Friday, December 31, 2021

FAVORITE VILLAN OF THE CULTURE WAR
What Herbert Marcuse Got Right — and Wrong

Socialists today should learn from Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: in particular, its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings about commodified liberation. But they should leave behind its moralism and despair about change.

Herbert Marcuse, photographed on May 18, 1979. (DPA / Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

12.27.2021


This article is reprinted from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy, a publication from the Jacobin Foundation. 

Few intellectuals have been so closely identified with a social movement as Herbert Marcuse was with the transatlantic New Left in the late 1960s. In 1966, the year One-Dimensional Man was issued in paperback, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) included the book in their political education curriculum, alongside the works of C. Wright Mills, Gabriel Kolko, Paul A. Baran, and Paul Sweezy. Following its translation into German and Italian the next year, it quickly became recognized as “a primary ideological source” for young radicals in Europe, according to Hubert J. Erb in the Austin Statesmen in 1967. In the upheavals that rocked universities during the first half of 1968, Marcuse, the “prophet of the New Left,” was suddenly everywhere. Students in Berlin held a banner proclaiming “Marx, Mao, Marcuse!” — an alliterative slogan more elaborately formulated by demonstrators in Rome: “Marx is the prophet, Marcuse his interpreter, and Mao his sword!” Although dismissed by most liberal critics and increasingly denounced by a motley chorus of conservatives, left sectarians, and Soviet apparatchiks, One-Dimensional Man maintained its position as the “bible” of the New Left through the end of the decade, providing, as American commentator Allen Graubard noted in 1968, a “special philosophical vocabulary” that graced New Left journals “as if it were part of ordinary language.”

This article aims to introduce and critically reevaluate One-Dimensional Man for today’s socialists. We begin with the book’s enthusiastic reception within the New Left, capturing why and how it resonated with a generation of young activists in the 1960s. Marcuse’s resolute moral and political opposition to the destructive direction of late capitalist society helped resuscitate the sense that the status quo was unsustainable and change was urgent. Unfortunately, however, some of the book’s weakest aspects — such as its offering as alternatives to the status quo various paths (cultural radicalism, new subjects of history, ultraleftism) that proved to be dead ends — were often its greatest draws for its New Left readers, something Marcuse himself understood and resisted.

In important ways, the New Left missed core aspects of Marcuse’s critical project that are worth retrieving for today. We turn to reconstructing and evaluating Marcuse’s moral and materialist analysis of late capitalism. We lay out the philosophical basis for his critique and his insistence on the breadth and depth of the moral commitments — to freedom, equality, happiness, reason, and peace — undergirding socialist politics. We then examine Marcuse’s materialist social theory, which raised critical questions about the gap between socialist theory and social conditions in “the affluent society” that resonate in our own moment. Our interpretation emphasizes the overlooked degree to which the “classical” Marxism of the Second International provides the underpinnings of One-Dimensional Man. Marcuse’s materialist analyses of working-class integration through consumerism, a rising standard of living, and the culture industry aimed to explain capitalism’s unexpected resilience and absorptive capacities.

It would ultimately be left both to Marcuse’s contemporaries Ralph Miliband and André Gorz and to today’s socialists to draw out the political implications of Marcuse’s questions and method and to formulate a socialist strategy adequate to the advanced capitalist world. Though he insisted that the basic premises of Marxist social theory remained correct — a distinct and underappreciated quality of the book — a sense of futility with the theory’s practical implications in the present, as well as fidelity to a vision of social change as total historical rupture, drew Marcuse to paint an imaginative but inadequate picture of his moment as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s proverbial “night in which all cows are black,” void of possibilities for radical social transformation.

There are, we suggest, two souls of Herbert Marcuse — on the one hand, the critical and materialist; on the other, the moralistic and defeatist — each with its own significance for today’s activists. We close by suggesting that One-Dimensional Man’s decline from its previous stardom may offer today’s Left a chance to learn from its spirit of protest, its materialist social theory, and its warnings regarding commodified liberation, while leaving firmly in the past its political Manichaeism and culturalist despair.
Guru of the New Left

Hebert Marcuse, a German-Jewish philosopher, lived a turbulent but scholarly life that hardly seemed to set him up to become a household name and “father” to a mass movement. He grew up in Berlin, and though he was politicized by the abortive German Revolution of 1918–19, he soon went to Freiburg to study philosophy under Martin Heidegger. (Marcuse participated briefly in a soldiers’ council during the revolution, and he sympathized with the Spartacist uprising and its assassinated leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.) Blocked in mainstream German academic circles with the rise of Nazism, Marcuse joined the Institute for Social Research (also known as the “Frankfurt School”) and, in the late 1930s, emigrated to the United States to teach at Columbia University. During World War II, Marcuse worked with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), helping to guide the war effort against the Nazis. He eventually returned to teaching, first at Brandeis University and then at the University of California, San Diego, where he became a bête noire of the Right, facing the condemnation of then governor Ronald Reagan.

Among Marcuse’s major writings, his first book published in English, Reason and Revolution (1941), remains one of the best interpretations of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and an expression of the engaged philosophy that he would continue to champion throughout his career. His other most important works were: Eros and Civilization (1955), a synthesis of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud that aimed to historicize modern psychology, investigate the psychic sources of domination, and articulate a utopia of fulfillment and sexual liberation; The Aesthetic Dimension (1978), which argued for the centrality of art, imagination, and sensuality to human emancipation; and, of course, One-Dimensional Man (published in 1964, but substantially finished in the late ’50s), which is the subject of this article.The New Left missed core aspects of Marcuse’s critical project that are worth retrieving for today.

Indeed, it may seem especially surprising that One-Dimensional Man, widely regarded as abstruse and pessimistic in the extreme, should have become so deeply insinuated in the discourse of a mass movement. While Marcuse promised, in his preface, that his argument would vacillate between two contradictory hypotheses — “that advanced industrial society is capable of containing qualitative change for the foreseeable future” and “that forces and tendencies exist which may break this containment and explode the society” — One-Dimensional Man was virtually silent on the second point, ultimately presenting a critical theory of society with no “liberating tendencies” capable of translating it into reality. Reviewers charged Marcuse with overlooking the obvious social ferment in American society at a time of escalating civil rights and antiwar militancy. Others excoriated Marcuse for characterizing the welfare state as a container of radical energies rather than an achievement by and for the working class. Although remarking that “qualitative change appears possible only as a change from without,” Marcuse even expressed skepticism toward the anti-colonial movements of the Third World. This great refusal to name possibilities in the present, this maddening tendency to see all apparent opposition as always already absorbed into and reinforcing the system, followed from the traditional materialist framework of Marcuse’s analysis, on the one hand, and the Luxemburgian quest for a total negation of the existing order — a social force capable of “breaking out of this whole” — on the other.

Ultimately, it is the depth of Marcuse’s quest for revolutionary rupture, and his insistence on its necessity, that accounts for the impact of One-Dimensional Man on the youth of affluent nations. Even if the book suggested that such a rupture was nowhere on the horizon, its account of the domination and repression subtly pervading advanced capitalist society confirmed the unarticulated observations of many newly politicized activists who were, moreover, enchanted by Marcuse’s expansive conception of liberation and his willingness to speculate about a utopian future. While the book’s departures from orthodox Marxism caused less shrewd critics to conclude that he had retreated “into the realm of Hegelian idealism,” the Marxologist George Lichtheim correctly recognized One-Dimensional Man, upon its release, as the introduction of Western Marxism to an American audience. To Lichtheim, the book was “a portent” of things to come, and, indeed, the few hopeful passages in the book seemed to anticipate the social unrest coming from exactly the groups Marcuse identified as “those who form the human base of the social pyramid — the outsiders and the poor, the unemployed and unemployable, the persecuted colored races, the inmates of prisons and mental institutions.” Thus did Marcuse’s elegy for the revolutionary working class intensify an ongoing search for new subjects of world-historical transformation, despite his explicit warnings that no such subject existed.

“It is sometimes said of Marcuse that the students who follow him haven’t the slightest idea what he means,” the Washington Post observed in 1968. Initial reviewers cautioned, “This is not an easy book,” noting its difficult syntax and disquieting aporetic conclusions. The ambiguities of One-Dimensional Man are legion. Does Marcuse’s argument depend, as Alasdair MacIntyre charged, on “a crude and unargued technological determinism”? Is his “technological order” in fact a political-economic system — or not? Does he describe class exploitation, or universal enslavement to the apparatus of domination? While oblique references to “the particular interests that organize the apparatus” evince a class analysis, much of the language in the book — including its very title — aligns with conventional mid-century humanistic discourse. Indeed, while it was possible for one reviewer to describe the book as decidedly not “just one more journalistic work on the alienation of modern man,” R.D. Laing, writing in the New Left Review, drew the opposite conclusion. Anticipating much of the book’s reception, Laing channeled what he took to be the lament at its core: “Will man be able to re-invent himself in the face of this new form of dehumanization?”

To Marcuse’s New Left interpreters, at least one point was unequivocal: the working classes were bought off, a conservative force, leaving, three SDS theorists wrote in 1965, “virtually no legitimate places from which to launch a total opposition movement.” Invoking Marcuse against calls like Bayard Rustin’s for a coalition politics anchored in the trade union movement, these activists looked beyond purportedly oppositional groups that had succumbed to the lures of parliamentarism and the welfare state, calling instead for “a thoroughly democratic revolution” led by “the most oppressed” — those least captured by existing institutions. But while they looked to the urban poor (as opposed to the working class), by 1968, the search for a revolutionary subject that was carried out under the sign of One-Dimensional Man just as often led to college students, disaffected intellectuals, and the “new working class” of salaried technicians and professionals. Within SDS, opponents of the workerist proposals put forward by the Progressive Labor faction “drew heavily on the ideas of Herbert Marcuse” to support an approach to organizing groups outside “the traditional, narrow industrial working class.” In Europe, students cited Marcuse on behalf of their view of the university as a nexus of revolutionary power. For his part, Marcuse at times seemed to encourage this reading. When asked about the radical forces in the world in July 1968, he placed “the intelligentsia, particularly the students” at the top of the list, followed only by “minorities in the ghetto.” They alone — not the working class — resisted incorporation.

This turn away from the labor movement accompanied other shifts in perspective: from “exploitation” to “alienation,” and from class to consciousness, as the source of radical opposition. As one popular underground newspaper, Berkeley Barb, summarized the argument of One-Dimensional Man in May 1968, “Only those groups on the outside of automation and ‘progress’ — the unemployed, the blacks and minorities, the students — think.” Late-1960s enthusiasts of cultural revolution, such as Theodore Roszak and Charles Reich, enlisted Marcuse in their Romantic attacks on consumerism and technology, dispensing with the materialist underpinnings of his analysis and, as Russell Jacoby noted, conflating his critique of instrumental reason with a subjectivist abandonment of reason itself. By a sleight of hand, Roszak cited Marcuse in order to unmask Marxism as “the mirror image of bourgeois industrialism,” guilty of the same soulless hyperrationality as the society it ostensibly opposes. For Reich, meanwhile, the totalizing ideology-critique in One-Dimensional Man had demonstrated that the source of domination is not in the social relations of production but in consciousness, attitude, and lifestyle. “Nobody wants inadequate housing and medical care — only the machine,” he explained:


Nobody wants war except the machine. And even businessmen, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in America. They are all fellow sufferers.

While it is true that Marcuse could hardly be held responsible for these depoliticized corruptions of his ideas, it is telling that he felt compelled to respond to them — more than once.

In fact, Marcuse’s drift away from One-Dimensional Man began almost from the moment it landed on bookshelves, as he attempted, in one historian’s words, “to break out of the theoretical box he had placed himself in with that book.” Writing in the International Socialist Journal in 1965, he declared, “The contradictions of capitalism are not transcended; they persist in their classic form; indeed, perhaps they have never been stronger,” thereby guarding against the impression that advanced capitalism had achieved permanent stability. Speaking to leftist students in Berlin the following year, he waxed enthusiastic about “the militant Liberation movements in the developing countries” and — picking up a theme that would become dominant for the rest of the decade — the alienated youth of the affluent nations. By 1967, he had come to view the counterculture as representing “a total rupture” with the ideology of advanced capitalism, a force heralding “a total trans-valuation of values, a new anthropology” and the development of needs that the existing political and economic system could not satisfy. The student uprisings of 1968 reinforced Marcuse’s growing conviction that “the only viable social revolution which stands today is the Youth” and that “the New Left today is the only hope we have.” So profoundly did this belief in these groups’ emancipatory potential shift Marcuse’s social theory that his 1969 book An Essay on Liberation was initially to be titled Beyond One-Dimensional Man. In the 1970s, even as he worried over the turn to the right (“counterrevolution”) in US politics, he would embrace ecology and especially the women’s movement — “perhaps the most important and potentially the most radical political movement that we have” — as pointing the way to a qualitative break with capitalist society.Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory.

In the final analysis, however, Marcuse consistently maintained that no force other than the working class was capable of achieving the full break with one-dimensional society demanded by critical theory. The student movement, the hippie counterculture, the radical intelligentsia — these were catalyst groups with a “preparatory function.” Their task was not revolution, but “radical enlightenment”; lacking a mass character, they could at best move the broader population from false to oppositional consciousness. Their signal achievement was having called into question “the prevailing structure of needs” and freed “imagination from the restraints of instrumental reason.” Marcuse applauded the New Left but cautiously warned his readers not to overrate its significance. The rebellions in Paris in May 1968, while encouraging as “a mass action,” were not a revolution, and the American campus revolts of that season in no way changed the fact that the situation in the United States was “not even pre-revolutionary.” Even at his most utopian, Marcuse inserted escape clauses like the following:


By itself, this opposition cannot be regarded as agent of radical change; it can become such an agent only if it is sustained by a working class which is no longer the prisoner of its own integration and of a bureaucratic trade-union and party apparatus supporting this integration.

Although he insisted that “the traditional idea of the revolution and the traditional strategy of the revolution” had been “surpassed by the development of . . . society,” Marcuse confessed in 1968, “In spite of everything that has been said, I still cannot imagine a revolution without the working class.”

By the end of the 1960s, it was clear to Marcuse that while the “Great Refusal” he had predicted in the conclusion to One-Dimensional Man had materialized, it was bound to remain a mere gesture — even a reactionary “confusion of personal with social liberation” — if it could not reawaken the working class from its slumber. And yet he was extremely pessimistic about the development of revolutionary class consciousness in the advanced capitalist countries (especially in the United States). For this reason, he strongly condemned New Left intellectuals who sneered at the student movement and retreated into “vulgar Marxism,” declaring in 1970:

To a great extent it was the student movement in the United States which mobilized the opposition against the war in Vietnam. . . . That goes far beyond personal interest — in fact, it is basically in contradiction to it and strikes at the heart of American imperialism. God knows it is not the fault of the students that the working class didn’t participate. . . . Nothing is more un-bourgeois than the American student movement, while nothing is more bourgeois than the American worker.

Statements like this one hastened the death of late-1960s Marcuse-mania. Already in 1968, he was booed by students at the Free University of Berlin for inadequately affirming their excitement about the supposed fusion of Third World and proletarian revolutionary forces. “A Revolution is waiting to be made,” one disappointed former admirer complained, “and he offers us California metaphysics.” A study of campus bookstores conducted in late 1969 found that One-Dimensional Man had been surpassed in sales by the works of Black Power militants, such as Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and a string of paeans to cultural radicalism (Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, and Laing’s The Politics of Experience). Marcuse’s defense of the university, his willingness to condemn violence, his concerns about the “anti-intellectualism” that had “infected” the New Left, and his calls for organizational discipline in the years that followed further diminished his standing. Although more than 1,600 people turned out to see him speak at the University of California, Berkeley, in February 1971, many in the audience were dismayed by his failure to discuss “the joyful possibilities of youth culture.” “I have always rejected the role of a father or grandfather of the movement,” he told Psychology Today. “I am not its spiritual adviser.”

So, what exactly was Marcuse’s theory, as laid out in One-Dimensional Man? How much was it a product of — and subject to the limits of — its time? What remains from the work? We will focus specifically on the social theory of the work, on which Marcuse’s ideology-critique of culture and philosophy rested, which was the book’s greatest influence and is most relevant for left-wing readers today.
Critique

One-Dimensional Man, most of all, is a resolute, unsparing, and honest depiction of a monstrous society, set for destruction, whose possibilities for change seemed far dwarfed by the forces of the status quo. The society Marcuse analyzed had more than enough technological ability to be decent and humane; instead, it teetered on the edge of destruction, preserved deep injustices, and relied on mass quiescence engineered by systematic manipulation. It was a sick, insane society that passed itself off as reasonable and orderly.

Marcuse’s call to radicalism rested on three main diagnoses of mid-century capitalism that have only shown signs of intensifying as the ruling class has tightened control:
Irrationality and destructiveness. The imminent possibility of nuclear war is the shadow that hangs over all of Marcuse’s critique, from the first sentence on. (“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?”) The prosperity and relative peace of the Trentes Glorieuses were purchased at the cost of an unending buildup toward a nuclear war that could annihilate the entire human race. Imperial ventures and the use of defense production to wastefully subsidize the private sector, keeping up profits and employment, trumped the survival of the species as a whole. This imminent destructiveness was also contained in the devastation the consumer society visited on the natural world.

Manipulation and unfreedom. Marcuse believed that some level of general material security and prosperity had been exchanged, in a devil’s bargain, for the broader demands of the socialist movement for autonomy. Workers had little decision-making power in the face of gigantic corporations, elections were organized spectacle rather than an opportunity to realize the will of the public, and the culture industry utilized techniques of mass manipulation to keep people pacified. “This is the pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated 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.” One-dimensionality was compliance in the guise of freedom.
Continuing poverty and exploitation. Despite the advances achieved by the working class of the period, Marcuse would emphasize the continuing poverty amid plenty that characterized the United States especially, and the vast differences between rich and poor countries. Moreover, he would insist that society was holding back the general decrease in working hours that could accompany the mechanization and automation of production.

Marcuse and Classical Marxism

One-Dimensional Man, then, offers the case for the continuing relevance of the Marxist critique of capitalism. But what about the theory’s understanding of collective action and social change? If social change is so urgent, why is society characterized by such a muted opposition? One-Dimensional Man answered by attempting to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse is insistent that an adequate explanation for working-class quiescence will have to be a materialist one. Something deep must have changed in the economy and society for mass consciousness to shift as it has. It is difficult to understand what that thing is, since the mid-century United States was surely still capitalist, characterized by the same injustices and systemic dynamics. Moreover, Marcuse treats as his point of departure what we might call the basic strategic formula of “classical Marxism” (broadly, from Marx and Friedrich Engels through the Second International and ending with the last attempts of international revolution of the early Third International), as the only rational theory for comprehensive social change.

That formula, more or less, runs as follows:

working-class majority + party + crisis = socialist revolution


The emerging working-class majority has particular structural advantages for exercising power, with their numbers, their concentration and accompanying capacity to organize, and the power of their strikes to shut down production and touch the powerful where it most hurts. These workers saw their basic survival, let alone their thriving, as fundamentally threatened by capitalism, and they had the power to tear it down. They needed to be organized into a political party, in order to intervene on the level of the state, to develop a consciousness that things could be different, and to formulate a strategy for how to get there. (Of course, precisely these kinds of mass working-class parties had developed all over the advanced capitalist world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) Finally, the persistence (and possibly radicalization) of generalized capitalist crisis would afford opportunities for dramatic revolutionary change, in which a class-conscious party would lead the majority toward a new, truly democratic order. (This theory sometimes goes by the name of “Kautskyism,” after its authoritative expositor, Karl Kautsky, in The Class Struggle (1892), The Road to Power (1909), and other works.)One-Dimensional Man attempted to provide a materialist social theory adequate to the conditions of the time, not by abandoning Marxism but by developing the theory.

Marcuse argued that the conclusion of the Marxist theory of social transformation still uniquely followed from the premises, but that those premises no longer applied to the world in any obvious way. Some sinister combination of defeat and partial victory had paralyzed politics.

The interesting task of One-Dimensional Man is that, though it accepts both the necessity of fundamental social change — especially given the severity of the threat of nuclear war and the irrational destructiveness of the social order — and the classical Marxist formula of how to get there, it argues that social change has undermined the latter without providing any alternative. (This was a common problem for many heterodox [ex-]Marxists at the time.) It’s a work that admits to being stuck in a way that was both intellectually forthright and so unsatisfying that Marcuse himself — and especially his epigones — would search for easy ways out to escape the dilemma.
The Theory of Integration — Social Democracy as Impasse

Beyond describing these matters and giving force to the kind of impossible frustration they must cause in anyone who reflected on the matter, Marcuse also laid out a hypothesis as to how this had happened. Marcuse argues that it was precisely the accomplishments of the working class and their institutions in the face of the last crisis that were standing in the way of the further, necessary change. There is perhaps no more powerful analysis of the capacity of capitalist society to absorb opposition and commodify liberation than One-Dimensional Man. Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on “an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.” Another way he had of expressing this was the intertwining of the perfection of the means of production and the means of destruction, pithily summarized in the juxtaposition of the “welfare and warfare state.” Social democracy was, in this view, the enemy of democratic socialism.


One of the main achievements of the working-class movement was its cutting off the logic of immiseration characteristic of the rise of capitalism and creating the power to extract profound concessions from capital in the form of high wages and the welfare state. (It should be noted that Marcuse seems at times to severely overestimate capital’s ability and willingness to accede to these demands in the text.) This increased standard of living, Marcuse insisted, was a real achievement, and was not to be denied as the basis for any real conception of human freedom.

However, this achievement had, for Marcuse, a fundamentally depoliticizing effect in several ways. First, the rising standard of living itself produced a cooling effect. Revolution occurs when, among other things, a subordinate class sees the existing order as absolutely opposed to its life. People revolt for want of bread — give them bread, and they don’t revolt. By giving the working class something to lose besides its chains, and by eliminating total immiseration for the vast majority in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism had made systemic change less likely.Late capitalist society, Marcuse said, was based simultaneously on ‘an increasing standard of living and an increasing concentration of power.’

Consumerism, the form in which this rising standard of living is realized, also, Marcuse argues, blunts working-class politics. This is, first of all, for material reasons. Consumption is atomized, so that the modes of life that once brought working-class people together now help to drive them apart. Working-class popular culture is replaced by a commoditized mass culture. There is, too, an ideological analogue. The system’s demonstrated ability to increase consumption is used to sideline any questions around life’s quality and meaning, the destructive externalities and militaristic uses of the production process, and the increasing concentration of control.

This changing standard of living was also based in changes in the labor process itself that, Marcuse argued, blunted opposition. Marcuse speaks of the mechanization of the production process increasingly relieving work of backbreaking destructiveness, as well as an increase in white-collar work and administration. These diminish the strength of the opposition of the worker to the capitalist and also diminish the leverage of workers. Again, these changes have an ideological analogue: the machine seems to play a role in production independent of any particular capitalist — it appears merely as the product of reason itself, and thus relatively uncontestable.

Finally, there was an overt trade-off between the satisfaction of needs and autonomy. (This is the best way to understand his characterization of “false needs” versus “true needs.”) The labor movement more or less gave up contestation over the prerogatives of management, ceding control of the production process; in exchange, it got greater wages and benefits. Marcuse saw this trade-off on the factory floor as the microcosm of a larger social transformation. Privacy and the freedom to criticize were being hemmed in on all sides. But the offer of greater prosperity and security quashed opposition. This is the basis for Marcuse’s use of the word “totalitarian” to refer to liberal-democratic capitalist societies just as much as Nazi or Soviet ones.

Advanced capitalist society “delivers the goods” to the majority, making questioning and attempting to change the irrational system itself seem totally unreasonable. In some ways, Marcuse simply updated for the advanced industrial world the criticism of Juvenal against the bread and circuses of Rome. Even as capitalism increased the power of the ruling class, exposed individuals to systematic and many-sided manipulation, and condemned the vast majority to alienated work and a still-significant minority to poverty, it also offered a two-car garage and spectacular entertainment. The most powerful and hard-to-counter ideology of the period was built on that basis — things are the way they are because technology and prosperity say so.

Thus, Marcuse provides a materialist theory of working-class integration through the rise in the standard of living (capitalism “delivers the goods”), the changing structure of occupations, and the atomization of the class through consumption. (Indeed, in classic Marxian fashion, it is the workers themselves who produce their own integration and subjugation. That is, it is ultimately their labor, their social action, and even now their consumption that reproduces the conditions of their own comfortable and bland unfreedom.) On top of these mechanisms are built a cultural totality that increasingly invades individual experience. Capitalist mass culture, due to its corporate structure, fundamentally sifts out information necessary for working-class people to get a bearing on how society works and overwhelms the individual with distractions and entertainment. Socialization through mass institutions such as the media reinforces the obstacles toward social change that shifts in capitalist production and the partial victories of social democracy erected.
Insights and Impasses

Some of Marcuse’s insights have become common sense on the Left. For instance, that corporate media systematically narrows the scope of political contestation is the raison d’être for today’s growing left media ecosystem, both independent and through established channels. We know that it is part of our fundamental task to expose how “opposition” parties are anything but when it comes to the sanctity of profits, the blind faith in technology’s ability to solve social problems, and militarism.

There are other insights that seem fresh and alive and worth recovering in light of some of the theoretical problems today’s socialists face. The reorientation of the Left around a program of class-struggle social democracy has allowed it to finally grow and engage with political reality. Marcuse at his best made normative, analytic, and strategic contributions that are worth revisiting in this context.

Let us begin with the normative. One of the freshest aspects of One-Dimensional Man today is its attempt to wed the critique of inequality with critiques of unfreedom, systemic irrationality, and destructiveness. Today’s Left has rightly restored obscene inequality and redistribution to the center of its politics, thereby broadening its base and concentrating its efforts. Still, Marcuse pushes us to remain expansive in our indictment of capitalism by discussing forthrightly aspects of the “good life” that it denies most individuals. Our society’s degradation of the natural world, everyday cruelty and meanness, trivial intellectual culture, boredom, depression, and puritanical preening are not incidental to our criticism but form a core plank of it. Politics and philosophy ought to clarify, not deny, the ordinary ways in which people express their happiness and dissatisfaction. This is a deeply sick society that denies important and ordinary goods to most human beings — liberty, love, satisfaction, security, peace — and it is rational to rebel against it.

Moreover, in cases where the normative and the practical-political are in some tension, we should admit the difficulty rather than elide it. It can be too easy to neglect the most fundamental issues of our, as Noam Chomsky puts it, “race to the precipice” — nuclear weapons and climate change — because they are related in only mediated, complex ways to economic interests. There is a temptation to either engage in empty moral gestures or push the problem aside to a later day. But the difficulty in formulating a concrete strategy around these issues is no excuse. Serious moral thinking and serious political economy must be joined.

Second, Marcuse offers analytic resources for considering what should be the central problem of the day: the separation of the working class from radical consciousness. Much like in the period of the New Left, the Left in the advanced capitalist world is still relatively isolated among the highly educated, despite wide popular appeals of a left-wing economic program. Marcuse both foregrounds the centrality of this question for any radical political strategy and offers a materialist method for analyzing the problem. He began with an analysis of changing class composition to understand the limits of oppositional politics with a narrow base since, however much he welcomed the New Left, he insisted that no fundamental transformation would occur without overcoming obstacles to working-class radicalism. He then offered an intriguing and still relevant hypothesis: that capitalist consumerism integrates through atomizing the neighborhoods, leisure, and general experience of working-class people. The intellectual task for today’s Left is to size up the sources of working-class atomization at work and at home, and to approach these obstacles as organizers.

And while hardly an immediate problem, Marcuse’s analysis of how partial victory can paralyze oppositional forces, and how a high level of capitalist development turned out to mean a low level of revolutionary potential, are absolutely essential for the Left’s long-term strategic perspective. It bears repeating that today’s Left should begin with the analysis of a relatively stable capitalism due to the near elimination of starvation in the advanced capitalist world and the spread of democratic and activist states. Furthermore, the Left should be ready for both severe defeat and partial incorporation. Are there ways that the Left can anticipate these plausible paths and prepare for them? Already, the increasing will to organize on the Left — remarkably well-developed since the Occupy Wall Street days — is a good sign, as organization is essential for maintaining continuity between high and low points of struggle. The rise of member-based organizations with vibrant internal cultures is again a promising development. Most of all, the Left needs to fight for structural reforms that increase the capacity to mobilize in the future and to find ways to plausibly resist the urge to demobilize with victories.

Yet Marcuse also articulated a form of defeatism that has plagued the Left of the advanced capitalist world. Marcuse’s liberatory and socialist message was largely abandoned and repressed with the defeats of the New Left, but his doubts as to the possibility of majoritarian left politics became the common sense of the New Left and the elite liberalism that would follow.

Critics of the strain of gloomy mid-century social theory Marcuse exemplifies often point to how wildly inaccurate the portrait of a fundamentally static world turned out to be. High growth rates, proportional wage growth, high unionization, and more were hardly permanent. But Marcuse was certainly not alone in failing to accurately predict how far we could fall backward. Some variation on the theory of state capitalism was widely held at the time. Everyone missed the possibility of a strong revanchist turn to a seemingly permanently discredited laissez-faire liberalism.

More problematic is Marcuse’s obfuscation of class theory. On the one hand, Marcuse depicts a society ruled by the few, which the vast majority has an interest in changing. As we mentioned, he continually returned to the necessity for working-class action in order to change society. On the other hand, when describing the various mediations that interpose themselves between this basic sociological analysis and late capitalism, he frequently presumes what he ought to prove — that working-class people have been not only effectively adjusted to but have even happily embraced their position in late capitalism. He presumes that the modal consciousness in advanced capitalist society is working-class consent rather than resignation. This has significant consequences for the theory and for organizing. Resignation is a different habit of mind to break through for organizers, which requires different tools than how one might approach the converted.


Some of Marcuse’s contemporaries noted the illicit presumption of working-class enthusiasm for the social order of the day and its quietist implications. In One-Dimensional Man, Marcuse cites a pamphlet by the Trotskyist Marxist-humanists on automation and speedup in Detroit, among other studies on the mechanization of the production process and the bonding of workers to the machine. Yet Raya Dunayevskaya, in her review of One-Dimensional Man in the Activist, would write that Marcuse “leaves out entirely the central point of the pamphlet, the division between the rank and file and the labor leadership in their attitudes toward Automation.” Marcuse supplemented references to this pamphlet with “many references to bourgeois studies which maintain the exact opposite”; Marcuse has “[failed] to hear this powerful oppositional voice at the point of production itself,” and instead chosen to listen to authors who claim that workers have been incorporated; he is wrong to adhere “to the view that the new forms of control have indeed succeeded in containing workers’ revolt.” Even as Marcuse plausibly pointed to the change in workers’ situations as being enough to present fundamental problems for a theory of social change — golden chains are less likely to produce revolutionaries — he less plausibly claimed that the overall reaction to this situation mostly eliminated tension, dissatisfaction, and opposition rooted in the production process, between workers and their bosses. Though he would insist that the underlying conflict of interests remained, the gap between imputed and actual interests threatened to become an abyss.

This provided a basis for New Left activists inspired by his works to reach the conclusion he refused to countenance, that there could be a socialist politics that somehow occurred independent of working-class radicalization. The “cultural turn,” with its overvaluation of interventions into culture and the discourse — and the increasing orientation to middle-class concerns that this implied — was both a plausible implication of Marcuse’s pessimism about integration and at the same time a conclusion he had to refuse given the critical theory of capitalist society. The theory also seemed to countenance a never-ending search for actors who were too marginalized to be incorporated into the system, less because of the moral importance of the flourishing of every human being than the conceit that, there, one might find the “real” revolutionaries. Both these trends are in no way immune to the commodification of opposition characteristic of late capitalist politics that Marcuse himself analyzed.

Moreover, Marcuse’s presumption about the form of political change necessary does not seem to have been subjected to the same critical consideration he insisted on applying to the working class. This vision of revolution is nobly related to the barricades of Marcuse’s youth in the betrayed German Revolution. Yet it is also rather all-or-nothing. The intransigent anti-capitalist consciousness that demanded the narrow debate of the period be burst open also threatened to lead to a kind of apolitical idealism.

This is, again, not unique to Marcuse — the severity of the chasm between the Second and Third International was real enough to facilitate the rise of Nazism. And Marcuse was severely critical of the parties or sects of the Second, Third, and Fourth Internationals. But the weakness of the vision of social change in the idea of the “Great Refusal” is related to Marcuse’s dismissive criticism of the parliamentary participation of the Italian and French communist parties (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI and Parti communiste françaism, PCF) and silence on the civil rights movement. Marcuse had little hope that participation in liberal democratic politics or the achievement of significant reforms could meaningfully shift the dynamics of the system overall (and the totality of the system is what mattered, in the final analysis). He only saw how they served to further integrate the working class into an increasingly powerful system, handicapping opposition before it could really get off the ground.

This led generally to an overvaluation of subjective radicalism and an undervaluation of objective transformation. The hope Marcuse placed in the New Left was that their cultural subversion, aesthetic sense, demand for a less narrow and repressed life, and expanded sense of need could flow over into demand for a transformation of the basic structures of social life, especially the economy. et he seemed to have very little hope that mass politics focused on redistribution could overflow its boundaries in the other direction.

Yet this was hardly the only conclusion one might reach from his premises. Starting from the premises that the working class of the advanced capitalist world was not likely to lead an insurrection, especially given its higher standard of living, while all the same it continued to suffer from alienation, exploitation, inadequate public investment, and diminished democracy, other theorists looked to develop a political strategy on these grounds that did not presume the same subjective integration that Marcuse did. André Gorz in France, influenced by the Left of the trade union movement in Italy, introduced in his Strategy for Labor: A Radical Proposal the idea of “non-reformist reforms” — aggressive measures that took on capital’s prerogatives, built the capacity of labor, and addressed the wide range of needs that were unmet by advanced capitalist societies — as a path forward for the Left. Ralph Miliband in Britain would underscore the importance of this idea for a socialist strategy adequate to the fact that no advanced capitalist state had ever collapsed and that revolutionary dictatorships had hardly proved fertile ground for socialist democracies. Bayard Rustin and Michael Harrington in the United States insisted that mass politics oriented toward (removing conservative obstacles to) expanding a hobbled American social democracy could spill over into fundamental system change. These theorists suggested that the causal arrow could, and indeed must, move the other way, from political action to a deepening of revolutionary consciousness.
Conclusion

We have said that there are two souls of critical theory in Herbert Marcuse. On the one hand, there are roots of what has become a sort of common sense among some of today’s liberals (however little they would be able to trace this to the Frankfurt School): the replacement of interest-based politics by ethics, self-expression, and identity; of class organization by cultural contestation; of majoritarian aspiration by elite pose. This is the long-standing tendency on the Left to flee the dilemmas of organizing a working-class majority in the advanced capitalist world, which is understandable but not tenable. On the other, there is the attempt to preserve and develop a socialist strategy adequate to the transformations of contemporary society — mass politics, the welfare state, the further application of technology to production, and mass media. Indefatigably critical, morally expansive, and analytically materialist, it forthrightly analyzes, and then seeks to overcome, new obstacles to organizing a working-class majority to press for a transition to a new society.




ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jeremy Cohan is the director of the Honors Program at the School of Visual Arts. He is currently writing a book on the political economy of neoliberal school reform in Chicago.

Benjamin Serby writes about the intellectual and political history of the postwar United States. He is currently a visiting assistant professor in the Honors College at Adelphi University.
E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants helped him teach humans about how to live sustainably with nature



Edward O. Wilson in his office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, in 2014.
Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images

December 27, 2021 

E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By the time I met Edward O. Wilson in 1982, he had already made at least five such contributions to science.

Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate. He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies.

Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O. – as he was fondly known – was an academic god for many young scientists like me. This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study.
E.O. Wilson reflects on insect society, human society and the importance of biodiversity in 2009.
Big insights from small subjects

In 1982 I cautiously sat down next to the great man during a break at a small conference on social insects. He turned, extended his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.” Then we talked until it was time to get back to business.

Three hours later I approached him again, this time without trepidation because surely now we were the best of friends. He turned, extended his hand, and said “Hi, I’m Ed Wilson. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Wilson forgetting me, but remaining kind and interested anyway, showed that beneath his many layers of brilliance was a real person and a compassionate one. I was fresh out of graduate school, and doubt that another person at that conference knew less than I — something I’m sure Wilson discovered as soon as I opened my mouth. Yet he didn’t hesitate to extend himself to me, not once but twice.

Thirty-two years later, in 2014, we met again. I had been invited to speak in a ceremony honoring his receipt of the Franklin Institute’s Benjamin Franklin Medal for Earth and Environmental Science. The award honored Wilson’s lifetime achievements in science, but particularly his many efforts to save life on Earth.

My work studying native plants and insects, and how crucial they are to food webs, was inspired by Wilson’s eloquent descriptions of biodiversity and how the myriad interactions among species create the conditions that enable the very existence of such species.

Biologist E.O. Wilson with models of his life’s greatest subject, ants. Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

I spent the first decades of my career studying the evolution of insect parental care, and Wilson’s early writings provided a number of testable hypotheses that guided that research. But his 1992 book, “The Diversity of Life,” resonated deeply with me and became the basis for an eventual turn in my career path.

Though I am an entomologist, I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes.

Throughout his career Wilson flatly rejected the notion held by many scholars that natural history – the study of the natural world through observation rather than experimentation – was unimportant. He proudly labeled himself a naturalist, and communicated the urgent need to study and preserve the natural world. Decades before it was in vogue, he recognized that our refusal to acknowledge the Earth’s limits, coupled with the unsustainability of perpetual economic growth, had set humans well on their way to ecological oblivion.

Wilson understood that humans’ reckless treatment of the ecosystems that support us was not only a recipe for our own demise. It was forcing the biodiversity he so cherished into the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history, and the first one caused by an animal: us.
E.O. Wilson long advocated conserving the world’s biodiversity hot spots – zones with high numbers of native species where habitats are most endangered. This image shows deforestation from 1975 to 2013 in one such area, West Africa’s Upper Guinean Forest. USGS
A broad vision for conservation

And so, to his lifelong fascination with ants, E. O. Wilson added a second passion: guiding humanity toward a more sustainable existence. To do that, he knew he had to reach beyond the towers of academia and write for the public, and that one book would not suffice. Learning requires repeated exposure, and that is what Wilson delivered in “The Diversity of Life,” “Biophilia,” “The Future of Life,” “The Creation” and his final plea in 2016, “Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.”

As Wilson aged, desperation and urgency replaced political correctness in his writings. He boldly exposed ecological destruction caused by fundamentalist religions and unrestricted population growth, and challenged the central dogma of conservation biology, demonstrating that conservation could not succeed if restricted to tiny, isolated habitat patches.

In “Half Earth,” he distilled a lifetime of ecological knowledge into one simple tenet: Life as we know it can be sustained only if we preserve functioning ecosystems on at least half of planet Earth.

But is this possible? Nearly half of the planet is used for some form of agriculture, and 7.9 billion people and their vast network of infrastructure occupy the other half.

As I see it, the only way to realize E.O.’s lifelong wish is learn to coexist with nature, in the same place, at the same time. It is essential to bury forever the notion that humans are here and nature is someplace else. Providing a blueprint for this radical cultural transformation has been my goal for the last 20 years, and I am honored that it melds with E.O. Wilson’s dream.

There is no time to waste in this effort. Wilson himself once said, “Conservation is a discipline with a deadline.” Whether humans have the wisdom to meet that deadline remains to be seen.

Author
Doug Tallamy
Professor of Entomology, University of Delaware
Disclosure statement
Doug Tallamy received funding from NSF 2015 for research on Chickadees.

10 weird creatures found in the deep sea in 2021

Shapeshifting fish, ghostly jellies, stunning cephalopods and more.

By Harry Baker 

If you're looking for bizarre creatures that defy explanation, there is no better place to look than the deep sea. Every year, researchers capture incredible footage of alien-looking animals and strange new species lurking in the deep, and this year was no different. Here is our list of the top 10 weirdest deep-sea creatures seen in 2021.

Blood-red jellyfish













This mysteries red jelly may be a new species previously unknown to science, NOAA researchers say. (Image credit: NOAA)

In August, researchers with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the discovery of a brand-new and unnamed species of blood-red jellyfish. The dark red jelly likely belongs to the genus Poralia, according to the researchers.

They first spotted the new jelly on July 28 using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) at a depth of around 2,300 feet (700 meters) just off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island. Other animals, including other cnidarians (jellyfish & corals), ctenophores (comb jellies), crustaceans and Actinopterygii (ray-finned fishes), were also seen on the dive.

Lots of deep-sea creatures have evolved a similar red color because red wavelengths of light do not penetrate into the deep ocean. This means that red animals appear black because there is no red light to reflect back toward potential predato














A glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) was spotted by researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute in the deep sea of the Central Pacific Ocean. (Image credit: Schmidt Ocean Institute)

Also in August, researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI) released footage of an elusive glass octopus (Vitreledonella richardi) off the coast of the remote Phoenix Islands, an archipelago located more than 3,200 miles (5,100 km) northeast of Sydney, Australia.

The translucent cephalopod was originally discovered during a 34-day expedition of the Central Pacific Ocean onboard the SOI's research vessel Falkor. Onboard scientists spotted the creature using the ROV SuBastian, which spent a total of 182 hours scanning the seafloor during the expedition.

Like other "glass" creatures, such as glass frogs and certain comb jellies, glass octopuses are almost completely transparent, with only their cylindrical eyes, optic nerve and digestive tract appearing opaque.

Read more: Elusive glass octopus spotted in the remote Pacific Ocean (Video)

Shape-shifting whalefish














An elusive whalefish was spotted 6,600 feet (2,013 meters) deep offshore of Monterey Bay, California. (Image credit: © 2021 MBARI)

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) released footage in August showing a bright orange, female whalefish (of the order Cetomimiformes) around 6,600 feet (2,013 m) deep offshore of Monterey Bay, California.

Very little is known about this bizarre fish because of the three drastically different appearances of the juveniles (tapetails), males (bignoses) and females (whalefish). The three forms look so different that scientists originally thought they were three different species. The shape-shifting transformation from juvenile to mature females is believed to be one of the most extreme among any vertebrates.

"Whalefish have rarely been seen alive in the deep, so many mysteries remain regarding these remarkable fish," the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute tweeted.

Read more: Shape-shifting fish that confounded scientists for 100 years spotted off California coast

'Emperor Dumbo'

























The newly discovered Emperor Dumbo octopus (Grimpteuthis imperator). (Image credit: creative commons)

In May, researchers reported the discovery of a brand new species of Dumbo octopus (Grimpteuthis imperator), nicknamed "Emperor Dumbo" by the researchers.

Researchers discovered the adorable creature in 2016 when they accidentally dragged it to the surface in a net while aboard the German research vessel Sonne during an expedition of the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea. Dumbo octopus species can be identified by the umbrella-like webbing joining their tentacles and their cartoonishly ear-like fins that resemble the oversized ears on Disney's famous elephant.

"It was a really lucky find," Alexander Ziegler, a researcher at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Bonn, Germany, and chief scientist onboard the research vessel, told Live Science, "because we weren't really looking for it. Plus, the whole animal came to the surface intact."

Read more: All hail 'Emperor Dumbo,' the newest species of deep-dwelling octopus

Real-life SpongeBob and Patrick



The real-life SpongeBob and Patrick side by side on the seafloor. (Image credit: NOAA Ocean Exploration/Christopher Ma)

In August, NOAA released a comical photo of the real-life counterparts of the cartoon best friends SpongeBob Squarepants and Patrick Star side-by-side on the seafloor.
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The image of the square(ish) yellow sponge and five-pointed pink sea star were taken by an ROV on July 27, at a depth of 6,184 feet (1,885 m) during an expedition of the Retriever Seamount off the coast of New England.

"The sponge is [in] the genus Hertwigia and the sea star is [in] the genus Chondraster," Christopher Mah, a marine biologist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History who first made the comparison on Twitter, told Live Science. The exact species is unclear, and they could even be brand new to science, he added.

Read more: Real-life SpongeBob and Patrick found side by side on seafloor. But they likely don't get along.

Alien-like spindly squid


NOAA scientists captured footage of a rare bigfin squid in the Gulf of Mexico. (Image credit: NOAA Ocean Exploration)

In November, NOAA scientists spotted a rare bigfin squid (of the genus Magnapinna) with an ROV during an expedition in the Gulf of Mexico.

The ghostly squid has a very odd body plan with huge, iridescent fins and bizarre elbow-like bends in its tentacles. "All of their arms and tentacles have this long, spaghetti-like extension," Mike Vecchione, a research zoologist with the NOAA Fisheries National Systematics Laboratory, can be heard saying in the NOAA video footage. "It's really difficult to tell the arms from the tentacles, which is very unusual for a squid."

To date, there have been fewer than 20 confirmed sightings of this deep-sea cephalopod since it was first discovered in 1998.

Read more: Eerie video captures elusive, alien-like squid gliding in the Gulf of Mexico

Giant phantom jellyfish

A giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea) was caught on film by MBARI scientists in Monterey Bay. (Image credit: © 2021 MBARI. )

In November, MBARI released rare video footage of a giant phantom jellyfish (Stygiomedusa gigantea). Scientists operating an ROV at a depth of 3,200 feet (975 m) in Monterey Bay, California, spotted the massive jelly, with its 3.3-foot-wide (1 m) bell and 33-foot-long (10 m) ribbon-like arms.

Not much is known about phantom jellyfish, but scientists think it uses its arms, which stream like loose scarves in its wake, to ensnare unfortunate prey and winch them up to its mouth. The creature also propels itself through the pitch-black depths with periodic pulses from its faintly glowing bell.

"The giant phantom jelly was first collected in 1899. Since then, scientists have only encountered this animal about 100 times," MBARI said in a statement. Although it is rarely spotted, the jelly has been found in the depths of every major ocean in the world, except for the Arctic Ocean.


Read more: Giant 'phantom jellyfish' that eats with mouth-arms spotted off California coast

In October, researchers trying to map the seafloor of the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea were shocked when they discovered a recent shipwreck from 2011. While trying to film the remains of the vessel, the team's ROV was continuously photobombed by a purpleback flying squid (Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis).

The shipwreck and squid were found at a depth of around 2,788 feet (850 m). The scientists from OceanX think it was a solitary squid, but it may have been more than one as it was hard to identify the cephalopod as it zoomed across the screen. The researchers also said the squid had a total body length of about 6 feet (2 m), which would be near the maximum size for the species.

"It was just so spectacular for me," Mattie Rodrigue, science program lead at OceanX, told Live Science. "We had absolutely no idea that we were going to encounter such a magnificent and large animal."

Read more: Giant purpleblack flying squid photobombs crew investigating shipwreck


Sponge tracks on the seafloor

An example of the strange trails left by sponges as they crawl across the seafloor in the Arctic. (Image credit: AWI OFOBS team, PS101)


In April, a new study revealed the first evidence of deep-sea sponges crawling around on the seafloor, after researchers snapped photos of bizarre brown tracks left behind by the surprisingly mobile creatures in the Arctic.

The sponge trails were first photographed in 2016 by towed cameras behind a research vessel at Langseth Ridge — a poorly studied region of the Arctic Ocean that's permanently covered in sea ice — at a depth of between 2,300 and 3,300 feet (700 to 1,000 meters).

"The trails are made up of the spicules, or spines, which the sponge can grow," study co-author Autun Purser, a deep-sea ecologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute at the Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told Live Science. "The sponge seems to expand along these spines, then contract to the new, moved position. During this process, some spines break off, forming the trails."

Read more: Arctic sponges crawl around the seafloor and leave bizarre brown trails to prove it

A see through skull

Footage of a barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma) taken by MBARI scientists in the Monterey Submarine Canyon (Image credit: © 2021 MBARI)

In December, MBARI researchers caught a rare glimpse of a barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma). This bizarre fish has a translucent forehead, which it actually looks through using a pair of bulbous green eyes inside its head.

An ROV filmed the strange creature while cruising at a depth of about 2,132 feet (650 m) in the Monterey Submarine Canyon, one of the deepest submarine canyons on the Pacific coast. Extraordinarily, MBARI scientists have only ever spotted the species nine times previously, despite having completed more than 5,600 dives in the fish's habitat.

"The barreleye first appeared very small out in the blue distance, but I immediately knew what I was looking at. It couldn't be mistaken for anything else," Thomas Knowles, a senior aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, told Live Science.

Read more: New footage shows bizarre deep-sea fish that sees through its forehead

Originally published on Live Science.


Seven most strange things

 that washed ashore in 2021

Representational image —Reuters.
Representational image —Reuters.

Across the globe, beaches have seen their fair share of weird blobs washing ashore. Small and weird debris has been found many times, including tar balls that dotted Israel's Mediterranean coastline in February or a tangled rope coral that found its way onto a beach in Texas. 

Other times, organisms numbered in the millions, such as the by-the-wind sailor jellyfish whose corpses were stranded across shores.

Here is a list of wild and strange things that ended up on beaches in the year 2021, as compiled by Live Science.

Millions of 'sailor' jellyfish

Beaches around the world face millions of dead 'sailors' by wind jellyfish as they wash up and die on the shores. They get floated near the top of the sea and the little sails on their backs catch the wind and push them from one feeding ground to the next.

When the seasons change wind patterns, huge colonies of the jellies can end up stranded on the shore.

Young killer whale strands on Scottish beach

A juvenile killer whale was heroically rescued in January after getting stranded on a Scottish beach. A group of trained medics carried a rescue on an island off the coast of Scotland. 

The animal was healthy and old enough to survive on its own, so it was brought to the deep water and sent off.

A truck-size basking shark

In January, local fishermen got stunned by witnessing a male basking shark measuring 26 feet (8 meters) long. It was the size of a pickup truck and it washed on the coast of Bremen. Marine researchers still aren't sure about the cause of his death.

Twisted 'rope pile' on a Texas beach

The creature looks like a tangled snarl of yellow rope, but it is actually a type of coral known as a colorful sea whip. 

Many commenters have said that they had seen colourful sea whips on the beach before, but had always assumed that the creatures were trash, such as discarded cords or part of a fishing net.

40 refloated whales in New Zealand

On a February morning on a remote beach in New Zealand, hundreds of people gathered when 49 long-finned pilot whales beached themselves.

Nine of them died during the stranding while the rescue group looked after the surviving whales throughout the day, keeping their skin cool and moist and preventing their fins from being crushed beneath their beached bodies. Later on, they were herded back by volunteers into the deep water.

Toxic tarballs wash up on Israel's coastline

The Israel oil spill turned into tar balls — small concentrated blobs of congealed oil were formed for several days because rough sea conditions from a storm broke up the slick and mixed it into the seawater.

It was described by officials as "one of the most serious ecological disasters" the country had ever seen.

Amazon 'river monster' turns up dead in Florida

A dead body of an Amazon "river monster" was found rotting by Florida locals near the Gulf of Mexico, and it became a worrisome issue as several people got disturbed with the thought that this beast might become the state's latest invasive species. But this so-called monster, the arapaima (Arapaima gigas), faces many hurdles before it can call Florida home. 




 

MASSIVE GREAT WHITE SHARK FLIES OUT OF WATER AT SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA WAVE FAMOUS FOR
TALENTED HOMESCHOOLED CHILDREN AND THEIR PROFESSIONAL SURF DREAM HARBORING
PARENTS!

Big scare.

I was planning on attending, along with family, a performance of La Bayadère at the famous Teatro de Scala but the ballet was cancelled yesterday afternoon due a covid outbreak amongst the corp

Heartbreaking as the Scala is the birthplace of ballet and incredibly beautiful, plus La Bayadère was choreographed by the great Rudolf Nuryev and I was very much looking forward to sharing the experience with my talented daughter.

Well, what to do?

Back home in my North County, San Diego home a massive great white shark flew out of the water at Seaside, a surf spot famous for talented homeschooled children and their stage parents many who drive Sprinter vans.

Did it wreck their time too?

Possibly.




IS SURF STILL WORTH PURSUING IN AN AGE WHERE THE NEW FACES OF THE SPORT ARE JONAH HILL AND MARK ZUCKERBERG?

By JP Currie

The fact is this: in the dying days of 2021, surfing is about the most mainstream thing you can do. So what to do? Adapt or die.

And so my hand has been forced.

I will not scroll idly by and watch BG reduced to a barge for sexagenarian surf tripe no-one gives a shit about.

This is a place where writing has lived. Maybe the last place online.

It is more than just a five-minute Google search of “surfing” in the dead après ski hour between canapés and cocktails.

It is more than the raving husk of someone who once worked for a vanished magazine that compiled advertisements for surf brands.

It should be the clear-eyed arbiter of surf culture; not the rheumy-eyed madman no-one cares about.


But is it worth it?

That’s the question.

Is surf still worth pursuing in an age where the new faces of the sport are Jonah Hill and Mark Zuckerberg?

I confess to periods of disillusionment, which will be a surprise to no-one.

Please don’t mistake this for being angry, or jaded. If it were the 7 Stages of Grief I’m on the upward turn towards reconstruction. If not quite hopeful, at least not misty-eyed.

A friend sent me a clip of what I missed at one of our locals the other day.

“The adult beginner pandemic” he called it. Busier than the middle of summer. Ten people attempting to straight hand every wave. Big blue boards flying.


Normally when he sends me clips of missed surf I get pangs of guilt, envy.

But I felt…vindicated?

But I’m not here to gleefully dismember surfing, rather I’d like to consider a more evolved way of thinking about it.

The fact is this: in the dying days of 2021, surfing is about the most mainstream thing you can do.

A “surfer” now is both everyone and no-one you know.

We live in a culture of generalists. Specialised knowledge and deep learning is a thing of the past. We all know a little about everything. Our capacity to retain information is both degraded but bolstered by the GBs in our pockets.

Yet broad swathes of knowledge are perfectly acceptable, even desirable. Flexibility is the ideal.


The same dilution has happened with surfing. Our lives of leisure, choice and comfort allow us to dabble in things formerly reserved for specialists, or those prepared to work for it. Everyone’s an expert now. They might not be an expert in your eyes, but they’re still a surfer, because for them mediocrity and cursory knowledge and/or skill is the norm.

When I saw Jack Dorsey Tweet about surf films and truth last week I felt that was a bellwether of our time. Or perhaps a death knell.

You see, Jack Dorsey is not Mark Zuckerberg.

Where Zuck is the zinc-faced sniveller that no-one liked at school; Dorsey is the geek that didn’t give a fuck and probably transcended cool.

He’s the tech bros tech bro. People trust him. People listen to him.

When he merges surfing and truth in a pithy Tweet to six million-plus followers, you’d better believe the foxes are in the coop.

And I know that this argument has resounded through every generation, particularly the nineties when surf fashion became high street fashion.


But things are truly different now.

People are different.

Spheres of influence are vastly different.

The ability for one voice to reach millions of people makes a mockery of glossy ads in print magazines seen by a few thousand.

Face it: you (if “you” are “the core”) are outnumbered and overrun.

The surf press has no impact, because it doesn’t exist. Have you ever wondered who those thousands of strangers discussing surfing on YouTube and Reddit are? They’re the surfers now. They control the narrative.

You’re just a relic, sat on a sinking barge, listening to old magazine editors sing shanties no-one understands as you disappear beneath the waves.

So what to do? Adapt or die.

Be like Kai Lenny. Be like water. Evolve. Don’t treat surfing as some kind of idol. He has the sense to hold surfing at arm’s length. It’s just part of his portfolio. Worth a HODL, sure, but not worth blowing your whole wad on.

Alternatively, you can stand with Billy Kemper, beating your chest in surf-or-die machismo. Or drown with Ben Marcus and his brand of sexagenarian tangential surf tripe, or the other pensioners caw cawing below the line.

Personally I’m with Kai.

In 2022, surfing’s just another thing to do.


(P.S. SurfAds, if you ever feel like a rebel tour give me a shout. We’ll coerce Longtom back. Maybe persuade Derek to jump ship, too, just to fluff us up a bit. I hear Dorsey’s looking for a passion project to fund. And hey @Jack, get me on @JP_Currie. Happy to talk about ghost-writing that memoir, too).