Abstract
One-Dimensional Man (hereafter ODM) articulates the crisis of Marxism in an era which seemed to refute the Marxian theory of history and socialist revolution. Marcuse challenges some of the basic postulates of Marx’s theory, while using Marxian categories and method of analysis and critique. The result is a reconstruction of Marxian theory which questions such central features of Marxism as the theory of capitalist crisis and the revolutionary role of the working class in making possible socialist revolution. Marcuse subtitles his book ‘Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society’, but roots his critique of culture and ideology in an analysis of the socio-economic foundation of ‘advanced industrial society’. Consequently, the book produces a theory of society that uses the Marxian method of analysis to produce a radical critique of contemporary capitalist and Communist societies, culture and ideology.
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Notes and References
Since I accept the feminist critique of sexist language, I am extremely uncomfortable with Marcuse’s concept of ‘one-dimentional man’. However, since this is one of his distinctive concepts, I am forced to use sexist language in explicating it, although I believe that contemporary critical theory should not use such terminology. In Marcuse’s defence, it might be noted that he himself became an ardent feminist, and as early as 1962 participated in a dialogue on women’s liberation. See ‘Emanzipation der Frau in der repressiven Gesellschaft. Ein Gespräch mit Herbert Marcuse and Peter Furth’, Das Argument, 23 (October–November 1962), pp. 2–12. In the 1970s Marcuse participated in a women’s study group and published an essay on ‘Feminism and Socialism’ which I shall discuss in 10.3. In the light of Marcuse’s early sympathies for feminism and later deep commitment, it is ironic that he should use sexist language as the title and central concept in one of his most important works. This phenomenon points to how sexist language was simply taken for granted before the work of the women’s movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, to the extent that even a progressive thinker like Marcuse would use the generic ‘man’ to describe the human species.
ODM is one of the classical texts of the critical theory developed by the Institute for Social Research, and many of its key ideas were elaborated during his work with the Institute. But since Marcuse’s 1941 essay, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’, presents themes which Horkheimer and Adorno developed later in Dialectic of Enlightenment, one should grasp the convergence of ideas in the thinking of core members of the Institute and the mutual interaction in the development of their basic ideas, rather than simply seeing ODM as a replay of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s problematic.
Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’. Page references to this article, and other articles that I shall use, will be cited in the text.
Marcuse, ‘Epilogue’, second edition of R&R (New York: Humanities Press, 1954) pp. 433ff (page references will appear in parentheses).
Marcuse, ‘Preface’, pp. 11–12. Marcuse begins his preface to Marxism and Freedom by stating that ‘a re-examination of Marxian theory’ is ‘one of the most urgent tasks for comprehending the contemporary situation’, but the claims that while ‘no other theory seems to have so accurately anticipated the basic tendencies’ in capitalist society, none apparently had drawn such incorrect conclusions for its analysis. While the economic and political development of twentieth-century capitalism shows many of the features which Marx derived from the inherent contradictions of the system, these contradictions did not explode in the final crisis’ (p. 7). It is precisely this dilemma that preoccupied Marcuse during the last decades of his life.
See Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (Marx-Studien III; Vienna, Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1910).
See Friedrich Pollock, ‘State Capitalism’, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX, no. 2 (1941).
The first edition of Pollock’s The Economic and Social Consequences of Automation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957).
Alfons Söllner, Geschichte und Herrschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
Serge Mallet’s collection of essays La nouvelle class ouvrière (Paris: Seuill, 1963).
See Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1976);
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964)
Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objects techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1958).
Paul Piccone, ‘The Changing function of Critical Theory’, New German Critique, 12 (Fall 1977) pp. 34f.
Tim Luke, ‘Culture and Politics in the Age of Artificial Negativity’, Telos, 35 (Spring 1978) pp. 55ff;
Hegelian ‘Two-dimensionality of essence and fact’, Zeitschrift, vol. VIII (1939) p. 231.
Rolf Ahlers argues, in an article entitled ‘Is Technology Intrinsically Repressive?’ (Continuum, VIII, Spring-Summer 1970, pp. 111ff),
Marcuse’s reading of Freud in his 1956 Frankfurt lectures is more pessimistic than his reading in EC, and directly anticipates the theses of ODM (compare EC with 5L, pp. 1–43). Marcuse now minimizes those elements of what I call an ‘anthropology of liberation’ in EC and the utopian dimension of emancipation for emphasis on what might be called an ‘anthropology of domination’ and theory of social control which explains how society comes to dominate individuals and to produce easily manipulable objects of administration.
Marcuse’s analysis comes close to behaviourism and ‘role theory’ here in his assumption that behaviour is increasingly shaped directly by societal institutions and dictates as individuals adjust to prescribed and prevailing social roles and conformist behaviour without friction or resistance. Although Marcuse describes tendencies towards increased social domination in EC, his commitment to a Freudian anthropology of liberation and acceptance of the Freudian concept of the autonomous ego — which developed as a psychological theory the dominant philosophical concept of the subject from Plato through to existentialism — kept him from assuming the possibility of total social control. It is interesting that in ‘Progress and Freud’s Theory of Instincts’ (see 5L, pp. 28ff), Marcuse uses certain aspects of the Freudian theory to demystify idealist theories of absolute freedom and total autonomy of the ego and begins to anticipate the very obsolescence of the limited freedom postulated in the Freudian theory — consequences that he will explicitly develop in his 1963 lecture, ‘The Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man’, which provided much of the anthropological foundation of ODM (see 5L, pp. 44ff).
Marcuse, ‘Obsolescence of the Freudian Concept of Man’. This is a key essay, articulating Marcuse’s turn from the anthropology of liberation in EC to an anthropology of domination in ODM. Given the relative obsolescence of the Freudian theory, Marcuse makes less use of it in his 1960s and 1970s writings than during the period of EC. An exception is his return to a more explicit use of Freud’s instinct theory in The Aesthetic Dimension.
Marcuse, 2018 De l’Ontologie’, p. 54.
In ‘De l’Ontologie’, Marcuse claims that his study focuses on ‘certain tendencies at the foundation of the most evolved industrial societies, especially the United States’ (p. 54). And in ‘Socialism in Developed Countries’ (pp. 139ff) he claims that ‘I am referring only to the most advanced centres of industrial society and to trends which have by no means fully emerged. Even in the United States they are little more than tendencies, but I am convinced that they are, as it were, infectious and will quite swiftly spread through the capitalist atmosphere to less advanced countries’ (p. 140). In ODM, Marcuse tends to claim that he is analysing tendencies from advanced industrial societies per se, but almost all of his examples come from the United States. See the interesting exchange between Mallet and Marcuse over whether the United States is or is not the most typical ‘advanced industrial’ country in Praxis, vol. 1, nos. 2/3 (1965) pp. 377–87. To describe the current form of contemporary capitalism, I have not chosen the term ‘monopoly capitalism’, since I believe that there are significant differences in the current form of ownership and management in today’s multinational corporations, conglomerates, interlocking directorates, etc. from earlier stages of monopoly ownership and control. I also reject the standard Marxist term ‘late capitalism’, which smacks of ideological wish-fulfilment that capitalism is about to pass away and humanity is about to enter the socialist realm of freedom. At different times Marcuse uses the terms ‘advanced capitalism’, ‘late-capitalism’, ‘monopoly capitalism’ and Hilferding’s term, ‘organized capitalism’.
See Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’, and John Fry, Marcuse: Dilemma and Liberation (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978) p. 100.
Conversations with Ron Aronson, Detroit, April 1980. Note in the passage translated from ‘De l’Ontologie’ that Marcuse claims that the analyses of American social scientists and journalists that he cites are ‘purely ideological and neglect the analysis of the fundamental processes’ (p. 54); this analysis Marcuse intends to provide in ODM. For Marcuse’s opinions on a wide variety of American social theories, see his article, ‘Der Einfluss der deutschen Emigration auf das amerikanische Geistesleben’, in Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, X (Heidelberg, 1965) pp. 27ff.
George Lichtheim, New York Review of Books, 20 February 1964;
Ernest van den Haag, Book Week (26 April 1964); Marshall Berman, Partisan Review, vol. 31 (Fall 1964);
Marshall Berman, Partisan Review, vol. 31 (Fall 1964);
Julius Gould, Encounter (September 1964)
Alasdair MacIntyre, Dissent, vol. XII (Spring 1965)
Raya Dunayevskaya, The Activist (Fall 1964);
Karl Miller, Monthly Review, vol. XIX (June 1967);
David Horowitz, International Socialist Journal, vol. IV (November–December 1967).
Klaus Mehnert, Moscow and the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975).
Allen Graubard, ‘One-Dimensional Pessimism’, Dissent, vol. XV (May–June 1968)]
Irving Howe, ‘Herbert Marcuse or Milovan Djilas?’, Harper’s (July 1969).
George Kateb, ‘The Political Thought of Herbert Marcuse’, Commentary (Jan. 1970)
Richard Goodwin, ‘The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse’, Atlantic (July 1971)
Eliseo Vivas, Contra Marcuse (Delta: New York, 1972).
Edgar Z. Friedenberg, Commentary, vol. 37 (April 1964);
Emile Capouya, Saturday Review, (28 March 1964);
Andrew Gorz, Nation (25 May 1964);
R. D. Laing, New Left Review, 26 (1964).
Palmier, Holz, Arnason, and Nicholas, as well as Paul Breines, ed., Critical Interruptions (New York: Herder & Herder, 1970).
J. M. Palmier, Sur Marcuse (Paris: 10/18, 1968);
Tito Perlini, Che cosa ha veramente detto Marcuse (Roma: Ubaldini Editore, 1968);
Herbert Gold, ‘California Left’, Saturday Evening Post (19 October 1968)
Robert W. Marks, The Meaning of Marcuse (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970).
Paul Piccone, Telos, vol. 2, no. 1 (Spring 1969), pp. 15–18;
Russell Jacoby, Telos, 5 (Spring 1970) pp. 188–90;
Robin Blackburn, Telos, 6 (Fall 1970) pp. 348–51.
Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages. Life in the United States 1945–1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982)
Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon (New York: Random House, 1976)
Henri Lefebvre’s Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Arche 1947–62; three volumes)
Dallas Smythe, ‘Communications: The Blind Spot of Western Marxism’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, vol. 1, no. 3 (1977)
See Karl Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, and Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, Marcuse continually reflected on and utilized the early critiques of capitalism by Karl Marx which he applied to contemporary society.
Carol Johnson, ‘The Problem of Reformism and Marx’s Theory of Fetishism’, New Left Review, 119 (January–February 1980) pp. 70ff
Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (MIT: Cambridge, 1971).
The concept of false needs and the distinction between true and false needs has caused much controversy. The Marxian heretic Hans Magnus Enzensberger has argued that consumer needs express genuine needs for pleasure, gratification and possession, but in an often distorted fashion; see The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury, 1974). Marcuse’s student William Leiss has been undertaking a sustained polemic against the concept of false needs. See his book The Limits to Satisfaction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976) and articles in the Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory: ‘Advertising, Needs, and Commodity Fetishism’ (with Stephen Kline) vol. 2, no. 1 (Winter 1978) pp. 5ff; ‘Needs, Exchanges, and the Fetishism of Objects’, vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1978) pp. 27ff; and the exchange between Leiss, Kontos, Macpherson and others in vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 1979). Although Leiss is correct to argue that the terms ‘commodity fetishism’ and ‘false needs’ are usually imprecise, I believe that his own analyses are valuable because they flesh out and give substance to these notions. That is, I believe that Leiss’s analyses of how advertising produces ‘symbolic expectations’ which commodities are to satisfy provide a good framework to specify how advertising produces false expectations which the commodities cannot satisfy and suggest how, in general, the consumer society and consumption produce ‘distorted’ (a term that Leiss does use) expectations and satisfactions. Thus I believe that Leiss’s quarrel with his theoretical father-figure is semantic and that it makes sense to concretize and clarify concepts like ‘false needs’ or ‘commodity fetishism’ rather than to discard them prematurely. In general, much more work needs to be done in clarifying the anthropological concept of ‘need’ and the effects of socialization in manufacturing, manipulating or maintaining needs.
Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, p. 11.
Walter Kaufmann’s introduction, ‘The Inevitability of Alienation’, to Richard Schacht, Alienation (Garden City: Doubleday, 1971).
See Schacht, Alienation; Bertell Ollman, Alienation; and Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation. In Chapters 1 and 2, I discuss the differences between the Hegelian, Marxian and existentialist concepts of alienation.
See Schacht, Alienation, pp. 161ff, for a fine discussion of the sociological literature on alienation.
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, in David Cooper, ed., Dialectics of Liberation (London: Penguin, 1968).
Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’, in David Cooper, ed., Dialectics of Liberation (London: Penguin, 1968). Marcuse’s concept of alienation here is quite similar to that of Erich Fromm, with whom he had some sharp disagreements over Freud and other issues (see Chapter 6). See Fromm, Escape From Freedom and The Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955), discussed in Schacht, Alienation.
Jeffrey Schrank, Snap, Crackle and Popular Taste (New York: Dell, 1977);
Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’, discussed in Chapter 2. On the concept of ‘radical needs’, see Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (London: Allison Busby, 1976).
Marcuse does not discuss in ODM the so-called ‘new working class’ of managerial and technical personnel described by Serge Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière, or the ‘white-collar’ class which was the topic of so much sociological literature at the time, or the emerging service industries. Consequently Marcuse really lacks a theory of the recomposition of the working class. On this theme, compare C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York: Oxford, 1951) Mallet;
Mallet; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973)
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review, 1974)
Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
Here Marcuse cites studies of automation and mechanized labour by Charles Walker, Daniel Bell, Ely Chinoy, Floyd Mason and Richard Hoffman, and Serge Mallet’s study of the Caltex refinery (ODM, pp. 23–31). It seems to me that Marcuse relies too uncritically on this literature and misinterprets Mallet’s study of the Caltex refinery, which intends to show new forms of struggle in the more automated enterprises by the ‘new working class’. See Mallet, La nouvelle classe ouvrière. Marcuse might also have been influenced by Fredrick Pollock’s studies of automation; see his book Automation, and Giacomo Marramo’s study ‘Political Economy and Critical Theory’, Telos, 24 (Summer 1975) pp. 56ff.
Herbert Marcuse, letter to Raya Dunayevskaya, 8 August 1960. I am grateful to Dunayevskaya for sending a copy of this and other interesting letters, and hope that the Marcuse-Dunayevskaya correspondence will someday be published. Dunaveyskaya continually produced sharp Marxist-Humanist critiques of Marcuse’s theory in the newspaper News and Letters and in her correspondence to Marcuse, whose replies were often interesting.
Marcuse cites Galbraith’s American Capitalism, which discusses the role of the state in advanced capitalism, but he also criticizes Galbraith’s ‘ideological concept’ of ‘countervailing powers’ (ODM, p. 51). In ODM — and also in his subsequent writings — Marcuse has hardly any analysis of the role of the state in managing the economy.
British reviewers attacked Marcuse on this point, claiming that he failed to appreciate the gains won for the working classes by the labour parties and the real differences these parties offered. See George Lichtheim’s review in the New York Review of Books (20 February 1964) pp. 164ff,
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Modern Society: An End to Revolt?’, Dissent, XII (Spring 1965) pp. 239ff. These same critics have criticized Marcuse for a failure to develop an adequate theory of the welfare state.
Marcuse cites Fred Cook’s book, The Warfare State (ODM, p. xvii) and later Seymour Melman’s Pentagon Capitalism (CR&R, p. 9) as important critiques of the military-industrial complex.
Marcuse’s discussion of the Soviet Union in ODM, pp. 39ff, adds little to his discussion in SM, and although he rejects the thesis which proclaims a ‘convergence’ in the nature of Soviet socialist and capitalist societies due to a common industrial-technical base and organization of labour, he does see some similarities and a convergence of interests beneath the differences in the systems. In ‘Socialism in Developed Countries’ he stresses again the similarities between state capitalism and state socialism (pp. 149ff).
Marcuse’s superficial analysis of the Third World and failure to anticipate the importance of Third World liberation movements were criticized in the reviews by Horowitz and Miller cited in note 18.
For conventional Marxian uses of the concept of ideology, see ODM, pp. 120, 145, 188, passim. In other passages, Marcuse uses ‘ideology’ in Mannheim’s sense of ideas and world views specific to a class and social order, in which all philosophy, or any ideas, would be ‘ideology’ (see, for example, ODM, p. 199). These differing senses of the concept of ideology at once reveal the synthetic-eclectic nature of Marcuse’s thought and his view that ideology — in a variety of forms and types — permeates advanced industrial society, which is ‘more ideological than its predecessor’ (ODM, p. 11).
See ODM, pp. 11–12, where Marcuse cites Adorno’s Prisms. Marcuse was extremely impressed with Adorno’s studies of culture and ideology and told me that Adorno’s work became increasingly important for him in the 1960s and 1970s (conversation with Marcuse, 28 December 1978). On Adorno’s theory of ideology, see my articles ‘Ideology’, and `Kulturindustrie und Massenkommunikation’, in Sozialforschung als Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Bonss and Axel Honneth (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982) pp. 482–515.
On the ‘end of ideology’ theory, see The End of Ideology Debate, ed. Chaim Waxman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968) and my discussion in ‘Ideology’.
Marcuse believed that the increased importance of culture and ideology in advanced capitalism in maintaining social stability and in directly shaping thought and behaviour justified an intensified concern with culture by Marxian radicals (conservation with Marcuse, 26 March 1978). The result is that Marcuse and other ‘culture radicals’ have added a cultural dimension to contemporary Marxism that was lacking in most earlier versions, although many critics claim that it is at the expense of an adequate economic and political analysis.
Chapter 3 of ODM can be read as an updating and radicalization of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s ‘culture industry’ theses, in which Marcuse almost completely devaluates the emancipatory potential of art in a society governed by the culture industries. See my article ‘Kulturindustrie’, and the discussion in 10.4 below.
On Hegel’s concept of the ‘unhappy consciousness’ see The Phenenomenology of Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1967) pp. 251ff, and Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1978) which focuses on the ‘unhappy consciousness’ as the key to Hegel’s theory.
See ODM, pp. 73ff. For discussion of Marcuse’s paradoxical inversion of Freud’s concept of sublimation, see Lipshires, Herbert Marcuse, and Horowitz, Repression.
Marcuse’s critique of language is influenced by George Orwell and the Austrian Karl Kraus (ODM, pp. 177, 196). For a discussion of Marcuse and Orwell, see Ian Slater, ‘Orwell, Marcuse and the Language of Politics’, Political Studies, vol. XXXI, no. 4 (1975).
On Kraus, see Werner Kraft, Das Ja des Neinsagers: Karl Kraus und seine geistige Welt (München: Text und Kritik, 1974).
The emphasis here on historical remembrance and the appeal for preservation of the subversive and emancipatory elements of the cultural heritage are shared by Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch. See Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illumination, and Bloch, The Principle of Hope, discussed in Douglas Kellner and Harry O’Hara, ‘Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch’, New German Critique, no. 9 (Fall 1976).
Schoolman, in The Imaginary Witness, criticizes Marcuse for failing to note progressive and critical elements in the contemporary social science research literature which Marcuse criticizes. Schoolman, in turn, fails to note conservative aspects.
Marcuse cites texts in this section by Wittgenstein, Austin and Ryle, and criticizes as well the neo-positivism of Ayer and Quine.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1960); ODM, p. 174 cites the relevant passages.
Marcuse’s critique here has given rise to a heated debate as to whether ordinary language analysis, especially Wittgenstein’s, is really so completely conservative and conformist. See the articles in the British journal Radical Philosophy, no. 8 (Summer 1974), no. 10 (Summer 1975), no. 12 (Winter 1975), no. 13 (Summer 1976) and an article by Alan Wertheimer, ‘Is Ordinary Language Analysis Conservative?’, Political Theory, vol. 4, no. 4 (November 1976); and Schoolman, The Imaginary Witness.
This notion of philosophical therapy was popularized by the Wittgensteinian John Wisdom in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Interestingly, Marcuse himself proposes a ‘linguistic therapy’ in succeeding works (see An Essay on Liberation, pp. 8ff). But Marcuse would argue that whereas Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy wants to manipulate individuals into accepting everyday usage and into conforming to dominant patterns of thought and behaviour, he is arguing that precisely those conventional norms and patterns conceal or suppress truths contained in more metaphysical and critical philosophical discourse. In effect, Marcuse is calling for a rehabilitation in philosophy of metaphysics and dialectical thinking in the face of its destruction by dominant tendencies in ordinary language philosophy or positivism. Marcuse defends his concept of philosophy throughout ODM and in ‘The Relevance of Reality’, a 1969 presidental address to the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association; the article is collected in an anthology of articles by contemporary philosophers on their concepts of philosophy — The Owl of Minerva, ed. Charles Bontempo and S. Jack Odell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975). The contributions by Quine, Ziff, Wisdom and Ayer show the sort of trivialization of philosophy that Marcuse is attacking and indicates why a thinker rooted in classical philosophy would be appalled by dominant tendencies in contemporary philosophy.
For critiques of Marcuse as a technological determinist, see Steigerwald, Herbert Marcuses ‘dritter Weg’; Claus Offe, ‘Technik und Eindimensionalität. Eine Version der Technokratiethese?’ in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse, pp. 73ff; Langdon Winner, who presents Marcuse as a theorist of ‘autonomous technology’ and ‘technics-out-of-control’ in Autonomous Technology (Cambridge: MIT, 1977); and Schoolman, The Imaginary Witness.
Schoolman also goes wrong by claiming that Weber is the decisive theoretical figure in Marcuse’s theory (pp. 179ff) and implies that Marx’s failure to conceptualize the role of technology kept him from perceiving ‘the most serious form of domination latent in capitalism, which could prevent all further human progress’ (p. 175). In fact, Schoolman fails to see how Marcuse’s appropriation of Weber was mediated through Lukács and the Marxism of the Institute for Social Research and that his synthesis of Weber, Marx, Lukács and varieties of critical Marxism provide the foundation for Marcuse’s theory. I have been stressing the role of commodities, needs, fetishism, ideology and the state in constituting advanced capitalism — all Marxist themes to which Marcuse gives his distinctive formulations — and I shall emphasize Marcuse’s Marxian critique of Weber in this section to try to distinguish the sort of neo-Marxian social theory which Marcuse develops and to show that he is not a technological reductionist or determinist.
Strictly speaking, Marcuse does not exactly provide either a rulingclass analysis like Baran and Sweezy in Monopoly Capital, or a power elite analysis à la C. Wright Mills of the dominant ‘vested interests’. In fact, instead of utilizing the usual Marxian distinction between the ruling class and working class in ODM, Marcuse stresses instead distinctions between the ‘dominated’ and an apparatus of domination. If pushed, Marcuse will answer that, of course, there is a ruling class with distinct class interests behind the technical apparatus; see, for example, ‘Reply to Karl Miller’, pp. 44 — a position that Marcuse consistently takes in his post-ODM writings. On the difference between ‘ruling class’ and ‘power elite’ analyses, see Paul Sweezy, ‘Power Elite or Ruling Class?’, in C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Alan Wolfe in The Seamy Side of Democracy (New York: McKay, 1973) sensibly argues for the usefulness of both approaches in doing social analysis, and this is, I believe, what Marcuse is doing in ODM.
I discuss in more detail the relationship between Marcuse and Max Weber in a forthcoming article on ‘Critical Theory, Max Weber and Rationalization’, which will appear in an anthology on Weber edited by Robert Antonio. For Marcuse’s discussion of Weber, see his 1964 article, ‘Industrialization and Capitalism in the Work of Max Weber’, Negations. For discussions of the connections between the theories of Marcuse and Weber, see Jean Cohen, ‘Max Weber and the Dynamics of Domination’, Telos, 14 (Winter 1972) pp. 63ff,
Gertraud Korf, Ausbruch aus dem ‘Gehäuse der Hörigkeit’ (Frankfurt: Verlag Marxistische Blätter, 1971).
See Vivas’s vicious book, Contra Marcuse, and the bitter critique by Richard Goodwin, ‘The Social Theory of Herbert Marcuse’.
Graubard, ‘One-Dimensional Pessimism’.
For a discussion of Marcuse and other radical thinkers in American social theory during the 1950s, see Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
Marcuse, ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism’, in Marx and the Western World, ed. Nicholas Lobkowicz (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1967).
Marcuse’s affirmative relationship to Marxism, even during the period in which he was writing ODM, comes out in a review of George Lichtheim’s Marxism, published in Political Science Quarterly, vol. LXXVIII, no. 1 (1962) pp. 117–19. While Marcuse praises aspects of Lichtheim’s study, he criticizes Lichtheim’s position that Marxism is now obsolescent and that its concepts ‘are no longer quite applicable to current history’ (p. 117). Marcuse insists that Marxism’s concepts are ‘historical categories which try to define tendencies and counter-tendencies within an antagonistic society’ and thus demand development in terms of historical change. Marcuse claims that the continuing relevance or obsolescence of Marxism can only be determined by ‘an analysis of advanced industrial society and of the structural changes which the development of this society in coexistence with the Communist societies has brought about’ (p. 118). The distinguishing feature of Marcuse’s relation to Marxism is thus his combined attempt to develop Marxism and to criticize those aspects that are outdated through constantly confronting Marxism with historical developments which often require a reconstruction of Marxism.
Marcuse, ‘The Obsolescence of Marxism’. In ‘Socialism in the Developed Countries’, he affirms that ‘the concepts which Marx originated should not be rejected but developed; their further development is already contained in the basic theses’ (p. 151).
See the famous Chapter 32 in Marx’s Capital. For discussion of Marxist crisis theories, see Karl Korsch, ‘Some Fundamental Presuppositions for a Materialist Discussion of Crisis Theory’, in Karl Korsch, and Russell Jacoby’s survey, ‘Politics of the Crisis Theory’, Telos, 23 (Spring 1975).
See Paul Mattick’s article, ‘The Limits of Integration’ in The Critical Spirit: Essays in Honor of Herbert Marcuse, ed. by Kurt Wolff and Barrington Moore, Jr (Boston: Beacon, 1967) and his book Critique of Marcuse (New York: Seabury, 1973)
as well as the article by Mitchell Franklin, ‘The Irony of the Beautiful Soul of Herbert Marcuse’, Telos, 6 (Fall 1970). The problem with these and most orthodox Marxian critiques of Marcuse is that they assume the truth and unquestioned continued validity of Marxism; they fail to see the extent to which Marcuse’s enterprise is rooted in an attempt to reconstruct Marxism to make it possible to provide a neo-Marxist account of contemporary capitalism and the prospects for radical social change.
In his book Marcuse — Dilemma and Liberation, John Fry cites tendencies and empirical research which put in question various theses which Marcuse sets forth in One-Dimensional Man, as does Mattick in ‘The Limits of Integration’.
This position is argued by David Horowitz, Repression, and John Fry (see note 64.) For a discussion of the capitalist business cycle which articulates the presuppositions of both Horowitz’s and Fry’s critique, see Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. This critique exemplifies what might be called the ‘Monthly Review’ case against Marcuse. Harry Cleaver, in Reading Capital Politically (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1979) shows the similarity between Marcuse and the Monthly Review group.
Mattick, ‘The Limits of Integration’, and Fry, Marcuse — Dilemma and Liberation.
Ibid. In the last decade there has been an upsurge of interest in theories of capitalist crisis which have to some extent displaced Marcusean types of theories of capitalist hegemony from the center of radical social theory. On the Marxian theory of capitalist crisis, see the sources in note 62, and for discussions of the current global crisis of capitalism, see Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, The End of Prosperity: The American Economy in the 1970s (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977); the articles in The Economic Crisis Reader, ed. David Mermelstein (New York: Vintage Books, 1975); The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism, ed. Jesse Schwartz (Santa Monica, Cal.: Goodyear, 1977);
Stanley Aronowitz, Food, Shelter and the American Dream (New York: Seabury Press, 1974)
Harry Cleaver, ‘Food, Famine, and the International Crisis’, Zerowork, 3 (Fall 1977);
Dick Roberts, Capitalism in Crisis (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975);
Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975);
the Union for Radical Political Economics, Radical Perspectives on the Economic Crisis of Monopoly Capitalism (New York: URPE/PEA, 1975); and Business Week, ‘The Reindustrialization of America’, 30 June 1980.
In ‘Socialism in the Developed Countries’, International Socialist Journal, vol. II, no. 8 (April 1965), after citing a ‘suspension of antitheses and contradictions within the society, Marcuse writes: ‘Of course, the contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger. Certainly, there has never been such an acute contradiction between the social wealth of the capitalist countries and the use to which that wealth is put. Every available force is mustered to disguise such an antithesis’ (pp. 139 and 140).
In ‘On Changing the World: A Reply to Karl Miller’, Monthly Review, vol. 19, no. 5 (October 1967), Marcuse writes: ‘the reality of capitalist society is its dynamic of antagonistic tendencies at all levels … these tendencies generate the internal contradictions of the system … one such contradiction is precisely that between the (precarious and temporary!) containment of radical social change on the one hand, and the ever more pressing alternative of radical social change on the other’ (pp. 43–4). In ‘The End of Utopia’, he states: ‘Today the classical contradictions within capitalism are stronger than they have ever been before’ (5L, p. 70) — a position that Marcuse constantly takes in his post-ODM writings. In Chapter 9, I shall focus on how Marcuse modified his analysis of advanced capitalism and how he returns, in many ways, to more conventionally Marxian modes of social analysis.
The following books provide historical background and empirical sociological details to Marcuse’s theory of one-dimensional society: Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976)
Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974)
David Noble, America By Design (New York: Basic Books, 1977)
Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America (New York: Basic Books, 1976)
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1978)
Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (New York: Basic Books, 1968)
James O’Conner, The Corporations and the State (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)
Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy (New York: Free Press, 1977); Mark Poster, Critical Theory of the Family; Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and the histories cited in note 19.
Critiques of the one-dimensional society theory are inspired by the labour history appproach of E. P. Thompson, Herbert Gutman and others, who stress resistance to capitalism and autonomous workers’ culture and struggles, as well as theories that continue to affirm the existence of class struggle and a militant working class in advanced capitalism. This approach informs the work of such Left journals as Socialist Radical America, Politics and Society, Zero Work, Cultural Correspondence, and the work of the Marho history group. For a cultural revolutionist, it is curious that Marcuse has never discussed in any detail oppositional culture. On oppositional cultures within contemporary capitalist societies, see Aronowitz, False Promises; Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)
for material on oppositional culture in America, see the issues of Radical America, vol. III, no. 6 (November 1969) and vol. IV, no. 6 (September–October 1970)
Herbert Gintis, ‘The New Working Class and Revolutionary Youth’, Socialist Revolution, vol. I, no. 3 (May–June 1970).
On Chicanos, see Thomas Almaguer, ‘Class, Race, and Chicano Oppression’, Socialist Revolution, 25 (July–September 1975)
Stan Steiner, La Raza (New York: Harper & Row, 1970); among the many books on black oppositional culture, see The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip Foner (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1970). For a discussion of British youth subcultures, which includes some excellent theoretical discussions of class, culture, hegemony and subcultures, see Working Papers for Cultural Studies (Autumn 1974).
‘Capital logic’ theories are associated with the work of Roman Rosdolsky, Paul Mattick, Harry Braverman and others, who posit the logic of capital as the key to historical development. This tendency, like the ideas of Marcuse, seems to conceive of the development of advanced capitalism in terms of the exigencies of capital accumulation and minimizes elements of class struggle and workers’ self activity. See the discussion and criticisms of capital logic theories in Stanley Aronowitz, ‘The End of Political Economy’, Social Text, 2 (Summer 1979).
For analyses of how contradictions within advanced capitalism provide space for struggle, see Aronowitz, ‘The End of Political Economy’; O’Conner, The Corporation and the State; Alvin Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology (New York: Seabury, 1975): and my study of ‘Network Television and American Society’.
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© 1984 Douglas Kellner
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Kellner, D. (1984). Marcuse’s Theory of Advanced Industrial Society: One-Dimensional Man. In: Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17583-3_9
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