CRITIQUE OF MARCUSE
One Dimensional Man In Class Society
By Paul Mattick, 1972
(Herder and Herder/Merlin Press)
"A Marxist shall not be duped by any kind of mystification or illusion."
Herbert Marcuse
In an address delivered in Korcula, Yugoslavia, Herbert Marcuse raised the question of "whether it is possible to conceive of revolution when there is no vital need for it." The need for revolution, he explained, "is something quite different from a vital need for better working conditions, a better income, more liberty and so on, which can be satisfied within the existing order. Why should the overthrow of the existing order be of vital necessity for people who own, or can hope to own, good clothes, a well-stocked larder, a TV set, a car, a house and so on, all within the existing order." (1) Marx, Marcuse related, expected a working-class revolution because, in his view, the labouring masses represented the absolute negation of the bourgeois order. The accumulation of capital destined the workers to increasing social and material misery. They were thus both inclined and driven to oppose and to transform capitalist society. However, if the proletariat is no longer the negation of capitalism, then, according to Marcuse, "it is no longer qualitatively different from other classes and hence no longer capable of creating a qualitatively different society." (2)
Marcuse is fully aware of the social unrest in even the advanced capitalist nations and of actually or potentially revolutionary situations in many under-developed countries. However, the movements in advanced nations are movements for "bourgeois rights" as, for instance, the Negro struggles in the United States. And the movements in underdeveloped countries are clearly not proletarian but national whose purpose was overcoming foreign oppression and the backwardness of their own conditions. Although the contradictions of capitalism still persist, the Marxian concept of revolution no longer fits the actual situation, for, in Marcuse's view, the capitalist system has succeeded in "in channeling antagonisms in such a way that it can manipulate them. Materially as well as ideologically, the very classes which were once the absolute negation of the capitalist system are now more and more integrated into it. (3)
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