Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was one of the German émigré intellectuals who came to the USA between the two World Wars, settling ultimately in California where he taught and wrote political and social theory. Although his scholarly reputation was founded at least as early as the 1941 publication of his major study of Hegel, Reason and Revolution, his real fame came in the 1960s when he was taken up as an intellectual leader by the radical student movement in the USA.
Working within Marxism, Marcuse was always more interested in the ‘humanist’ or ‘early’ Marx, whose concern for the alienation of modern society was much nearer Marcuse’s interests than the ‘economist’ Marx of Das Kapital. The books that earned Marcuse his role in the American radical movement were those like One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization which concentrated more on the emotional and ideological constraints of modern mass society than the straightforward analysis of class struggle and economic exploitation.
In fact Marcuse quickly realized the great difficulty of fitting a Marxist class model to American society, where the relative affluence of blue-collar workers, especially if they were white and northern, and their conservative and racist social views made them, for him, poor material for a proletarian uprising. He was concerned for such status groups, but more because he felt they were suffering a false consciousness in striving to satisfy needs implanted by the media and advertising agencies in the interests of an inhuman and over-materialist economy. Marcuse’s own hopes were for a new form of revolutionary class forged out of those, blacks, students, ecologists, anyone who was cut loose from the basic acquisitive economic structure, who would fight for human liberation from both capitalist and state socialist systems. His own work on Russia, Soviet Communism and Russian Marxism, had convinced him that the Marxist revolution as practised in Eastern Europe was every bit as dehumanizing as capitalism, and this semi-anarchist position was perfectly fitting for the Vietnam-anxious radicals of the period. In some ways his work is almost closer to libertarianism than to Marxism and, despite the death of the cause that made him famous, still stands close reading as an alternative radical critique of high-technology society.
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