THE LEGACY OF HERBERT MARCUSE

...His turn to the underclass—blacks, students, women, the Third World, and so forth—and his effort to derive radical needs from psychological and anthropological (instead of economic) factors was consistent with a theory of revolution that requires a revolutionary subject to represent a complete refusal of capitalist society and a radically new mode of being...

...2. The Theory of Revolution...

...However, like Marx, he tended to dismiss liberal political and economic institutions as mere bourgeois ideology—as structures that prevented the full realization of these values for everyone...

...The orthodox Marxist premises underlying Marcuse's vision and, in part, accounting for its failure, or limits, are the following: 1. The Class Theory...

...Once Marcuse realized that the working class was integrated into society and into the political (electoral) system, he searched for a substitute able to spark a proletariat gone "reformist...

...Could production and distribution be organized so as to retain the articulation of needs through markets, without the system of domination over labor typical both of corporate capitalism and centrally planned societies...

...What is most fateful in the continuity between Marx and Marcuse is their dislike of the institutions of modern civil society and their reduction of these institutions to mere bourgeois culture and capitalist relations...

...To this orthodox Marxist view of modernity, Marcuse added Weber's notion of the "iron cage...

...There is a half-truth in both assertions...

...To be sure, from the standpoint of administered mass democracy, Marcuse displayed a preference for an often idealized model of liberal capitalism, with its intact private sphere, family form, individuality, and autonomous culture...

...is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force...

...Both Marcuse and orthodox Marxists are blinded by their insistence on seeing the institutions of modern civil society—representative democracy, formal law, pluralist forms of association, publics, civil liberties, and the market—as merely efficient modes of legitimizing the repressive state, the manipulative mass media, and capitalist domination...

...Might it not be that attempts to suppress civil society altogether, in the name of revolutionary justice (Jacobinist communism) or national tradition (fascism) represent a new kind of 20thcentury authoritarianism...

...It corresponds to the idea that the successes of the mixed economy of the welfare state have resulted in a "happy consciousness" (material satisfaction without freedom), a series of "repressive desublimations" (permissiveness without satisfaction), and the dissolution of the boundaries between the private, the public, and the social, which were once the crucial loci of critical consciousness...

...2. Could one embed formal law, or legality and due process, in a new system of political relations that would sever their historical connection with both capitalist private property and state bureaucracy...

...The bourgeoisie and the proletariat remain the fundamental classes of modern society for Marcuse, although the bourgeoisie loses its preeminent control of the economy and the state to the "technostructure" (Galbraith's term), while the proletariat cannot carry out its revolutionary mission because its class consciousness is blocked by mass culture...

...Marcuse's idea of happiness as a free play of faculties, reconciliation of man with nature, subject with object—to the exclusion of a concern with institutional forms and political freedom—derives from his concept of alienated labor...

...In other words, the positive and negative aspects of liberal bourgeois society must be distinguished from each other before any thoughtful investigation of the practical developmental possibilities of the former can be examined...

...The typical Marxist critique of Marcuse's onedimensionality thesis has concerned itself with arguing either, (a) that he overestimated the abilities of American capitalism to smooth over contradictions or, (b) that he underestimated the radical potential of the American working class...

...It also explains his affinity with one version of Marx's own model of communism: the model of the Grundrisse, according to which automation abolishes the need for alienated labor, and in which freedom is conceived in the nonpolitical terms of the extension of free time...

...From a philosophical standpoint, Marcuse certainly understood what has been the most precious "gain" of modern civil society—the principle of individual autonomy...

...the modern economic order...

...What would be the ideal combination of democratic self-management at the enterprise level, markets, and long-range planning of goals...

...The overinterpretation of Weber's "iron cage" tends to underestimate and even conceal the structural and historical differences between the United States and the Soviet Union...

...Neither can perceive the specific potentials of, for example, the American capitalist system or the real connection between authoritarianism and modern institutions...

...Its total misery, alienation, and exclusion from society pointed toward the radical revolution demanded by Marxist theory...

...The theory of one-dimensional society postulates the emergence of an authoritarian technological rationality that has freed itself from the particular interests of capital and has become a political force capable of suppressing social contradictions, critical discourse, and radical needs...

...Marcuse even spoke of liberal tolerance as repressive, and (like Horkheimer and Adorno) located the seeds of fascism and the onedimensional universe in liberal capitalist civil society, and in the dialectic of "instrumental reason" it fostered...

...We must also proceed with a theoretical framework that allows one to ask whether it is possible to abolish the structures of domination, exclusion, and injustice of late capitalism while preserving the political and social freedoms of particular civil societies in a new and expanded form...

...4. Finally, does the authoritarian threat to civil 92 society, with its voluntary associations, private law, publics, liberties, and markets stem only from immanent tendencies of the capitalist form of this society...

...Beacon, 1975...

...of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart, this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved...

...But his insistence that all the conditions necessary for emancipation are somehow all there (in both West and East), the stance of "the Great Refusal," remained only an abstract utopian promise unrelated to any identifiable dynamics of the societies in question...

...Instead of responding to statism with the myth of the abolition of power through direct democracy (a myth on which domination feeds), how about a multiplication of counter powers within a plurality of participatory frameworks—and a multifaceted representative structure, to compliment a combination of selfmanagement, markets, and planning in the economic sphere...

...In short, the fine line between apology and "the great refusal" must be carefully drawn, and the ridiculous cries of "reformism" by the ultraleft and the orthodox Marxists must be ignored...

...This is unpalatable to many Marxists...

...Marcuse adopted Weber's cynical assessment of representative democracy and interpreted his concept of legitimation along the lines of the historical materialist conception of ideology...

...He concurred with Marx in embracing the underlying universalistic values of modernity (freedom, equality, and so forth...

...Ironcially, the vision of the abolition of both civil society and the state, and the idea of the transformation of politics (seen solely as the domination of man by man) into the administration of things, generates an ideology (Soviet Marxism), which, against all of Marcuse's intentions, legitimates those statist societies that exercise the most total domination over alienated labor...

...They have begun to develop a theory of how political crisis in a welfare 2 Cf...

...Indeed, he was not entirely unsuccessful in this regard...

...One could argue that from the beginning, and without change, the entire thrust of Marcuse's antipathy toward capitalism sprang from his emphasis on the concept of labor and the critique of alienated labor...

...One can get out of this theoretical morass only by taking seriously the original (but undeveloped) Marxian insights into the contradictory nature of all the institutions of modern civil society...

...But these critics miss the mark, to the extent that Marcuse's theory of onedimensionality must be seen precisely as a response both to the "failure" of the proletariat to accomplish the mission appointed to it by Marxism, and to the undeniable continuing success of capitalism in reproducing itself...

...Insofar as alienated labor is the crucial issue, political alienation and political domination seem to be derivative phenomena...

...This generated a completely one-sided analysis that implied that total emancipation required the abolition of civil society —of its economic, political, juridical institutions...

...4. The Critique of Civil Society...

...Throughout his life, Herbert Marcuse endeavored to develop a theoretical analysis of the dynamics of contemporary capitalist society that would have practical relevance as well as explanatory value...

...3. Is political domination inherent in the existence of political power, or in its monopolization by the state apparatus...

...91 flict-free extension of technical reason to all of society, and this was supposed to account for the failure of the Marxist project...

...The mutual attraction, in the 1960s, between politically active radicals searching for the means to comprehend their society and Marcuse's penetrating analyses of the structure, ideology, and dangers of late capitalism created a powerful synthesis that gave the New Left many of its distinguishing characteristics...

...Some contemporary critical theorists, by making the institutions and norms of the public sphere, civil society, and politics the focus of their investigations of late capitalism, have made a decisive first step in this direction...

...the works of Claus Offe, "Political Authority and Class Structures: An Analysis of Late Capitalist Societies," International Journal of Sociology 2: 73-107, and Jurgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston...

...To be sure, Marcuse's personal discomfort with the current state of affairs distinguished his work from all apologies for either late capitalist or state socialist societies...

...3. The Primacy of Labor and the Economy...

...state both continues and replaces traditional economic crises, by analyzing the new structural contradictions inherent in state interventionism and the problem of legitimation that it creates...

...This posing of the question certainly agrees with the spirit of Marcuse, if not with the letter and logic of his work...

...It is futile to find refuge from the cul-de-sac of "Marcusianism" in a revived orthodox Marxism...

...Weber's concept of rationalization and bureaucracy was then overinterpreted as a smooth conI Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribners, 1979), pp...

...I INTEND TO SHOW, indeed, that there is a connection between Marcuse's seemingly romantic critique of industrialism (albeit a future-directed one) and Marxism...

...181-82...

...The theory of one-dimensional society is the core of Marcuse's work...

...This provides the key to his attack on both Soviet Marxism and Western capitalism...

...In short, isn't the demand for the participation in power in all areas of society the only sensible way of combating the disciplinary structures of domination in both civil society and the state...

...All the 20th-century revolts against civil society, from above and below, indicate that only an institutional continuity with what is best in its heritage can allow us to raise the question of emancipation in a way that does not turn into its opposite...

...Now that Marcuse has died, it is well worth the effort to take another look at what he wrote, and to ask: in what way does Marcuse's mode of theorizing remain pertinent to the analysis of American society by a left that intends to be both democratic and socialist...

...But we must take the next step, and analyze some of the political and cultural traditions (antistatism, pluralism, regionalism, religion, modes of individualism, and for forth), which inform American life and activate social protest, on the right as well as the left, against the state and corporate-capitalist control...

...But Marcuse's peculiar combination of a Marxist orthodoxy with an unfortunate reading of Weber's concept of rationalization produces a version of neo-Marxism that, although initially attractive, is no longer fruitful...

...He also realized if only at times, that the truth of political liberalism lay in the double notion that at least some aspects of society must remain independent of state penetration, and that the autonomy of individuals (and, for that matter, groups), and their so-called rights or civil liberties do not derive from the state and therefore cannot legitimately be abrogated by it...

...These questions cannot be handled by a theory that envisions an apocalyptic revolution that sweeps everything before its path and creates a totally new, transparent, conflict-free society...

...So is the convergence theory and technocracy thesis (similar to those of Galbraith and Bell) implicit in the analysis of advanced industrial society in Soviet Marxism and One-Dimensional Man...

...SOME OF THE QUESTIONS to be considered, then, are: 1. Is the dynamism of the economy in modern civil society located in the capitalist form of private ownership or in market mechanisms that can be distinguished from it...

...Perhaps it would be more fruitful for the left to question both in terms of their interrelation rather than their opposition...

...Certainly, American capitalism is beset with significant contradictions and conflicts...

...Thus, rather than questioning the premises of the class theory, Marcuse preferred to blame a derailed history for the failure of the Marxist project in the West...

...To Marcuse, the proletariat was the revolutionary class par excellence, because it embodied the absolute negation of bourgeois society...

...I would say that the most significant, new, non-Marxist element here—Marcuse's ability to positively validate the needs of non-workingclass strata and to recognize their potential—is vitiated by his retention of the notion of a unified, revolutionary subject...