Class & Economy as Practices of Power:Herbert Marcuse

One-Dimensional ManCh. 1 & 2

“This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing.”

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Herbert Marcuse• 1898 – 1979• Student of Heidegger, broke

w/him over Heidegger’s Nazi party membership, immigrated to US from Germany in 1934

• Worked for US gov’t during & immediately after WWII

• Member of Frankfurt school• Taught at Columbia, Harvard,

Brandeis, UCSD• Mentor of Angela Davis, “Father

of the New Left”

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Marcuse

• One-Dimensional Man– Neo-Marxist social criticism– The absence of the critical dimension– The prevalence of false consciousness– Western totalitarianism– Modes of thinking as an instrument of power– Existential concerns: transcendence & authenticity

• Ch. 1: Western totalitarianism• Ch. 2: The loss of the negative dimension in politics &

society

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What is totalitarianism?

• The permanent and total mobilization of society and the individual in the defense of “the state”– NOT just government

• Totalitarianism “is not only a terroristic political coordination of society, but also a non-terroristic economic technical coordination which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested interests” (3)– Terror– “Technology”

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“Technical Society”

• In the west, “Technical progress, extended to a whole system of domination and coordination, creates forms of life (and of power) which appear to reconcile the forces opposing the system, and to defeat or refute all protest in the name of freedom from toil and domination.” (xliv)

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A Fully Integrated Society

• The full integration of state, economy, and society thwarts criticism:– The social order has integrated even concepts &

agents that were meant to negate and oppose it– “society”, “individual”, “class”, “private”, “family”– “With the growing integration of industrial society,

these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms.” (xlvi)

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A Fully Integrated Society

• “In this society, the productive apparatus tends to become totalitarian to the extent to which it determines not only the socially needed occupation, skills, and attitude– but also individual needs and aspirations. It thus

obliterates the opposition between the public and private existence, between individual and social needs.” (xlvii)

• The individual self is thus fully mobilized in the service of the state

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False Consciousness

• True and false needs:– True: food, clothes, company, shelter, to be free

insofar as possible from suffering, ugliness, & toil– False: “those which are superimposed upon the

particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice.” (5)*

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False Consciousness

• Example: Relaxation.– Work is hard and unpleasant– You need to relax.– Vacations are expensive.– Work & save.– Buy & buy.– Now you’re broke. Back to work.– Work is hard and unpleasant.– “euphoria in unhappiness” (5)

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False Consciousness

• “No matter how much such needs may have become the individual’s own, reproduced and and fortified by the conditions of his existence; no matter how much he indentifies himself with them and finds himself in their satisfaction– they continue to be what they were from the beginning

—products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression.” (5)

• “Private [mental] space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality.” (10)

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False Consciousness

• How to distinguish false from true needs?– No judge can do it, it would be reprehensible.– It must be left to the individual “if and when they are free

to give their own answer.” (6)– But they are NOT free.

• Thus, the more this process proceeds, “the more unimaginable” it becomes that “individuals might break their servitude and seize their own liberation.”

• “All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude.”

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Positivism

• This is in part because of the triumph of positivism– “The concept is synonymous with the corresponding

set of operations.”– Example: length. What about justice?

• “Many of the more troublesome concepts are being eliminated” because they cannot be operationalized. (13)– “debunking of the mind”– Reason brought to earth, incorporated

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One-Dimensional Thought

• Criticism becomes impossible. Lacking a “negative” dimension to criticize “positive” thought, the status quo appears perfectly rational.– The objective good of progress and efficiency– Justice justice system– Free institutions those of the free world– “Does not the threat of an atomic catastrophe which

could wipe out the human race also serve to protect the very forces which perpetuate this danger?”

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One-Dimensional Thought• The pattern of one-dimensional thought & behavior either deflects

ideas, actions, feelings that transcend it, or reduces them to its own terms.– Reason and religion both tamed, co-opted

• Example: freedom. Don’t people choose freely? Who is to contradict them?– But the availability of choice here is not the issue. That is a non-critical

understanding of freedom• Free election of masters abolishes neither masters nor slaves• Free choice of goods & services is not free if these gods & services sustain social

controls over a life of toil and fear• Doing what you want isn’t freedom if your wants are given to you by the forces of

your exploitation. That you want that just demonstrates the efficacy of the controls (7-8)*

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So What?

• In the past, constant labor was necessary• Now, technology has rendered this unnecessary,

also opening new political possibilities– Where once life was a struggle to dominate the

world, there is now the possibility of its pacification• “the development of man’s struggle with man and nature,

under conditions where the competing needs, desires, and aspirations are no longer organized by the vested interests in domination and scarcity”

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So What?

• However, while there exists a trend toward this consummation of technology, there are “intensive efforts to contain this trend within the established institutions.”– Technology becomes an instrument of domination

rather than liberation, of servitude rather than freedom. This is the “irrational element in its rationality.”*

• “Life as an end is qualitatively different from life as a means.” (17)

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So What?

• What is being lost?– Freedom FROM the economy

• The individual exists only as an economic unit– Liberation from politics over which the individual has

no real control• Democracy is not, in fact, rule by the people. It is only

insofar as elections are thought to be equivalent to power– Freedom of Choice?

– Freedom of individual thought, unrestrained by manufactured “public opinion”

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The unification of opposing forces• Political parties

– In the name of profit and against the Enemy– Applies both to US & USSR

• Classes– To maintain the comfortable society

• Labor & industry– A shared interest in long-term corporate profitability

• Is this stabilization temporary, painting over the roots of conflict, or is it permanent, having transformed the very basis of social conflict?– Systematic effects– The elimination of negative potential

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Nullification of Labor

• Laborers, who once lived in contradiction & negation of the system, are now integrated– Sticks: Technological unemployment, outsourcing,

speed-up– Carrots: Lifelong benefits (retirement, etc.) cause

workers to identify their own interests WITH the company• Even to the extent that they will surrender increased

wages to ensure continued profitability– Co-optation of labor interests

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Revolution: Impossible

• In order for fundamental social change (revolution) to occur, the laboring classes must be “alienated from this universe in their very existence, that their consciousness is that of the total impossibility to continue to exist in this universe… Thus, the negation exists prior to the change itself…” (25)– Labor no longer alienated; its critical (negative)

dimension is gone

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Revolution: Impossible

• The promise of an ever-more-comfortable existence for some and brutality for others makes it impossible to imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse & action

• The current system is supremely able to contain & manipulate subversive thought & action

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The Professionals & Bosses• Professionals are integrated ever more systematically

– Interdependence of professions• Striking has no effect

– Reliance on machines• Computers store the knowledge once held by humans• Mechanized production means laborers less necessary

– Proletarianization• Example: store clerks, university lecturers

• Even owners and bosses are integrated, becoming less makers of decisions than corporate administrators– Behind the veil of vast corporate & government administration,

responsibility dissolves and there is no place to affix responsibility, resentment, or anger

– Who governs? Who leads?

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Life as a thing

• Labor, organizers, administrators, management all lose negative potential– They plan, they administrate, but “the decisions

over life and death, over personal and national security are made at places over which the individuals have no control.” (32)

• No one decides, no one chooses, they only function.

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Life as a thing

• “The insanity of the whole absolves the particular insanities and turns the crimes against humanity into a rational enterprise.” (52)– 5 million deaths is rationally preferable to 10

million.• But this is only a single insanity within a greater system

of insanity.

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Life as a thing

• “The growing productivity of labor creates an increasing surplus-product which ... allows an increased consumption—notwithstanding the increased diversion of productivity.”– Work Consume Work– As productivity increases, why don’t we work less?

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Life as a thing

• “As long as this constellation prevails, it reduces the use-value of freedom: there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the “good” life.” (49)– Use-value of freedom? Efficiency• Freedom not good for anything• Happiness ≠ Freedom

– Who defines “good”?

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Life as a thing

• “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing.” – It doesn’t matter “if the thing is animated and

chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing.” (33)

• The human administered, managed like equipment

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That’s crazy talk.

• “The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of forces which prevent their realization.” (4)

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For next time: Freudian terms

• Id/ego/superego• Eros/erotic – joining together, not necessarily sexual• Pleasure Principle – the id seeks pleasure above all• Reality Principle –the id’s pleasure-seeking is

thwarted by the external conditions in the world• Sublimation—erotic energy redirected away from

sex due to reality principle• Thanatos—the drive to destroy, aggression