Herbert Marcuse – New Left Revival?

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER

 APRIL 19, 2024
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World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time.

Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a scholar of Herbert Marcuse, has brought to life his ideology for a prosperous healthy society, proposing that “nature is an ally” in his book The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, 284 pgs. Daraja Press, 2023.

Today, it can be argued that a byzantine world of discordant parties, i.e., (1) global ultra-high-end capitalism (2) neofascism (3) racism (4) anti-establishmentarianism (5) flagging democracy are converging altogether at an explosive point in time in a new chapter of human history, and hopefully, as an aside, everlasting fusion technology (that really works) to take the heat off global warming but still decades in the making.

The works of Herbert Marcuse in the spirit of a hearty revival of the New Left are timely and may be necessary in today’s world to re-establish some semblance of sanity by offering balance to a geopolitical order that seems utterly confused and directionless and at each other’s throats.

Author of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse was thrust onto the big stage as the preeminent theorist of the New Left, arguably more relevant today than during the 1960s. His widely read One-Dimensional Man exposes the inherent weaknesses in capitalism and communism found in a stifling conformity of life (somewhat in the spirit of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World) via modern modes of domination and social control but hopeful of human freedom and happiness by way of liberation, as expressed in Eros and Civilization.

“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 7)

Charles Reitz’s comprehensive study of Marcuse: “These works challenged corporate capitalism’s illusions of democracy characterized by consumerism, cultural anaesthetization, intellectual compliance, environmental degradation, and war as untenable forms of wasted abundance and pollical freedom.”

Accordingly, “If the New Left emphasizes the struggle for the restoration of nature, for public parks and beaches, for spaces of tranquility and beauty; if it demands a new sexual morality, the liberation of women, then it fights against material conditions imposed by the capitalist system and reproducing this system. (Marcuse 1972, 17) Marcuse’s political-philosophical vision continues to offer intelligent strategic perspectives on current concerns—especially issues of neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes, police brutality, environmental destruction, and education as monocultural social manipulation. These troubles are profound, yet they can be countered through a Marcusean strategy of revolutionary ecological liberation and women’s emancipation— radical socialism as I will attempt to show in my concluding chapter 10 below. Marcuse’s posthumously published Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974 underscored his belief that the women’s movement was one of the most important political forces for system change.” (The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, pg. 145)

Marcuse’s work lays the groundwork for the 99% to be awakened, politically prepared, and strengthened, calling for a new ecosocialist world system Charles Reitz refers to as “EarthCommonWealth” with emphasis on equality and liberation of labor in a world of nature’s restoration. He interconnects the basic elements of a good life by removing the rotting influence of capitalistic excesses that stealthily brainwash the subconscious, by-the-hour, day-in, day-out via television, social networking galore, city bus posters, blaring radio ads, freeway billboards, insolent mobile phone ads, subway wall glitterati of comparables for purchase, on credit, over time.

As explained by Reitz, EarthCommonWealth is a revolutionary alternative to the “misuse of limited natural resources for profit.” Accordingly, this misuse is at the heart of a disruptive world climate system and disadvantaged lifestyle for labor throughout the world.

In the context of Marcuse’s criticisms of contemporary society, Reitz zeroes in on America: “Racial animosity, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and a resurgent nationalism/ patriotism are being orchestrated today in the troubled system of American/ global capitalism. These are neo-populist/neo-fascist instrumentalities of social control and economic stabilization… All this is said without mentioning the name of Donald Trump, though it has clear relevance to recent political developments in terms of a resurgence of reactionary rhetoric and racist tendencies on the right.”

“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses, which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 14)

Underlying America’s extreme racial animosity used as a political weapon, radicalization of education provides a contemptuous convenience that “Marcuse anticipated back in the 1960s of counterrevolutionary tendencies now raging in higher education to reduce the liberal arts in American general education to the conservatively filtered monocultural residue of an elitist, Anglocentric curriculum.”

Reitz defines democracy’s experiment with capitalism, especially in the eyes of younger generations, portending a different future that older generations should contemplate: “Given today’s workforce discontent and destabilization, it is no wonder that an openness to socialist alternatives is taking hold among younger people. An opinion piece in The New York Times, (Goldberg 2017) carried the heading “No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism.” Millennials are the “older cousins” of Generation Z (Volpe 2). The piece concludes that the “rotten morality” behind today’s intensifying inequalities is more apparent than ever, hence radicalizing young people. This reflects the steady growth among the youth of what Marcuse called the “New Sensibility”—new needs, generated under capitalism, but which capitalism cannot fulfill, for gender equality, ecological economics, and anti-racism.”

“New needs unfulfilled by the current system” are fully exposed for all to see by America’s broken-down dysfunctional politics of infighting as a normal course of governing, failing to address “new needs.” How is it possible to take this seriously?

“Today the 1% is armed with its own theory; the 99% is not. A fundamentally different outlook is necessary. The main problem, as I see it, is to develop an incisive vision for humanity as sensuous living labor. I have developed in this volume a labor theory of ethics, an ethical realism grounded on the mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity of commonwealth labor… EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most ugly and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence,” pg. 257.

The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse by Charles Reitz with an afterword by Nnimmo Bassey is an antidote, a breath of fresh air, to society’s state of confusion and misdirection, and above all else, a sense of relief knowing there is another way that is much better.

This short review does not come close to doing justice to Reitz’s remarkable work that shines a beam of enlightenment, with impressive detail and brilliant source material, on a better course for the world’s 99%. It should be in the library of every serious advocate for a better ecologically safe existence, a much better existence.

The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse needs to be studied, reread, and then reread and studied again, and then shared. It’s worth it!

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com

The revolutionary ecological legacy of

 Herbert Marcuse – 2nd Edition

By:Charles Reitz, Nnimmo Bassey

This new edition includes an Afterword by Nnimmo Bassey: System Change Will Not Be Negotiated.


The author appeals to the energies of those engaged in a wide range of contemporary social justice struggles such as ecosocialism, antiracism, the women’s movement, LGBTQ rights, and antiwar forces. As the dialectical counterpart of Marcuse’s Great Refusal, the book, which culminates with the ‘EarthCommonWealth Project’ is keyed to what we are struggling for, not just what we are struggling against. The author argues that regressive political forces must be countered today, and this is best accomplished through radical collaboration around an agenda recognizing the basic economic and political needs of diverse subaltern communities. System negation must become a new general interest. The author discusses core ethical insights from African philosophical sources, indigenous American philosophy, and radical feminist philosophy. Humanity’s first teachings on ethics are to be found in ancient African proverbs. These subsequently served also as a critique of colonialism and neocolonialism. Long-suppressed indigenous American sources supply a philosophical and political critique of Euro-centric economic and cultural values. They also offer an understanding of humanity’s place in nature and the leadership of women and attest to modes of cooperative and egalitarian forms of community. Feminist anthropology furnishes an historical context for understanding the origins of patriarchy and how to move beyond dominator power to new forms of partnership power. The book envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most bestial and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence. It is searching for a new system of ecological production, egalitarian distribution, shared ownership, and democratized governance, having its foundation in the ethics of partnership productivity with an ecosocialist and humanist commitment to living our lives on the planet consistent with the most honorable and aesthetic forms of human social and political fulfillment.

ISBN Print: 9781990263811
Publication Date: July 2023
Page Count: 284
Binding Type: Soft cover
Trim Size: 6in x 9in
Language: English




Charles Reitz

Charles Reitz: Retired Co-Director of Campus Intercultural Center and Director of Multicultural Education; Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Social Science, Kansas City Kansas Community College. His previous books include: Art, Alienation, and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse…


Nnimmo Bassey

Nnimmo Bassey is a Nigerian environmental justice activist, architect, essayist and poet. He is the director of the ecological think-tank, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF) and coordinator of Oilwatch International. He was the chair of Friends of the Earth…

A Happy Response to Ross Douthat on “the Left,” Pessimism, Coates, and Marxism

BY PAUL STREETFacebook

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  APRIL 19, 2024

Image by Hennie Stander.

Let us stop to smile at the ridiculousness of The New York Times’ rightmost columnist Ross Douthat.

A recent Douthat piece is titled “Can the Left Be Happy?” It accuses “the [US] left” of being intrinsically despondent, discontented and pessimistic.

Douthat pins his argument mainly on the leftish Black author Ta-Nehesi Coates’ following pessimistic statement in The Atlantic eleven years ago: “I don’t believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice…I don’t even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos … I don’t know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.”

“In this [Coates’] crisis of faith,” Douthat claims. “you see the question that has hung over left-wing culture throughout a period in which its influence over many American institutions has markedly increased: Does it make any sense for a left-winger to be happy?”

Douthat also cites a review essay in which the childhood psychology scholar Candice L. Odgers dared to suggest that rising youth depression might to be related to “guns, exposure to violence, structural discrimination and racism, sexism and sexual abuse, the opioid epidemic, economic hardship and social isolation.”

The Catholic reactionary Trump apologist Douthat claims that “the left” is “by nature, unhappier than the moderate and conservative alternatives. The refusal of contentment is essential to radical politics…”

Douthat relates this alleged left unhappiness to the implosion of what he considers “the 20th century left’s”  two sources of optimism: “the Christianity of the American social gospel tradition, which influenced New Deal liberalism and infused the civil rights movement, and the Marxist conviction that the iron logic of historical development would eventually bring about a secular utopia — trust the science (of socialism)!”  Further:

‘What’s notable about the left in the 2020s is that neither anchor is there anymore. The secularization of left-wing politics has made the kind of Christian-inflected cosmic optimism that still defined, say, Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign seem increasingly irrelevant or cringe-worthy. Meanwhile, the revival of Marxism and socialism has not been accompanied by any obvious recovery of faith in a Marxist science of history. I know many people on the left who think Marx was right about capitalism’s contradictions; I know many fewer who share his expectation that the dialectic will yield a worker’s paradise…Instead you have a fear that when ‘late capitalism’ crashes, it will probably take everybody down with it, a sense we should be ‘learning to die’ as the climate crisis worsens, a belief in white supremacy as an original sin without the clear promise of redemption.’

Good grief. Where to begin in picking through this childish drivel?

Douthat is laboring under eight wrongheaded notions.

His first mistake is to believe that there is any cohesive political and intellectual formation that can be reasonably be called “the left” in the United States.  Where is this mysterious entity that Trump and his party keep railing about – “the Left?” Do we have a big seriously “radical” Socialist party or movement actually contending for power in the United States right now? (Where do I sign up? Hello?)

Douthat’s reference to the arch-neoliberal Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign suggests that he follows the Republi-fascist party and movement in absurdly casting his net to widely as to include Obama and the rest of the militantly capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party in his notion of “the Left.”

Douthat’s second incorrect notion is that “left-wing culture” has recently “markedly increase its influence over many American institutions.”  He is living in a Trumpian fantasy world if he seriously believes this.  My best guess is that he is referring here to the bourgeois- identitarian “diversity” and “PC” culture that is evident in workplaces, schools, media, and the militantly capitalist-imperialist Democratic Party – and to the fact that a small number of Democratic elected officials (Bernie Sanders and AOC above all) vaguely identify as “socialists.”  Whatever.

Douthat’s third error is to oddly spotlight the pessimist Ta-Nehesi Coates as the epitome of “the left.”  The actual leftist Cornel West broke down the absurdity of this identification seven years ago:

‘Ta-Nehisi Coates and I come from a great tradition of the black freedom struggle. He represents the neoliberal wing that sounds militant about white supremacy but renders black fightback invisible. This wing reaps the benefits of the neoliberal establishment that rewards silences on issues such as Wall Street greed or Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people…The disagreement between Coates and me is clear: any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading. So it is with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ worldview… Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical and unremovable. What concerns me is his narrative of “defiance”. For Coates, defiance is narrowly aesthetic – a personal commitment to writing with no connection to collective action. It generates crocodile tears of neoliberals who have no intention of sharing power or giving up privilege…When he honestly asks: “How do you defy a power that insists on claiming you?”, the answer should be clear: they claim you because you are silent on what is a threat to their order (especially Wall Street and war). You defy them when you threaten that order….Coates tries to justify his “defiance” by an appeal to “black atheism, to a disbelief in dreams and moral appeal”. He not only has “no expectations of white people at all”, but for him, if freedom means anything at all it is “this defiance”…Note that his perception of white people is tribal and his conception of freedom is neoliberal. Racial groups are homogeneous and freedom is individualistic in his world. Classes don’t exist and empires are nonexistent.’

Douthat’s fourth mess-up is that his charge of pessimism dangerously diverts attention away from what capitalism (and its related and overlapping oppression structures, systems, and practices of imperialism, racism, and sexism) are in fact doing to the world: potentially ending all prospects for a decent future with runaway climate change, environmental ruination more broadly, potentially nuclear global war, pandemicide, and the the growing political pathology of fascism.  Do we charge doctors who properly diagnoses lethal ailments and diseases with pessimism, preferring not to provoke fear and sadness in patients and their loved by telling them what is causing their ill-health?  Shall we forbid book titles like Ill Fares the Land (both the late Tony Judt and Susan George have written left books with that title) when the land is in fact unnecessarily faring ill, courtesy of capitalism-imperialism?

Douthat’s fifth mistake is to reflexively identify one’s scientific understanding of what capitalism and racism (and imperialism, sexism, nativism, nationalism, and fascism) are in fact doing to the world, including yes the climate, with pessimism and unhappiness. For myself and for other actual radical socialists and communists I know, it is a pleasing, hopeful, and even optimistic activity to communicate and struggle with others about what’s really happening in a world under the control of imperial capital.  We believe that our fellow humans can grasp and act on that knowledge in the process of building a movement for a revolutionary socialist order that can put humanity on the path to a world beyond all exploitation, oppression, and injustice.  We think revolution and another world are possible.  Imagine that!

(I am no fan of the dysfunctional maxim that too many Marxians like to quote from the imprisoned 1920s Italian communist Antonio Gramsci: “pessimism of the mind, optimism of the will.”  Anyone who thinks mental pessimism doesn’t fuel spiritual and activist discouragement and inertia is out of touch with basic mind-body research, lived human experience, and natural intelligence.  It’s a stupid, self-cancelling aphorism that should be dropped on “the left.”)

Douthat’s sixth mistake is to over-identify one’s personal happiness with one’s understanding of the world outside oneself.  Many of us actual radical leftists can combine a sense that capitalism is actively ruining life on Earth – that’s just a material fact – with continuing to play and party and enjoy friendships and/or romance, exercise, pets, music, philosophy, good food, sports,  painting, and the delight of children.

Douthat’s seventh mistake is to noxiously suggest that there’s something wrong with unhappiness. Sadness and depression are natural parts of life and learning how to process and  develop through darkness is part of an authentic existence, without a neurotic smile painted on one’s face to meet social expectations. Given the many epic tragedies and grave menaces afoot today, symptoms mainly of the capitalist-imperialist order, one has to wonder about the moral, intellectual and spiritual health of anyone who doesn’t experience considerable moments of real sadness and depression.

And, for what it’s worth, the people most prone to their politics sparking unhappiness that I have met in this country are on the Republi-fascist right: they fuss and fume about the mythical great power of the purported “radical Left” “deep state” that is supposedly “stealing our elections and our country,” collapsing our “European culture,” fueling rampant “inner-city crime,” and “replacing” whites with nefarious dark-skinned immigrants, etc.

Douthat’s eighth screw-up is to pretend that he knows anything much about “the Marxist science of history.” Douthat’s notion that a significant portion of  “the left” is depressed/pessimistic  because the “Marxist science of history” has not been borne with the fulfilment of Marx’s “expectation that the dialectic will yield a worker’s paradise” is flawed in three key ways.

First, despite Douthat’s odd reference to “the revival of Marxism,” only a small part Douthat’s mysterious “The Left” is Marxist in any serious and scientific way.

Second, while Marx and his comrades and followers had plenty of reasons to think that the “dialectical expectation” of proletarian revolution would be borne out in the late 19^th Centuries and perhaps during and after World War One, no serious Marxist in 2024 thinks that iron laws of history make socialist revolution inevitable. That’s essentially a religious, faith-based thing to believe.[1]

Third, the science that is Marxism does not remotely depend on the fulfillment of the dialectical prophecy. Disillusioned ex-radicals who claim that Marxism is invalidated by the “failure of the proletariat to rise up against capital” have missed the most enduring and relevant points in Marx.  Marx’s core historical-materialist discovery was that, as Engels explained in 1888, “In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch.” Each historical period combines an underlying mode of production (combining technical forces with distinctive social relations of production) with an overlaying political and ideological superstructure both serving and conditioned by that mode of production.

Look at Engels’ speech at Marx’s gravesite in Highgate Cemetery in 1883:

‘On the 14th of March.., the greatest living thinker ceased to think…An immeasurable loss has been sustained both by the militant proletariat of Europe and America, and by historical science, in the death of this man. The gap that has been left by the departure of this mighty spirit will soon enough make itself felt…Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.

But that is not all. Marx also discovered the special law of motion governing the present-day capitalist mode of production, and the bourgeois society that this mode of production has created. The discovery of surplus value suddenly threw light on the problem, in trying to solve which all previous investigations, of both bourgeois economists and socialist critics, had been groping in the dark.

Two such discoveries would be enough for one lifetime. Happy the man to whom it is granted to make even one such discovery. But in every single field which Marx investigated — and he investigated very many fields, none of them superficially — in every field, even in that of mathematics, he made independent discoveries. Such was the man of science. But this was not even half the man. Science was for Marx a historically dynamic, revolutionary force. However great the joy with which he welcomed a new discovery in some theoretical science whose practical application perhaps it was as yet quite impossible to envisage, he experienced quite another kind of joy when the discovery involved immediate revolutionary changes in industry, and in historical development in general. For example, he followed closely the development of the discoveries made in the field of electricity and recently those of Marcel Deprez.

For Marx was before all else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat, which he was the first to make conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation. Fighting was his element. And he fought with a passion, a tenacity and a success such as few could rival. His work on the first Rheinische Zeitung (1842), the Paris Vorwarts (1844), the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung (1847), the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49), the New York Tribune (1852-61), and, in addition to these, a host of militant pamphlets, work in organisations in Paris, Brussels and London, and finally, crowning all, the formation of the great International Working Men’s Association — this was indeed an achievement of which its founder might well have been proud even if he had done nothing else.’

See any mention of inevitable proletarian revolution as fundamental to Marxism as science in the eulogy penned by the thinker and ally who knew him best?  You do not.  And indeed, contrary to the notion of Marxism as inevitable-ism, Engels noted that Marx spent much of his life trying to bring his own (de-classed) bourgeois background to the fore of helping make socialist revolution with his own human agency. Why spend much of your life agitating for socialism and communism if you see them as inevitable?

Both of the scientific discoveries that Engels righty attributed to 141 years ago – (a) historical eras rooted in modes of productions topped by political and ideological superstructures and (b) surplus value and contradictory laws of motion under capitalist political economy – are as relevant today as ever.

I’m not happy to observe that we continue to suffer under the cancerous contradictions of the capitalist era but I happily retain faith in revolutionists’ continuing ability  to help people see and fight through and past these contradictions – to “contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat” and the emancipation of humanity.

This essay previously appeared on The Paul Street Report

Note

1.  For an excellent critique of “inevitable-ism,” “class truth,” and other forms of religious, fetishist, subjectivist, partisan, irrational, anti-scientific and anti-revolutionary belief in “Marxist,” “communist,” and postmodern thought, see Ishak Baran and KJA, “Ajith: A Portrait of the Residue of the Past,” Demarcations – A Journal of Communist Theory and Polemic (December, 2014). 

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).