ordinary speech, music, and signal.49

46 Brandon LaBelle, Sonic Agency, 35. 47 LaBelle, 43. 48 Ultra-red, Five Protocols for Organized Listening. 49 Christoph Cox, Sonic Flux (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 113.

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Conclusion This discussion has undertaken the task of initiating a conversation between concepts and pathways rooted within the field of sound studies and the work of Herbert Marcuse. While often absent in much of the emergent sonic discourse, this chapter has laid out significant currents of research which could most notably be strengthened with the inclusion of Marcuse’s aesthetic thought. While often differing in approach and/ or context, there are seemingly unifying themes around conceptions of noise. Whether through notions a glitch, an ethico-affective stance, or extended practices of “sound art,” trans and queer artists of color can undoubtedly locate means of agency through the inclusion of Marcuse as an interlocutor alongside both theory and practice. While this chapter has aimed to initiate potential avenues of conversation, such a notion of Marcusean pathways for queer agency through sonic conceptions of noise is undoubtedly in need of further exploration.

CHAPTER 18

The Unfreedom of Moral Perception During Occurrent Experience James William Lincoln

Human freedom is … rooted in the human sensibility. —Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) Even those whom you would think of as defeated are living beings figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and to protect what optimism they have for that, at least. —Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011) The first stratification [of consciousness] is a¯layavijñ¯ana or storeconsciousness, the repository of all v¯as¯anas (traces of past experience). The “seeds” generated by good or bad action, are stored in the “¯alayaconsciousness”. It is the realm of potentiality. —Bina Gupta, “The Buddhist Schools.” An Introduction to Indian Philosophy (2012)

J. W. Lincoln (B) Lasell University, Newton, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_18

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Dominant conceptions surrounding gender, race, class, and other group striations cover our social topography. They define guidelines that direct and discipline the social subject according to the sensibilities of the local, and sometimes global, normative social order. Sara Ahmed, a feminist affect theorist and social philosopher, consistently refines our appreciation of this by showing how social sensibilities, or norms, constitute an expected “way of living, a way of connecting with others over or around something.”1 That is, life’s experiences are consistently shaped by dominant social sensibilities because of their directing and disciplining power. Moreover, as black feminist theorists like Patricia Hill Collin and socialpolitical theorists like Charles W. Mills point out, society’s interlocking social-political systems have the power to mold a subject’s epistemological standpoint.2 Life’s experiences, that is, also have the capacity to transcribe a society’s sensibilities onto the minds and bodies of its members through a socialization process that transforms external evaluative expectations into internal background epistemic structures which mediate thought and knowing. As a result, one’s background epistemological resources, and thereby one’s conscious apprehension of life’s experiences, are subject to the same dominant social sensibilities, even when they occupy cultural and sub-cultural spaces. Yet, what is the nature of the relationship between consciousness, a subject’s life experiences, and their background epistemic resources? What does this relationship have to tell us about one’s moral perceptions of occurrent experience given its capacity to impact our immediate apprehension of the world? Moral perceptions occur whenever one comes to have an immediate discernment about the moral features of an occurrent experience.3 If

1 Sura Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” reprinted in: The Affect Theory Reader, eds. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 43. 2 See Patricia H. Collins, Black Feminist Thoughts: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008); Charles W. Mills “White Ignorance,” Chapter 1 in Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: New York Press, 2007), 11–38. 3 The nature of this belief, whether it is perceptual or non-perceptual, is surely relevant to this question. However, the focus of this current piece is to investigate the source and plasticity of our background epistemic resources. These resources serve as a ground upon which consciousness renders a morally pertinent encounter into an experience with moral features. Moral perceptions, as an immediate discernment of a situation’s moral features, can be considered perceptual or non-perceptual, judgmental, in nature, depending on what moral perceptual theory you endorse. Regardless of one’s preferred moral perceptual

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someone is walking down the street, it is not unreasonable to want that person to come to have the immediate belief that their occurrent experience represents something morally wrong should they encounter, say, someone kicking an infant. Yet, it is often the case that instances of bullying, exploitation, sexual harassment, race or gender discrimination, and other forms of oppression are overlooked features of occurrent experience. That is, when confronted by such events, there are swaths of people that do not come to have a moral perception of a situation’s immorality or, instead, can falsely take an oppressive act to be “right” rather than “wrong.” Notably, cases where one’s moral perceptions are insensitive to the moral status of the other are especially alarming (e.g., during acts of sex trafficking, slavery, testimonial injustice, and so on). Given this, it is important that we understand the extent to which one is free to influence their moral perceptions because such discernments play an indispensable role in navigating moral life. With this in mind, the aim of this piece is to develop an interdisciplinary perspective on the development of the background epistemic resources available to human consciousness in order to investigate the extent to which one is free to influence their moral perceptions. In what follows, I develop a dialectical view of consciousness in order to conceptualize the relationship between life’s experiences and our background epistemic resources. To do this, I synthesize the work of Herbert Marcuse with the phenomenological branch of Feminist Affect Theory using Buddhist moral psychology, specifically work from the Mah¯ay¯anan tradition. From this, I go on to argue that a subject’s moral perceptions of occurrent experience are outside their immediate control because background epistemic resources and structures cultivated through dialectical consciousness curate the contents of such discernments. That is, I argue that we are not free to have moral perceptions in whichever way we wish during occurrent experience because such immediate discernments are not ours to willfully control in the moment. However, I conclude by supporting the claim that we can influence our moral perceptions by cultivating the grounds upon which our dialectical consciousness is rooted.

theory, a view about the formation of our background epistemic resources is needed to inform our understanding of how moral perceptions are mediated by our existing moral beliefs and dispositions. In this way, the framework offered here is intended to apply to any moral perceptual theory.

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Marcuse’s Epistemic Subject: Reason and Drives Marcuse, a critical social philosopher from the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, approaches the subject qua knower, henceforth referred to as the epistemic subject, with the understanding that they seek to make sense of their world, to render it intelligible as a consciousness in that world. In his view, life shapes consciousness and society curates life. That is, he recognizes that society’s expectations and practices shape the epistemic subject’s habits of thought through manipulation of a subject’s drives and ways of thinking by means of curating life’s experiences through social sensibilities. He argues that the rationality, one’s way of thinking and connecting with others, within advanced capitalist industrial society is whittled down by our immersion into the happenings and sensibilities of society. As such, a subject’s critical reflective capacities atrophy and result in a one-dimensional (i.e., uncritical or merely positive) form of thought and knowing. He writes The means of mass transportation and communication, the commodities of lodging, food, and clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers and, through the latter, to the whole. The products [and infrastructure] indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood. … it becomes a way of life. It is a good way of life – much better than before – and as a good way of life, it militates against qualitative change. Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior in which ideas, aspirations, and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to terms of this universe. They are redefined by the rationality of the given system and of its quantitative extension.4

Alternatively put, the subject, as a result of living within an advanced capitalistic civilization, conforms to dominant sensibilities regarding value, morality, and meaning not merely because they adopt those attitudes by means of willful practice. Instead, the ways in which one connects and interfaces with others, social artifacts, and the material world prompts the epistemic subject to internalize society’s “rationality,” its way of thinking 4 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1964), 12.

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and operating. This, in turn, governs expected forms of thought and knowing in the subject. At the same time, the epistemic subject’s capacity to resist this process via critical, negative, thought is undermined because the sense that the “world as it is” is not also the “world as it must be” diminishes. The subject comes to believe that “conformity with local sensibilities” is a rational choice in that conformity is in the subject’s best interest, inasmuch as they are aware, where one’s life is “bettered” by that system, sometimes at the expense of others. The result is that the epistemic subject acquiesces to the value and meaning structures governing the social world as if they were a necessity because the current social order, and its sensibilities, defines “how things are done.” One-dimensional thinking, as a kind of operational thinking, persists because the subject is directed and disciplined, he argues, by a social system which “permeates the general consciousness” resulting in the absorption of negative thinking into positive, one-dimensional, thinking.5 For example, consider our relationship to automobiles. They have a certain amount of utility inasmuch as they are useful tools for traveling. Cars can also support meaningful relationships because they allow for visits with friends, family, and services (i.e., hospitals, grocery stores …) that are located outside reasonable walking distances. As a result, road systems develop over time, cityscapes build parking garages, freeways are constructed between cities, freeways are tolled, street parking is established, traffic officers are hired, parking attendants are dispatched, demand for cars rises, people are hired to increase car production, mechanics learn how to fix them, and the pedestrian is restricted to walk-ways and sidewalks. Cars become an integral part of contemporary life. In many places within the United States, having a car has almost become a precondition for life’s activities. With this example in mind, Marcuse’s observations about society and one-dimensional thinking can be illustrated in the following way. Navigating society and connecting with people through our use of cars amounts to a kind of social administration of our lives because the performance of certain expected car-based actions and ways of thinking are required to have relationships and access services (i.e., waiting in traffic, finding parking, traveling on roads …). A car-rationality, a way of thinking based on cars, emerges and is internalized by the subject when making

5 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 226.

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decisions about their life (i.e., which jobs to apply to, school to attend, friends to hold on to, family to visit, ways to vote …). In turn, the reality of the world, materially and socially, becomes not only more carfriendly but car-advocating. The world systematizes the role of cars into a “need” and we, as subjects in a world of cars, are indoctrinated to accept dominant social sensibilities about cars. Thoughts about robust public transportation systems, pedestrian friendly cities, and so on become valuable only in relationship to their car-supportive claims. Resistance to car-rationality is directed and disciplined so that the subject accepts the car’s place in life. Moreover, it becomes rational for the subject to adopt the dominant social sensibility about cars because the world is organized to help people by car-means. Ultimately, the roadways of the car-world shape the rational pathways of our inner-world wherever one says “I can’t get there because I don’t have a car” when in reality one can’t get there because society resists alternative ways of life that are not dependent on car-use (i.e., one with robust public transportation). As a theoretical ground, Marcuse uses an interpretation of Freud’s psychoanalysis to flush out his view of the epistemic subject and the influential role of social sensibilities. He writes, “Freud’s theory reveals the biological deindividualization beneath the sociological one… The primary instincts pertain to life and death - that is to say, to organic matter as such. And they link organic matter back with inorganic matter and forward within higher mental manifestations.”6 The thought expressed in this passage, and throughout Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, is that the sociological forces of civilization shape the primary life and death drives into expressions which direct our general disposition to the world. Such dispositions are shaped to align with some ideological guidelines of the good life, with some set of social sensibilities. Put alternatively, social scripts, both explicit and implied, communicate expectations and provide the framework by which society disciplines deviation from normalized standards. These standards are internalized by one’s drives and dictate how one is drawn to or repulsed from certain actions, objects, and peoples. Through this, one’s consciousness of the world is affectively articulated and is reason shaping. As an investigation into the social epistemological forces of civilization, Marcuse’s work on the epistemic subject’s drives seeks to unpack 6 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 107.

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the relationship between social sensibilities (i.e., the rationality of the social system) and individual sense-abilities. Marcuse’s use of “sensibilities” often references normative expectations which define the standards of appropriate rational and drive-based frameworks for social encounterresponse behaviors. However, he often uses “sensibilities” in a second way. In contrast to sensibilities, “sense-abilities” reference a subject’s rational and drive-based sensitivities which render the moral and nonmoral value landscape comprehensible to the subject. This distinction begins to form in the following passage from Marcuse’s “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of the Instincts:” The organism develops through the activity of two original basic instincts: the life instinct [i.e. Eros] and the death instinct, the destructive instinct. While the former strives for the binding of living substance into ever larger and more permanent units, the death instinct desires regression to [a] condition [like that which existed] before birth, without needs and thus without pain… Thus the psychic dynamic takes the form of a constant struggle of three basic forces: Eros, the death instinct, and the outside world. Corresponding to these three forces are the three basic principles which according to Freud determine the function of the psychic apparatus: the pleasure principle, the Nirvana principle, and the reality principle… the pleasure principle stands for the unlimited unfolding of the life instinct [for joy and happiness], and the Nirvana principle for the regression into the painless condition before birth [i.e. of existence without struggle or suffering], and the reality principle signifies the totality of the modifications of those instincts compelled by the outside world.7

Marcuse’s observation of the reality principle in this excerpt highlights his commitment to the claim that subjects modify their sense-abilities in accordance with normative parameters defined by the outside social world according to its sensibilities. The influence of dominant sensibilities on a subject’s sense-abilities can appear wherever the subject strategically adapts their desires and ways of thinking to navigate the tension that exists between the reality principle, the pleasure principle (i.e., individual desires motivated by the life instinct), and the Nirvana principle (i.e., the pursuit

7 Herbert Marcuse, “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” reprinted in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), 164–65.

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of contentment motivated by the death instinct). Put otherwise, adaptation of one’s sense-abilities to the dominant sensibilities occurs as a result of the directing and disciplining forces within civilization on the subject trying to fit-in for their own sake. Further evidence for the important role of this distinction in his work is found in An Essay on Liberation. Here, Marcuse points out that what we take to be obscene or beautiful is most often curated by the social order’s dominant sensibilities.8 He argues that obscenity is used as “a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.”9 That is, a subject’s repulsion from the obscene and attraction toward the beautiful follow normalized standards for obscenity and beauty prescribed by society’s dominant sensibilities. By synthesizing Marxian, Hegelian, and Freudian philosophy, Marcuse carries Freudian drive theory toward the realization that life’s experiences cultivate individual consciousness and its apprehension of occurrent experience by shaping a subject’s sense-abilities. In doing so, civilization utilizes socialization as a curating device regulating one’s life experiences to direct and discipline individuals in accordance with social sensibilities of value and meaning, both about morality and utility. In summary, Marcuse holds the following beliefs about the epistemic subject. First, life’s experiences shape a subject’s sense-abilities by curating their background epistemic resources (i.e., their drives and ways of thinking). Second, socialization directs and disciplines the subject’s sense-abilities toward the dominant sensibilities by curating life’s experiences. Lastly, while not directly discussed in this paper, Marcuse’s focus on society’s potential for liberation in the totality of his work10 defines a third belief: that this process can be resisted.11 That is, Marcuse’s call

8 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1969), 8. 9 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 8. 10 This is especially the case in One-Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation but is also true in later works and lectures such as “Repressive Tolerance” and “Nature and Revolution.” 11 See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 216. One such place that this is apparent is in the following passage: “The possibility of an entirely different societal organization of life has nothing in common with the “possibility” of a man with a green hat appearing in all doorways tomorrow, but treating them with the same logic may serve the defamation of undesirable possibilities… What appears unlovely and disorderly from the logical point

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to resist the dominating forces of society by means of the cultivation of a new sensibility and the participation in a “Great Refusal” to operate in an oppressive system signal his commitment to the idea that individual sense-abilities can be liberated. As a result, three observations follow from Marcuse’s view of the epistemic subject. First, our drives and ways of thinking are semi-plastic but intransigent because civilization/society represses, sublimates, or desublimates our sense-abilities while maintaining an underlying set of affective and thought potentialities (i.e., Eros [the life drive], Thanatos [the death drive] which aims for Nirvana, and the practice of reasoning persists). Second, human instincts and ways of thinking are compulsory inasmuch as having certain dispositions, or sense-abilities, to undergo expressions of Eros or Thanatos manifest as an intensification of an immediate belief attitude or affective force outside the momentary willful control of the subject. This force pulls the subject in a particular direction, toward a particular object, or toward a certain belief rather than necessitating that certain actions be taken. Third, that the subject strategically adapts their drives and ways of thinking to the established culture/society and in doing so internalizes its sensibilities thereby shaping the subject’s sense-abilities in an accidental way. Given this, Marcuse’s view of the epistemic subject contains more than merely a commitment to a rational consciousness, a form of being plagued by pervasive one-dimensional thinking in contemporary society. Rather, it hints at a form of affective consciousness, of being attuned to the world through one’s embodied drives for life and death, which, unfortunately, is left underdeveloped in his work on a “new sensibility” in The Essay on Liberation and subsequent lectures due to his passing in 1979. Yet, Marcuse begins to develop a deeper sense of consciousness through his realization that life “is experienced as a struggle with one’s self and the environment” inasmuch as one seeks to regulate one’s affective and rational engagement with the world in an adaptive way so as to affirm the life instincts or death instincts with the ultimate goal of living.12 He is committed to the idea that human drives and ways of thinking are semi-plastic, compulsory rather than purely volitional, and are accidental

of view, may well comprise the lovely elements of a different order, and may thus be an essential part of the material from which philosophical concepts are built.” 12 Marcuse, “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts.”

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byproducts of a historical process that never allows the subject to perfectly fit with the environment, social or otherwise. Marcuse’s epistemic subject is defined by “man’s primary impulses and senses as foundations of his rationality and experience” and the manipulation of these foundations shapes our very encounters with the world.13 Given this, I am inclined to suggest that this view of the epistemic subject intersects with Feminist Affect Theory in many important ways and, because of this, I argue for their compatibility in the next section.

Feminist Affect Theory and Marcuse’s Epistemic Subject Put briefly, Feminist Affect Theory14 takes affects to be an integral part of the body’s engagement with the world and it articulates embodiment as “webbed in its relations” to the world.15 Affects are displayed in “a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected.”16 Donovan O. Schaefer, a professor of material religion and visual culture, describes affect theory in Religious Affects as a field which “thematizes the way that the world prompts us to move before the interventions of language. It calls attention to embodied histories that precede the advent of language – as well as moments when language is bound with other thick, embodied forces.”17 By this description, Marcuse shares a project in common with affect theory because each aims to critique power within civilization by supplementing the linguistic, or rational, perspective on human consciousness rather than erase it in favor of embodied forms of knowing. Both theoretical traditions recognize that affects, or drives in Marcuse’s case, within the embodied subject are of paramount importance for understanding the epistemic subject

13 Herbert Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” reprinted in: The Essential Marcuse: Selected writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, eds. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston, MA. Beacon Press, 2007). 14 I write here primarily from the perspective of the phenomenological branch of Feminist Affect Theories. 15 Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC. Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 16 Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 2. 17 Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015),

9.

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beyond its reduction to a form of rational consciousness.18 Moreover, where Marcuse lacks a fully developed view of affective subjectivity but provides a robust view of rational subjectivity, Affect theory provides a robust view of affective subjectivity while not treading deeply into rational subjectivity because it is not the central object of study for that field. As a result, if these views are compatible, we are presented with an opportunity to put these traditions into conversation in order to develop a robust conception of consciousness with the potential to fix what is often referred to as “Descartes’s error”19 by reunifying our conceptions of the rational and embodied subject. In this section, I argue for this compatibility by outlining the developmental and conceptual parallels between these two traditions. First, Schaefer describes affects as essentially semi-plastic but intransigent, compulsory, and adaptively accidental. He highlights affect theory’s fusion of Freudian drives with Darwinian evolutionary biology by describing the subject’s embodied affects as a set of sculpted dispositions which are configured into structures in accordance with one’s embodied experiences and cultural history (i.e., the intransigence claim).20 Additionally, these affective structures are susceptible to reconfiguration with some sense of general consistency (i.e., the semi-plastic claim).21 That said, it is worth recalling that Marcuse implicitly takes the same to be true of our drives which comprise, what he calls, our second nature. Additionally, Schaefer’s discussion of affects as compulsory and adaptively accidental continues to echo Marcuse’s use of Freudian drive theory. Affects are felt intensities aimed at the world and its objects. We often think of animal affective responses as mechanistic in kind. However, this is a misrepresentation of affect theory. Rather, the idea is that an embodied accumulation of affected experiences and evolutions over time configures the subject to respond affectively or rationally in particular ways to certain environmental stimuli. It’s about embodied compulsory affective responses, not compulsively necessary choice or action. 18 Schaefer, Religious Affects, 21. 19 This is a phrase coined by Antonio Damasio (1994) in Descartes Error. It is used to

reference Descartes’ mind–body distinction which, historically, has caused western philosophy to treat rationality and embodiment as separate, non-overlapping, aspects of human development and consciousness. 20 Schaefer, 29. 21 Schaefer, 29.

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For example, there is an episode of the U.S. version of The Office where Jim, the office prankster, plays a chime on his computer while offering his coworker, Dwight, a mint. After months of creating an affective environment which linked a chime with the taste of mint, Jim plays the chime and does not offer a mint. The result: Dwight is confused as to why his mouth tastes bad. The explanation: “Affectivity is not optional, but compulsory” and this compulsion is a result of having adapted one’s affective dispositions or instincts to the environmental stimuli in an automatic way facilitated by the subject living in that space.22 Schaefer writes, “Affect theory offers an alternative model [to the merely rational framework of consciousness], in which affects have their own capacity to articulate bodies to systems of power.”23 Again, it is worth noting that this model echoes Marcuse’s description of our sense-abilities toward obscenities as compulsory responses to certain social stimuli which, in turn, influence our thoughts and knowings. The study of affect also gives us the tools to think about bodies in terms of “affective economies - economies driven by a complex matrix of compulsions that do not necessarily follow predictable watercourses”24 ; the dynamic accumulation of affects is a strategic response to myriad environmental conditions and it is not reasonable to expect the embodied bundle of responses to be without contradiction. There is an accidental nature to affects during the configuration of the body whereby one cannot expect a perfect affective-fit between the environment and the subject. This mirrors Marcuse’s commitment to the reality principle inasmuch as our instincts are being strategically adapted to the world in a way that permits internal contradictions. Notably, Marcuse’s belief that contradictions in lived experience will reveal unfreedoms is also relevant to Schaefer’s point because both suggest that the subject will never be completely ordered without countervailing affective, and as Marcuse points out, rational structures. Thus, both theories predict the development of internal contradictions while pointing out that oppressive systems will also attempt to manage and defuse those contradictions. Additionally, as Ahmed describes them, affects are sticky. “Affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas,

22 Schaefer, 14. 23 Schaefer, 92. 24 Schaefer, 149–50.

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values, and objects.”25 For example, happiness, as a form of approval and a mode of affective response, possesses an intentional relation to the world, according to Ahmed. Affects are taken to be intentional to an object or person inasmuch as that affect-producing target points to a future possibility (i.e., to be happy or unhappy) and they are taken to be evaluative inasmuch as the promise of the “future possibility” articulates a value judgment of good or bad respective to the promise for happiness or unhappiness.26 She writes: The object becomes a feeling-cause. Once an object is a feeling-cause, it can cause feeling, so that when we feel the feeling we expect to feel we are affirmed… for a life to count as a good life, it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course.27

I take this to mean that affects take on a directedness toward an object and that the object is encountered as good or bad with respect to the object’s status as a feeling-cause. These are objects which carry a bundle of affective and relational promises. If we recall Marcuse’s discussion of obscenity and beauty as attaching to objects, actions, or peoples in the world, then we notice that he too takes drives to possess directedness. In Marcusean terms, this directedness communicates an evaluative component to a subject’s sense-abilities which reveal the evaluative dimensions of the thing, moral or otherwise. Lastly, it is also worth noting that a common Freudian ground is shared by Marcuse and the phenomenological division of Affect Theory which guides these theoretical views in a way that permits compatibility. This shared basis reveals the theoretical closeness of Marcusean drives and Feminist Affects. Each holds that drive or affect structures emerge over time, as Schaefer might put it, “as the preferred method for bodies to navigate the ambiguity of information-rich environments. They prioritize effective strategies intensifying motivational forces.”28 It

25 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 29. 26 Ahmed, 29. 27 Ahmed, 40. 28 Schaefer, Religious Affects, 46.

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is true that Marcuse’s construction of the epistemic subject takes theoretical cues from Hegelian and Marxian theory whereas Affect Theory takes cues from Darwinian Evolutionary Theory. However, Both Marcuse and Affect theory hold that response mechanisms will change over time to align sense-abilities/affective sensitivities with best-fit strategies for experiencing the environment according to some functional or social standard. As a result, this difference fails to support the idea that these views are incompatible in light of the aforementioned parallels between affects and drives (i.e., their semi-plastic but intransigent, compulsory, directive, and adaptively accidental nature). If anything, it suggests that each tradition developed functionally compatible views independently and in their own traditions because the systems offer different ways of talking about the same process for affect-structure development, one grounded in the philosophy of evolutionary biology and the other in Hegelian and Marxist philosophy. Thereby, I take this difference between these views to be a non-criticism to their compatible nature given the functional and theoretical symmetry between Feminist Affect Theory and Marcuse’s epistemic subject. In summary, Marcuse’s view of the epistemic subject and Affect theory are compatible traditions because each is grounded in the idea that a subject’s drives or affects are semi-plastic but intransigent (i.e., flexibly variable within some range of defined possibility), compulsory (i.e., beyond one’s immediate willful control),29 adaptively accidental (i.e., imperfectly attuning to fit the environment), and possess a sense of directedness (i.e., intentionally directed toward meaningful content). Moreover, this compatibility is grounded in a shared Freudian influence

29 It is worth noting that “compulsory” could be thought of as having at least two senses. In the first sense, it might be suggested that someone is coerced to feel X-ly when saying that “X is compulsory.” This implicates that one’s drives or affects can be made to manifest in this or that way at any given moment by coercive means. In the second sense, it might be suggested that someone feels X-ly in a habitual sense when saying that “X is compulsory.” This implicates that one’s drives/affects are automatic responses outside anyone’s immediate willful control. “Compulsory,” as it is used here, is used in this second sense. This does not mean that we are immune to affective manipulations by others, but rather that the way in which we can be manipulated to feel X-ly at any given moment is dictated by a set of compulsory configurations within the epistemic subject which regulate their affective responses to the world. It is these responses, or configurations, which are (in the sense used here) compulsory, outside the immediate control of the subject and their community.

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which was transformed by different theoretical traditions which nevertheless produced functionally similar views with analogous consequences. As a result, each tradition’s view of the epistemic subject is positioned to complement and be complemented by the other thereby providing a holistic picture of human consciousness, and thereby the epistemic subject, in its rational and affective dimensions.

Synthesizing Marcuse and Affect Theory Using Buddhist Philosophy Compatibility, while useful for justifying our putting Marcuse’s epistemic subject and Affect Theory in conversation, is merely one step toward articulating a view which describes the extent to which life’s experiences and socialization shapes the epistemic subject and their moral perceptions. It is worth pointing out that one aspect of this compatibility is grounded in the compulsory nature of one’s conscious apprehension of the world. This, itself, hints at the unfree nature of moral perception during occurrent experience. Yet, there is still a need to synthesize these approaches into a useful framework that provides a robust sense of the epistemic subject that is sensitive to its rational and affective dimensions. For this, I turn to the Mah¯ay¯anan school of Buddhism, which will henceforth be referenced using “Buddhist philosophy.” I make this turn because Buddhist philosophy provides a model for understanding the mechanisms by which social sensibilities become inscribed onto individuals in a way that emphasizes the causal role of life’s experiences on the affective and rational aggregates of the human subject. Buddhist philosophy develops a view of the epistemic subject which is sensitive to both Marcuse’s concern for the rational subject and Affect Theory’s concern for the embodied subject because the Buddhist philosophical tradition explored here takes the human creature as an aggregate comprised of material (i.e., the body)

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and mental (i.e., the mind) components.30 In this way, Buddhist philosophy carries the potential to guide our understanding of the epistemic subject toward this robust sense. There are at least two concepts in Buddhist philosophy relevant to the project at hand: store consciousness and psychological seeds.31 Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching introduces the reader to these concepts in the following way: In each of us, there are wholesome and unwholesome roots -- or seeds -in the depths of our consciousness… if the seed of betrayal is watered, you may betray even those you love… The source of our perception, our way of seeing, lies in our store consciousness… [what we see] depends on our mind -- our sadness, our memories, our anger. Our perceptions carry with them all the errors of subjectivity.32

As demonstrated in this passage, Buddhist philosophy is sensitive to the idea that one’s conscious encounter with or view of the world will be directed by one’s subjective store consciousness.33 Bina Gupta, a comparative philosopher, expands on the relationship between consciousness and store consciousness in the following way:

30 Walpola R¯ ahula Thero, What the Buddha Taught (Bedford, Gordon: Fraser Gallery, 1967), 20–23. For the sake of bridging the linguistic gap between Marcuse/Affect theory and Buddhist philosophy, I use “material” and “mental” to categorize the Buddhism’s conception of “being,” the five aggregates. “Materiality” references the body and includes the aggregate of matter (Mpakkhandha). “Mental” aggregates which include sensations (Vedanakkhandhd), perceptions (Sannakkhandha), mental formations (Samkharakkhandha), and consciousness (Vinnattakkhandha). 31 These are especially developed in Mahayana schools. Store consciousness is also

typically associated with Yogacara Buddhism. 32 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation (New York, NY: Random House Books Inc., 2015), 53–55. 33 This echoes insights made by Sara Ahmed in Queer Phenomenology and in Living a Feminist Life where she describes Consciousness as a sensuous as well as thought dependent phenomenon.

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The three transformations [of consciousness] are: sensory representation, self-awareness, and the store-house (i.e., store) consciousness where experiences at the two levels deposit their traces as seeds which need to be actualized under appropriate conditions.34

That is, store consciousness contains epistemic impressions from life’s experiences which serve as the ground for a subject’s affective configurations, beliefs, and habits of reason. Store consciousness serves as the source of our background epistemic resources and we use it to turn our encounters with the world into meaningful experiences. Put metaphorically, life’s experiences plant seeds in store consciousness. These seeds are adaptively cultivated or repressed/neglected through our everyday experiences and choices under salient lived conditions. Living a life of anger or hate fosters aggressive encounters with the world and shapes your perceptions of it. Encountering systematic forms of oppression through violence can reveal empty parking lots at night as dangerous. A life where fear is a pervasive phenomenon, rather than a momentary occasion, will nurture dispositions for distrust, anger, and hate that shape one’s engagement with the world. Choosing to continue to engage in destructive behavior, even after one comes to understand it as destructive, continues to reinforce one’s own propensity for destruction over creation. Notably, distrust, anger, and outrage are often warranted by those facing dehumanization and brutalization in oppressive social systems. Examples of this phenomenon are abundant. To further illustrate the importance of seeds, or experiential potentialities, it should be noted that Buddhists hold that right view (i.e., holding the Buddhist moral and metaphysical outlook on life) is a fundamental step in the Eightfold Noble Path, as founded on the Four Noble Truths. The Four Noble Truths are, briefly put, (1) human existence is characterized by dukkha (i.e., suffering), (2) the immediate cause of dukkha and excess dukkha exists because of our ignorance toward the nature of things as fundamentally impermanent (i.e., suffering prompted by attachments fueled by selfish needs or desires), (3) dukkha can be overcome, or cease, through abating the cause of dukkha, and (4) the pathway to overcoming dukkha is articulated by the Eightfold Noble Path. As part of this path, Right View points to the philosophical weight of the first 34 Bina Gupta, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on Reality, Knowledge, and Freedom (Routledge, 2011), 220.

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three Noble Truths and the need to adopt a view of life which recognizes a fundamental interdependence and interconnectedness of persons, the prevalence of surplus suffering or dukkha, and the truth of the nonself. If this view does not curate one’s background epistemic resources, the Buddha’s path can neither be walked nor seen. Buddhists philosophy articulates the need for the epistemic subject to, and their ability to, cultivate a store consciousness that helps the agent experience value in the world in a way that reveals an object, person, or relation as helpful or as a hindrance to a life without excess suffering (dukkha). This idea will be returned to in the conclusion of this piece. Moreover, right view emphasizes a Buddhist’s philosophical commitment to the existence of some set, or set of sets, of psychological seeds which should be cultivated under a Buddhist ethics and with contextual reference. In fact, it is the promotion of the sublime states that point to this kind of advice. The sublime states include loving-kindness or generosity of care for others, compassion or empathy, sympathetic joy for others without envy, and peacefulness. Each is seen as essential for epistemically navigating life’s fortunes and misfortunes. These, it is argued, would be housed within a store consciousness capable of bringing the epistemic subject closer to seeing the world in a way that allows them to identify dukkha and pathways to minimize it. Yet, we need not adopt a Buddhist Ethics to use Buddhist philosophy to understand how store consciousness functions in subjectivity. Instead, to explain store consciousness and its relationship to subjective experience, we can turn to the teachings of Ven. Dr. Walpola R¯ahula.35 The aggregate of consciousness (vijnanaskandha) contains three distinct aspects: (1) citta (store consciousness), (2) manas (self-consciousness), (3) vijnana (perceptual consciousness).36 R¯ahula writes: Thus we can see that vijnana represents the simple reaction or response of the sense-organs when they come in contact with external objects. This is the uppermost or superficial aspect or layer of the vijnanaskandha. Manas represents the aspect of its mental functioning, thinking, reasoning, conceiving ideas, etc. Citta, which is here called alayavijnana, represents the deepest, finest and subtlest aspect or layer of the Aggregate of

35 It should be pointed out that Dr. R¯ ahula was the first monastic buddhist to hold a professorship in the western world. 36 R¯ ahula, What the Buddha Taught, 23.

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Consciousness. It contains all the traces or impressions of the past actions and all good and bad future potentialities.37

Under this model, as articulated by the Yog¯ac¯ara school of Mah¯ay¯ana Buddhism, there are three main aspects of human consciousness. Perceptual Consciousness (vijnana) as articulated by sensory interaction with the world and our embodied activity. Self-Consciousness (manas ) amounts to our self-awareness and mental activity. But Store Consciousness (citta or alayavijnana) amounts to the underlying elements, concepts, ideas, and dispositions which dialectically articulate experience and are shaped by experience through vijnana and manas. Buddhist philosophers following this tradition point to the idea that alayavijnana stands as a unifying principle of consciousness by which conscious events, like seeing a bird or thinking caring thoughts about a friend, are possible and compulsory. As Jay Garfield, a comparative philosopher, puts it, store consciousness “is the pre-reflective ground of experience… it is not introspectable and is not the seat of the subjectivity of any particular conscious episode, but rather stands as a transcendental condition on any awareness being conscious at all.”38 If consciousness unifies awareness of one’s experiences into an experience, then such an event is compulsorily shaped by store consciousness at its very core in the Buddhist sense described here. Awareness may precede consciousness, but experience’s inscribing of store consciousness will, for the Buddhist, fundamentally shape our encounters with the world by organizing current and future conscious experiences in a compulsory way. Such is also the case, as we have seen, in both Marcuse’s view of the epistemic subject and in Affect Theory’s discussion of the affectively embodied subject. Within this framework, it is vital to note that one’s store consciousness changes over time. It is just as impermanent as everything else in Buddhist metaphysics and fits as part of the five aggregates of our being: (1) form 37 “Alayavijnana—Store Consciousness,” Buddhist Council of NSW. Retrieved from: https://www.budsas.org/ebud/ebdha195.htm. 38 Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (Oxford University

Press, 2015), 130. It is important to note here, as Garfield does, that this is not some attempt by Buddhist philosophers to “sneak” a self back into the Buddha’s teachings. Rather, this is not a self in the sense that Buddhists reject, an Atman or soul-like permanent thing, but rather it is an ever changing and impermanent part of the aggregate of our being.

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or embodiment, (2) sensation or affectedness, (3) perceptual awareness of external and internal happenings, (4) possessing mental states, and (5) consciousness. Under a theory of seeds, alayavijnana becomes the garden by which lived experience plants dispositional and cognitive seeds that grow to shape our encounter with the world. These seeds, or beliefs and affective dispositions within one’s background epistemic resources, are further cultivated during our encounter with the world. Alayavijnana collects one’s affective and rational experiences (i.e., those mental states that become seeds), and uses these to compulsorily unify experience into a meaningful manifold, and constantly revises that manifold’s content according to whichever seeds are nurtured or neglected. The Sautr¯antika theory of seeds (b¯ıja) underlying consciousness can inform our understanding of the theory of store consciousness by articulating the process by which lived experience influences consciousness thereby shaping our encounter with future experiences in a compulsory way.39 As Christian Coseru, a philosopher of mind and cross-cultural philosophy, writes: A ‘seed’ in this case stands for two sets of phenomena: (1) latent dispositions underlying the karmic process; and (2) the capacity or power of certain causal chains to bring about a given result… The theory of seeds in the mental stream thus provides a mode of talking about causality that does not exclude the notions of latency and disposition.40

In this passage, Coseru points to the idea that the subject engages and encounters the world, but more so to the idea that that world has a causal influence on the subject by shaping involuntary compulsions rather than whole-hog freedom-denying psychological mechanisms. Given this, he acknowledges the need for a language that avoids a fatalistic picture of human choice. Utilizing psychological seeds to identify causally created epistemological structures in store consciousness provides a picture of the non-determined epistemic subject that avoids radical atomism and gives us a language to discuss life’s influence on a subject’s perceptions of occurrent experience. The way the subject chooses to engage the world and 39 Christian Corseru, “Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2017 edn., ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2017/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/, 40. 40 Corseru, “Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy,” 38–39.

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the way that life’s happenings influence the subject’s encounter with the world provide a dialectically causal story regarding how the subject affectively and rationally comprehends their lived reality and, thereby, comes to have the compulsory moral perception that they do. Coseru continues: Following this process of maturation and dependence upon the repository consciousness there evolves a reflexive awareness whose object is none other than this subliminal or repository consciousness itself. This theory of cognitive emergence presumably provides a better account of the role that the residual forces of past cognitions play in ‘seeding’ the repository consciousness. It is the dynamics of these residual forces which ultimately generates the intentional forms of cognitive awareness that support all other forms of cognitive activity.41

From this, we gather that the seeds planted by life’s experiences are gained throughout our development, from infancy to our present existence, and guide store consciousness’s articulation of our “cognitive awareness” of the world. That is, the seeds of our experience influence and inform our moral perceptions of the world and drive their compulsory nature. As a result, civilization’s socialization of the subject can plant a lot of instinctual/affective or rational seeds regarding expectations of value and normalcy thereby shaping our experience of the world. I believe a Marcusean Affect theory can be developed using this Buddhist approach to causality in store consciousness for three reasons. First, there is a catalog of affective capacities currently possessed by the human being as a result of evolutionary psychology and observed by Freudian instinct theory (the life instinct/love/attraction and death instinct/hate/aversion as base affects) which are directed and shaped in accordance with the local environment. In Buddhist terms, the first seeds of store consciousness possess the potentiality for hate/death instincts or love/life instincts and are cultivated by life’s experiences. In this way, Buddhist philosophy articulates a mechanism and language with which to be precise about the process wherein sensibilities cultivate one’s background epistemic resources or sense-abilities. Second, dynamic embodied affects or drives can be cultivated or planted in store consciousness as the life instincts and death instincts

41 Coseru, 44.

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are cultivated by life’s experiences in the local environment. The pleasure and reality principles describe how we come to have more complex affective abilities such as outrage, anger, lust, altruism, and so on. These would seemingly emerge or be repressed in accordance with socialization practices, life choices, moments of trauma or joy, and in those moments where one makes paradigm shifting decisions. Over time, and through natural maturation, a Buddhist theory of mind predicts that these affects will grow effectively motivating and that modes of rational thinking will emerge because of the dispositions and beliefs in one’s store consciousness. Lastly, store consciousness serves as the epistemic ground for one’s experience and judgment of the world’s value landscape (i.e., it informs moral perceptions during occurrent experience). This will carry the errors of subjectivity inasmuch as one’s affective dispositions, propositional beliefs, and ways of reasoning will influence one’s engagement with the world. According to this Buddhist infused Marcusean Affect Theory, the epistemic subject is a triadic being whose lived experience is articulated by its store consciousness, its interaction with the world, and the constant reshaping of store consciousness’s epistemic resources (i.e., its affective dispositions, beliefs, and modes of rationality) by experience. Thereby, this view results in a kind of Dialectical Consciousness (DC) which is best articulated by the following four observations: 1. the epistemic subject affectively (i.e., via one’s sense-abilities) interacts with and is shaped by life’s experiences, 2. the epistemic subject’s rational habits judge and are shaped by life’s experiences, 3. A subject’s moral perceptions of the world aim to make sense of perceived value using a store consciousness comprised of these affective and rational aspects. The human being simultaneously undergoes biological and culturally influenced processes which shape its understanding of those experiences42 and moral perceptions, 4. At any given moment, one comes to have experiences that are constructed by store consciousness thereby mediating a subject’s moral perceptions in a compulsory, not willful, way, of the world that, at first glance, reinforce existing structures within store

42 Schaefer, Religious Affects, 49.

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consciousness. Unless the subject becomes aware of some propositional/affective contradiction or undergoes some kind of existential transformation, they will not be pushed to challenge the very foundation of their store consciousness because their moral perceptions reinforce their justification to see the world as that have seen the world. Additionally, if they do not embrace a healthy skepticism about how to resolve contradictions or existential challenges, the subject will perceive value in the world as they have perceived value in the world. They may also dismiss inconsistent experiences as unimportant rather than as a signal calling for further investigation of the social world or one’s store consciousness as a foundation for their moral perceptions. With DC in view, there are several reasons why I believe we should accept it as an adequate picture of the epistemic subject describing our compulsory moral perceptions. First, it accurately predicts that certain affective dispositions and thought patterns will emerge as a feature of socialization during child development or during adulthood. It suggests that when socialization disciplines or controls a child’s engagement with the world then certain affective dispositions and ways of thinking will follow from the seeds those experiences plant when they are nurtured. For example, if we only provide boys with toys that are physically engaging at very young ages, then boyhood preferences for physical activity would predictably become part of (or an enhanced part of) a bundle of affective responses to and reasoning about the world. It thereby would seem natural when young boys do not identify with activities like reading but gravitate toward sports because of an aversion (as an expression of Thanatos) to the former and an attraction (as an expression of Eros) to the latter. These dispositions, as a result, lead to moral perceptions of sports as a “moral good” inasmuch as they are seen as a conception of how to live well, as a proper way of life for boys wherein they can “function” according to the local sensibilities of a good life. In fact, Martin’s 1998 study of preschool classrooms makes just this kind of observation. Within the study, she interrogates hidden curriculums and claims that they (partially) curate embodied differences between the genders while making

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any correlation between preferences and physical differences appear and feel natural.43 Hidden curriculums, as a form of socialization, are unseen or implicit practices that classrooms maintain which simultaneously serve as forms of socially controlling subjects. These include practices which socialize students into privileging certain modes of expression and these curriculums demand that students practice, she concludes, “bodily control in congruence with the goals of the school as an institution.”44 She writes: The effects of dressing-up or bodily adornment, the gendered nature of formal or relaxed behaviors, how the different restrictions on girls’ and boys’ voices limit their physicality, how teachers instruct girls’ and boys’ bodies, and the gendering of physical interactions between children … suggest one way that bodies are gendered and physical differences are constructed is through social institutions and their practices.45

DC also holds that if experiences of a certain kind become normalized adults will develop affective responses and habits in reasoning about the world. For example, former President Nixon’s illegalization of marijuana and his war on drugs consistently presented a vilification narrative of the black body to the U.S. population. After having experiences that associated the black body with crime, a negative affective attunement to black bodies seems to have arguably been reinforced in our public life. As a result, the dominant political discourse seems to rationalize policies which systematically disadvantage marginalized populations because those “super predator” populations needed to be controlled or punished. Many adult epistemic subjects, usually in a position of privilege and power, came to have, or have reinforced, compulsory moral perceptions of the black body as if it were representative of “wrong doing.” Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s “Discipline and Punished: Poor Women, Bodily Inscription, and Resistance Through Education” echoes this observation by describing the systematic depiction of “Welfare Queens” as a process which disciplines our expectations of women on welfare. As

43 Karin A. Martin, “Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices of Preschools,” American Sociological Review, 63, no. 4 (August 1998): 494. 44 Martin, “Becoming a Gendered Body,” 494. 45 Martin, 497, 510.

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a result, political discourse often utilizes a narrative that too often unwarrantedly punishes those who need aid. She writes: The welfare mother -- imagined as young, never married, and black (contrary to statistical evidence)-- is positioned as dangerous and in need of punishment … the poor welfare mother threatens not just her own children but all children. The Welfare Queen is made to signify moral aberration and economic drain; her figure becomes even more impacted once responsibility for the destruction of the “American Way of Life” is attributed to her.46

These are, in effect, observations about our moral perceptions of Welfare Queens as made possible by DC. Taken together, I take Martin’s and Adair’s observations (among others who make similar observations like bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, and Angela Davis) as offering evidence for the fecundity of DC to predict patterns in socialized consciousness as grounded in store consciousness and the resulting moral perceptions that follow. The second reason to accept DC is that it accounts for the vicious loop which characterizes consciousness’s role in the articulation of our moral perceptions of occurrent experience. Sara Ahmed emphasizes this observation in Living a Feminist Life. She writes: …power works as a mode of directionality, a way of orienting bodies in particular ways, so they are facing a certain way, heading toward a future that is given as fact … A crowd is directed. Once a crowd is directed, a crowd becomes directive. We are directed by what is in front of us; what is in front of us depends on the direction we have already taken … [consciousness] is a loop: we are directed by what is in front of us; what is in front of us depends on how we are [and have been] directed.47

In this, Ahmed makes the observation that there is a mutually evolving relationship between embodied subjectivity, lived experiences, socialization, and consciousness’s capacity to organize experience into a lived 46 Vivyan C. Adair, “Disciplined and Punished: Poor Women, Bodily Inscription, and Resistance through Education,” in Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education, ed. Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. Dahlberg (Temple University Press), 39–40. 47 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 43–48.

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reality for the subject (i.e., to curate one’s moral perceptions). Socialization and life’s experiences, she claims, direct our orientation and encounter with the world. As a matter of course, objects in the world come to represent a bundle of promises toward some end or way of being. Focusing on happiness and sadness, Ahmed describes how social norms orientate us to approve of certain happenings and to disapprove of others, to have defined moral perceptions. She writes. Happiness: what we end up doing to avoid the consequence of being sad. Happiness is a way of being directed toward those things that would or should make you happy. Happiness can thus also be a form of pressure. Pressure does not always feel harsh. A pressure can begin with a light touch. A gentle encouragement…48

Given this, part of DC’s value, I claim, is that it captures this account of the epistemic subject and acknowledges that how we come to encounter or judge the world (and to have moral perceptions of it) is a function of how we have encountered or judged that world (and our past moral perceptions of it).

The Unfreedom of Moral Perception During Occurrent Experience DC might be objected to because it could be interpreted as fatalistic, especially if we are trying to determine how it is that we can achieve emancipatory social change. That is, DC emphasizes the compulsory nature of our conscious apprehension of the world and, thereby, the unfree nature of our moral perceptions of occurrent experience. Yet, this strikes me as an unnecessary interpretation of DC. Instead, DC forces us to take seriously the complexities of moral agency and responsibility given that store consciousness directly impacts our moral perceptions of the world’s moral features which, in turn, impacts store consciousness. DC does not predict that one cannot ever modify or reorient oneself to the world, to come to have different moral perceptions that one currently does. In fact, this is a fundamental part of Buddhist philosophy and a virtue of using Buddhism to synthesize Marcuse and Affect Theory. It keeps open the possibility for liberation. Ultimately, DC’s value is a function of its ability 48 Ahmed, 48.

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to provide a model for understanding socialization’s oppressive potential while opening up a future possibility for seeing the world differently, for our liberation from domination, brutalization, and oppression. Our liberation from dukkha. Specifically, it highlights society’s power to limit our capacity to freely shape our moral perception by showing the extent to which life’s experiences can influence our rational and affective parts, both of which shape the epistemic resources which prompt us to have the moral perceptions that we do. DC pushes us to re-interrogate the relationship between rationality, affective dispositions, and moral perceptions. In doing so, it forces us to take seriously the available reasons, rendered by our moral perceptions, one uses during moral decision making in our lives as moral agents. It does this by making explicit the scope of our unfreedom. As either a consequence of our attachment to radical individualism or the influence of scientific ideology, we often think ourselves capable of easily overcoming the influence of the lived world and that our experiences are independent of our moral judgments. Sartre’s belief that we are condemned to be free was itself a commitment to the belief that the subject is equipped with an ever-present capacity to transform any experience into an expression of one’s freedom to choose. However, social striations across our lived world exist as epistemological gatekeepers for epistemic agents and signpost that world with morally evaluative content. The epistemic dimensions of the U.S.’s culture of silence regarding sexual violence against women is a prime example of this phenomenon. Although we have seen some reform to this of late, the atmosphere of silence surrounding sexual violence against women is still pervasive and especially disturbing given that such events are fundamentally antithetical to the dignity of women qua persons. A world where this is pervasive, on top of devaluing and harming women, also limits one’s moral perceptions of personhood when seeing women. Similarly upsetting, many men maintain epistemically problematic dispositions toward this reality or, at worst, are presently incapable of having alternative moral perceptions of it. As bell hooks, a black feminist philosopher, puts it, socialization in patriarchy becomes a tool used to forge people into expressions of masculine or feminine subjectivity under the guiding hand of a culture of domination. As a result, women come to fear men as an origin of violence, to have moral perception of them as “cruel” or “violent,” and, hooks claims,

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men also come to fear that same violent potential.49 The perpetuation of the “wait until your father comes home” narrative among other things communicates the idea that masculinity is about power, domination, and fear. hooks writes: Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.50

She points out that patriarchal masculinity “teaches men that their selfhood has meaning only in relation to the pursuit of external power; such masculinity is a subtext of the dominator [social] model”51 where men achieve manhood, the ideal of meaning, only if they dominate. Hegemonic boyhood socialization, thereby, becomes defined by the expression of violence, emotional distance, and coming to see any intimate or genuine form of emotional connection with another as alien or, at worst, obscene. Granted, men and women have vastly different reasons to fear the patriarchal agent and to have the moral perceptions of the other as they do. The violence experienced by each intersectional subject will vary. Yet, it is seemingly the case that fear pervades our lives as a result of our embeddedness in a society that perpetuates an ideology of domination. We are afraid of being dominated and this fear shapes our moral perceptions in a compulsory way by defining the epistemic grounds upon which those perceptions are formed, by shaping our store consciousness. Patriarchy, thereby, enforces an oppressive form of socialization. It systematically oppresses and harms because it makes intersubjective modes of fear an ever-present reality rather than a passing moment in life.52 Where women are taught to systematically fear men because of the emotional or physical violence perpetrated by patriarchy’s domination of them qua women, it seems that men, myself included, appear to systematically fear other men. According to hooks, this fear results from the 49 Bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York, NY: Atria Books, 2004), 18. 50 Hooks, The Will to Change, 18. 51 Hooks, 116. 52 Hooks, 118.

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knowledge that failing to meet the demands of hegemonic masculinity makes you the target of male violence: a kind of violence that men are also aware of because they experience hegemonic masculinity’s curriculum of practiced violence, bullying, and abuse. Again, this sense of fear will be realized across various social identities in both content and intensity because, for example, the black male subject, the immigrant, and white male subject have different reasons to fear a routine traffic stop. Yet, as hooks points out, we are all afraid. She writes, “this is the big secret we all keep together-the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture.”53 Fear, in this sense, pushes us away from each other, it interrupts our connections to the other and disrupts our access to liberating moral perceptions. Socialization has the ability to influence the epistemic subject through hidden or explicit curriculums that shape store consciousness, and thereby our moral perceptions. DC, under a Marcusean-Buddhist Affect Theory, shows how such systems are reinforced. Taken together, the nature of our immediate moral perceptions of the value landscape is marked by unfreedom: our inability to choose how we perceive the moral features of the world during occurrent experience. To further motivate this idea that we are not as free as we wish we were, consider the following scenario. Phil loves his son (Sam) and takes his role as a father very seriously. Committed to his “manhood,” Phil expresses his masculinity through conventional activities by participating in sporting rituals, his work as a mechanic, and by teaching Sam how to fish and hunt. As Sam gets older, Phil begins to bond with Sam by rebuilding a truck together in preparation for his senior year of high school. Sam picks up on the skills quickly and soon expresses the desire to follow in Phil’s footsteps. For Phil, being with Sam is an experience filled with joy and, as Ahmed might put it, an encounter with Sam is a happy experience. Phil has moral perceptions of Sam which represent Sam’s moral value as a person, his dignity. One day, at dinner, Sam sits with his family (mom, dad, and his sister) and says that he’s not happy. Sam then comes out to his family. Phil’s beliefs about the moral status of homosexuality (i.e., that it is a moral wrong according to his religious views) results in a huge fight. Over time, Phil fails to reconcile his moral values, his life with Sam, and this new information regarding Sam’s sexual identity. Experiences with

53 Hooks, 9.

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Sam are no longer happy for Phil and Phil’s compulsory moral perceptions of Sam change into taking Sam to be representative of something “wrong.” There are many ways this scenario could have played out and it is not the intention of this example to provide a one-dimensional account of the coming-out process nor how one expresses any religious values. Instead, the Phil-scenario represents a contrast case indicative of how the unfreedom of our moral perceptions during occurrent experience can manifest in our lives. Phil, as a subject, is not free to experience Sam any way he wishes at any singular moment. Instead, his moral perceptions are compulsory and rendered meaningful for him by means of his store consciousness. Yet, the contents of store consciousness can change during transformative moments, those times which have significance or existential import for the subject thereby reshaping, nursing, or planting seeds within one’s store consciousness. In Phil’s case, we can easily contrast his pre-Sam-coming-out experiences with his post-Sam-coming-out experiences and, in doing so, see that Sam’s coming out was a transformative moment for Phil. Phil’s paternal attraction to Sam (as a mode of affectively expressing Eros) has been reshaped into a repulsion (as a mode of affectively expressing Thanatos). DC’s Buddhist synthesis of Marcuse and Affect theory allows us to catalog the shift in Phil’s moral perceptions of Sam while appreciating the conditions required for that shift because both Phil’s ways of thinking about Sam and the embodied affects experienced when looking at Sam point to the epistemological mechanisms underlying Phil’s occurrent experience. That is, Phil’s moral perceptions of Sam track shifts in Phil’s knowledge about Sam in conjunction with the background beliefs and affective dispositions Phil as accumulated over his lifetime pertaining to homosexuality. Developing a Marcusean Affect theory by means of Buddhist concepts allows us to unpack our everyday moral perceptions. We can conceive of them as being founded upon one’s store consciousness as the background epistemic resource by which a subject comes to see the world as having a value landscape. This perceptual ability carries the errors of subjectivity inasmuch as one’s affective disposition, beliefs, and ways of thinking (i.e., one’s sense-abilities) about the world influence one’s moral perceptions of the world in an essentially compulsory way. This is the corner stone of DC. DC articulates a complex model for understanding the epistemic subject as both affectively and rationally engaged in the world. Epistemic

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subjects exist in an information rich environment and, thereby, cannot be limited to the confines of contemporary theories of knowledge which exclude affects in favor of propositional knowledge. Affects reveal vital information about the world and how we come to see it. Moreover, DC amplifies and echoes claims made by Patricia Hill Collin’s Black Feminist Epistemology. That is, lived experiences shape consciousnesses with epistemic access to concepts and modes of knowing that reveal dimensions of reality (i.e., through moral perceptions) initially unseen or overlooked by those outside that standpoint. Presumably, individuals who exist in intersectional epistemic locations are, by definition, exposed to affective forces and, thereby, would be expected to adapt one’s accumulated affects and ways of thinking to the local environment. DC also points to a deeper need to understand that freedom is not synonymous with being affect-free or existing as a purely transcendental subject. Marcuse makes this observation in his lecture on “Nature and Revolution” and in An Essay on Liberation. In the former, he writes: …freedom is rooted in the primary drives of men and women, it is the vital need to enhance their life instincts. Prerequisite is the capacity of the senses to experience not only the “given” but also the “hidden” qualities of things which would make for the betterment of life … the senses are not only the basis for the epistemological constitution of reality, but also for its transformation, its subversion in the interest of liberation.54

Moreover, this echoes his earlier claims in the latter as he writes: new sensibility, which expresses the ascent of the life instincts over aggressiveness and guilt, would foster, on a social scale, the vital need for the abolition of injustice and misery and would shape the further evolution of the “standard of living” … [the] affirmation of the right to build a society in which the abolition of poverty and toil terminates in a universe where the sensuous, the playful, the calm, and the beautiful become forms of existence and thereby the Form of the society itself.55

Given DC, the liberation of the human creature’s moral perceptions depends, essentially, on the cultivation of store consciousness which

54 Marcuse, “Nature and Revolution,” 243. 55 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 23–25.

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expose the cruelty of objects which do not actually carry the promises they appear to have as cause-objects. The cruel optimism of neoliberal capitalist sensibilities regarding the good life must be undercut by an affective disposition which identifies such things as life-hindering rather than life affirming. Our affective and rational attachment to neoliberal objects of value is, as Marcuse puts it, forms of domination inasmuch they are mediated by the market’s depiction of false consumer needs or by the dominant class for the sake of maintaining existing power structures. We might say that these objects engender a cruel optimism in the Marcusean subject. As Berlant, a feminist affect theorist, puts it, this “optimism is cruel when it takes shape as an affectively stunning double bind: a binding to fantasies that block the satisfaction they offer, and a binding to the promise of optimism as such that the fantasies have come to represent.”56 Or, as Ahmed puts it, “The promise of happiness takes this form: that if you have this or have that or do this or do that, then happiness is what follows.”57 Notably, Marcuse’s call for a new sensibility, in response to these epistemic obstacles, becomes a praxis by which the individual takes freedom to be a biological necessity. This is a mode of store consciousness wherein one experiences the world in ways that are incapable of tolerating surplus repression and demands no other forms of repression other than that required for the “amelioration of life.”58 Marcuse’s new sensibility is, in this way, a call for a new form of experiential expression via our compulsory moral perceptions of occurrent experience and requires a renovation and cultivation of a new, life affirming, form of store consciousness. That is, it requires a revision and reinvestment into the praxis of cultivating life affirming sense-abilities.

Conclusion: Marcuse’s New Sensibility and Buddhist Ethical Concepts As a last takeaway, I would like to suggest that the dimensions of a new sensibility cultivated within a Marcusean version of Affect Theory and informed by Buddhist philosophy must adopt and cultivate positive

56 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 51. 57 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 41. 58 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, 28.

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dispositions to at least three Buddhist philosophical concepts.59 This new sensibility requires us to cultivate a store consciousness which emphasizes (1) the dependent origination/interdependent co-arising of our world, (2) the existence of dukkha and excess dukkha in our world, and (3) the essential role of compassion as an affect and way of thinking in the understanding of (1) and alleviation of excess dukkha. To the first point, (1) articulates a new sensibility which acknowledges that the world is fundamentally relational and that one antinomy of action is that the world comes to be through the collective action of individuals together. We arise together and create the world we live in as a collective activity. A new sensibility which acknowledges (1) adopts a life affirming affect toward the interest of individuals which make up a collective because, as the Dalai Lama writes, “it is in everyone’s interest to do what leads to happiness and avoid that which leads to suffering. And because, as we have seen, our interests are inextricably linked, we are compelled to accept ethics as an indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.”60 To the second and third points, (2) seems clearly supported by current times. Suffering exists and there is excess suffering both in the form of physical suffering and in the surplus repression of the psyche to adopt forms of cruel optimism and dispositions of happiness toward harmful behaviors. (3) seems to articulate at least one affective force or personal affect which can grant epistemic access to identifying, via moral perception, the various forms of excess dukkha (physical or repressive). As an expression of Eros, the life drive, compassion can manifest either as selflove or the love of others. In this way, compassion articulates an essential tool for capturing unhappy affects and to intensify one’s motivational force to change the conditions which create such sufferings. Relatedly, Ahmed writes, “I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects [perhaps by the feminist killjoy] that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy affects, then the story does not end there…. we might want to reread melancholic subjects, the ones who refuse to let go of suffering, who are even prepared to kill some forms 59 (1) comes primarily from the Mah¯ ay¯ana school, whereas the others are found in various forms in multiple Buddhist traditions. 60 Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1999),

47.

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of joy, as an alternative model of the social good.”61 As I interpret this passage, it seems that through an expression of enlightened compassion, a sustained engagement with the suffering of others and ourselves, we can wrestle with sources of excess suffering in the world in order to open up the possibility for liberation. By refusing to accommodate or identify with systems of oppression, perhaps even by refusing to express our compassion in ways prescribed by those systems, we can reject those systems and express compassion toward the people those systems dehumanize. In this respect, I take being a Killjoy to be an act of intense compassion which acknowledges humanization and liberation over brutalization and domination. I take what has been presented here as the beginning of a process by which we can start to use the notion of the epistemic subject as a duality, as embodied and cerebral, to the advantage of social justice efforts because DC makes explicit the unfreedom of moral perception. This unfreedom must be addressed if we are to overcome the oppressive way our current society, and its members, facilitates false moral perceptions which take oppressive forms of life to be life affirming. Embodied affects and ways of thinking must not always serve the ends of neoliberal capitalist sensibilities. Rather, cultivating enlightened seeds of compassion, recognizing surplus dukkha in its physical and repressive forms, and coming to see the deeply intersubjective nature of our existence can begin to shape one’s store consciousness to see the world, not just as it is, but as it could be. Moral perceptions prompted from this position could be truly liberating. Yet, how we respond to immediate experience may be prone to hegemony if we do not exercise a healthy amount of skepticism about our moral perceptions of occurrent experience because they are compulsory forms of knowing. In this way, there is hope because we do seem to have the capacity to influence our store consciousness by seeking out experiences and practicing ways of thinking which emphasize humanization and liberation over brutalization and domination. This capacity is the cornerstone to expressing our freedoms during immediate experience. To see suffering, to see its source, and to see the path to liberation we must begin by acknowledging that our immediate moral perceptions of the world are expressions of our unfreedom.

61 Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 50.

CHAPTER 19

From Reform Politics Toward Liberation During the Suicide of Capitalism: Examples from Housing Policy Peter Marcuse

Introduction At a conference like this gathering in October 2019, centered on the work of Herbert Marcuse and Critical Theory, the ultimate goal can be taken as axiomatic: In Herbert Marcuse’s words and in the words of our conference’s call, the problem is a one-dimensional society, one with a “smooth, democratic unfreedom” in which the opportunities for the full and free development of the society’s members, as would be possible in a liberated society, are severely constrained, and the free development of the many is inhibited for the benefit of the few, without effective opposition. The

Peter Marcuse: Deceased. P. Marcuse (Deceased) (B) Columbia University, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_19

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poverty, illnesses, unjust inequalities, racial, gender, age, national discrimination, environmental pollution, and so on are well-known harms about which we have enough knowledge and resources that we no longer to need to tolerate them. Our goal is to find ways by which emancipatory alternatives can be developed to a restrictive one-dimensional society, for which the most widely used term—if not as widely probed—is “capitalism.” “Liberation” is the process of moving to its opposite, although it initially would mean only a negative, the absence of war, the end of the harms that society imposes on so many. The end point of the process of liberation would be a free society, a society not only free of poverty, ugliness, hatreds, but one positively dedicated to the physical and emotional fulfillment and happiness of all its members, not the enrichment of a few, nor growth for its own sake. There would not simply be more, but better. The most widely recognized term for what a society of liberation might look like, beyond peaceful, is probably “socialism,” at least in its utopian presentation, although again in quotes and with many qualms and caveats if historical experiences with its invocation thus far are made the test of its value, and even if the pure idea of it is hardly on any real agenda today. The Context in Which Our Discussion Takes Place Has to Be Recognized Intersectionally Capitalism is a key factor in producing inhumane living conditions for millions globally. The recognition of the imminent new and unprecedented level of disasters that may flow from climate change and the catastrophic level of the disasters that nuclear war might produce, serve to heighten that unease and discontent that we have today. A Marxist analysis would thus justify the conclusion, in the words of a recent In These Times headline, that “Socialism is the Only Way.”1 On the other hand, climate change makes our situation so dire that, to quote another headline from the same issue, “We Don’t Have Time to End Capitalism.”2

1 Ashley Dawson, “We Can’t Beat Climate Change Under Capitalism. Socialism Is the Only Way,” In These Times, April 15, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/article/21837/soc ialism-anti-capitalism-economic-reform. 2 Tobita Chow, “We Don’t Have Time to End Capitalism—But Growth Can Still Be Green,” In These Times, April 15, 2019, https://inthesetimes.com/article/21830/capita lism-economic-debates-alternatives.

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So how can we get from here to there, from entrenched capitalism to liberatory socialism? The Options for Social Action The main options for liberatory social action worth being taken seriously today are, I would suggest, four3 : 1. Revolutionary action (hardly on any agenda, with the possible exception of some of the countries of the global south) 2. Reform through conventional politics (the most widely attempted) 3. Reform and transformational politics (with a goal of peace, varying along a left-liberal axis) 4. Transformational politics (leading to an ultimate goal of liberation) These four options each have their own pros and cons. And each must take into account the historic setting: First, Power relationships are critical in determining which options are realistic and require examining who the parties—pro and con—are, and their respective strength, as well as which interests seek change, and which block change. Second, each option must take into account two new dangers: those connected with global climate change, and those connected with nuclear war, deliberate or accidental. There are today social movements, energetic forces, ideological currents, political campaigns in the United States that have mass bases, such as those of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, labor unions and workers’ organizations such as those of nurses and teachers and health care workers, both urban and rural, also immigrant and civil rights-based minorities and majorities, as well as gender-based and culturally concerned groups. All of them occupy emancipatory alternative spaces, which can today be put forward and must be recognized. Such forces are still far from a majority influence in society, but they show a discontent with the prevailing order that is deep and widely felt. 3 The discussion here is based on Europe and does not include the option of repression. However, its possibility in a few other unique countries, such as Hong Kong or Israel/ Palestine, should not be ignored.

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Let us look at the options one at a time. If one starts with our two opening assumptions about the state of the world today: Socialism is the Only Way, and We Don’t Have Time to End Capitalism, there are two different but related ways to go: Revolutionary Action, and Transformational Politics.

Revolutionary Action This is of course on the theoretical goal of historical efforts to achieve the scale of changes such as would be necessary to approach the goal of liberation, but historical forces of reaction today, given the strength of the existing holders of political and economic and ideological power that Herbert Marcuse described in Essay on Liberation casts doubt on its feasibility. The Forces of Reaction But the omni-presence of capital and those who control it confront the system, and they challenge it with strength, struggle, and confrontation. Perhaps there is a social democratic alternative in the “Defeat Capitalism in class struggle by organized confrontation” way. That is, take power, and enact economic, social, governmental revolution. But this possibility is not on the books. The power of the global capitalist system militarily, economically, intellectually, and psychologically is thus far overwhelming, and has defeated every historical attempt to impose socialism in a large sphere, certainly in any country. Consider, for instance, democratic socialist organizations in the United States like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA): “The DSA … recognizes the centrality of power, but recognizes that we must organize across multiple arenas — formal politics, workplaces, and communities — to confront and defeat the multipole incarnations of the power of the capitalist class.”4 The Forces Toward Liberation There are significant forces actively working toward systemic change in the direction of liberation: The growing opposition to the global 4 Maria Svart, National Director of the Democratic Socialists of America, September 18, 2019.

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dominion of corporate capitalism is confronted by the sustained, institutionalized power of this dominion: its economic and military hold in the four continents, its neocolonial empire, and, most important, its unshaken capacity to subject the majority of the population to its overwhelming force and drive to increase productivity. This global power keeps the socialist orbit on the defensive, all too costly not only in terms of military expenditures but also in the perpetuation of a repressive bureaucracy. The development of socialism thus continues to be deflected from its original goals, and the competitive coexistence with the West generates values and aspirations for which the American standard of living serves as a model. Others, including many participants in this conference, have explored the strengths and weaknesses of forces for radical change today, gender, age, nationality, civil liberties, even survival propelled activities. Their actions must be supported in every possible way today; their limits must also be recognized, and I believe the overwhelming conclusion today must be that revolution of the scale necessary to move from domination to liberation is not yet in sight.

Reform Through Conventional Politics Struggles Around Housing Issues I want to take the example of struggles around housing issues,5 as presented by Bernie Sanders’s campaigns for the U.S. Presidency—taking it as the closest to a campaign that takes the concept of socialism forward in the real context of U.S. politics to ask whether reforms such as the many proposed in struggles such as those can help move us toward such a society, for brevity called “socialist.” I want to argue that housing issues are among the many that offer opportunities to help advance a truly emancipatory socialist alternative. The environmental crisis and climate change, and the difficulties of restraining Donald Trump and the forces he represents, their lack of ability or understanding of the cataclysmic nuclear risks they are imposing on the globe brings out the importance

5 For further discussions of desirable goals for conventional reforms in housing and planning policy, see my blog #72 “Fair Housing and Beyond: Some Elusive Principles for Social Change,” September 13, 2015, https://pmarcuse.wordpress.com/2015/09/13/ blog-72-fair-housing-and-beyond-some-elusive-principles-for-social-change-3/.

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of the second in These Times’ headline: “We don’t have time to end capitalism.”

Reforms Such as Sanders Proposes Reforms such as Sanders proposes, socialist only within limits, are in fact the only real way our societies are dealing with the human costs of capitalism today. Examine the liberal, comparatively radical, but not revolutionary, proposals in the program of Bernie Sanders, perhaps the most radical of mainstream reform efforts on the table in mainstream political discourse today. Sanders’s recent record has not been impressive. His 2016 presidential campaign proposed a massive expansion of the National Housing Trust Fund—at least $5 billion to construct, preserve, and rehabilitate at minimum 3.5 million subsidized rental homes. But the rest of his platform for housing policy reforms addressed ways to increase homeownership. Increasing the supply of even minimally adequate homes is largely a matter of limited market subsidies for developers and social service providers. Resolving the Housing Crisis But resolving the housing crisis requires more than social services,6 and requires not improving the market, but rejecting it. Herbert Marcuse made the point neatly: He quotes a revisionist approach where “leadership in building a more constructive society” is combined with normal functioning in the established society. Herbert Marcuse continues: “This philosophy is achieved by directing the criticism against surface phenomena, while accepting the basic premises of the criticized society.”7 Expanding Home Ownership Expanding home ownership is a main plank in the Sanders platform. But it is one of the contributions of Critical Theory that it exposes owner occupancy as utilizing the unpaid labor of maintenance and management 6 See David Madden and Peter Marcuse, In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis (New York: Verso, 2016) for other discussions of radical and possible housing reforms. 7 Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), 261.

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by the resident to make it work, whether the owners themselves occupy the owned unit or profit from its rental as single-family housing. Home ownership thus has a very a strong component of labor exploitation in repairs and in services, and particularly exploitation if unrecognized as a commodification of labor, including exploitation of others and of oneself. Resident home ownership further has a cultural aspect, a mystification of the value of ownership as “the home is where the heart is,” providing a commodified non-material benefit at significant but suppressed material cost. Home Ownership Further Has a Political Aspect Home ownership further has a political aspect, generally promoting conservativism, leading owners to be content with their lives and status, with the privatization of benefits that are socially provided. Ideologically, it promotes owners’ belief in having a stake in the system and an opportunity to profit from the commodification of housing. It further prompts seeing social services such as police, fire protection, or education as a political right, but rather as commodities to be distributed via the market provision of housing in its capitalist form; the public or social provision of which is in fact a part of socialist rather than capitalist forms with market subsidies reinforcing the commodity form of protected government ownership or social co-ownership independent of the market. Reforms May in Fact Impede Progress But some well-intentioned housing reforms may in fact impede progress, even in the short-term and at small scale. This may happen when conventional reforms are often put forward as a progressive model for a socialist societal organization of the provision of life’s necessities might look like. The problem is that isolated bubbles of alternate forms of ownership or tenure in an active profit-driven housing and land market will not long withstand the pressures from commercial sources in an overwhelmingly market-driven system of housing provision and regulation, in which housing legislation is more often driven by the desire to protect the interests and profit of a property owner rather than the interests of a housing resident.

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Micro-Housing Another example of unintended negative consequences of housing reform efforts is the line of exploration of minimum standards to be used in key housing policy. The most extreme examples are perhaps a number explicitly dealing with the homeless, such as developing park benches contoured to discourage overnight sleeping, or security zones delineated with police protection to permit open spaces for sleeping with reduced risks of theft or molestation. Even relatively mainstream sanctioned exploration of minimum space requirements of square feet per person to be proved, or minimum standards defined by the necessities of simple survival, the so-called Existence-Minimum architectural explorations of modern housing design, simply lower the idea of what housing reforms should accomplish: do less better, not do better with less: During the housing crisis of the 1920s, the German concept Existenzminimum (minimum dwelling design for minimum survival) was developed and applied to the construction of public social housing. It was considered a design laboratory, where research, design, and experimentation would focus on a unique goal: create a space-efficient affordable housing typology, based on minimum quality standards. Empirical evidence indicates a renewed interest in alternative design solutions and minimum dwelling approaches over the last decade: examples include micro-housing solutions and collaborative housing models.8

This is in a way the exact opposite of at least the publicly stated goal of housing reform, which would describe its goals in terms such as decent, livable, family-friendly, attractive, dignified, housing—if not simply good homes. Adequate, Decent, Safe, and Sanitary One other weakness of conventional housing reforms is their neglect even in textbook social reforms of key concepts in housing such as equity or social justice, integration or community-building, accessibility to services, or integration in comprehensive planning. “Adequate, decent, 8 Sara Brysch, “Reinterpreting Existenzminimum in Contemporary Affordable Housing Solutions,” Urban Planning 4, no. 3 (September 30, 2019): 326, https://doi.org/10. 17645/up.v4i3.2121.

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safe and sanitary,”9 often used in legislation or legal documents relating to the appropriate standards to good housing, is hardly a radical formulation, and nowhere near the goals of social justice-oriented transformative housing described with the term: liberatory. If liberatory is considered utopian, then survival minimum should be considered subhuman. Ask the thousands affected by Donald Trump’s immigration policies at the Mexican border. Another weakness of conventional campaigns for housing reform is their failure to highlight that the gain from increasing housing prices as an unearned profit from speculation in the market value of land, derived from its monopoly character that reflect the privatization of the socially created benefits of location shared proximities to social benefits, such as personal security and neighborhood environmental quality and accessibility to benefits publicly provided, such as roads and highways and streets. Non-profit Housing as Motor Even limited conventional housing reforms may indeed serve a political function. Not as islands separated in a sea of profit, but as an alternative to profit as a motor of social action and growth. But in a part of the economy that constitutes perhaps a third of the volume of the entire economy, such altruistically motivated experiments are not likely to have a significant effect of what actually happens on the ground.

Transformational Reforms in a Transformational Politics Is attention to the type of immediate housing reforms, or their parallels in other sectors, thus a waste of time for dedicated but idealistic individuals of groups seeking fundamentally just social changes? By no means. Of course many conventional housing reforms immediately benefit many people now unjustly treated in our society. And, unless they are pursued 9 For instance, Physical condition standards for HUD housing require that it be “decent, safe, sanitary and in good repair.” For instance, HUD’s standards, with a long list of details well above an existence minimum. 24 CFR § 5.703, for r (DSS/GR). As for Navaho housing, https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/25/700.55. For HUD’s rules, see https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/24/5.703.

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with bloated rhetoric or in opposition to larger reforms, limited smallerscale reforms should not distract from more fundamental and longer changes. Indeed, greater and more fundamental changes can be pursued in direct connection with the lesser reforms. The trick is linking the two together in a politic fashion. For instance, again taking housing issues as an example. Rent Controls Rent controls, in various guises: caps on rent, fixed rental scales, limits on increases, set as a percentage of tenants’ income, etc. But it can be pointed out, as part of the struggle for the strongest possible fair rents, that goals tacitly accept the treatment of housing as a commodity, the basic use of the market rather than the need for housing as the principle for the allocation of housing, both existing and new, perhaps coupled with a subsidy system that would subsidize the payment of rent to cover the actual cost of its supply, although not paying for profit or speculative gain over and above the actual costs of labor (including the landlord or owner’s actual labor). “Housing for people not for profit,” would be the simple slogan. The necessary subsidies would be provided out of a steeply progressive income tax, along some lines already suggested within the mainstream of present electoral policy debates. Would that be what a socialist housing system would look like? Would it not welcome short-term and stricter rent controls, but regularly pointing out the logic of going further? Pointing out the logic and fairness of turning “socialism” into an avowed desirable goal, instead of a pejorative negative one? Constantly pointing out the intersectionality (with less jargon) of each reform? Public Housing Or take public housing, and the many desirable alternatives for common ownership, including notably community land trusts.10 Some trusts of land, others of buildings, and commons type ownerships, with various combinations of legal forms of landownership and building ownership and 10 Although see the excellent argument pointing out their limitations in many of their implementations: Olivia R. Williams, “The Problem With Community Land Trusts,” Jacobin, July 7, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/07/community-land-trusts-clts-pro blems.

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community participation,11 all are worth consideration, if the dangers of exaggerating their potential as a model, the bubble in a dominant housing market setting, is acknowledged. A Right to Housing Perhaps the broadest transformational housing demand that might be raised in conjunction with any housing reform proposals today is the call for a right to housing.12 There are a number of versions of such a call already in circulation today, but mainly in more theoretical discussions of the limits of existing reforms and what might be beneficially added were they not politically incapable of passage.13 But any transformational housing reform, or indeed of any reforms within an overwhelming capitalist setting with its rules, will at best be colored by the existing arrangements that our experience under capitalism affords. Major improvements are indeed attainable, and their benefits may be nothing to be sneezed at. Nevertheless, improvements do not exhaust today’s possibilities. The concept of social action leading to an ideal of liberation is on the historical agenda today as it never has been before. Not silicon valley’s conception of liberation, such as Mark Zuckerberg holding that “networked computers are tools of liberation,” although “it’s not entirely clear who is being liberated from what” or if these tools would “make the world a better place, even if it’s not entirely clear what is better and for who,” and when much of recent history suggests that they may be used for repression just as easily as for liberation.14 But the technological advances of the last century have led to a new set of both possibilities and dangers: 11 See pmarcuse.wordpress.com, Blog #54—Community Land Trusts as Transformative Housing Reforms, July 23, 2014. 12 For a discussion putting such rights in the broader setting of the causes of poverty generally and the Right to the City as some responses to them, see pmarcuse.wordpress.com, Blog 122c—Non-Causes of Poverty, Jobs, Welfare Responses, September 24, 2018. 13 Chester Hartman, “The Case for a Right to Housing,” NHI Shelterforce Online, #148, Winter 2006, https://shelterforce.org/2006/11/23/the_case_for_a_right_to_hous ing/. 14 Margarate O’Mara, “The Church of Techno-Optimism,” New York Times, September 29, 2019, p. A4, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/28/opinion/sunday/silicon-val ley-techno-optimism.html.

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In the face of bright new possibilities: the overcoming of scarcity, the elimination of poverty, abundance; satisfaction of needs, new levels of creativity, of new needs, the physical and social and aesthetic and economic possibilities of cities and urban formations. New Dangers New dangers: nuclear annihilation; environmental despoliation; climate change, surveillance; and control of resistance movements. And above all the dangers of unsustainable growth, whose net increasing result will be economic decline, impoverishment, and dehumanization: The end of the species Homo Sapiens. But perhaps what makes these weak forces of rebellion into revolutionary developments is not their own strengths under capitalism today and as Herbert Marcuse graphically describes them, but rather the collapse of capitalism itself. Perhaps in its own workings it produces its opposition, very dialectically.

To Conclude A possible omen of good things to come. As I write this, Donald Trump is threatened with impeachment and removal from office for asking the Ukraine’s help in uncovering bad things about his political opponent, Joseph Biden, using his power over foreign affairs to shape the foreign policy of his country for his own benefit. He denies he was doing that. Yet, while that threat is of impeachment is still on the front page of the New York Times, Trump has just publicly asked China in conversation about foreign policy for exactly similar personal help against a personal political opponent, thus doing with China exactly what he was accused of doing with the Ukraine! The New York Times calls doing with China what he is about to be impeached for doing with Ukraine “self-destruction.” It also calls Trump “The Self-Impeaching President.”15 Perhaps soon the headline will be: “Capitalism: The Self-Defeating System.” In other words, the suicide of capitalism. 15 New York Times Editorial Board, “Trump, the Self-Impeaching President,” October 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/opinion/trump-impeachment-china. html.

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Afterword---On An Essay on Liberation Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay On Liberation can be read as deeply optimistic or as deeply pessimistic. Marcuse eloquently described what liberation could bring—new men and women, new ways of life in a new world. Getting from here to there is not spelled out; changes “must happen," new practices “will emerge,” new practices “will occur.” Humans will develop new senses, new sensibilities; they will not put up with the living arrangements called capitalism, from which all have to suffer: This qualitative change must occur in the needs, in the infrastructure of man… The educational demands thus drive the movement… The mass democracy developed by monopoly capitalism has shaped the rights and liberties which it grants in its own image and interest… Freedom would become the environment of an organism… The semi-democratic process works of necessity.16

But the other possibility is also imminent. We will end human life, not only as we know it, but in every form. The darkness may also descend. In Herbert Marcuse’s analysis, climate change may do it for us; we may exhaust the globe’s resources needed to sustain life, through our greed for ever more growth; we may kill each other by design, or by one cataclysmic accident, or by spreading malfunctions of misconceived efforts to sustain unsustainable conditions. Capitalism may commit suicide. We will either have new men and new women with liberated senses and sensibilities, or we will have no people at all. Herbert Marcuse leaves it up to us. But in the end, he challenges us, yes—us: The most daring images of a new world, of new ways of life, are still guided by concepts, and by a logic elaborated in the development of thought, transmitted from generation to generation… the rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of the political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined.17

Is he downplaying the economic struggle, and the role of the immediate process, as he suggests elsewhere? How does the political struggle 16 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 17 Marcuse, 29, 5.

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create the new needs that are a precondition to their own formation? The rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of the political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined. The rebels would redefine the objectives and the strategy of the political struggle, in which alone the concrete goals of liberation can be determined. This “voluntary” servitude (voluntary inasmuch as it is introjected into the individuals), which justifies the benevolent masters, can be broken only through a political practice which reaches the roots of containment and contentment in the infrastructure of man, a political practice of methodical disengagement from and refusal of the Establishment, aiming at a radical transvaluation of values. So, the rebellion is necessary to produce the rebels, and both will be more an accompaniment to, or causes for, the extension of struggles, which some revolutionary forces must have won in this society, before the changes have taken place in the structure of humans. Herbert’s utopia is a precondition, as well as a product of the actions his utopia is required to produce.

Afterword Douglas Kellner

The chapters in this volume collect many important papers from the 2017 and 2019 conferences of the International Herbert Marcuse Society. They demonstrate the cogency and current relevance of the critical theory and radical politics of Herbert Marcuse in the contemporary era. Both conferences and the papers collected here articulate how Herbert Marcuse developed both powerful critiques of contemporary forms of domination in neo-liberal capitalism and the authoritarian states that have become a threat to liberal democracy in the twenty-first century. The articles also focus on Marcuse’s theory of liberation and radical social change, manifesting how Marcuse’s work contains both radical critiques of contemporary societies and perspectives for liberation and radical social change that have made his life and writings of continued relevance in the decades after his death in 1979. Thus the collection provides both the critiques of domination and theories of liberation in Marcuse’s dialectical critical theory and, as mentioned in the Introduction, “provide a multidimensional analysis of the current era and issues through the lens of Marcuse’s work.” Hence, the articles critically engage both crises and conflicts in the current global neoliberal and authoritarian order of the contemporary epoch, and present future alternatives that show possibilities of a freer, happier, and more ecologically sustainable society.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1

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Further, the essays illustrate Marcuse’s multidimensional approach that combines critique of the capitalist economy, ecological crisis, the authoritarian state, the culture industry, growing inequality and violence, and dominant forms of ideology. The Volume puts on display the resources in Marcuse’s critical theory that reveal the destructive forces of domination ranging from an out-of-control economy that provides economic insecurity as it ravages the environment and produces ecological crisis to forms of the authoritarian state that undermine democracy and threaten human well-being and life. Another critical dimension of Marcuse’s thought that is highlighted in the essays collected here, involves the dialectic of subjectivity which contrasts the ways that what he calls “one-dimensional society and culture” produced a conformist consciousness that is shaped by the dominant culture, institutions, and forces of domination, contrasted with a rebellious subjectivity that strives for liberation, autonomy, selfdetermination, and more emancipatory forms of consciousness and action. Marcuse thus emerges as a theorist of resistance and rebellion, as well as critic of conformity and domination. His thought and the essays collected here engage domination in the dimension of class, race, gender and sexuality, as well as struggles against racism, sexism, classism, and bias against alternative sexualities. Marcuse strongly influenced the revolutionary, feminist, anti-racist and sexual liberationist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and thus his works well articulate with the oppositional movements of the contemporary moment ranging from Black Lives Matter to radical ecology movements responding to growing ecocrisis. The reader of this book thus receives excellent analyses of Herbert Marcuse’s life work that continues to influence and be of relevance to critical philosophy and social theory and radical politics in the contemporary era.

Index

A Administered negativity, 8, 257, 258, 264, 271, 273–275, 278 Adorno, Theodor W., 44, 46, 47, 50, 53, 55–59, 133, 172, 189, 254, 271, 273, 281, 282, 294 Affect theory, 11, 367, 374, 375, 377–379, 383, 385, 386, 390, 393, 394, 396 Ahmed, Sara, 366, 376, 377, 380, 389, 390, 393, 396, 397 Albo, Greg, 29, 36, 37, 40 Al Fekr Al Mo’¯ a.ser, 7, 187–190, 195, 196, 201–208 Alienation, 10, 21, 26, 35, 49, 105, 132, 134, 135, 139, 151, 156, 188, 191, 192, 196, 200, 201, 206, 225, 227, 265, 271, 320, 334, 335, 337, 339, 346, 347, 359, 360 Arab Spring, 153, 159 Arendt, Hannah, 47, 301, 304, 311

Artificial reverie, 8, 255, 269, 274, 278 Asceticism, 6, 92, 101 Authoritarianism, 2–5, 15, 17, 18, 27, 32, 44, 46, 47, 56, 60, 61, 67, 103, 113, 116, 119, 120, 124, 125, 134, 148 B Berlant, Lauren, 365, 396 Bion, Wilfred, 254, 258, 260, 276, 278 Black Lives Matter, 35, 142 Brown, Wendy, 18, 22, 25–27, 32, 34, 49, 64 Buchannan, James, 22 Buddhist/Buddhism, 11, 367, 379–383, 385, 386, 390, 393, 394, 396 C Carlson, Tucker, 27

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 T. Hines et al. (eds.), The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times, Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1

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INDEX

Carnivalesque, 141 Collins, Patricia Hill, 366 Corbyn, Jeremy, 36–38, 40 COVID/coronavirus, 27, 30, 157, 159, 329, 330, 336, 347 Critical theory, 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 129, 159, 187–189, 191, 195, 197, 200, 203–205, 207–209, 212, 218–221, 226, 242, 251, 252, 287, 296–298, 315 Culture Industry, 254, 255, 257, 269–278

D Davis, Angela, 28, 72, 121, 129, 389 Declaration of Human Rights, 303, 305, 307 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 164, 166, 181, 183, 185 Descartes, Rene, 375 Despotism, 15, 17, 30, 33, 38 Dialectic of Enlightenment , 53, 58, 133, 172, 184, 185, 273, 280–282, 285, 288

E EarthCommonWealth, 10, 320, 322, 326, 327 Echeverria, Bolivar, 6, 7, 163–176, 178, 180–185

F False needs, 26, 95, 298, 335 Fanon, Frantz, 202, 226 Floyd, George, 128, 155 Freedom, 2, 8, 22, 23, 48–51, 56, 64, 79, 82, 83, 96, 97, 100, 129, 133, 137–139, 142, 144, 146, 151, 159, 164, 173, 175, 194, 196, 203–205, 212, 215, 216,

226–228, 232, 238, 239, 241, 242, 245, 250, 251, 255, 261, 303, 312, 317, 318, 322, 335, 346, 359, 362, 365, 384, 391, 395, 396, 411 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 26, 46, 49, 53, 65, 97, 98, 133, 135, 136, 189, 198, 200, 317, 332, 370, 371 Fridays for Future, 312 Fromm, Erich, 5, 48, 49, 136, 137, 157, 158, 190 G Gabouray, Jacob, 354, 355 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 9, 126, 293, 296–298 Gindin, Sam, 37, 38, 40 Glitch, 11, 354, 355, 364 Global South, 19, 21, 29, 32, 302, 305, 306, 309, 310, 318, 401 Graeber, David, 103, 104, 157, 363 H Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 44, 63, 134, 138, 141, 147, 192, 199, 301 Hedonism, 6, 92, 104 Hegarty, Paul, 356 Hegemony, 3, 11, 37, 159, 253, 255–257, 277, 310, 398 HIV/AIDS, 362 hooks, bell, 389, 391, 392 Horkheimer, Max, 9, 48, 53, 54, 58, 70, 133, 146, 172, 185, 189, 193, 271–273, 278–288, 290, 292–295, 297, 298 Human Rights, 10, 301–313 Husserl, Edmund, 192, 193, 195 I Instincts, 26, 96, 98, 99, 105, 109, 110, 135, 139, 175, 198, 227,

INDEX

228, 317, 335, 370, 371, 373, 376, 385, 395 International Criminal Court, 302, 312

J Jacoby, Russell, 194, 198, 200

K Kant, Immanuel, 48, 56, 65, 139, 212, 216, 267–269, 273 Kellner, Douglas, 33–35, 57, 72, 78, 97, 98, 101, 102, 108, 194, 221, 222, 241, 279, 280, 316, 317, 320, 336 Keynesianism, 94, 105 Kirchheimer, Otto, 9, 279–281, 283–285, 287–290, 292, 293, 295, 298 Klein, Melanie, 8, 87, 254, 258–263, 269–271, 276, 277 Kovel, Joel, 264, 265, 276

L LaBelle, Brandon, 359, 362, 363 LGBTQ2S, 11, 351, 360 Luke, Timothy W., 8, 254–257, 263–266, 274, 276, 277

M Macintyre, Alasdair, 204 MacLean, Nancy, 22, 23, 25, 34 Mahmoud, Mahmoud, 190 Marcuse, Herbert Aesthetic Dimension, 226, 335, 350 Counterrevolution and Revolt , 16, 32, 74, 76, 77, 117, 323, 336–338, 350, 354, 356, 358, 360, 365

417

Eros, 83, 135, 200, 345 Eros and Civilization, 26, 70, 98, 101, 115, 135, 136, 198, 215, 216, 320, 335, 351, 370, 404 Essay on Liberation, 61, 70, 73, 92, 95, 96, 101, 102, 109, 110, 139, 146, 156, 201, 316, 319, 337, 338, 372, 373, 395, 396, 402, 411 Great Refusal, 5, 41, 72, 129, 147, 151, 359, 373 Historical Fate of Bourgeois Democracy, 16, 24, 33, 34 Negations , 70, 77, 81, 93, 129, 198, 199, 204, 334, 346 new sensibility, 11, 82, 139, 199, 200, 373, 396, 397 One-Dimensional Man, 2, 3, 8, 19, 22, 36, 57, 70, 71, 73, 78, 84, 95, 96, 105, 111, 121, 123, 126, 127, 129, 138, 146, 202, 203, 213, 239–245, 247–249, 258, 259, 261, 263, 264, 296, 297, 332, 334, 335, 351, 360, 368, 369, 372 Reason and Revolution, 70, 75, 191, 194, 195, 204, 205, 238 Thanatos, 115, 136, 394 Marcuse, Peter, 11, 404 Marx, Karl, 7, 24, 26, 42, 48, 70, 77, 91–93, 98, 124, 126, 128, 131, 132, 140, 144, 150, 167–173, 175–181, 184, 189, 192, 197, 219, 220, 312, 323–325, 330–332, 335, 336, 338, 343 Mills, Charles W., 135, 264, 265, 277, 366 Music, 11, 19, 201, 224, 226, 228, 339, 340, 350, 352–355, 361, 363

418

INDEX

N Neoliberalism, 2–6, 8, 9, 16–20, 22–30, 32–35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 69, 79, 80, 89, 93, 94, 102–104, 106, 110, 121, 126, 127, 129, 148–152, 154, 157, 159, 257, 258, 278, 280, 356 NGOs, 82 Noise, 10, 11, 319, 350, 354–359, 361, 363, 364 O Obama, Barack, 117, 143, 242, 246–248, 250 Occupy Wall Street, 153 One-dimensionality, 8, 71, 106, 217, 226, 249, 254–258, 262–266, 273, 274, 276–278, 352, 360 Oppression, 8, 64, 69, 100, 108, 155, 170, 201, 207, 228, 242–244, 247, 249–251, 305, 313, 322, 367, 381, 391, 398 P Panitch, Leo, 29, 36–38, 40 Piccone, Paul, 8, 188, 189, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201, 254–258, 263–266, 274, 276, 277, 286 Populism, 2–5, 17, 23, 26, 69, 80, 112, 114–117, 125, 128 Left-wing, 5, 69 right-wing, 77, 79, 80, 83, 114, 123 Post-racial, 8, 241–247, 250, 252 Potere al Popolo, 5, 69, 76, 85, 86 Praxis, 4, 35, 44, 58, 59, 62, 63, 108, 114, 128, 164, 168, 169, 183, 185, 188, 194, 201, 208, 214, 222, 223, 230, 238, 250, 396 Protestant work ethic, 319 Psychosis, 263, 265, 275

R Rabi’, Hamid, 190 Racket theory, 9, 280, 283–285, 288, 290, 293, 296, 297 Reagan, Ronald, 18, 22, 33, 121 Reich, Wilhelm, 48, 133 Reitz, Charles, 10, 42, 101, 315, 319, 322–324, 326 Repressive desublimation, 7, 57, 97, 105, 106, 134, 214, 224, 226, 227, 229, 351 Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 192–194, 198

S Sanders, Bernie, 37, 38, 40, 154, 401, 403, 404 Schemata, 254, 268–271, 278 Semiotics, 6, 165–168, 174, 176, 181, 183, 185 Sensibilities, 9, 11, 38, 40–42, 76, 82, 84, 91, 101, 109, 138, 139, 159, 225, 318, 336–339, 346, 350, 358, 360, 365, 366, 368–373, 379, 385, 387, 395–398, 411 Serres, Michael, 357 Social networks, 5, 83–88 Srnicek, Nick, 5, 69, 76, 77, 81, 82 Streeck, Wolfgang, 24, 33, 34, 37

T Technology, 5, 26, 75, 83–86, 89, 200, 202, 203, 222, 255, 285, 294, 298, 318, 322, 325, 345, 354, 358 Telos (journal), 7, 187, 188, 191, 196, 206, 208, 209, 221 Thaemiltz, Terre, 361 Thatcher, Margaret, 18, 22 The Authoritarian Personality, 5, 46, 47, 190

INDEX

Trump, Donald, 17, 19, 27, 33, 34, 46, 47, 65, 84, 111, 112, 114–124, 127, 155, 311, 403, 407, 410

Weber, Max, 101, 132 West, Cornel, 34 Williams, Alex, 5, 69, 76, 77, 81, 82 Wolin, Sheldon, 16, 42 Wretched of the Earth Collective, 108 Wright, Erik Olin, 40, 41

U United Nations, 303, 307, 308

V Veblen, Thorstein, 293–298 von Hayek, Friedrich, 22

W Web 2.0, 84, 85

419

Y Yanomami, 10, 330, 338, 339, 341–347 Z Zakariyya, Fouad, 195, 201, 202, 205, 207 Zapatistas, 149