{"id":174404,"date":"2020-12-07T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T12:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=174404"},"modified":"2020-12-05T07:19:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T07:19:45","slug":"marcuse-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/12\/marcuse-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Marcuse Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty years later,\u00a0<\/em>One-Dimensional Man\u00a0looks more prescient than its author could have imagined.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Herbert Marcuse – Alchetron<\/p><\/div>\n

23 Nov 2020 – <\/em>When Herbert Marcuse\u2019s\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0appeared fifty years ago, it was a revelation. To many of us who were becoming the New Left, Marcuse reflected and explained our own feeling of suffocation, our alienation from an increasingly totalitarian universe that trumpeted its freedom at every moment.<\/p>\n

We had grown up in it, we had encountered it in Allen Ginsberg\u2019s\u00a0Howl<\/em>; but until\u00a0One-Dimensional Man,<\/em>\u00a0we could scarcely understand, let alone describe, it. A student of Marcuse\u2019s, I wrote at the time in Radical America that the book was \u201ca major step in our breaking out of that closing universe. By naming it, by helping us to get conscious of it, by conveying its overwhelming power, [Marcuse] helped us to define ourselves in opposition to it\u2014total opposition.\u201d<\/p>\n

He spoke to a deep sense of alienation.\u00a0\u201cThe pure form of servitude,\u201d he wrote, is \u201cto exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if the thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing.\u201d Moreover, \u201cFree election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201csociety without opposition\u201d Marcuse described was mobilized against the enemy to the point of threatening all-out nuclear destruction. It was based on the \u201csupreme promise\u201d of \u201can ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action.\u201d Their \u201cmany liberties and comforts\u201d only \u201cperpetuated and intensified\u201d their \u201csubjection to [the] productive apparatus.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we read\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0today, do we not again and again seem to be encountering the society in which we live?<\/p>\n

The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation\u2014liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable\u2014while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefaction; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although products of the Cold War and containing many themes that are now outdated, these lines still have an aura of prophecy about them.<\/p>\n

Unlike his equally alienated colleagues Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Marcuse never lost his revolutionary outlook. He insisted on the technical and historical prospect of human liberation, even if no movement was demanding it.<\/p>\n

He believed even Marx\u2019s eschatological vision was not radical enough: the society\u2019s actual capacities far exceed any emancipation Marx might have imagined. In spite of the book\u2019s negativity, it is not hard to find the utopianism underlying\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>. In this sense\u00a0An Essay on Liberation<\/em>, published five years later, was already implied in 1964.<\/p>\n

Referring to Civil Rights demonstrations, Marcuse writes hopefully of \u201cthe substratum of the outcasts and outsiders\u201d: \u201cThe fact that they start refusing to play the game may be the fact which marks the beginning of the end of a period.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the early 1960s Marcuse could not see any political force demanding that the society use its capacities for what he called \u201cthe pacification of existence\u201d\u2014a life free from domination, scarcity, and unnecessary toil.<\/p>\n

But this would change shortly after the publication of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>, as the New Left exploded onto the scene with its deeper demands for liberation as well as black-white equality and an end to the war in Vietnam. Marcuse embraced us.<\/p>\n

And we embraced him in return. Marcuse was not only a striking analyst of politics and culture but also a writer of towering intellectual authority. How remarkable that the great philosophical work of the American New Left was penned by a German Marxist born in 1898 who had participated in the revolutionary events of 1918\u201319.<\/p>\n

The demanding pages of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>, which sold more than 300,000 copies in its first edition, are steeped in Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, Marx and Freud, as well as the avant-garde classics of modern culture.<\/p>\n

Marcuse\u2019s perspective integrates them all: the deepest hopes of humankind form a single civilizational thread. From Plato and Marx to Marcuse: in the classroom he self-consciously saw himself as keeping alive the great tradition of Western rationalism, referring to each predecessor as \u201cthe old man.\u201d<\/p>\n

The New Left had to create itself. We lacked continuity with an older radical movement, had no theory at hand to clarify our goals and tasks. So Marcuse\u2019s presence and contributions were essential.<\/p>\n

The support of this dignified grandfather figure speaking with a foreign accent and belonging to the civilization\u2019s great intellectual and political traditions helped us to overcome our tentativeness and defy the parent-figures ruling our world.<\/p>\n

Thus we discovered, despite our youth and seeming marginality, that we too belonged to these traditions. As the philosopher Andrew Feenberg, another Marcuse student, observed, \u201cOur protests were not merely personal, but belonged to history with a capital H.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is little doubt that few readers were able to struggle all the way through\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>, especially the dense philosophical half that critiques \u201cone-dimensional thought\u201d\u2014philosophy of science, linguistic philosophy, philosophical analysis, and the theory of social science.<\/p>\n

But the book\u2019s main argument is clear enough. Although its subtitle (\u201cstudies in the ideology of advanced industrial society\u201d) is modest, Marcuse self-consciously follows in Marx\u2019s footsteps by updating Marxism to fit capitalism in his own time.<\/p>\n

Historical changes, he argues, have made some but not all Marxist categories obsolete without abolishing rulers or ruled, capitalists or proletariat.<\/p>\n

Two changes are key.<\/p>\n

First, through countervailing mechanisms and practices, capitalism has overcome Marx\u2019s predictions of massive crisis. These mechanisms and practices created a system able to deliver the goods to those at its center while visiting its worst terrors on those at its margins, both within the society and overseas.<\/p>\n

Second, in the process of this overcoming, the proletariat has ceased to be a fundamentally oppositional force: \u201cAssimilation in needs and aspirations, in the standard of living, in leisure activities, in politics derives from an integration in the plant itself, in the material process of production.\u201d<\/p>\n

The starting point of Marcuse\u2019s post-Marxism is strictly Marxist. The change in the consciousness of the working class stems from a change in its\u00a0being<\/em>. The key word is \u201cintegration\u201d: as workers become integrated into the process of production, as their most compelling material needs are met, as they become integrated into the society, that society ceases to experience opposition.<\/p>\n

It becomes one-dimensional. Marcuse asserts the eclipse of the proletariat as the concrete source of opposition at the center of Marxism, as well as the fading of the cultural and religious transcendence built into all previous societies.<\/p>\n

His analysis diverges from the process of production and, at this stage of capitalist history, points to the centrality of culture, of the whole realm of consciousness and the unconscious: the lessening ability to feel, think, and articulate alternatives, whether in fantasy or reality, to the prevailing forms of life.<\/p>\n

At stake is not only the proletariat\u2019s diminished class-consciousness, its incapacity to project a different form of society, but also a broader inability to transcend daily experience in poetry, music, and literature, perhaps even in imagination and daydreams.<\/p>\n

Marcuse\u2019s point is that advanced capitalism\u2019s immense productive power and, already in 1964, media wizardry created a superficially richer yet strictly contained sense of possibility\u00a0within<\/em>\u00a0the system.<\/p>\n

This is joined by and predicated on a profound mood of resignation about alternatives and a decreasing ability to think critically about the dominant way of life.<\/p>\n

The totalitarian direction of the one-dimensional society is wholly compatible with civil rights, a free press, and free elections. In place of exploitation, Marcuse speaks of \u201cdomination\u201d and \u201crepression.\u201d<\/p>\n

He rarely focuses solely on the capitalist class in his discussions, preferring to speak of the \u201cinterest in domination.\u201d He conveys the sense of a smooth, comfortable oppression that has managed to exorcize or repress its contradictions.<\/p>\n

Is the notion of totalitarianism an exaggeration? To be sure, Marcuse is hurling back at the \u201cFree World\u201d its own epithet for the Soviet enemy. But there is more here than an especially pointed barb.<\/p>\n

In describing capitalist societies as totalitarian, Marcuse has in mind \u201cthe total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

By this he means that the Cold War global political and military situation brought corporations and unions together to serve \u201cnational security,\u201d enlisted all cultural institutions from Hollywood to the universities, marked the boundaries of tolerable and unsafe discourse, and generated spontaneous as well as organized policing mechanisms.<\/p>\n

During a period of seemingly endless prosperity, stabilized in the West by its welfare-warfare states, the people of the advanced and advancing industrial world were manipulated into going along with the threat of nuclear destruction and became unable to think in terms of alternatives.<\/p>\n

Yet according to Marcuse there is a deeper source of the society without opposition. Such a society is an outgrowth, more fundamentally, of \u201ctechnology as a form of social control and domination.\u201d By technology, he has in mind Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s definition in\u00a0Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/em>\u00a0(1944): the instrumentalization of nature and of humans.<\/p>\n

This refers both to human oppression of other humans and to the project of overcoming scarcity by dominating nature. Certainly technical progress entails meeting the basic material needs of the vast majority, but it also entails something more: creating the false needs that sustain consumer society.<\/p>\n

The manufacture of false needs predefines the universe of thought and experience; technology thereby becomes totalitarian. \u201cTechnological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nation, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcuse stresses that the totalitarian world is dedicated to \u201cthe progress of self-perpetuating productivity on the basis of oppression,\u201d endlessly expanding the consumer economy that \u201cdelivers the goods.\u201d In serving this project \u201cthe established universe of ordinary language tends to coagulate into a totally manipulated and indoctrinated universe\u201d in which the pleasures of consumption absorb political opposition. An alternative logic is possible, but it can emerge \u201conly in the struggle\u00a0against<\/em>\u00a0the established society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of us young radicals felt unable to tolerate the situation Marcuse described and denounced. Resistance became our vital necessity. Inspired by the courage of the Civil Rights movement, inflamed by the Vietnam War, and fueled by the vague yet thrilling new sense of possibility we discovered among ourselves, we attacked our universities\u2019 and elders\u2019 stifling liberalism. Women among us contested our own and the society\u2019s sexism.<\/p>\n

Although Marcuse did not explore sources of possible resistance to the one-dimensional society\u2014for the foreclosure of serious resistance is one of the main threads of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u2014he immediately identified himself with the student movement when it emerged.<\/p>\n

And soon the phenomenon of Herbert Marcuse was born. Described in a 1968\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>story as \u201cthe foremost literary symbol of the New Left,\u201d he was also its most unlikely media star. More interviews and articles appeared in publications such as\u00a0Psychology Today\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Playboy<\/em>, and an impressive range of prominent intellectuals writing in virtually every language was moved to comment on him and his ideas.<\/p>\n

Celebrity was an odd outcome for an author whose book so darkly captured our alienation. Yet he inspired, encouraged, and outraged with his unsettling blend of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, with his placement of the utopian beside the grimly realistic. Marcuse became fashionable because his complex message made sense.<\/p>\n

Yet no matter how insightful\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0is, it bears a date: written during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, published in 1964. It recalls a world of conformity that is long gone\u2014the prosperous postwar \u201cgolden years,\u201d the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the welfare and warfare state, the high tide of the labor movement in advanced capitalist societies, the American and European belief in progress, the threat and attraction of communism.<\/p>\n

This was the politically passive time just before the Civil Rights movement and the explosion onto the scene of the anti\u2013Vietnam War movement and the New Left.<\/p>\n

The moment of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0passed. In brilliantly capturing that moment, Marcuse mistakenly gave off the sense that it was stable. But communism and the Cold War are over, ended by the Party-state\u2019s inherent blockages and capitalism\u2019s clear economic and political superiorities.<\/p>\n

It turns out that there never was such an entity as \u201cadvanced industrial society.\u201d That society was always capitalism, and the other industrial society, communism, never was able to become advanced enough, one-dimensional or totalitarian enough, to survive the competition.<\/p>\n

The international stasis at the core of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0ended in 1989, along with its paralytic effect on politics, society, and culture. The result: no more enemy, no more moment-to-moment nuclear threat, no more Cold War bipartisan political consensus, no more witch hunts, no more externally imposed harmony between labor and capital.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne-dimensionality\u201d also did not foresee that social movements, already beginning in the early 1960s, might have a transformative effect on the flat, gray American society many of us grew up in.<\/p>\n

These movements made all capitalist societies more diverse, more racially equal, more tolerant, multicultural, and feminist\u2014in key ways, more livable for almost everyone. When women become CEOs of major corporations, same-sex marriage rites become common, government agencies use Spanish, and an African American family occupies the White House, the watchword of our times is no longer \u201cconformity\u201d but \u201cindividual freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marcuse didn\u2019t look for unexpected places where the system\u2019s contradictions might break out. He seemed to have too much faith in domination and too little in resistance, too much respect for the rulers and too little for the ruled.<\/p>\n

But if he failed to anticipate these social and political changes, he did realize that any such changes would become intertwined with a kaleidoscopic and immensely profitable expansion of choices and forms of expression.<\/p>\n

Thus Marcusean analysis is immensely useful in understanding the profusion of tattoos and pornography, the Internet and smart phones, coffee houses and art fairs, T-shirts and jeans, oral sex and divorce, yoga and foreign travel, Twitter and Facebook, Whole Foods and Trader Joe\u2019s, \u201cyour comments\u201d on everything under the sun.<\/p>\n

A combination of movements and markets led to a space freer, more inclusive, more interesting and diverse, and humanly and socially richer than any of us would have imagined upon closing the pages of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thus, on the one hand, Marcuse\u2019s expectations were unmet: we capitalist subjects responded to the repressions and the possibilities within and around us in assertive ways that significantly changed ourselves, others, and the world.<\/p>\n

But, on the other hand, that world has also been shaped by what Marcuse understood as capitalism\u2019s dazzling ability to generate and meet new needs, to deliver the goods and then some.<\/p>\n

The system\u2019s emancipatory possibilities, Marcuse knew, \u201care gradually being realized through means and institutions which cancel their liberating potential.\u201d He foresaw the sexual dimension of this with his notion of \u201crepressive desublimation\u201d: release of sexual impulses in socially tolerated ways\u2014for example, throughout the mass media\u2014that serve, rather than challenge, the existing order.<\/p>\n

Indeed, capitalism co-opts not only sex, but also hipness and tolerance: to young people today, entrepreneurship has some of the same cachet political activism had in the days of the New Left. Far from threatening the capitalist system, the energies released in the 1960s have become vital sources of its expansion and profits, especially in the crisis-ridden years since 1975.<\/p>\n

The cultural and social changes in which we participated not only failed to threaten the capitalist system, but have been happily accommodated by it.<\/p>\n

While capitalism\u2019s absorptive power seems universal, its prosperity is not. Here, again, Marcuse\u2019s analysis shows some wear. Today\u2019s reality contrasts sharply with his premise that the welfare state would remain stable.<\/p>\n

The general prosperity has ended and, especially in the United States and Britain, the ideology of neoliberalism has been fashioned to replace the welfare-warfare state. Those running the system have scrapped the social compact of the Golden Age.<\/p>\n

Wholly unanticipated by Marcuse, we have been living through a revival of class conflict\u2014from above. Inequality is on the rise, labor movements have shrunk and lost much of their political clout, and the direct political power of corporations and the wealthy has increased enormously.<\/p>\n

Against Marcuse\u2019s expectation, there is no overarching administrative apparatus running the show, much of economic life has been given over to unproductive financial speculation, the standard of living of the vast majority is no longer rising, and the gains of rising productivity are being wholly captured by the owners of capital.<\/p>\n

In his post-Marxism, Marcuse could not have foreseen the Marxist paradox we are living: capitalism has proven unable to create an \u201cever-more-comfortable life\u201d for everyone in spite of its unstoppable drive for profit and growth.<\/p>\n

Yet\u2014and, in this respect, Marcuse\u2019s analysis remains prophetic\u2014in key ways today\u2019s society is even more starkly one-dimensional than that of fifty years ago.<\/p>\n

The social-democratic and revolutionary lefts have collapsed throughout the advanced industrial world and in most other places. There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of opposition organizations and movements trying to save animals, clean up the environment, help workers, protect children, support women, remove poisons from food\u2014but no significant opposition to the system as a whole and its way of life.<\/p>\n

Neoliberal capitalism rules nearly everywhere despite all apparent conflicts. The financial meltdown and Great Recession produced Occupy and\u00a0indignados<\/em>, but six years later the world system is unchanged, the culprits have escaped prosecution and, however bizarre it seems, the Tea Party sprang to life by demanding more of the same policies that caused the crisis in the first place.<\/p>\n

Despite the Arab Spring, change in the Middle East seems caught between Islamist fundamentalism and military dictatorship. The possibility of another world is being refuted on the ground.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s \u201csociety without opposition\u201d is unlike Marcuse\u2019s because it lacks an administrative layer, \u201cthe interest in domination,\u201d overseeing the whole. The economy is the whole.<\/p>\n

As the late New Left philosopher Andr\u00e9 Gorz has written, unlimited economic growth, fueled by advertising, fundamentally alters our social world: the economy, which was once only a sub-system of social life with specific and necessary tasks to perform, \u201cswallows up all areas of social activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gorz supplements Marcuse: as the market becomes the meaning and content of everything, as its dynamism overwhelms the stability Marcuse predicted, our \u201cfree society\u201d becomes ever more enveloped by capital\u2019s relentless production of false needs and its co-optation of even genuine opposition. Thus society continues further along the totalitarian path Marcuse anticipated fifty years ago.<\/p>\n

It may be useful to conclude this reflection on\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>\u00a0closer to home, with a discussion of today\u2019s left, especially the Occupy movements that flourished briefly in 2011 and have now mostly disappeared.<\/p>\n

Many observers were struck by Occupy\u2019s refusal to make concrete political demands and by its other novel ways of functioning: camping in public spaces; organizing the dozens of activities needed to sustain an alternative community; avoiding traditional leadership forms by relying on horizontalism, consensus, and the people\u2019s microphone; and holding interminable meetings.<\/p>\n

Obviously a movement so located and structured could not last, and many post-mortems understandably criticized these features.<\/p>\n

But consider the wider context, our one-dimensional societies. There is no meaningful opposition in the political, social, and media worlds; all new forms of opposition become paralyzed before being formed; cynicism infects all politics; even imagining an alternative seems futile.<\/p>\n

The American political system is widely regarded as broken, but this is certainly by intent, so that the government is rendered unable to take effective action on anything that matters, including soaring inequality and corporate domination of the political and legislative process.<\/p>\n

So how can opposition form? How to respond? As Marcuse asked toward the end of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>, \u201cHow can the administered individuals\u2014who have made their mutilation into their own liberties and satisfactions\u2026 liberate themselves from themselves as well as from their masters? How is it even thinkable that the vicious circle be broken?\u201d<\/p>\n

His answer, framed in semi-apocalyptic terms, is a root-and-branch rejection of the existing order and the creation of a \u201cnew sensibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

This means that typical political strategies go nowhere. \u201cThe totalitarian tendencies of the one-dimensional society render the traditional ways and means of protest ineffective\u2014perhaps even dangerous because they preserve the illusion of popular sovereignty,\u201d Marcuse writes.<\/p>\n

Thus, from the point of view of\u00a0One-Dimensional Man<\/em>, most arguments over the strategy and structures of Occupy miss the point. Rather than be recognizably political, a new radical movement would have to\u2014will still have to\u2014be as much about creating a different sensibility and different values as about an effective alternative politics.<\/p>\n

Creating a movement for an alternative is an immense and many-sided task, one that Occupy barely began. But Occupy did begin it. It tried to create a genuine alternative to what passes for democracy today, to reclaim public spaces for a public use, to actively involve its participants, to find ways of keeping them unified, to overcome their habituation to roles of dominance and passivity. It refused to give the media its requisite sound bites and rejected the foreshortened \u201crealism\u201d of the status quo.<\/p>\n

Some critics understood this while Occupy was underway; others didn\u2019t. One who didn\u2019t was Shawn Gude, who wrote in\u00a0Jacobin<\/em>\u00a0of \u201coccupiers\u2019 aversion to politics.\u201d He makes the familiar demand for the political: \u201cacting politically means confronting power, not side-stepping it. It means reshaping existing institutions, not just building alternative ones. It means directly and indirectly engaging the state, not cocooning oneself from it.\u201d Compare Gude\u2019s focused criticism with Matt Taibbi\u2019s more enthusiastic\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0<\/em>appreciation. Taibbi was obviously delighted that Occupy allowed<\/p>\n

people to show how tired they are not just of Wall Street, but\u00a0everything. This is a visceral, impassioned, deep-seated rejection of the entire direction of our society, a refusal to take even one more step forward into the shallow commercial abyss of phoniness, short-term calculation, withered idealism and intellectual bankruptcy that American mass society has become. If there is such a thing as going on strike from one\u2019s own culture, this is it. And by being so broad in scope and so elemental in its motivation, it\u2019s flown over the heads of many on both the right and the left.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What Taibbi appreciated in Occupy is obviously not what Gude or any of us would call a radical politics. He is talking about what Marcuse called the \u201cGreat Refusal\u2014the protest against that which is.\u201d That was the heart of Occupy: the hope and experience of creating an alternative, the creation of a new radical generation, the insertion of inequality and the political power of the wealthy and corporations into political discourse.<\/p>\n

Of course Gude is right: Occupy faded before creating lasting organizational forms or developing strategic bite. And, perhaps even worse, it discouraged and disillusioned many of its participants.<\/p>\n

But Marcuse helps us to see that this dilemma between practical politics and the great refusal means something larger. How can a movement break with this all-absorbing world to demand and create a better one?<\/p>\n

How to encourage people not simply to come together to momentarily create an alternative, but to do battle against the dominant institutions? And in the name of what?<\/p>\n

One-Dimensional Man\u00a0<\/em>teaches us that we need to slow down in making our assessments: before evaluating Occupy politically, and before imagining what its future revivals, offshoots, or follow-ups might look like, we need to understand the scope of the issues it was raising and the depth of the questions it was posing.<\/p>\n

And we need to ask to what extent Occupy\u2019s essential inspiration and features stemmed from its self-creation in this one-dimensional society at this moment in history, which leads us to ask, further, whether its weaknesses were not inseparable from its strengths.<\/p>\n

In the introduction to\u00a0One-Dimensional Man\u00a0<\/em>Marcuse announces that the book will \u201cvacillate throughout between two contradictory hypotheses: (1) that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future; (2) that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society. I do not think that a clear answer can be given.\u201d Fifty years on, after the New Left exploded that containment, after Occupy briefly focused attention on the need for an alternative, the contradiction persists. We are still unable to give a clear answer.<\/p>\n

Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Stanford Encyclopaedia on Philosophy about Marcuse<\/a>
\nWikipedia about Herbert Marcuse<\/a>
\nHerbert Marcuse official homepage<\/a>
\nOne-Dimensional Man<\/a>
\nPaul von Blum at TruthDig<\/a> \u2013 \u201cMarcuse is the greatest but largely unknown philosopher of the mid-20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original – transnational.live<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

23 Nov 2020 – When Herbert Marcuse\u2019s\u00a0One-Dimensional Man\u00a0appeared fifty years ago, it was a revelation. To many of us who were becoming the New Left, Marcuse reflected and explained our own feeling of suffocation, our alienation from an increasingly totalitarian universe that trumpeted its freedom at every moment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":174405,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[232,269,120,276,401,267,2253,260,487,378,234,109,287,118],"class_list":["post-174404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spotlight","tag-capitalism","tag-communication","tag-conflict","tag-democracy","tag-environment","tag-geopolitics","tag-herbert-marcuse","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-journalism","tag-media","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}