Abstract
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 critique of alienated labor in the newly discovered 1844 Manuscripts.
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Notes
- 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.
- 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 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).
- 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).
- 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).
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- 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-popular-capitalism-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.
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 37.
Marcuse, Essay on Liberation.
- 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).
- 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.
- 43.
Lauren Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Internetworked Social Movements,” Sociological Theory, 23, no. 1 (2005): 42–74.
- 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.”.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 49.
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt and Co., 2014).
- 50.
Marcuse, Essay on Liberation, 7.
- 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.
- 54.
Karl Mannheim, “The Problem of Generations” in Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London: Routledge, 1952), 276–320.
- 55.
Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope (London: Polity Press, 2014).
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Langman, L. (2023). Refusals Redux. In: Hines, T., Jansen, PE., Kirsch, R.E., Maley, T. (eds) The Dialectics of Liberation in Dark Times. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22488-1_7
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