Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse (1898 – 1979)

    Seeing the title of the previous post ("Six Dimensional Man") reminded me that I had a book upstairs by Herbert Marcuse called "One Dimensional Man" that I had never read; never even opened. Marcuse rocketed to world fame in the nineteen sixties, together with Hannah Arendt, as leading thinkers of the New Left. Perhaps it had belonged to my brother Peter (1944–1965). 

    This morning, while brewing my morning coffee, I brought the book down and took it out into the conservatory to read with my coffee. I could not make any sense of it. Even the title baffled me. Was it good to be one-dimensional, or bad? Did one-dimensional mean narrow, or focussed or obsessional. On page 50, half-way through a long paragraph, there was a line of type that had been carefully scored out, in ink. Had it not been scored I would have stumbled on that line, for it did not fit with the preceding line; nor did it fit with the following line. So my predecessor was right: there was a whole line of extraneous type inserted in the middle of the page. That rather knocked my confidence.

    The second-last chapter was titled "The Catastrophe of Liberation" –– and seemed oxymoronic.  I flipped through the final Conclusion, and put the book down defeated; and disappointed. My weary 83 year-old brain was not up to that sort of turgid prose writing and error-prone typography.

    Seeing my problem, the ingenious Google imp quickly found and proffered a 30 minute video [Ref.1] in which Bryan Magee interviewed the 79 year-old Marcuse, brilliantly revealing the important question raised by the Frankfurt School in 1930, two or three of the key answers they came up with in subsequent decades all carefully and cogently expounded by the aging Marcuse. I shall try to summarise [a] the question, and [b] the answers; then [c] turn to critique. (But I do recommend the video [Ref.1]). 

[a] The question raised by the Frankfurt philosophers was: "Why did Marx's proletarian revolution against capitalism not produce communism (as Marx had predicted), but produced instead the monster of fascism? And, after the (military) defeat of fascism, the present chaotic loss of values. 

[b] Obviously, society adapted.  On the one hand the proletariat changed; it was no longer true that "it had nothing to lose but its chains"; it had acquired many comforts and benefits, and it was better educated.  Capitalism also changed. It learned to manipulate the un-conscious and sub-conscious minds of its customers (the proletariat), creating false goals and selling empty dreams. But 'alienation' remained; the work of the average worker is unrewarding. The proletariat might even own shares, and thus the 'means of production', but it does not control the company; that is the role of the bosses earning grotesque salaries. 

[c] Critique. 

(i) Marcuse remained a loyal Marxist, in spite of the fact that all Marxist regimes were corrupt and brutal dictatorships, and in spite of the numerous and extensive corrections and modification that Marxism required in the mid-twentieth century. He remained a devotee of young Marx, sincerely believing that the ideal community involved sharing, co-operating and a 'subsuming of the Self'. (As, of course, did Buddha and Jesus.) Did Marcuse perhaps underestimate the strength and ubiquity of selfishness, and the role of 'Self' in concepts like liberty and libertarianism? 

(ii) Magee suggested that it is impossible to integrate individual egos into a class-based theory. Marcuse categorically disagreed. He had explicitly attempted (In "Eros and Civilization", 1955) to add Freud to Marx. But, while such an integration is highly relevant and necessary, it is a giant task. It may be that Marcuse only half succeeded. Economic theorists prefer to model individuals as motivated by rather simple forces like need, greed, fear, habit. The truth is absurdly more complex. 

(iii) Magee asked Marcuse why the philosophers of his school wrote such unreadably turgid prose. One might point out that these German philosophers all became refugees, living in the USA, writing and lecturing in a language that was not their mother tongue. Marcuse added Adorno's defence: that the Frankfurt School believed that the 'establishment' had so manipulated the language and syntax of social discourse that arguments automatically came out in their favour.  For example, people will tend to vote for 'liberty', till they eventually realise that 'regulation' better protects them from other people's liberties. To combat that deliberate manipulation, these philosophers felt driven to circumlocution and neologism. 

(iv)  Magee asked what positive benefits accrued from the Frankfurt School's updating of Marxism. Marcuse suggested that it provided, under the name of Critical Theory, a way of understanding the woes of our present post-capitalist Western society, claiming that while getting richer and more technically competent, we are getting more brutal, selfish, and dishonest. Magee suggested that this was a philosophy of disappointment.

(v) But (and this is my question, not Bryan Magee's) is Western society less happy now than in the nineteenth century?

   Anna Berry built a "constantly moving happiness machine" [Ref.2], to mimic and ridicule that created by the Techno-Military-Industrial-Complex, whereby the proletarian finds himself meaninglessly turning a handle, creating profit for someone else. 

References

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23Ho0m_Sv0. "The Frankfurt School – Herbert Marcuse & Bryan Magee

[2] https://www.annaberry.co.uk/the-constantly-moving-happiness-machine/