The Actual Legacy of the Frankfurt School & Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

Professors Jeremy Cohan and Benjamin Serby explore the influence of the Frankfurt School on the New Left and discuss what the left today can draw from Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (and what it should leave in the past).

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[adamkeeney]

Why do your scholars have the cadence of 14 year-old girls from the San Fernando valley? It's really like um striking.

[sunalwaysshinesonTVs]

We're talking about critical theory, Frankfurt School & Marcus... so I think an appropriate comment give this forum would be, I really like Serby's back half-filled book shelf backgrounds. In addition to a new twist on the partial object, it's also a nice twist on the contrived groomed bookshelves, with the one or few prominently displayed titles.

[robbibittybob]

I think Marcuse's best feature is his admission that ODM is an analysis of tendencies rather than a definitive prophecy. Its refutation is baked in; he admits fully that the affluent society could collapse under its own weight and the tendencies could reverse, the contradictions becoming explosive again. In this way ODM is the strongest indictment of Social Democracy and the golden age of capitalism written.

Another strength of the book is Marcuse's careful efforts to materialise thought itself. The book is a negative work, and the famous passage describing freedom is negative, because the way society is ordered and how we are all mobilised does not permit a horizon, another dimension.

In order for a new mode of thinking to emerge proper, the totalising capitalist system has to go; think of the passage where Marcuse imagines a world suddenly without advertisements.

[pauljackson]

M. takes a despairing idea - absorption of revolutionary class consciousness due to capitalism's powers of absorption (hedonism/individual rebellion in culture, reform in politics) - w/o total despair. Read it awhile back. Guess: he criticized 'beats' as bourgeois individualistic, v liked 60s rebellion as a political movement that seemed to embody his "great refusal."
Important, challenging read - this podcast can't substitute for the book.

[fredwelf]

I didn't really like this presentation. I felt that Marcuse's revolutionary marxism was omitted, that is, that Marx was a revolutionary above all in his mature works which Marcuse identified. Marcuse in 'Reason and Revolution' addresses how consciousness is essential in the activity of ideology critique which Marx describes in the "German Ideology." Marcuse focussed on Marx's important categories of alienation, consciousness and labor but disagreed with the traditional interpreters of Marx that the economic reductionism was primary. Marcuse points out how consciousness is above the economic analysis which is not unimportant. The main issue is why the revolution has not occurred, what a revolution would look like in terms of strategy and tactics and its policy goals. The last thing anyone wants is a fascist police state led by authoritarian courts.

[RobinHerzig]

Thanx for helping me better digest Marcuse. I love it.

From Marx to earlier 20th century labor strikes to the Frankfurt School to Occupy + Bernie keep us learning, thinking, moving thru the left space but we still aren't making enough of a dent on the ground. We support organizing + finding DSA-style politicians… but more tactics leading to long-term strategic improvements in our lives is where we ought to be.

[Walker-lddn]

I kept waiting for Moon Zappa to be called next. Where did he learn to speak? Like really?

[capitalistrealism]

Listening to Benjamin Serby had a hint of what Terence McKenna would be if instead of Botany he was doing Marx studies.

[patrickholt]

To what extent was the Cuban revolution a point of reference for Marcuse? Given that it began with bourgeois and student putchists doing caudillismo, who for a variety of personal and contextual reasons converted themselves to Marxism in the process of pursuing revolution and guerilla war against then Batista dictatorship.

The British New Left, per New Left Review and Ralph Miliband, overwhelmingly embraced the Labour left, and the 2nd International tradition of the Labour left pursuing electoralism as a means to mass political education and transformative reforms such as to increase working class organisation and power and diminish bourgeois power, rather than parliamentarism as an end in itself predicated on seeking class peace. The people who had left the CPGB didn't do so to retire from politics. They recognised the need to build the class and the class's main party, and to persuade it leftwards. That being the same as the long-term strategy of the CPGB and current CPB, after the naval-gazing debacle and opting out of politics of Democratic Left, it can't be said that the mainstream of the British New Left even differed from the CPGB on the British road to socialism.

[thedualtransition]

The Frankfurt School rejected historical materialism and political economy, calling it Marxist is like calling a burger without a patty a "non-patty burger". Many were employed by the US state (some the OSS the forerunner of the CIA) while in the US (maybe it should be called the Washington School), and much of their funding came from rich Americans, which would not have happened if they had kept the centrality of economic class. Gramsci integrated culture and materialism, most of the Frankfurt school were explicitly anti-communist. So we get "critical;" theory without the central dimension of class, nicely defanged.

[oeautobody]

Definitely critical people, so depressing.

[dkblack]

I used to think that Jacobin was a genuine left, but its a CIA outfit.

[HenriettaKerr-gu]

Garcia Steven Johnson Susan Lee Cynthia

[geoffreynhill]

Yes, it's a pity Capitalism hasn't collapsed but it's getting there. 😉