Questioning Our Limits to Leave Scarcity Behind

Giorgos Kallis
MARCH 2020
GREEN EUROPEAN JOURNAL

Whereas mainstream economics is about expansion and productivity, environmentalism has often taken it upon itself to remind people of the limits and the consequences of exceeding them. Too many emissions will see climate catastrophe. Too much resource extraction will see society break down. But is this way of thinking counterproductive? Does appealing to external limits deny society the chance to set its own path? We spoke to the political ecology thinker Giorgos Kallis about his new book, Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care, to discuss problems with the standard discourse on limits and where to look for alternatives.

Green European Journal: Nowadays some of the talk about limits – to growth, to demography, of the planet – is based on Malthus and the Neo-Malthusians of the 1960 and 1970s. In Limits you explain that Malthus’s original message is quite different from the usual story about limits and overpopulation. (1) Can you explain?

Giorgos Kallis: We have come to think of Malthus as someone who worried about overpopulation and limits to growth. But if you read his An Essay on the Principle of Population carefully, Malthus makes clear that he does not believe there are limits to resources, not even to food production. (2) He is not worried about overpopulation, a term he never uses – he is worried about producing enough food to keep the population growing.

The secret to understanding Malthus is to remember that he was both a priest and an economist, the first professor of political economy. Malthus was a student of the theologian William Paley at Cambridge. For those priests, the greatness of a nation was measured by its numbers. Population growth was good, not bad. Malthus does not predict overpopulation and famines in the future. In his essay, he argues against redistribution, positing that if we take care of the poor they will become lazy and not work hard enough to produce food and support themselves. Keep them hungry so that they are industrious, and so the population keeps growing.

Malthus’s influence on subsequent economists and economics is much stronger than we often realise. He turned the Christian mantra to go forth and multiply into an economic principle. Population growth in his model was the greatest possible good for humanity, its God-given mission. Malthus translated this expansionary logic into a foundational assumption of economics. In economics, the religious dimension disappears but the assumption that our duty as humans is to expand, multiply, and colonise the earth’s surface (and beyond) remains.

Does the emphasis that economics puts on scarcity and growth come from Malthus?

Not only, but yes, Malthus played an important role. He was one of the first to hide the moral assumption of a duty to expand without limits behind seemingly mathematical language. His crude model was one of arithmetic, linear growth in food production clashing with geometric, exponential growth in population. But population grows exponentially only if you assume that for some reason people cannot limit how many children they want to have. Throughout history, humans have adapted their reproductive strategies to their environments. The moral and political assumption that humans must expand their numbers is hidden behind mathematics, giving it an aura of science. Unlimited wants and therefore scarcity are made to appear as facts of nature. What is a very particular morality appears as the natural state of things: we need to produce in ever-greater quantities because we do not have enough.


As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In modern economics, maximisation is no longer about population but consumption and an abstract notion of utility. If for Malthus we had to produce as much food as possible to allow the maximum possible growth of population, for modern economists, production has to increase to be able to enjoy as much as possible in a limited amount of time. Economists, like Lionel Robbins in his famous essay in which he defined economics as the science that studies scarcity, like to tell the story of Robinson Crusoe. (3) Robbins writes that Crusoe on his island had everything he needed – he could hunt, fish, grow food, and enjoy life. But if he hunted he wouldn’t be able to read, and if he read he wouldn’t be able to fish. So his time was limited and everything he did had an opportunity cost of not doing something else. Scarcity followed Crusoe in Paradise.

What I try to show in Limits is how this is a myth. It is a moral myth necessary for capitalism’s constant expansion, not some universal state of nature. As humans, we do not have unlimited wants, wanting ever more of what we can or cannot get. Put us on a paradise island and rest assured that we will know how to enjoy it, unlike what the dismal science wants us to think about ourselves.

In mainstream thought, maximising and expanding is always good. Where can we turn for alternatives?

There are many possible ways to arrange our affairs, other than thinking that we live in world of scarcity and that we have to expand. Many pre-capitalist societies had a logic of limitation where they trusted their environments and lived in a steady state, satisfied with what they had. I’m not saying we can turn a world of 9 billion people into a hunter-gatherer civilisation trusting its environment. Rather, I’m saying that human societies have been organised differently and that this is a reason for hope that capitalist civilisation can be followed by a different arrangement not predicated on limitless expansion.


The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

But the first step is to recognise where we’re at and why. Part of the problem today is that even environmentalists frame the present state of affairs as one where we are producing and consuming too much, overshooting planetary boundaries, or that our ecological footprint is too big. Framing things this way feeds into the idea that our needs are naturally without limits and that we clash with an external world that limits us. We have to build a story instead that starts from the basic truth that humans know how to limit ourselves and that a meaningful and truly free life is a life that knows its limits.

Our popular myths today are about expansion – think of the self-made entrepreneur or the Hollywood blockbuster where the hero always beats death in a happy ending. We lack meaningful, popular stories of freedom within limits. We need novelists and artists who tell different stories with different forms and cultural heroes that show different ways of being, celebrating those who refuse the mad pursuit of more and who organise for the protection of their communities and for wellbeing within limits.

Should this emphasise personal restriction?

Where we environmentalists are wrong is that we think that by appealing to a future disaster, we will prompt people to limit themselves. But facing death, people choose to live and not to think about tomorrow. If they know that they will die soon, they will live even more madly (or worse, become depressed and retreat). A different story should dismantle the idea that liberation means living without limits. The cultural work economic liberals have done in the last centuries has succeeded in making people think that the good life is a life where you can do whatever you please. So the cultural work has to start by questioning whether this vision is really good and desirable.

The environmentalist discourse of “sacrifice”, that we can’t live like Donald Trump because then the planet will be ruined, leaves intact the idea that living like a billionaire is nice to begin with. Many of us do not want to live like Trump, Elon Musk, or The Wolf of Wall Street (even if occasionally we laugh with them and their megalomania). As Spanish philosopher Jorge Riechmann put it in the title of a book, some people who do not want to colonise Mars; some people want to live a good life down here on Earth with their friends and loved ones. (4) Can we have stories about these people? Can we have stories that remind us that behind the scenes the lives of Trump or Musk are miserable? Maybe not miserable, but banal, boring, empty of meaning, and hysteric in their meaningless pursuit of power for power’s sake.

You argue that environmentalists are stuck in a discourse of external limits. You come from the degrowth movement, how can its insights help us see matters differently?

There are two narratives in the degrowth movement. One is the idea of continental political ecologists such as Ivan Illich, André Gorz or Cornelius Castoriadis that we need self-limitation and that we should collectively set our limits. Another comes from the Anglo-Saxon debate on limits to growth – the idea that limits are set by the planet and food, resources, and energy are running out. Most degrowth scholars, such as Serge Latouche or myself until recently, treat these two notions of limits as one and the same. In my new book, I try to set them apart into an autonomous understanding of limits – i.e. it is we who shape our desires and our limits – and a heteronomous one that attributes limits to the external forces of nature.


For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in.

Heteronomy is anti-political and anti-democratic, Castoriadis argued. If your laws and limits are given by an external force, God or Mother Nature, then there is little that you as a collective can to do other than obey these forces, and their messengers or representatives. Now, the fact that we as a society determine our limits does not mean that there are no limits. You cannot jump from a skyscraper and land intact. But ultimately the decision whether to jump or not out of the skyscraper is yours, no matter how catastrophic the result may be. As long as we frame this choice as “Damn, the law of gravity limits me and I can’t jump off the skyscraper!”, we will be searching for ways to jump. The point is to stop and ask, “Why jump?”

Climate change and disasters are coming, but is it useful frame climate change as a problem of external limits, scarcity, or a limited atmosphere that cannot absorb any more of our emissions? As long as the language is that of terrible metaphors such as “sink” or carbon “budgets”, then the natural reaction is to think how can we exceed these limits, how can we engineer the climate so that it can take more of us and our desires. This is the logic that dates back to Malthus: producing more to confront a world of limits.

For the green movement, the way forward is not to keep warning about pending disasters but to organise an alternative political project with a fundamentally different view of the good life than that of capitalist modernity. Not only in theory but through everyday practice, people must be convinced that this is a better world to live in. Of course, we should not stop talking about planetary thresholds, which like stepping off a skyscraper will bring catastrophic consequences. But the emphasis should be on the economic system and the forces that push us over the edge.


People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Autonomy is central to many 20th-century political ecology thinkers. What possibilities does the concept of autonomy offer the green movement?

The concept of autonomy puts green politics in a much broader and more encompassing perspective than discourse around disasters, peak oil, and the rest. People can relate to the desire for autonomy, for freedom. Autonomy is about the capacity of people to manage their lives collectively and their place in a world where globalisation is taking everything away. It claims a real democracy. This yearning for more freedom and social protection is what right-wing opportunists are cynically exploiting with nationalism and xenophobia. Greens can be the true defenders of autonomy – not a fake autonomy that takes out its frustrations on the weak and the different.

Ecology means true freedom, as André Gorz first claimed. It is commonplace to caricature Greens as enemies of freedom, those who want to take your car and your steak away, telling you how and how not to live. This myth rests on an idea of freedom as freedom to do as you please, which means freedom for the strong. Real freedom can be exercised only within limits. Think of a piano player who needs a limited keyboard to create beautiful music or the painter who needs a canvas. Limits liberate because they reduce the debilitating weight of limitless choice. Limiting oneself leaves space for others to live too. Ecology is first and foremost about limits, about autonomy, about freedom.

Alternative movements and political projects are often limited to cities or at best regions. What does autonomy mean in practice for movements engaging with the state and running for office?

I guess you have the political experience of Barcelona en Comú in mind. The rise of a citizens’ movement in power in Barcelona in 2015 was in many ways an interesting experience, even if it lost a bit of its steam and promise along the way. It became wrapped up in the Catalan question as well as becoming exhausted, as all political projects eventually are, by the passing of time and everyday bureaucratic battles. The original impulse, however, coming from civil society and from the grassroots movements that networked in the indignant squares, pointed to a possible articulation between alternative ways of living and alternative economic practices such as commons, and organising for seizing political office and power through elections.


Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives.

In our recent work on degrowth and the state, Giacomo D’Alisa and I claim that we should move beyond a division which sees people and civil society on one pole, and authorities and the state on the other. This perspective is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of the state as the amalgam of political society and civil society. Political society is the space of political institutions and legal control with its police force and legal mechanisms of coercion, whereas civil society is the sphere of the commons with institutions such as the family, unions, associations, church, and sports clubs. Political society exerts force to rule but it cannot go far without the consent of civil society. The acts of political society have to make “sense” to people, so culture and re-articulation of existing common sense(s) in the sphere of civil society is crucial in any political transformation.

Alternative practices, such as transition towns or time-banks, can act as new civil society institutions that nourish and perform new common senses. In turn, these can create political sensitivities and constituencies that will demand changes in political institutions in line with their objectives. As Silvia Federici has put it, the point is not to demand that the state provides our meals or teaches our children, but to self-organise communally to educate and feed ourselves and our children, asking the state to pay and support our initiatives. There is no alternative to the state in this sense, we will always need a higher level of social organising and redistribution of resources. But the form of the state would have to change dramatically in a socio-ecological transition towards the commons.

Barcelona en Comu did not emerge as a political movement out of thin air. It was built, thought, and practised by people active and sweating every day in alternative economic initiatives, from movements against house foreclosures and for a debt jubilee to consumer or housing co-ops. The political party was born in the grassroots, as activists realised that transforming society requires engaging with the state and its institutions, however difficult that may turn out to be. There are parallels with the Occupy movement and organising for Bernie Sanders’ candidacy in the U.S.

So individual change comes first?

No. Nothing comes first, not the egg nor the chicken. I believe in co-evolution, butterflies changing with flowers. Unless we have different people, living and desiring to live differently, we will not have political change to support different ways of living. Who would organise to see such change through? But unless we have political change to alter social and material infrastructures and to support different ways of living, it is very hard for people to change and live differently. Changes need to co-evolve. So no, I am not proposing individual action as an alternative to political or structural change. But I also do not think that individual change, or changes in ways of living, consuming, and desiring is secondary, and that changing the “mode of production” will see everything else to fall into place. We need individual change, but not just for the sake of reducing resource consumption (however important that may be, it is insufficient alone), but because political change is not possible without individual change. This is why my book focuses on the ethic of collective self-limitation as a foundational stone for a new political project. I do not mean that a different culture or ethics alone will change capitalism, far from it. But reversely, unless we start decolonising our imaginary from the ethic of limitless expansion, we may find one day that we escaped capitalism but that everything has stayed the same.
FOOTNOTES

1. Giorgos Kallis (2019). Limits: Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

2. Thomas Malthus (1798). An Essay on the Principle of Population As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Goodwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers. London: J. Johnson in St Paul’s Church-yard.

3. Lionel Robbins (1932, 1935, 2nd ed.). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, London: Macmillan.

4. Jorge Riechmann (2004). Gente que no quiere viajar a Marte. Madrid: Los Libros de la Catarata.

Study examines role of urban agriculture in food-energy-water nexus policies

by The City University of New York

Violin plots showing the range of responses (n=15) for each awareness-increasing policy. Median and interquartile ranges are shown with box plots within each violin plot. Credit: Landscape and Urban Planning (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104848

A new paper in Landscape and Urban Planning examines policies to advance urban agriculture that address the food-energy-water (FEW) nexus, the complex relationships among the flows of food, energy and water in cities.

As urban agriculture becomes more prevalent, policies have been established to regulate and support the practice. In this study, a research team including Associate Professor Nevin Cohen and Adjunct Assistant Professor Rositsa T. Ilieva characterize existing FEW nexus policies based on policy data from five case study cities in Europe and the U.S. to analyze their relationships to urban agriculture and to identify policy types that support resource-efficient practices.

The researchers found that despite extensive evidence of the importance of the interconnections among resources, urban policies have seldom considered food, energy and water together, largely due to siloed decision-making bodies that lead to compartmentalized policies.

An analysis of policy data from Dortmund, Gorz´ow Wielkopolski, London, Nantes, and New York City found that the number, type and degree of support for nexus policies vary among the cities. Most urban agriculture policies are implemented at the local scale, and few incorporated all elements of the nexus.

However, many nexus policies indirectly include urban agriculture, such as policy in New York City requiring new buildings, or those undergoing major renovations, to have roofs covered by either solar panels or a green roof system. This regulation simultaneously addresses stormwater management, energy conservation and opportunities for rooftop food production where suitable.

"The study shows that urban policymakers ought to consider the FEW nexus to promote resource efficiency and sustainability as they try to support and expand urban farms and community gardens," says Dr. Cohen.

"Our paper highlights the importance of comparative cross-country research given the global nature of climate-related challenges affecting local communities," Dr. Ilieva emphasizes. "By highlighting pioneering urban agriculture strategies within municipal food-energy-water policies worldwide, we can help policymakers leverage the power of new and existing public policies to address these interconnected issues in tandem."

More information: Runrid Fox-Kämper et al, The role of urban agriculture in food-energy-water nexus policies: Insights from Europe and the U.S, Landscape and Urban Planning (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.landurbplan.2023.104848

Provided by The City University of New York Gauging the environmental impact of urban farms and gardens

4 Problems for the Degrowth Movement

Though increasingly influential in activist circles and policy discussions, the degrowth perspective on addressing climate change suffers from serious analytical and political flaws. We need a program of green growth to decarbonize the planet.

By Daniel Driscoll

February 24, 2024

Source: Jacobin

A barn and wind turbines in rural Illinois. (Wikimedia Commons)

Amid the French protests of May 1968, the idea of degrowth was born under the name décroissance. It quickly gained traction in Parisian Marxist circles with work from the likes of Austrian French philosopher André Gorz and others. When in 1972 the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, the term décroissance came to the mainstream.

Today décroissance is having another moment, this time under its English moniker, as degrowth enters both policy circles and popular discourse. It is, however, a distraction for left climate movements, one that we can ill afford when the world has such limited time to decarbonize.

Degrowth provides neither empirically grounded, actionable solutions nor a credible theory of social and political change. It suffers from four big problems.

1. Degrowth often confuses correlation for causation and overextrapolates from the past.

The strength of the degrowth movement comes from accurately recounting how wealthy countries developed through the use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels and economies coevolved together: coal powered the earliest factories in the Industrial Revolution. Electricity then lit, connected, and expanded cities around the world. Oil and gas knit the post–World War II world economy together.

Economic growth, then, went hand in hand with the growth of emissions. The degrowth movement argues that while switching to green growth may be theoretically possible, sufficiently rapid decarbonization requires degrowth.

The focus on growth, however, may lead to confusing correlation for causation, and at worst distorting our policy priorities. Therefore, an elementary reminder is in order: carbon emissions come from burning carbon — they are CO2 emissions, not GDP emissions. To decarbonize, we need to replace carbon energy sources with clean energy, and repressing growth will not solve the problem of financing electrification and energy-input replacement.

This point may seem obvious, but many people seem to forget it and focus too narrowly on economic growth and GDP (which is of course a controversial indicator of well-being). Growth is contingent upon energy input, but that energy does not need to come from carbon. Those who argue that decoupling emissions from GDP cannot happen fast enough are extrapolating from the historic association of emissions and growth. If historical trends routinely and straightforwardly predicted our economic future, then much of the risk that we know to be endemic to the stock market and the financial sector would not exist, as the past would be a sure guide to what’s coming next.

2. Degrowth doesn’t acknowledge that redistribution can drive growth.

Degrowth requires political suppression of consumption and production. To offset the massive income reductions this would entail for poorer populations, many degrowth experts argue that this decrease in production and consumption should be accompanied by wealth redistribution.

At first glance, that proposal looks reasonable — we can decrease emissions and inequality at the same time. But simultaneously reducing growth and redistributing resources is not so simple. Redistribution to lower income groups or populations who have a higher propensity to spend can actually increase household consumption, which all other things equal may in turn increase emissions.

Redistribution is a worthy goal, but on its own it will not decarbonize the economy. Some nuanced degrowth writing focuses loss prescriptions on wealthier residents within rich countries and rich countries overall. This is sensible, but it ignores the emissions that are likely to come with emerging market economy (EME) development in countries like India. It also ignores the recoil of investment in EMEs that would result from reductions in consumption and growth in wealthy countries, which would tend to bring excess capital back home to the richer countries.

Degrowth advocates might argue that these problems could be addressed through national and global planning regimes, which could (e.g.) restrain households from increasing consumption too much and force capital to invest more in poorer countries. But the kind of state planning required to mitigate emissions and regulate behavior while reducing overall production and consumption would need to be a globally coercive regime, with otherworldly institutional capacities and knowledge. Imagine the surveillance and punishment apparatuses needed to constantly monitor people around the world to enforce production and consumption quotas. Few would voluntarily agree to this system; governments now are not even following through on relatively modest climate accords. Maybe a sacrifice of democratic governance would be worth it, as some have argued. But even if an authoritarian regime of global planning were justified, what social forces would have the capacity to institute one?

To be clear, this isn’t an objection to planning per se. To address the climate crisis, we clearly need a big dose of democratic economic planning that prioritizes ecological goals over profit. But large-scale planning becomes both more technically and morally fraught when it involves forcing most of the world’s population to accept lower living standards.

Historically, industrial transformations have required growth, and relatively lower growth in the context of such transformations has led to horrific casualties (e.g., the Soviet Union’s creation of famine in Ukraine during its industrialization drive in the early 1930s). Lower growth means more trade-offs and losses in a transition, meaning that new capital formation comes at the cost of greater suppression of consumption and thus of living standards.

This is because the new capital needed to transition has to come from somewhere. It can come from reallocating resources from traditional growth sectors (e.g., from agriculture to industry) or from a rising tide of growth that can improve the living standards of the majority. Therefore, a global investment boom is necessary to pay for decarbonization — not a decline in investment, as many degrowth advocates claim.

3. Degrowth adopts unjustified assumptions from orthodox economics.

Degrowth has a lot in common with carbon-tax advocacy. Carbon-tax supporters, like degrowthers, have advocated decreases in consumption as the way to decarbonization.

This approach has not gone well historically. The French government imposed carbon taxes without offering adequate substitutes for citizens (such as affordable electric vehicless or sufficient public transportation options); as a result, living costs increased for lower-income households who spent larger shares of their budgets on energy, and eventually widespread social unrest resulted.

The truth is that a narrow emphasis on reducing consumption is deeply rooted in orthodox economics. An orthodox economics perspective would claim that we must decrease consumption to decrease emissions. This outlook tries to predict the future by holding variables in the present constant. It assumes that resources and worker productivity are always being maximized and also that energy unit costs will not decrease.

Those are false assumptions: resource utilization, productivity, and energy costs change a great deal. Resource utilization can become more efficient over time; think about how small computers have become since the 1980s thanks to increasingly powerful microchips. Productivity and efficiency constantly vary. Why else would firms share information and techniques with each other in order to improve themselves on those measures? And energy costs can also decrease — look at the recent collapse in the price of solar.

This means that decarbonization through decreased consumption may not be necessary. In fact, carrots (economic gains) have had more political success historically than sticks (economic losses) when implementing climate policies.

Decarbonization will likely require massive investment. By the most sophisticated measures, global decarbonization will cost roughly $4 trillion per annum, and some version of state-led green growth is probably our best route. Such investment on a smaller scale is already increasing the availability of carbon-free substitutes in the United States and China. Degrowthers often focus too much on economic suppression when we need to acknowledge that electrification, energy replacement, and economic justice may require one last economic boom.

4. Degrowth doesn’t have an adequate theory of political transformation.

From the radical social reorganization of the Paris Commune to the policy outcomes that followed the civil rights movement, historians and social scientists have studied the conditions that lead to successful political transformation. To explain movement strengths or weaknesses and predict or evaluate movement successes and failures, many scholars will plug a movement into what they call a “political opportunity structure.” A political opportunity structure has three components: (1) public consciousness, (2) organizational or mobilizing strength, and (3) macro political opportunities.

What is the political opportunity structure of the degrowth movement? Despite academic chatter, the degrowth movement is irrelevant to most people in the world. To get a pulse of public opinion, I compared Google searches of “degrowth” versus “how to get rich.”Google searches for “degrowth” versus “how to get rich.” Note: On y-axis, the value of 100 indicates peak popularity. Explore more here. The recent peak in “how to get rich” searches represents the Netflix release of a show under that name.

Not only do most people prioritize growth and prosperity over addressing climate change (as discussed throughout), but most people also do not know or care about degrowth. The degrowth movement fails in the arena of public consciousness in both opinion and salience.

Things look even more dire when examining other aspects of the movement’s political opportunity structure. There is no major social movement organization or institution centering degrowth in its platform. If such organizations do exist, they have feeble resources and networks, which are key ingredients for movement success. The civil rights movement, for instance, boasted black colleges, churches, and activist organizations (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress of Racial Equality) tied together through strong networks and alliances. Degrowth has no natural constituency, and creating it would require a global-scale transformation of political consciousness.

Finally, the macro political conditions to support the movement are not present. There are no political regimes interested in advancing the movement. Not even the European Union, arguably the international bloc most committed to decarbonization right now, is interested in degrowth. At the “Beyond Growth” Conference, European Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen stated, “A growth model centered on fossil fuels is simply obsolete” and called for “a different growth model that is sustainable far into the future.” She’s talking about green growth, not degrowth.

Furthermore, studies find again and again that democracies prioritize economic prosperity over real decarbonization. Economic growth can enhance people’s quality of life (barring wars, or the trend of wealth concentration outpacing growth that Thomas Piketty has documented). National governments are legitimized by growth, and when they fail to provide it, there are political consequences.

If economic stagnation often leads to explosions of anger at the status quo in wealthy countries, imagine how emerging market economies will deal with forced degrowth (those countries’ growth rates in the coming years are projected to dwarf those of advanced market economies). It is hard to believe that emerging economies will accept nondevelopment for the sake of climate goals. (No wonder social scientists in BRICS and non-OECD countries favor green growth over degrowth.)

Degrowthers might reasonably retort that proponents of green growth policies also lack the public consciousness, organizational or mobilizing strength, and macro political opportunities to win meaningful change. The difference is that the vast majority of society has an interest in an egalitarian green growth agenda along the lines of the Green New Deal, because they stand to benefit from a massive public investment in green jobs, infrastructure, and public transportation that would raise their standard of living. And organized workers in strategic sectors like electricity and auto have the structural leverage to win key climate demands.

In other words, the broader climate movement has a potential coalition with the interests and capacity to achieve its goals — but it still needs to be organized. That means a green growth program has a plausible potential “political opportunity structure,” unlike degrowth.

What’s at Stake?

Despite degrowth’s unclear prospects of achieving decarbonization and lack of a plausible popular constituency, many smart people have been distracted by it. Instead of trying to convince everyone that we need to fight economic growth, there are more immediate practical problems that those who want a green transition need to attend to. To name a few:Financing emerging market economies. EMEs cannot afford to abandon fossil fuels and fund the green transition with their own balance sheets.

Ending austerity in wealthy countries. Rich countries can afford decarbonization already. But they have been stymied by neoliberal ideologies and policy approaches that have prevented them from using the power of the state and public investment to transform their economies.

Compensating losers in the transition. Households with higher energy costs and workers and regions reliant on carbon-intensive industries will need support, in the form of welfare programs, job training, and so on as economies transition away from fossil fuels.
Critical mineral extraction. How can we harvest critical minerals to build green technologies without abusing labor and destroying ecosystems?

Using the power of “the big green state” to achieve a just transition. If private capital is in the driver’s seat for the green transition, there is the danger that public goods could be privatized, key goals could be sacrificed for quick profits, and inequality could worsen. And not all decarbonization is profitable. How do we do green planning to ensure a transition that serves the public rather than private interests?

Addressing geopolitical challenges. Some countries are either apathetic about climate change or have assets that are directly threatened by decarbonization (e.g., petrostates). How do we get them to decarbonize?

These are just a few of the critical problems we face moving forward with decarbonization. Limited time means we must place bets and prioritize solutions to them now. Degrowth may be an appealing idea for morally committed left academics and activists. But it is not a serious path forward for the climate.

This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.

Daniel Driscoll  is a postdoctoral researcher at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Starting fall 2024, he will be an assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Virginia.

Four-day work week: Reformist or revolutionary?

Transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society will mean moving away from the capitalist growth imperative

Nick Gottlieb / April 9, 2023 / 

https://canadiandimension.com/

Office workers in the early 1980s. Photo courtesy the Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums/Flickr.


The British Columbia Green Party is the closest thing to a left-wing political party (at least, with any seats) we’ve got in Canada. So I did a double-take when I saw that the World Economic Forum is advocating for the same policy they are: reduced working hours.

It turns out the BC Greens are just the latest to join an odd convergence of interests supporting the four-day work week. Groups ranging from self-proclaimed “business leaders” to mainstream media outlets, climate activists, and radical economists seem to have joined forces in support of this policy.

What exactly is going on? Is it genuinely a win-win-win, a top-to-bottom alignment of class interests with climate benefits to boot, just waiting for someone to flip the switch?

If you think that sounds implausible, it’s because it is: the reality is that the anti-capitalist economists who first studied the four-day work week made a radically different case for it than pro-corporate magazines like Forbes. Whether it’s radical or not depends on the form and context in which it’s implemented.

The World Economic Forum and various other business interests—I’ll call them the “Davos contingent”—advocating for a four-day work week claim that it will help fight gender inequality and climate change (along with a few other trendy issues they can try to co-opt). Simultaneously, and here’s the crux, a compressed work schedule will improve worker productivity to the point that it more than offsets the reduction in working hours.

One article cites a Japanese study that saw worker productivity go up by 40 percent, nearly double the reduction in working hours, and goes so far as to claim that reduced working hours is essential for “preserving economic growth.” Every piece of support from this camp emphasizes that cutting working hours will actually help grow the economy.

There is some evidence that cutting out an entire day of work could reduce carbon emissions even if it stimulated economic growth, although the mechanism behind this raises some questions about who exactly the Davos contingent imagines enjoying the benefits of a four-day work week. Most pilot studies have found climate benefits coming predominantly from a decline in commuting and, in some cases, from reduced energy use at offices.

To capture these climate benefits, new employees can’t fill in for the old ones, which in practice limits the opportunity to businesses where daily presence isn’t required—effectively, to the so-called “knowledge sector.” A grocery store, for example, would not see the same climate benefits from implementing a four-day work week that a public relations firm might because they’re simply going to hire more cashiers to fill in their hours. The same goes for hospitals, schools, and much of the rest of the economy.

So there’s already some question about just who this policy is designed for, and what limitations that might have on its purported benefits. But to top it off, the vast majority of the articles coming out of the Davos contingent justify the potential emissions reductions by mis-applying research by a sociologist named Juliet Schor—research that demonstrated that reducing working hours could reduce environmental footprint precisely by reducing total economic activity.

The Davos contingent is, at least publicly, attempting to have it both ways, arguing that we should reduce working hours as a way to stimulate economic growth while simultaneously claiming the environmental benefits that radical economists have found would come with reducing economic growth.

Schor’s research on working hours is part of a tradition that is now known as degrowth: the idea that to remain within the Earth’s ecological limits, wealthy countries need to shrink their economies. Most degrowth advocates support reducing working hours, but precisely as a way to help reduce total economic activity while mitigating harm to workers. Shorter work weeks and job sharing are ways to ensure people can still earn a living even if total economic activity in wealthier, industrialized countries declines. If, as the Davos contingent proposes, reducing working hours increases total economic activity through improved productivity, then the benefits cited by degrowth economists disappear.

All that leaves us with the question: should we support it, and how? It’s helpful to look at this through the frame created by the socialist philosopher André Gorz. Is this a “non-reformist reform,” or a reformist one? It is clearly a boon for workers—at least, the workers it applies to. But beyond its immediate material benefit, will it further entrench class society or will it contribute to the longer-term project of overcoming it? Will it perpetuate or accelerate the rate of consumption, or will it put wealthy countries like Canada on a path towards shrinking their material footprint? Does it contribute to revolutionary change even though its support base includes those thoroughly in the reformist (and even capitalist) camp?

As Mark and Paul Engler explain, Gorz didn’t give us a clear litmus test for whether something is reformist or non-reformist: context, framing, and the process of fighting for the reform itself are key factors. Just like Rosa Luxemburg argued in her famous essay on the subject, reformists and revolutionaries often pursue the same short-term tactics, but by framing those tactics as the end goal themselves, reformists lose out on the more transformative benefits that stand to be gained.

1933

Companies and governments implementing a four-day work week because of the (claimed) benefits for business, workers, and climate? Reformist. Labour laws won by social movements that implement a four-day work week as a first step towards a bigger project of moving away from economic growth and towards sufficiency in the Global North? Non-reformist.

So where does that leave the BC Green Party’s campaign? Their framing is, at least so far, thoroughly reformist, presumably because they see that approach as a path to actually getting something passed. It’s a classic example of the hazards radical movements face when they obtain electoral power. But to their credit, the legislation they suggest the province adopt appears designed to apply to much more than just the knowledge sector and doesn’t specifically highlight productivity gains as a goal.

Ultimately, what it would take for this to be a radical campaign in BC is a shift in framing: are we simply trying to incrementally improve worker wellbeing and, maybe, cut a few tonnes of carbon emissions? Or are we trying to take a step towards transforming our ecologically unsustainable class society by moving away from the capitalist growth imperative?

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.

Habermas

Some Notes on Habermas and the Public Sphere of Politics.

Habermas draws a distinction between two types of action: communicative action, where the agents base their actions on (and coordinate their interactions by) their mutual recognition of validity-claims; and instrumental/strategic action, where the coordination of actions is linked to the their successful completion. Habermas argues that instrumental and strategic actions are (conceptually and in reality) always parasitic on communicative action. Hence instrumental and strategic actions alone cannot form a stable system of social action.

Habermas’s conceptual distinction between communicative action and instrumental action is paralleled by his distinction between lifeworld and system in his social ontology: his description of the nature of social being. The lifeworld concerns the lived experience of the context of everyday life in which interactions between individuals are coordinated through speech and validity-claims. Systems are real patterns of instrumental action instantiated by money (the capitalist economy) and power (the administrative state).

In his later work, Habermas made a distinction between "lifeworld" and "system." The public sphere is part of the lifeworld; "system" refers to the market economy and the state apparatus. The lifeworld is the immediate milieu of the individual social actor, and Habermas opposed any analysis which uncoupled the interdependence of the lifeworld and the system in the negotiation of political power-it is thus a mistake to see that the system dominates the whole of society. The goal of democratic societies is to "erect a democratic dam against the colonizing encroachment of system imperatives on areas of the lifeworld" (Further Reflections).


Habermas argues that the self-intepretation of the public sphere took shape in the concept of "public opinion", which he considers in the light of the work of Kant, Marx, Hegel, Mill and Tocqueville. The bourgeois public sphere eventually eroded because of economic and structural changes. The boundaries between state and society blurred, leading to what Habermas calls the refeudalization of society. State and society became involved in each other's spheres; the private sphere collapsed into itself. The key feature of the public sphere - rational-critical debate - was replaced by leisure, and private people no longer existed as a public of property owners. Habermas argues that the world of the mass media is cheap and powerful. He says that it attempts to manipulate and create a public where none exists, and to manufacture consensus. This is particularly evident in modern politics, with the rise of new disciplines such as advertising and public relations. These, and large non- governmental organizations, replace the old institutions of the public sphere. The public sphere takes on a feudal aspect again, as politicians and organizations represent themselves before the voters. Public opinion is now manipulative, and, more rarely, still critical. We still need a strong public sphere to check domination by the state and non-governmental organizations. Habermas holds out some hope that power and domination may not be permanent features.

Enlightenment Democracy, Relativism, and the Threat of Authoritarian Politics

A central issue in Habermas's effort to sustain the Enlightenment project is the problem of relativism. This problem underlies several postmodern critiques of modernity, the Enlightenment, and Habermas, and is thus a useful first path into Habermas's thought.

The Enlightenment project of justifying democratic polity (and thus justifying emancipation from non-democratic polities - e.g., the prevailing monarchies of the time) rests on these key conceptions:

1) however diverse cultures and individuals may vary from one another in terms of religious convictions, traditions, sentiments, etc. - reason (at least in potential - a potential that must be developed by education) stands as a universally shared capacity of humanity;

2) such reason is characterized first of all as an autonomy or freedom - a freedom which, for such central figures as Locke and Kant, is capable of giving itself its own law;

3) just as this reason seems capable of discerning universal laws in the domain of mathematics and the natural sciences (witness the success of the Copernican Revolution and Newton) - so reason, it is hoped, is capable of discerning universal laws and norms in the moral and political domains.

As an example of such a universal norm: if I am to exercise my freedom by choosing my own goals and projects - this freedom requires that others respect these choices by not attempting to override them and make use of me for their own purposes. (In Kantian terms, others must never treat me simply as a means, but always as an end.)

But if I logically require others to respect my freedom as an autonomous rationality, then insofar as I acknowledge others as autonomous rationalities - reciprocity demands that I respect others' freedom as well.

This norm of respect then issues in the political demand for democracy: only democracies, as resting on the [free and rational] consent of the governed, thereby respect and preserve the fundamental humanity of its citizens ( i.e., precisely their central character as rational freedoms). [This argument, initially launched by John Locke, finds its way into Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and from there into the arguments for women's emancipation in writers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the arguments for civil rights as articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.]

On The Living Wage/Guaranteed Income

To give this idea a more radical twist, we could endorse a general, state-guaranteed citizen income, as originally proposed by Andre Gorz and now backed by Claus Offe, among others. Severing the link between income and employment would place the current "economic society"--now centered on the traditional role of full-time wage labor-on a new footing and create an equivalent for the disintegrating welfare system. This "basic income" would absorb the capitalist world market's destructive impact on those who slide into the increasingly "superfluous" population. Such a radical redistribution program requires, however, a change in deep-rooted values that will be difficult to orchestrate. Also, under present conditions of global competition, we might wonder how the program could be financed within the budgetary limits of individual nation states, since the target income would have to be above the lowest level of welfare support.

The globalization of the economy ends the history of the welfare-state compromise. While it by no means ideally solved capitalism's inherent problems, this compromise had at least succeeded in keeping social costs within accepted limits. Despite the bureaucratization and "normalization" so convincingly criticized by Michel Foucault, the scale of social disparities under this compromise was limited sufficiently to avoid the manifest repudiation of the normative promises of the democratic and liberal tradition.

Religion in the Public Sphere

What is most surprising in this context is the political revitalization of religion at the heart of
Western society. Though there is statistical evidence for a wave of secularization in almost
all European countries since the end of World War II, in the United States all data show
that the comparatively large proportion of the population made up of devout and religiously
active citizens has remained the same over the last six decades.5 Here, a carefully
planned coalition between the Evangelical and born-again Christians on one side, the
American Catholics on the other side siphons off a political surplus value from the religious
renewal at the heart of Western civilization.6 And it tends to intensify, at the cultural level,
the political division of the West that was prompted by the Iraq War.7 With the abolition of
the death penalty, with liberal regulations on abortion, with setting homosexual
partnerships on a par with heterosexual marriages, with an unconditional rejection of
torture, and generally with the privileging of individual rights versus collective goods, e.g.,
national security, the European states seem now to be moving forward alone down the
path they had trodden side by side with the United States.

Against the background of the rise of religion across the globe, the division of the West is
now perceived as if Europe were isolating itself from the rest of the world. Seen in terms of
world history, Max Weber’s Occidental Rationalism appears to be the actual deviation. The
Occident’s own image of modernity seems, as in a psychological experiment, to undergo a
switchover: what has been the supposedly “normal” model for the future of all other
cultures suddenly changes into a special-case scenario. Even if this suggestive Gestaltswitch
does not quite bear up to sociological scrutiny, and if the contrasting evidence of
what appears as a sweeping desecularization can be brought into line with more
conventional explanations,8 there is no doubting the evidence itself and above all the
symptomatic fact of divisive political moods crystallizing around it. Irrespective of how one
evaluates the facts, there is now a Kulturkampf raging in the United States which forms the
background for an academic debate on the role of religion in the political public sphere.

Faith and Knowledge

First of all, the word "secularization" has a juridical meaning that refers
to the forcible appropriation of church property by the secular state.  This
meaning has since been extended to the emergence of cultural and societal
modernism in general.  Since then, the word "secularization" has been
associated with both of these opposed judgments, whether it is the
successful taming of ecclesiastical authority by worldly power that is being
emphasized or rather the act of unlawful appropriation.

According to the first interpretation, religious ways of thinking and living
have been replaced by reason-based and consequently superior equivalents.
According to the second, modern modes of thinking and living are to be
regarded as the illegitimate spoils of conquest.  The "replacement" model
lends a progressive-optimistic meaning to the act of deconsecration, whereas
the "expropriation" model connotes theoretically-conceived corruption of a
rootless modernity.

But I think both interpretations make the same mistake.  They both consider
secularization as a kind of zero-sum game between, on one hand, the
productive powers of science and technology harnessed by capitalism and, on
the other, the tenacious powers of religion and the church.  This image no
longer fits a post-secular society that posits the continued existence of
religious communities within a continually secularizing society.  And most
of all, this too-narrow view overlooks the civilizing role of democratically
enlightened common sense, which proceeds along its own track as an equal
third partner amid the murmurs of cultural conflict between science and
religion.

>From the standpoint of the liberal state, of course, religious communities
are entitled to be called "reasonable" only if they renounce the use of
violence as a means of propagating the truths of their faith.  This
understanding stems from a threefold reflection on the role of the faithful
within a pluralistic society.  First of all, the religious conscience must
handle the encounter with other confessions and other religions cognitively.
Second, it must accede to the authority of science, which holds a social
monopoly on knowledge.  Finally, it must participate in the premises of a
constitutional state, which is based on a non-sacred concept of morality.
Without this reflective "thrust," monotheisms within ruthlessly modernizing
societies develop a destructive potential.  The phrase "reflective thrust,"
of course, can give the false impression of being something that is
one-sided and close-ended.  The reality, however, is that this work of
reflection in the face of any newly emerging conflict is a process that runs
its course through the public spaces of democracy.

As soon as an existentially relevant question, such as biotechnology,
becomes part of the political agenda, the citizens, both believers and
non-believers, will press upon each other their ideologically impregnated
world-views and so will stumble upon the harsh reality of ideological
pluralism.  If they learn to deal with this reality without violence and
with an acceptance of their own fallibility, they will come to understand
what the secular principles of decision-making written into the Constitution
mean in a post-secular society.  In other words, the ideologically neutral
state does not prejudice its political decisions in any way toward either
side of the conflict between the rival claims of science and religious
faith.  The political reason of the citizenry follows a dynamic of
secularization only insofar as it maintains in the end product an equal
distance from vital traditions and ideological content.  But such a state
retains a capacity to learn only to the extent that it remains osmotically
open, without relinquishing its independence, to both science and religion.

Of course, common sense itself is also full of illusions about the world and
must let itself be enlightened without reservation by the sciences.  But the
scientific theories that impinge on the world of life leave the framework of
our everyday knowledge essentially untouched.  If we learn something new
about the world and about ourselves as beings in the world, the content of
our self-understanding changes.  Copernicus and Darwin revolutionized the
geocentric and anthropocentric worldviews.  But the destruction of the
astronomical illusion that the stars revolve around the earth had less
effect on our lives than did the biological disillusionment over the place
of mankind in the natural order.  It appears that the closer scientific
knowledge gets to our body, the more it disturbs our self-understanding.
Research on the brain is teaching us about the physiology of our
consciousness.  But does this change that intuitive sense of responsibility
and accountability that accompanies all of our actions?

Pluralist Societies

The expanded concept of tolerance does not remain restricted to the sphere of religion but can be generally extended to tolerance of others who think differently in any way. Within today’s pluralist societies where the traditions of various linguistic and cultural communities come together, tolerance is always necessary "where ways of life challenge judgements in terms of both existential relevance and claims to truth and rightness" (J. Habermas)

Multiculturalism and the Liberal State

 My  article, n1 which provides the basis for our discussion, is a response
  to my friend Charles Taylor's The Politics of Recognition. n2 The
  controversial issue is briefly this: Should citizens' identities as
  members of ethnic, cultural, or religious groups publicly matter,
  and if so, how can collective identities make a difference within
  the frame of a constitutional democracy? Are collective identities
  and cultural memberships politically relevant, and if so, how can
  they legitimately affect the distribution of rights and the recognition
  of legal claims? There are many aspects to multiculturalism, but the
  present debate focuses narrowly on normative questions of political
  and legal theory. Without any attempt to summarize the arguments of
  the book, I would like to remind you of the two opposed answers to
  the question at hand - the liberal and the communitarian positions
  - and of my own response, which is critical of both. n3
           I cannot go into the details of the argumentation here, but it might
  help just to mention both the philosophical and the political contexts
  in which my response to Taylor was embedded. 

As to philosophical themes, those familiar with discussions in political theory will have discovered two controversial issues at stake. First, I am defending liberals against the communitarian critique with regard to the concept of the "self." The individualistic approach to a theory of rights does not necessarily imply an atomistic, disembodied, and desocialized concept of the person. The legal person is, of course, an artificial construct. Modern legal orders presuppose abstract subjects as carriers of those rights of which they are composed. These artificial persons are not identical with natural persons, who are individuated by their unique life histories. But legal persons, too, should and can be constructed as socialized individuals. They are members of a community of legal consociates who are supposed to recognize each other as free and equal. The equal respect required from legal persons pertains, however, also to the context of those intersubjective relationships which are constitutive for their identities as natural persons.

Together with the communitarians I am, on the other hand, critical of the liberal assumption that human rights are prior to popular sovereignty. The addressees of law must be in a position to see themselves at the same time as authors of those laws to which they are subject. Human rights may not just be imposed on popular sovereignty as an external constraint. Of course, popular sovereignty must not be able to arbitrarily dispose of human rights either. The two mutually presuppose each other. The solution to this seeming paradox is that human rights must be conceived in such a way that they are enabling rather than constraining conditions for democratic self-legislation.

Turning to political themes: The idea of a "struggle for recognition" stems from Hegel's Phenomenology. n8 From this perspective, we can discover similarities among different but related phenomena: feminism, nationalism, conflict of cultures, besides the particular issue of multiculturalism. All these phenomena have in common the political struggle for the recognition of suppressed collective identities. This good is different from other collective goods. It cannot be substituted for by generalized social rewards (income, leisure time, working conditions, etc.) which are the objects of the usual distribution conflicts in the welfare state. But those struggles for recognition, fought in various forms of identity politics, are also different in many other respects. One such aspect is law: Since of these groups only women and ethnic minorities have been recognized as objects of constitutional protection, only feminist and mul- [*853] ticulturalist claims can be, at least in principle, settled within the frame of the constitutional state.

Finally, an example. The immediate political context in Germany at the time of my article was the debate on "asylum," which in fact was about immigration. Applying the principles above, one can arrive at the following conclusions: First, there are good legal reasons for defending a right to political asylum. n9 On the other hand, there are only moral reasons, albeit rather strong ones, for establishing a liberal immigration policy. The claim to immigration and citizenship in the receiving country is a moral claim but, unlike political asylum, not a legal right.

Second, immigrants should be obliged to assent to the principles of the constitution as interpreted within the scope of the political culture: that is, the ethical-political self-understanding of the citizenry of the receiving country. Once they become citizens themselves, they in turn get a voice in public debates, which may then shift the established inerpretation of the constitutional principles. The obligation to accept the political culture may not, however, extend to assimilation to the way of life of the majority culture. A legally required political socialization may not have an impact on other aspects of the collective identity of the immigrants' culture of origin.

Public sphere - Does Internet Create Democracy

Luhmann, Habermas, and the Theory of Communication

Habermas Forum

The Frankfurt School and “Critical Theory”

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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)

BYJEREMY COHAN BENJAMIN SERBY

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.

Republished from Catalyst: A Journal of Theory and Strategy.

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.